The Video Games Thread

Topic

What are you playing? Talk video games here.

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Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name

This takes a little time to get going, but not much.

Should you play this if you have not played Yakuza: Like A Dragon? Not really. You can but the references will go right by you and the game will appear lesser.  Never played the series at all? Do not start here.

For long time fans this picks up from the end of Yakuza 6: The Song of Life. All the familiar mechanics are here, plus some new ones.

Very important – switch the action assist off. If you switch it on, it moves the extreme hear mode button to L3 and it is far too easy to trigger. With it off, this plays like the game you expect.

The first chapter is pretty limited but the second? That’s where it opens up with side activity all over the place! At the same time the upgrades open up too and there are some very neat ones.  Upgrading the spider line to throw around more than one enemy is very fun.

Bad stuff – dodge feels more complicated to use. And boss ultimate attacks are back. They were rubbish in prior games and they are here.

It all looks very, very good and it is very fun to play.

The kids have got me playing Suika on the Switch, a very simple and charming puzzle game in the vein of Tetris or Puyo Puyo, which revolves around fitting fruit in a jar.

It’s highly compelling and addictive while also being thoroughly pleasant to play. It also has that just-one-more-go factor that makes the best puzzle games so great. It’s pretty simple so might not have much longevity, but for the price of a couple of quid you can’t argue.

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Martin Smith, Ben

Sifu

If you have a look online you will find lots of talk about this game is more accessible, that players can play how they want. The only problem is that it is complete bollocks but you can only find that out by buying and playing the game.

The problem? There are three modifiers available at the start, the rest? Locked behind completing the game! That is not how those modifiers were talked about or presented. It is bullcrap. So yeah, Sloclap got £16 out of me while rendering themselves developers non grata for all eternity.

The visual style is good but not that great. The bigger problem is the game’s fighting isn’t as good as it thinks it is. You can’t counter or parry enemy attacks when the animations for them lack distinctiveness.  Nor is the auto-targeting that smart.

The reliance on double button takedown is a major down mark, along with overly complicated controls that say they don’t know what accessibility entails.  They just think making it a little easier is it.  It tries to use haptic feedback but there’s not enough for me to get a sense of flow. AC Valhalla managed to do that three years ago!

The boss fight I did was unimaginative and cheap, with the ability to do a charge attack through solid objects that my player would have to climb over.

Nor is its signposting on levels, the way it “explains” its mechanics clear.

If anything, the game comes across as particularly exploitative of gaming culture and player tendencies.  Of being a game that “does not hand hold”, translation – doesn’t tell you what you need to know. Of the “git gud” outlook. And finally, claiming the game is accessible when it isn’t.

I might experiment with the remapping, see if I can get a better set of controls from it that way.  But I don’t have a shortage of games to play and Like A Dragon: Gaiden – The Man Who Erased His Name smashes the hell out of this.

Soooo…. Gave remapping a try in Sifu.

An immediate problem is you cannot totally remap! You want the takedown move to be L1 + R1? Not allowed.  That is a major flaw in a game offering remap.

Still, did find a better combination, started to play it a bit better.  Then new flaws became apparent.  Lots of games are doing enemy health display as tiny health bars. Problem is an enemy that looks dead isn’t, a guard break bar that is full isn’t.  And this game is all about guard break.  So it starts playing fast and loose with its own systems that undermines your confidence and trust in it, as you’ll be doing what you think should raise that meter and it doesn’t raise, it doesn’t break.

Not only that but enemy attacks and combos are uninterruptable. You dodge and hit an enemy in the face? They continue their attack chain. You dodge to the side? They still hit you because they have instantly aligned to your new direction! It is bullcrap.

But hey, you’ve a camera that gives you a clear view of the action, that doesn’t impair your dodging by freezing you in place or blocking you against a wall? Don’t be silly, of course you don’t have that.

It’s amazing that this game got the reviews it got. There is so much cheap, bad stuff here that reviewers should have covered. Why didn’t they? That exploiting of gaming culture, the belief that the fault is always with the player, that the game cannot possibly be underhanded and unfair.  This game really is.

Do not buy it, do not give a porky pie developer more cash, there are far, far better games to play, with a far better learning and development curve than this.

[Al-x]

So… I heard all the good things about PS5, the graphics, (and that its half the price of a gaming laptop) and took the plunge.

I got the Black Friday deal (No more starting on that Friday as the days between BF and Xmas vary from year to year. So they all start sales at the start of November).

The BF bundle deal had the console (disk slot version) and the dl access code to Spiderman 2.
I got this small Bluetooth adapter at Amazon and hooked up my Bluetooth speakers. All good.

Getting ready for a little of Spiderman 2 and take it from there. More games to fall behind on. 🤣

• This reply was modified 1 year ago by Al-x.

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Bruce, Dave, Martin Smith, Ben

Hope you enjoy it, Al!

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Al-x

Get Spider-Man: Miles Morales Ultimate Edition.

It includes PS5 Spider-Man, with all the DLC, it’s a bargain a package.

Then play Spider-Man 2.

They’re great, compact games, not +100 hour monsters.

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Al-x

Enjoy, Al! There’s some cracking games ahead of you.

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Al-x

I got all 3 Spider man games now. They are pretty much Spider man simulation games.
I can remember the past Spidey games 20 years ago, but I digress.

Watching the NFL games yesterday now got me interested in this Madden 24 game on Black Friday sale now.
Nice graphics from what I saw. Any comments here?

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Ben

[Al-x]

I keep doubling and then salvaging the repeat posting…
I see huge Steam sales on the Assasin’s Creed series.

13 games in all. I won’t get all of them, (not that greedy), just a game or two of the best ones.
Further my acquisitions and escapism 🤣

• This reply was modified 1 year ago by Al-x.
• This reply was modified 1 year ago by Al-x.
• This reply was modified 1 year ago by Al-x.

Madden, and sports games generally, have a terrible and deserved reputation for microtransactions.  But they’re also put out annually which means short cuts in production. I’d check a review or two first.

Like a Dragon: Gaiden – The Man Who Erased His Name

If you want it to be, this can be a short game of probably less than 10 hours, but that will operate similar to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. You can go for Ganon at the start but unless you’re that good, it’s not a smart move.  The same is true here.

The fighting system is showing its age but remains as fun as ever.  The two styles of Agent and Dragon work well and only get better as you get upgrades, which is where it goes awry.

If you want to max out Kiryu you’ll have to be very careful in how you spend the game’s second – and finite – currency.  Most people, like me, won’t pick up on that until it’s far too late.  Since both currencies are required to purchase upgrades, you can hit a wall of being unable to buy due to a lack of one of them.

Ultimately, you’re here for the parallel story of Kiryu, of how he came to be part of the events if Like a Dragon.  It more than nails that, with the usual, over-the-top melodrama that the series is known for.  The ending is particularly good for long term fans.

On the whole, this is a good game with some flawed systems, but hurt by corporate greed. This is a digital-only title, except in Japan, which is greedy on Sega’s part.  There is no end of fans who would want to place Gaiden with the other titles of the Like A Dragon world.

After being snared by a Black Friday offer, I’ve been playing the PS4 version of the PS3’s Red Dead Redemption on the PS5. And I’ve been really enjoying it.

There’s a leisurely and uncluttered quality to it that I really enjoy – that laid-back sense of just enjoying being in a world and exploring it slowly, without too much in the way of fussy mechanics or skill trees, and a welcome lack of any real pushiness to get on with the story missions or sidequests.

