The Video Games Thread

Topic

What are you playing? Talk video games here.

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God, I loved the original Discworld game. They really managed to capture the spirit of the books there, I thought.

Martin Smith wrote:

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.

That seems to be a bit of an agreement amongst many fans, as far as I’ve heard, yeah.

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Martin Smith

River City Girls 2

Is this a better game than its predecessor? Well, yes, but there’s a hefty but that I’ll come back to.

Story sequences and characters are similar. It is easier to combo enemies, the window for that is more generous. The game world is similar but a bit larger. The difficulty is more forgiving, well, by comparison to the first one.

While the combat is the game’s best card, the AI is cheap. Infinite guard. A pixel out of reach but you better believe they will be able to hit you