It’s just a very nice place to be, and although (despite the recent 60fps upgrade for PS5) the visuals obviously don’t look anywhere near as impressive as RDR2, I find this game much more relaxing and enjoyable to play, with far less faffy busywork.

If they’d have done a full remaster, it could have been a fantastic next-gen experience – but as it is, it’s still a very nice port of a classic game.

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Martin Smith

Not a new story, as lay-offs have been endemic across the gaming industry, but this also shows up how clueless Embracer are:

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/embracer-ceo-confirms-timesplitters-studio-faces-closure-before-christmas/

Corporate wankers.

On a happier note, I’m becoming hooked on Spirit-Farer.

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Todd

Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth demo

Picking up, quite literally, where Gaiden ended, this is a superb demo.

The game’s predecessor, Ichiban’s first outing, had a good turn-based battle system, but they’ve built on it so much. Attack positioning, use of objects, smarter party AI for follow-up attacks; it’s clearly the same system but so much better.

The boss fight in the Stort part of the demo emphasises all of this. He’s weak to electricity so I amplify that weakness and then have Ichiban hit him with an electrified baseball bat!

The Hawaii part looks great but I stopped playing because there’s loads to do but no save function. Plus, the more I play, the more I want the full game, which isn’t out until the end of Jan 2024.

This does everything a demo should do.

The Warhammer 40k: Boltgun game is a lot of fun. Fast paced movement and good gunplay. All the weapons feel weighty and like they’d actually doing damage in real life. One of the better retro / boomer shooters I’ve recently played. Final level is a bit of a pain in the tits though (making you replay all the bosses you’d beaten earlier in the game).

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Martin Smith, Ben

Die for the Emperor, Bruce.

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Bruce, Todd

The game keeps saying stuff like this and “The enemies of the Imperium will taste death this day”. I have nil interest in 40K but love the aesthetic of it and how 100% commited it is to goofy shit like this.

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Ben

GTA VI looks pretty good, while still being exactly what I expected.

Vice City is my favourite of the series though, so if they can come close to capturing that vibe then it should be a lot of fun.

I bought a HDMI adapter for the SNES, N64 and GC recently. It’s by Kaico Labs, which I assumed was Chinese but is actually not far from me, on the outskirts of Worcester. It claims to work with all three machines (and specifically the Super Famicom) in 50hx and 60hz. It’s not something I particularly need for myself – I’ve got a decent little CRT now for all of them and my main TV still has one of every kind of input – but I figured it’d be handy for when going round friends’ houses to play retro games, as we’ve struggled to get retro consoles working on modern Smart TVs that only have aerial and HDMI inputs.

At that low bar of “does it give out a signal a TV can read through HDMI” it succeeds. For all three consoles, it can connect them to an HDTV. It doesn’t necessarily do it well though.

The unit itself is a little dongle thing with an HDMI port on one end and a Nintendo AV connector on the other. Completely undocumented by the accompanying booklet or the website is a little switch next to the HDMI port. This changes the unit between AV and S-Video mode, which makes a big difference. Literally the difference between it working and not. It’s rather astonishing there’s nothing telling you what it is or what it’s for really, especially considering all the negative reviews on Amazon where it’s clear they probably just need to flick the switch.

Anyway, I tested it with all three machines in both modes. GameCube was the most clear cut in difference between AV and SV, as it SV gives you nothing but a blank screen and a “no signal” message. Switching to AV does give a picture, but honestly it looked worse on my TV than using stock red, yellow, white composite cables. Changing between 50hz and 60hz mode (which is offered by the games themselves) doesn’t seem to make much of any difference.

That isn’t true for the SNES. I should say, my SNES is an original PAL mode but modded with a Super CIC chip that lets it essentially double as a Super Famicom, outputting in 60hz. Running in native PAL 50hz, the picture is pretty good in SV mode but really washed out and desaturated in AV, far worse than actually using AV cables looks. Switching over to 60hz mode, it again looks washed out in AV mode and better in SV (though I noticed colour-banding in black areas for the latter) but unfortunately, it moves the picture significantly higher up the screen, cutting off a big chunk (enough that on Mario World the top of the box that holds your back up item was missing). So unfortunately, it’s not as good as just using the RGB SCART cable I’ve got.

The N64 is the one console that does come out pretty well. In AV the picture is again washed out and desaturated, but in SV it’s bright and colourful. Compared to an actual S-Video connection it’s maybe a bit smoother (which might be what you want with an N64 picture) but pretty much equal. Oh and there’s no input lag or latency on any device, I guess because it’s not processing the picture.

So if you’ve got any of these machines and want to run them on a TV with only an HDMI input, this is a solid option, but not without its drawbacks. It’s £24 on Amazon, but cheaper directly from Kaico at the moment (on sale).

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Ben

Spirit-Farer

This is a clever little game.

It starts off gradual, introducing you to its concepts. Although, it can be a bit unclear in its information, like how a character tells you they’ll never eat the same thing twice, it applies to all characters, not just that one.

It becomes more complex as it goes on, sometimes bring a bit opaque as to where to get what.  This is where online guides are handy.

The endgame, not the ending, is where the game became far weaker for me. The bounce mechanic I particularly dislike as it tends to be erratic and it scrolls up and down a bit too fast. Similarly blind jumps are not fun.

At the same time the later characters tend to be far nastier than the earlier ones.  Where it was sad to see most of the early lot to the Everdoor, the later lot I was itching to boot through it! Though with Elena’s quest I looked at it and went ‘nope’, load of timed rubbish.

Most of the systems and mini-games work well, though there’s a large luck-based element to a good few that can irritate.  The sawmill was always pretty variable. The platform sections with Daria were bizarre too.  The game sells itself as cozy but its endgame is far less so, as if someone decided it suddenly needed to be more challenging. Those two concepts do not really go together.

Graphically, it has a great aesthetic and some wonderful designs.  The fast travel seal bus stop is particularly good. The one weakness it has is it can be unclear as to what it a platform and what was not.

Soundtrack is excellent, with a set of great themes.

Ultimately, I can’t really complain much about a game I got for £5. Overall, it’s good. It has its ups and downs but it also a unique experience that should be played.

Elder Scrolls Online: High Isle / Galen Finale

Just couldn’t let it lie so gave it another go on this final quest, with an awful boss fight. This time, however, I managed to, just, take the bastard out.

It remains a terrible boss fight due to too much visual clutter. At one point I suddenly had less than 1% health, I couldn’t tell you what caused it. There’s also a luck aspect of what moves are used. It was a little less chaotic, so maybe the game reduced the difficulty a bit.  It remains a very crappy, unimaginative boss fight of attrition.

With it going for £10, decided that Forspoken was worth a gamble. And it has been!

I played the demo ahead of it’s release and the demo was not good. It threw too much, too fast at the player, the combat wasn’t good. As a demo it failed its principal purpose- to sell me the game.

The trailers for the game also failed it. Having played the opening hours there are so many better ways to sell this game that it’s tragic they went with what they did.

Frey works much better as a character when you have her story from the start. As dies the script, unless you want to tell me that, if you were transported to another world, your first line would not be “what the fuck?”. The F-bombs fit.

What was hugely annoying in the trailers and demo, the quips between Frey and Cuff, is far less so here.  And, if anything, with Athia being so desolate, the one-liners break up the monotony nicely.

Finally, with all the assists on, and being eased into it, I’m enjoying the combat far more, though I’m still not sure R2 is the best trigger option for this kind of game.

Of course, what I’m playing now isn’t the game as it was. It has had months of adjustment and updates. I’m reasonably certain an auto-fail stealth sequence was either removed or made far easier.  Enemy health bars are much easier to see too.

Overall, a good start and looks like it’ll be fun.

The other one I tried out over the weekend was the trial for Immortals of Aveum.

Once you get past the EA log-in rubbish, I can’t see any reason for it – there’s no cross progression, pretty certain it’s single player only.  Maybe there’s multilayer which I’ve missed. Once you get past that, it’s good.

It is a substantive one too – you get three levels to play through, which gives a good sense of the game. The systems work well, it looks good and it is trying to do something new.

Critically, it isn’t doing that much that’s new, it is pretty conventional but that’s not a bad thing.  It has clearly had a lot of effort poured into it too. I can see why it got dubbed a 7 / 10 game but in 2023? That’s still very good. Finally, new stuff ought to be supported.

Did a lot more than I thought in Starfield 

PlayStation Wrap-Up 2023

What a goddamn mess. A set of cards that the Share process is difficult, complicated and totally opaque.

The more interesting, in-depth screens? No way to share. It’s a frustrating mess.

Ha, yeah I had mine come through today too. An utter mess.

Skyrim, Yakuza series, and Vampire Survivors all adding a significant chunk to the total tine there.

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Ben

Dave wrote:

After being snared by a Black Friday offer, I’ve been playing the PS4 version of the PS3’s Red Dead Redemption on the PS5. And I’ve been really enjoying it.

I finished this today. Had a great time with it overall and will miss playing it, partly for the fun gameplay and missions but mainly for the ambience and general feel of the whole experience.

Tempted to start Undead Nightmare straight away but not sure that will have quite the same appeal.

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Ben, Bruce

Didn’t expect to be writing this but Forspoken has gotten rather good. It was getting a bit weaker with too many magic- resistant enemies, which irks when there’s only one magic type available.

But, after taking out the first major boss – and the confrontation was pretty epic – it really recovers. New magic attacks, new traversal that really speeds things up, along with quick switching between the magics.

And the plot improves, with some rather vicious twists. The world is massive and rewards exploration – so going to do that and side stuff in Praenost before heading to Avaloat.

The other thing it did well was the lead-up to the first boss, with you going through their land, breaking their first line of defence, then to their town and castle.

Several months and 470 hours later and I’m at the end, for now, of Elder Scrolls Online.

While the world design, characters and quests are often very good, the major bosses on the most recent expansions are not.  I can sometimes go with attrition boss fights, a good example is Monster Hunter World. Here the boss fights are boring, sometimes suffering from visual clutter and a lack of clarity when you really need it.

That said, no way do I end up racking up 470 hours on a game, unless a game is doing a lot of things right – which it does. I like the systems and how it plays most of the time. The voice cast is often excellent. The variance across the various zones is also excellent.

Wario Land is fun.

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Bruce

Forspoken has some curious pacing.  It is a 12 chapter game, but some of those chapters last minutes and are practically narrative / cutscenes. I’m on chapter 11, which I got to far faster than expected.

The later regions also really start to irritate with the design. What you are after is on the top of this tower, how to get there? No clue, no clear route.  That monument you want to get to? The same.  Some of it is setting up precise platforming, but the parkour and camera isn’t good enough for it.

It isn’t helped by Frey deciding to go full arsehole either.  Although, as a whole Chapter 10 is quite clever, but blighted by a crappy boss fight, which it shares with the second Tanta fight.

When it isn’t doing stupid stuff, the game remains fun. The magic works, as does the parkour, most of the time. Environmental design is often excellent, with varied vistas.

As a bit of a treat to keep my youngest occupied on Christmas Eve, I picked up the ports of Portal and Portal 2 on the Switch. These games are all-time greats, so brilliantly simple in concept but with such imaginative challenges and a great sense of design. Just fantastic.

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Bruce, Ben

Oh, I had no idea those were on Switch.

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Dave

Me neither, I was just looking for an alternative option to dusting off my old PS3 to play them. Around £13 for both is a good deal, and they both play super smooth in 60fps.

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Ben

Finished Forspoken.

As games for £10 go, it is well worth nabbing, not least as the post-launch updates make it the game it should have been.

The final unlocks practically propel you to the endgame, so decided to do the final boss. That was a mix of the good, the bad and the meh.  Overall it was pretty good, there are worse final bosses.

The story finale works unexpectedly well, with Robian’s demise being Frey’s trigger to spiral down to being a complete arse contrasted against the impact of finding out about her origins.  The final villain revelation also worked well.

So now I can fully explore the world and nab those final upgrades and perhaps access those irritating out-of-reach places I couldn’t get to.  With all magics available, combat should be more fun too.

Finally, rarely has a F-bomb been so perfectly timed as in this game’s final boss.

My son got a VR headset (a Meta Quest 2) for Christmas and I just tried it out for the first time after he spent most of the day playing it. Holy crap, this stuff has advanced so much since I last tried it. Incredibly immersive and responsive, and a real feeling of being transported to a completely different fully 3D space. And I’ve only played the basic setup/tutorial thing so far. Really incredible.

I’m tempted to try some of the Star Wars or Iron Man experience stuff just for kicks. Although given how immediate and engaging even the kid-friendly stuff is, I imagine a combat or horror game would give me a heart attack.

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Ben

That is Resident Evil: Biohazard’s VR reputation.

On the other side, something like Star Wars: Squadrons is supposed to be amazing.

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Dave

Oh is that a good one? I might give that a look.

I played the first level non-VR, couldn’t get past it being first person view only – find that difficult for flight games, but it had the aesthetic and visuals nailed perfectly.

Only thing is I don’t know if it’ll work with the VR tech you have so check the details.

Looks like the main Star Wars content on the Meta Quest is Vader Immortal, which looks quite good fun.

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Ben

Dave wrote:

As a bit of a treat to keep my youngest occupied on Christmas Eve, I picked up the ports of Portal and Portal 2 on the Switch. These games are all-time greats, so brilliantly simple in concept but with such imaginative challenges and a great sense of design. Just fantastic.

The two player mode in Portal 2 is one of the best couch coop modes I can remember. Hopefully thats in the Switch port and you get a chance to play it.

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Dave

For my family the hidden secret of Christmas is that Boxing Day is just as good as Christmas day, as you get to relax and enjoy your new stuff without having to do a big meal and visit relatives, you can just chill out at home. And for us (especially this Christmas) that means gaming. So we’ve been checking out some of our new games this morning.

On Switch, Mario Wonder is an absolute joy. I don’t have the same connection to Mario as some people (although I recognise what well-made and fun games they are) but the SNES Super Mario World was a high point for me – and this feels like a modern update of that, but with a ton more charm and detail. Loads of little touches in the design, animation and music show the care that’s gone into the game and make it a real pleasure to play.

At the other end of the tone spectrum is MK1 on PS5, which I’ve only played a bit so far but which seems like a nice modern update of the OG Mortal Kombat games – but with some cool new touches, like the Kameo system (which lets you call in another character for an assist, kind of like the Marvel vs Capcom games). It also looks amazing, beautiful in a way that almost feels weird for a MK game. I’m looking forward to spending a couple of hours on the story mode later.

On VR the kids have been loving Beat Saber, which (like most of these rhythm games) seems entirely designed to make me feel like an old fart who can’t keep up with the kids any more.

And we’ve also played Super Hot which is a cool on-rails FPS game with a really smart time-twisting dynamic where your enemies only move when you do. The polygon graphics style weirdly reminded me of Virtua Cop, but more stylised than that.

Bruce wrote:

Dave wrote:

As a bit of a treat to keep my youngest occupied on Christmas Eve, I picked up the ports of Portal and Portal 2 on the Switch. These games are all-time greats, so brilliantly simple in concept but with such imaginative challenges and a great sense of design. Just fantastic.

The two player mode in Portal 2 is one of the best couch coop modes I can remember. Hopefully thats in the Switch port and you get a chance to play it.

Yeah, once he’s played the first game I want to have a go on that with him.

I’ve managed to snag two white whales the past week or so.

First is Retro Game Challenge, the Western release of the first game based on/inspired by Game Center CX (a Japanese show about retro games). I’ve been after this for about five years, I think. Ever since I hit the point of the show where it’s made. But it was only released in Japan and the US, so hard to get. But I snagged a loose cart from the US for about £30 (boxed copies go for about £80). Very keen to play that (just wait – the Switch port is going to get localised now I’ve got it), but first…

Super Mario RPG. I’ve been after this for about 9 years, ever since I when back into retro gaming full tilt. I’d originally played a big chunk of it back in about 2000, emulated on a PC so under-specced to run it that it was going about half speed (and I didn’t entirely realise).

But again, only released in Japan and the US. Well, on the Virtual Console since, but I prefer physical copies. I got a Japanese copy no problem (for a shell swap to run a US copy on my SNES) but I’ve completely failed to get a US copy. Brexit, import VAT changes and eBay standardising international postage have all hindered that.

But now: a Switch port. Which is much cheaper, easier and prettier. Got it for Christmas and spent some time with it yesterday and it’s as much fun as I remember. They’ve broadened out the attack enhance timing too, which is nice, widening the timing for it (with gradiations of effect).

My son got Marvel Vs Capcom Infinite as a stocking filler so we had a quick go on it today too.

It’s a decent enough modern update of the formula and the fights are fast and fun. But the move to a 3D style over flat cartoon sprites and the reduction in the number of fighters from teams of three to just pairs both feel like backwards steps.

Also, like most of these games these days it looks like you need to buy a whole extra DLC pack to access the full roster, which feels like a swizz.

Wow, just hit a big milestone for replies.

 

Dave wrote:

My son got Marvel Vs Capcom Infinite as a stocking filler so we had a quick go on it today too.

It’s a decent enough modern update of the formula and the fights are fast and fun. But the move to a 3D style over flat cartoon sprites and the reduction in the number of fighters from teams of three to just pairs both feel like backwards steps.

Also, like most of these games these days it looks like you need to buy a whole extra DLC pack to access the full roster, which feels like a swizz.

It is a swizz. Make with the readies.

Meanwhile, Forspoken‘s endgame went off the rails very, very badly. One of the worst parts of the game us it’s breakdowns, they are rubbish. Badly indicated, poor visibility escape sequences. On their own you can live with them, but when combined with instant death platforming and imprecise parkour controls? It’s a recipe for immense frustration and total disaster for the game retaining my interest.

I’m still going to play through as a tourist and see the regions, but it’s become very clear that I will not be able to hit all the endpoints I wanted to. I don’t platinum games, as there’s often too much rubbish in the requirements, but there is a sidequest I would have liked to have done which is now locked away for me.

For a game that was going to tap a much wider audience than usual, they made a real mess of the controls and systems for Hogwarts Legacy.

Complicated, poorly explained, with remarkably little in the way of assists. “Story” mode? Technically yes, but they clearly don’t understand how to do it.

Edit – The Hogwarts Fuck-Up continued:

They assune the player knows R3 = lock-on despite mnot mentioning it. Ditto circle and triangle being dodge moves. Oh and the R2 trigger does not feel good to use, no haptic that I can feel.

And, to add insult to injury, non-pausable story scenes.  Every other 2023 game I have has this, why does this not have it? Also lacks basic prompts like square to talk, when previous interactions were triggered by d-pad.

Ugh, Diablo IV‘s Tomb Lord is not a good time. Terribly designed, far too much health and massive area attacks with additional enemies it spams way too much. I just about survived it but the entire fight was severely unpleasant.  If that’s the staple boss then I’ll likely opt to kill everything in a dungeon bar the boss because it was not good.

Hogwarts Legacy: The Idiocy Continued

After an OK stealth section, along with some crappy bridge “puzzles”, you’re asked to discover a paintings secret. Well, you have a reveal spell, that should do it, right? Nope.

What is the right spell? Lumos.  On a painting. Worse is the game doesn’t give any indication of this, I looked up the answer online.  The nearest hint is the spell description of for times when extra light is needed. And that applies to a painting how?

Tekken 8 Demo

Generally, I don’t have the dexterity skills required for one-on-one fighting games but 2023 has seen Capcom go: O RLY?

It started with Street Fighter VI throwing down the gauntlet,  including an alternative, more accessible control set-up.  From what I can tell Mortal Kombat 1 did not pick up that gauntlet but this certainly does.  And they work very, very well.

Combine that with some incredibly flashy, yet clear presentation and it both looks and plays good.  The opening story chapter is absurdly bonkers in the best way, as Jin and Kazuya tear up Tokyo.  It’s hard not to play this and conclude Tekken 8 got some tips from Final Fantasy XVI for its sheer spectacle.

Cheap Xbox games:

Vampire Survivors 

I don’t see the appeal of this. Take a slow moving character whose movements is all you control, while a slow auto-fire slowly kills enemies.

Survive for long enough while collecting gems to level up and you get upgrades. Problem is they are pretty pathetic and then it’s back to walking and collecting. It’s not a fun combination then you get killed. Still, can unlock stuff, right? Maybe but any unlock you get will have minimal impact – game is all about random grind.

Moral of the story: Cheap does not equal good.

Ikaruga

On this one I knew I was buying a total bastard and so it is. But the soundtrack and visuals are excellent, even if I lack the skill to really play it beyond level 1.

Radiant Silvergun

This is what Treasure did before Ikaruga. It’s a far more intricate and complex shooter, arguably bafflingly so. It was on sale so this was a curiosity buy. It’s OK, but like it’s successor, pretty brutal.

Returned to Starfield, did some random stuff, including successfully disabling a Spacer vessel, boarding and taking it over. Thought that was it but nope, you have to fly it to a port for it stay yours. Next time…

On the other hand, I finished the Freestar Rangers quest which was very satisfying. And I got a very cool starship as a result.

Pre-ordered the Classic Tomb Raider games (1-3) off Steam to be released on Valentine’s Day (Lara’s birthday).

I’m old school 🤣

And this one is interesting and just might have a point:

???

Dave wrote:

My son got a VR headset (a Meta Quest 2) for Christmas and I just tried it out for the first time after he spent most of the day playing it. Holy crap, this stuff has advanced so much since I last tried it. Incredibly immersive and responsive, and a real feeling of being transported to a completely different fully 3D space. And I’ve only played the basic setup/tutorial thing so far. Really incredible.

Right? It really is amazing!

SuperHot was my favourite game really, and I keep going back to BeatSaber. Vader Immortal was fun, but very limited – it’s a lot more like watching a movie with little game elements. Kid’s been playing Tales from Galay’s Edge, which is more open, apparently, but I haven’t tried it yet.

Haven’t had the balls yet to go for a horror game yet, but the Walking Dead one is highly rated.
Another game I’ve been playing a lot is “Until You Fall”, which is a very simple hack’n’slash action RPG, but if you like that kind of thing it’s great fun, and it’s actually a pretty good workout, too.

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Dave

Christian wrote:

Another game I’ve been playing a lot is “Until You Fall”, which is a very simple hack’n’slash action RPG, but if you like that kind of thing it’s great fun, and it’s actually a pretty good workout, too.

We recently got Blade & Sorcery: Nomad which sounds like a similar thing. Quite fun although moving around is a bit clunky.

Decided it was finally time to start on Mass Effect Legendary Edition.

ME1 has had a nice paint job, but the biggest success here is how well the story and characters works. The opening mission to Eden Prime, the investigation on the Citadel, getting Garrus, Wrexham and Tali, it all hits hard

There are improvements beyond the visual – the shooting is better, there’s more of a cover system, skills are streamlined, no class restrictions on weaponry, the Mako controls better. A good few of the weapons control better, especially the sniper rifle.

But not everything got fixed – Thresher Maws are even harder, with a precognition acid shotgun attack and the Mako feels incredibly fragile. The fight outside the ruins when you’re getting Liara, with the Geth Armature, remains awful. Felt worse in LE with the combination of little damage to + very mobile stalkers + shots overheating your weapons = not a fun time. Oh and your party is suicidal so will likely be dead for a time very fast.

So it’s probably going to be up and down, but hopefully with up in the lead.

This time I’m doing two things different- Wrex lives and FemShep, who is living up to her rep.

Dave wrote:

We recently got Blade & Sorcery: Nomad which sounds like a similar thing. Quite fun although moving around is a bit clunky.

Yeah, I think Nomad is one step further than Until You Fall (and we only have a quest 1, so I can’t play it).

I think I’ll skip the Quest 2 and get the Quest 3 when I feel like I’ve played out the available stuff for the first one. I expect there’ll be a jump in the kind of games you’ll be able to get for this soon, too. The potential is amazing, but in the current generation of games it’s definitely clear that they’re far more limited than “proper” video games. But once you can get that kind of game for proper VR, that’ll be a complete game changer, I think.

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Dave

Mass Effect 1 LE continued:

Got Liara, but what’s surreal is the trophy completion for it on PS – it’s around 41%!

That looks absurd to my eyes. Sure, the fight in the ruins is rough, but not that rough and then there’s that Krogan to deal with, but neither of those should be thar huge a barrier.

Did a load of crew conversations- it’s surprising how well written these are, even on what are seen as the weaker characters like Ashley and Kaiden.

Did the Feros missions. It plays far better with the weapon adjusts, I have a hazy recollection of this being far more frustrating in the original.

Also, this time around, most of the colonists lived! Was not expecting that at all, so cool.  The Thorian boss was an absurd slaugter, corpses all over the place but Wrex was having a good time!

Playing it now, just over a decade on from when I played it on PS3, out of order, it’s remarkable how straight to the point it is. Now there’d likely be level caps on the systems, more sidequests and collect-a-thons. ME1 just goes straight for it.

[Al-x]

Ben wrote:

Madden, and sports games generally, have a terrible and deserved reputation for microtransactions.  But they’re also put out annually which means short cuts in production. I’d check a review or two first.

You’re not kidding at all. I saw the review of the NBA game, and you have to pay here and there to get the good things and some of the common basketball plays like the fast break or the pick and roll play you just can’t do in the game. Save your money..

• This reply was modified 11 months, 1 week ago by Al-x.

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Ben

Hogwarts Legacy is blighted by some of the worst “puzzles” I’ve ever seen. Badly designed, badly communicated, opaque “logic”. There is no fun to be had in these goddamn trials. All they belong to is the gameplay category of never wanting to experience them again, so killing any replay of it.

I’ve been playing through the Mortal Kombat 1 story mode over the past few days and just finished it.

It’s great fun, with an over-the-top silly plot that’s like watching a new Mortal Kombat movie (with a couple of interactive fights every few minutes).

I don’t usually like cutscene-heavy games but this was a laugh and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Plus the plot manages to be accessible and uncomplicated while also allowing for tons of nods to MK games of old.

(Plus it made me genuinely like Johnny Cage, which I would have thought was impossible. )

A fun ride.

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Ben, Martin Smith

Super Mario RPG then, which I finished last night.

As I mentioned before, I’ve been waiting about ten years to play this again, after playing what turns out to be about half of it over 20 years ago. Does it hold up to those expectations?

Not entirely. It is a fun game. It’s got nice battle systems, it looks lovely, the story is funny enough to cover being somewhat thin and the music’s great.

It is somewhat insubstantial though. It’s quite short. I did the entire main story in under 15 hours (and nearly an hour of that was fruitlessly trying to beat the paratrooper ascent in under 11 seconds) and that’s with taking my time to clear out most enemies in areas. There’s some post-game content (stronger versions of the bosses, a mini-game casino) and hidden treasures I didn’t bother with, which I would guess add another three hours or so, possibly.

Being short isn’t really a problem in and of itself though. I really don’t think its story could have sustained being much longer. But it’s short while also being so easy that it’s almost trivial, which doesn’t help. While this definitely has the DNA of a mid-90s Final Fantasy, it’s pitched much more as a beginner’s level one. While the battle system is fun and requires you to pay attention to get the attack enhancement timings, there’s not much depth to it. There’s rarely much call to use your special attacks over your normal ones, and they’re pretty quickly made obsolete in terms of power. One of the later bosses for example was supposedly weak to jump attacks, but Mario’s mid-strength jump attack was doing less damage (with a long string of attack enhancement timed button presses) than just his normal attack. The game is incredibly generous with health too. Peach and Mallow’s healing spells will almost always heal you to full HP and cost little MP (here called Flower Points). Your Flower Points are slightly harder to keep filled, but I never found myself short of the refill items (or any items, in fact) and the game will quite often find an excuse to just completely refill both HP and FP. Money’s pretty easy to come by too. Initially I was selling off old equipment as I replaced it, that old JRPG frugality coming into play, but quickly realised you don’t need to at all.

I’m on the fence with the difficulty. It certainly made the game breezier (even though I wasn’t on the easy mode, called “Breezy”) and less of a faff – I certainly never had to grind, let alone struggle to avoid a game over when in a dungeon low on health – but it maybe could have done with requiring more in the way of tactics for battles.

I’m definitely glad I finally got to play it (again) but I’m also really glad it wasn’t after purchasing an expensive US SNES cart of it. I think it really would have been a disappointment then.

[Ben]

13 year old beats Tetris, first time it has been done so a Sky News reporter decides to be an idiot:

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/sky-news-presenter-criticised-for-telling-teenage-tetris-champ-to-go-outside/

• This reply was modified 11 months, 1 week ago by Ben.

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Todd, Dave

The Tetris thing is kind of crazy. I mean, this game has been out for 40 years and this is the FIRST time someone has managed this. It’s quite amazing.

I remember playing a variant of Tetris to such an extent that I started doing it in my dreams. Which is kind of when I decided I had to stop. Gaiman’s poem “Virus” always reasonated with that experience for me.

Virus

There was a computer game, I was given it
One of my friends gave it to me, he was playing it
He said, it’s brilliant, you should play it
And I did, and it was.
I copied it off the disk he gave me
For anyone, I wanted everyone to play it.
Everyone should have this much fun
I sent it upline to bulletin boards
But mainly I got it out to all my friends
(Personal contact. That’s the way it was given to me)
My friends were like me: some were scared of viruses,
Someone gave you a game on a disk, next week on Friday the 13th
It reformatted your hard drive or corrupted your memory.
But this one never did that. This was dead safe.
Even my friends who didn’t like computers started to play:
As you get better the game gets harder;
Maybe you never win but you can get pretty good
I’m pretty good
Of course I have to spend a lot of time playing it.
So do my friends. And their friends.
And just the people you meet, you can see them, walking down motorways
Or standing in queues, away from their computers,
But they play it in their heads in the meantime,
Combining shapes
Puzzleing over contours, putting colors next to colors,
Twisting signals to new screen sections
Listening to the music
Sure, people think about it, but mainly they play it.
My record’s eighteen hours at a stretch.
40,012 points, 3 fanfares.
You play through the tears, the aching wrist, the hunger, after a while
It all goes away
All of it except the game, I should say.
There’s no room in my mind anymore; no room for other things
We copied the game, gave it to our friends.
It transcends language, occupies our time,
Sometimes I think I’m forgetting things these days
I wonder what happened to the TV? There used to be a TV.
I wonder what will happen when I run out of canned food?
I wonder where all the people went? And then I realize how,
If I’m fast enough, I can put a black square next to a red line,
Mirror it and rotate them so they both disappear,
Clearing the left block
For a white bubble to rise…
(so they disappear)
And when the power goes off for good then I will play it in my head until I die

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Todd, Ben

I had no idea you could keep going on Tetris to the point where the game goes : Fuck it, I’m done.

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Todd, Christian

And it’s only possible because people have worked out new ways of using the controller.

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Todd

Continued with side quests in ME1. Oh and Virmire has shown up… Not going there just yet.

Did a side missions where the research team ended up turning themselves into husks. Another was disarming a nuke, with the final firefight being hilarious. Hopped in the Mako and annihilated them. Even got Haliat point blank with the main cannon!

Did a slaver clear out as well as the Bring Down The Sky quest.  Most of it is good except for a part with motion detecting mines that the safe route is very unclear.  The finale is a messy fight and a lacking decision.  Oh well, a lot of it was good.

Most importantly, I have unlocked Wrex’s family armour quest!

There’s also a smattering of little thing that each work well: a blackmailer wanting to exploit Shepherd’s past, a reporter with an agenda, a hacked off Fleet Admiral.  Then there is  Conrad Verner, whose belief that getting a photo of Shepherd to put up in his lounge will go down well with his wife is hilarious.

Martin Smith wrote:

And it’s only possible because people have worked out new ways of using the controller.

That’s what she said!

Did a major chunk of the main quest in Starfield.

It also showed the game at its best and worst. The best is when you’re free to move from place to place, dock with ststions, do quests, take on starships etc. The worst is when it railroads you – like requiring theft, or quest choice that feels forced, or an outpost building system that does not align at all to what you’ve been told to do.

And there was a lot of that.  In one bit I’m trying to escape an unkillable super-bastard and, with shots and grenades flying everything, these people do not move! So I shoot one of them in the arse to get them to move.  Or, the quest choice determines which companion dies, with that being set by who you’ve spent the most time with, which feels underhanded and nasty. Oh and not to forget, unclear, not very fun “puzzles”.

And yet despite all that, once it got back to the business of telling its main story, it recovered fast.  And that story takes a very meta twist. One that really works for me.

Does feel like it has suddenly gone into is endgame, which I’ll likely spin out a bit longer due to getting certain skills and ship parts.

I’m really loving Retro Game Challenge. It’s definitely proving worth the wait and price.

The concept is you’re sent back to the 80s and forced to complete challenges on a string of pseudo-NES games. These are often “meta” challenges ala Xbox achievements and PS trophies rather than ones built specifically into the games themselves. For instance one is just “get a boost start” in the racing game, another is “get 20,000 points” in the first shoot em up.

You have various aides in this: you can read manuals for the games, which often have hidden functions like continues. There are issues of a game magazine, which have cheat codes (often after the game has “been out” a while, ie after you’ve done the challenges for it), alongside reviews, previews of future games, sales charts etc. and you can talk to the kid you’re hanging out with playing for some tips but usually odd discussions. This means that completing challenges can often not quite require you to cheat but you’re greatly benefitted by it, even if to just save time (like using the course select codes for Rally King when the challenges are to beat a certain course in a certain time).

And this really reflects the TV show the game is based on Game Center CX, where Arino often has to rely on hidden continue codes or level skips and suchlike to get through his challenges in the time limits he has.

What ultimately makes all this work is that the games themselves are great. They’re not just cheap minigames, they feel like proper retro games that have fallen through from an alternate reality. They roughly chart the course of the Famicom boom, from relatively simplistic arcade games like a Space Invaders clone through to the start of Jrpgs. The challenges themselves don’t cover the entirety of each game and you can play them freely afterwards, so there’s actual value in doing that.

The only downside is that some of the US localisation is a bit crass, mainly in the magazine bits. There are reader letters all credited to pun names cribbed off the Simpsons prank calls and the magazine staff are all photos of real US game journos of the time, which feels a bit brown-nosy. I’d have loved all the GCCX references that were in the Japanese version to have been kept, but that was pretty unlikely, I guess.

Barring diving off a cliff by the end, this is an excellent game and it’s such a shame it got such a limited release in the West. Hopefully the Switch remake will get translated.

ME Legendary Edition

ME1 continued

Been doing side stuff – have unlocked Garrus’ mission, uncovered a Geth trap – which was funny, as I had the Mako, which made for a short fight.

Also did the Luna mission which really shows up the change in game design. All three silos you need to hit, with their defence turrets are clustered together.  Now they’d be more spaced out.

Most satisfying was doing the Major Kyle mission.  Way back when, first time I played ME1, it ended as a bloodbath because I did not have the skill to talk him down. This time I did and it made for a great resolution.

Still got Noveria and side stuff to do before I hit… Virmire.

ME: LE – ME1 Part 4

Did the biotics hostage mission, which also supplied some excellent equipment. Opted to talk them down.

Then did the Geth Incursion quartet. There was a surprising amount of variation in these missions as I went from system to system.  Nor had I picked up on the squad effect on certain skills, like decrypting.

Had also upgraded the team’s equipment, which rendered some of the firefights to be rather one-sided!

Back on the Normandy, did some crew conversations and suddenly, both Kaiden and Liara want to get together with Shepherd! Did not see that coming from either of them.

Demo time

Both of these are good demos, they give a fairly good sense of the game but neither sells it to the degree that I’ll buy it.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

This is OK. Certainly looks nice. The problem for me is in its controls, which I find rather fiddly. The other problem is respawning enemies, whose attacks are quite cheap. Now, both of those were in the old games, and were rubbish there too.  Not everything in old games needs to be brought back.

Some of the accessibility help does aid me on the controls, but only so far on the platforming, which has a skip option that sends the wrong messages.

The demo would have been better with a boss fight, as have heard that they can be far stronger compared to the usual enemies.

Granblue Fantasy Relink

This has a good graphic style, enemies and characters are well animated. The combat is pretty good, feels akin to Tales of Arise in places. The special moves are, as might be expected, wonderfully over the top.

So why not buy it? Well, there is a little game called Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth coming out at the same time, or close to it. Likely get this later when the price has dropped.

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Dave

I tried the free demo for Prince Of Persia this morning too. I thought it was great, a proper old school feel to the gameplay but with a polished modern look. Might pick up the full game if the kids like it.

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Ben

Not sure what this is, looks like some kind of Uncharted ripoff.

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Ben

I’m liking the look of Indy. Mostly first person separates it from Uncharted and Tomb Raider, while aligning well to MachineGames’ skills.

Hellblade II looks good but has been confirmed to be digital-only, which really undermines it.

Visions of Mana is looking good.

Really like the look of Avowed.

Ben wrote:

I’m liking the look of Indy. Mostly first person separates it from Uncharted and Tomb Raider, while aligning well to MachineGames’ skills.

I think the first-person perspective is a bit weird when you’re meant to be playing as an iconic character like Indy, surely you want to see him on-screen.

To be honest, outside of the cutscenes the game itself looks a bit rough around the edges at this stage, a bit clunky and simplistic and PS3-gen looking. Hopefully things will improve as we see more of it in the run-up to release.

I would not be surprised if it slips to 2025, but it’s not always first person. It’s an interesting combination.

I started playing Battletech last night. Finally. It’s like 7 years old now. I bought it three years ago, after upgrading my ageing desktop with a graphics card that barely fits into it, but haven’t got around to it. I just find it hard to gather the will to play games on my desktop, booting it back up in the evening (especially in the summer, when over-heating is a possibility) and not getting distracted by the internet. And in the more immediate sense, I’ve been meaning to start it since last Thursday and just haven’t got round to it.

But I eventually did! I did the tutorial last night. Well, first level. To call it a tutorial would be very generous. Battletech is a comprehensive adaptation of a tabletop game. There’s a lot going on – line of sight, evasion from movement, hit chances, heat levels, range, facing position etc. Previous adaptations (like my beloved Mechcommander) have simplified this down into a real time strategy format, but Battletech is a full on turn based strategy. So there’s a lot to explain, but in rules and the games busy UI. So what does the tutorial cover?

1. This how you move
2. This is how you sprint
3. This is how you jump (but that will now be turned off).

That’s it. It’s galling in how little it actually tells you about playing the game before expecting you to start playing the game at full capacity. Like i can understand not going into tactics or anything, but I didn’t even know what half the stats displayed for each mech meant. I thought the red lines between mechs were enemy line of sight, but they’re not, they’re your line of sight. So I inevitably failed the mission. I’ve had to watch a 30 minute YT video (by a fan!) to understand it.

Madness.

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lorcan_nagle

Dave wrote:

Not sure what this is, looks like some kind of Uncharted ripoff.

The graphics look good (even using Harrison’s likeness and all), but first person perspective?

There was an Indiana game YEARS ago, but it’s all a reminder of how much they dropped the ball. Then again, it allowed the creation of Lara Croft and I pre-ordered the package of the remastered classic games.👍

Martin Smith wrote:

I started playing Battletech last night. Finally. It’s like 7 years old now. I bought it three years ago, after upgrading my ageing desktop with a graphics card that barely fits into it, but haven’t got around to it. I just find it hard to gather the will to play games on my desktop, booting it back up in the evening (especially in the summer, when over-heating is a possibility) and not getting distracted by the internet. And in the more immediate sense, I’ve been meaning to start it since last Thursday and just haven’t got round to it.

But I eventually did! I did the tutorial last night. Well, first level. To call it a tutorial would be very generous. Battletech is a comprehensive adaptation of a tabletop game. There’s a lot going on – line of sight, evasion from movement, hit chances, heat levels, range, facing position etc. Previous adaptations (like my beloved Mechcommander) have simplified this down into a real time strategy format, but Battletech is a full on turn based strategy. So there’s a lot to explain, but in rules and the games busy UI. So what does the tutorial cover?

1. This how you move
2. This is how you sprint
3. This is how you jump (but that will now be turned off).

That’s it. It’s galling in how little it actually tells you about playing the game before expecting you to start playing the game at full capacity. Like i can understand not going into tactics or anything, but I didn’t even know what half the stats displayed for each mech meant. I thought the red lines between mechs were enemy line of sight, but they’re not, they’re your line of sight. So I inevitably failed the mission. I’ve had to watch a 30 minute YT video (by a fan!) to understand it.

Madness.

As a long-term player of the tabletop game, I loved BattleTech, and didn’t have the same problems but I guess I was already primed for a lot of the detail and was more going “that’s how they converted this game concept” as opposed to “what does this mean?”

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Martin Smith

Well, weirdly, I made it through the first mission (which is oddly hard, I’d say, as you get ambushed like three or four times and ends on another ambush that you lose for story reasons) and then in the second mission, it started tutorialising all the other stuff, which is just a bizarre choice. Either you put all that in the first mission, or you make the first mission a handholdy cakewalk you can’t lose and then drip in all the other systems. Don’t have me falling prey to overheating, targeted damage and stability failures and then go “oh here’s how all that works”.

Anyway, that aside, I’m in the game proper now, dicking around on my ship, looking at contracts and whatnot and it’s just shy of being overwhelming. I just blew two months operating budget on salvage that turned out to not even be a full mech, I think? It seems fun but I don’t think I’m going to be very good at the fiscal roleplaying stuff.

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lorcan_nagle

Having played all through the original Red Dead Redemption before Christmas (and thoroughly enjoyed it) I’ve moved onto RDR2 in the past week.

Somehow it manages to be a next-gen version of the same concept that’s far more beautiful and slick than the first one, while at the same time ripping out almost everything that’s fun about RDR1 in favour of what’s basically a dull cowboy simulator.

I’m several hours in now and there’s no two ways about it, the game is just fucking boring. The main character moves like treacle, you feel like you’re barely participating in long cutscenes and story that I struggle to care about, and even the action setpieces feel leaden. Plus the whole thing is bogged down by all the clutter and faffing about that I hate in modern games.

The first game had a tight story with loads of exciting missions and locations, great characters and loads of fun sidequest/minigame type stuff to explore, with very little flab. In RDR2 I’m spending a load of time doing shit like shaving, and changing clothes to match the weather, and making sure I eat enough soup.

RDR1 is a masterpiece, this just feels like a chore.

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Christian, Ben, lorcan_nagle

I went back to Doom (2016) after that post to remind me that games can be fun again. It worked.

 

 

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Ben

For all of its content nothing in RDR2 tops RDR1’s journey into Mexico sequence.

(Fourth attempt posting that on the broken ass board)

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Todd, Martin Smith, Dave, Ben

Also, I’m about 50 hours into my Fallout New Vegas play through and i’m hitting the “I guess I’d better get on with the main storyline” phase.

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Martin Smith, Dave, Christian, Ben

Now the board is back, time to add the Mass Effect posts here:

At the endgame of ME1.

And Virmire? I had forgotten just how epic this level is. Oh and Wrex?

WREX IS ALIVE!

And this time, Kaiden is dead.

The way it moves from section to section is great. Getting to the Salarians, the confrontation with Wrex over the genophage cure, infiltrating Saren’s base, the revelations about indoctrination, the exchange with Sovereign, hitting the breeding facility, setting the bomb, that decision and a boss fight with Saren! It’s set up as a major mission and it delivers it so very well.

There’s the design of Virmire, with a neat touch of storm coming in that develops as the mission goes on, but it is boosted by a great soundtrack. Combine that with all the plot and character moments and it’s a level that really stands the test of time. ME1 came out 2007, I’m playing it 15 years later. In all that time, no one else has done anything like this.

Just one mission left now.

Mass Effect 1

And here we are, at the end, of the beginning.

I had forgotten a huge amount of this, I remembered the general skeleton but that was all.  The full detail of the mission on Ilos, the conversation with the Vigil, which gives the fuller detail on the Reapers, the flight to the Conduit, it was all so very good.

But it doesn’t stop there, Sovereign and a Geth Fleet assault the Citadel, you’re pursuing Saren, then you get locked out in the elevator. Shepherd’s response? We’re going out!

Cue an incredibly bad ass vertical ascent up the Citadel, taking out numerous Geth, a Geth Drops hip, all culminating in a huge fight with four Geth heavy turrets.  At one point in that Liara is taken out, for a change I remember to use Unity! Then go back to hitting the turrets, on one point Shepherd blew up one of them with a sniper rifle!

Then it is time for the final confrontation with Saren. No other game I know allows you to talk the final boss into blowing his own head off!  Not that that is going to get in the way of actual fight, despite Wrex shooting Saren’s corpse in the head!

What made this final fight so good were the same enhancements that made this version so much better. It was easier to aim, to shoot, far, far less weapon sway, which better supports the idea that you are playing an elite soldier.

Shepherd takes out Saren, the fleets unload on Sovereign- blowing the crap out of it. Humanity gets a council seat, I slung Anderson on it. Udina? It ain’t ever being Udina.

Such an excellent finale. When to start Mass Effect 2? I don’t know as there’s a good few other games demanding my attention.

I’m really enjoying BattleTech now, but it is pretty glitchy in some respects. I’ve done multiple missions where the enemies gain reinforcements. Literally every time this has happened, the reinforcements have just been there with the initial group of enemies though. The game doesn’t seem to realise this, which leads to situations such as in the mission I just finished, where 9 turns into fighting two supposedly separate (but completely together) groups of pirates, the game suddenly goes “looks like we’ve got new sensor traces. Reinforcements are on the way!” But it was just referring to one of the groups of mechs that had been there since the start. Baffling.

The other thing I’m finding a little frustrating is the mech bay limit and storage. You can only have five mechs ready for use (this expands as you get more bays as you go into the game, apparently). All your other mechs have to be in storage. You can take them out, but only if you have a space. This takes in-game days to be done. But once they’re taken out of storage, you then have to go about fitting weapons, which apparently doesn’t count as part of being “readied” for use. And that takes even more in-game days to sort.

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lorcan_nagle

Hogwarts Legacy

Let’s deal with the elephant first: Rowlings’ tanking and tarnishing of Harry Potter. Five years ago developing a Harry Potter game would gave looked a very safe bet then it all kicked off. If we assume a royalty is 10-15%, VAT is 20%, so a £32 game goes down to probably around £25, so say £3-4.  But, even scaled up for millions, Rowling already has so many she isn’t going to notice the addition or loss of a few more.

More generally, where gaming is concerned, it is exceedingly difficult to not support a bastard, be they individual or company.  Just about every game company does bad stuff, the only difference is the quantity and quality.

As to to the game itself, it is a conventional open world game that allows you to run and fly around Hogwarts and a good chunk of the surrounding area, including Hogsmeade. And that is all it really has to do.

Combat is OK, bit too chaotic at times but the Story setting defangs that neatly.  World design is excellent, enemies are limited but fun to fight.

In a good many ways, it can work well as an introduction to gaming. As it covers open world exploration, gear systems and upgrades, shopping, customisation, skills – a good many of the systems that recur from game to game.

Martin Smith wrote:

I’m really enjoying BattleTech now, but it is pretty glitchy in some respects. I’ve done multiple missions where the enemies gain reinforcements. Literally every time this has happened, the reinforcements have just been there with the initial group of enemies though. The game doesn’t seem to realise this, which leads to situations such as in the mission I just finished, where 9 turns into fighting two supposedly separate (but completely together) groups of pirates, the game suddenly goes “looks like we’ve got new sensor traces. Reinforcements are on the way!” But it was just referring to one of the groups of mechs that had been there since the start. Baffling.

The other thing I’m finding a little frustrating is the mech bay limit and storage. You can only have five mechs ready for use (this expands as you get more bays as you go into the game, apparently). All your other mechs have to be in storage. You can take them out, but only if you have a space. This takes in-game days to be done. But once they’re taken out of storage, you then have to go about fitting weapons, which apparently doesn’t count as part of being “readied” for use. And that takes even more in-game days to sort.

The reinforcements can seem to be triggered depending on which way you move around the battlefield. I’ve definitely stumbled across extra enemies and then got caught in between them and the original force a couple of times.

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Martin Smith

That makes sense and is fine, I just wish all of the game’s systems would keep up with it. In that example I gave, it did an animation of a dropship appearing to, er, drop them off when it said about them appearing, but as I said, they’d been there the whole time. So it really should have been an event triggered either by the first lot being killed off by a certain amount or turn count (the latter presumably triggering that animation). For the mechs to be there from the start, intermingled with the first group just seems like shoddy programming, really.

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lorcan_nagle

It’s the kind of thing you’d hope they’d improve on in a sequel, but apparently Microsoft had no interest in another license, and Harebrained Schemes’ most recent game was a flop so they’re splitting away from Paradox, but can’t bring BattleTech with them. So this is all we get.

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Martin Smith

Returned to Starfield. Did a couple of the main quest, raided a temple, nabbed an artifact over numerous pirate corpses, then did the Entangled quest.

If you want a new definition of a gaming tragedy, it is that, out of Starfield’s millions of players, just over 12% have done this quest. The tragedy? The quest is superb. Sure, it’s very Bethesda, as you can see the choice at the end coming from miles away, but it is still very, very good.

You warp back and forth between two quantum realities, both existing until the end where you choose one of them.  The apocalyptic reality has a plague of scorpions, lovely things where the kids are so ugly you don’t want to meet the parents, but know you are going to.

The level has been talked of as being similar to Titanfall’s Cause and Effect. That’s a fair link to make, but I found Entangled less demanding, but every bit as smart.

Other stuff – Got the starship design fully upgraded, which was not cheap, so likely to be doing side stuff for a bit.

lorcan_nagle wrote:

It’s the kind of thing you’d hope they’d improve on in a sequel, but apparently Microsoft had no interest in another license, and Harebrained Schemes’ most recent game was a flop so they’re splitting away from Paradox, but can’t bring BattleTech with them. So this is all we get.

Yeah, I saw that Paradox effectively screwed over HBS after Lamplighter’s flopped. Real dick move cutting them lose but keeping the games.

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Ben, lorcan_nagle

Interesting interview with the creator of the Discworld games here: https://www.timeextension.com/features/interview-john-cleese-told-us-to-fk-off-the-inside-story-of-terry-pratchetts-discworld-games

Terry comes off well (in happily selling the game rights to a random guy with a plan having turned down loads of publishers with big cheques) but I get the feeling the bit at the end about the rights to everything DW being sewn up just before his death is the work of his assistant, Rob, who I’ve always got a dodgy vibe from.

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Todd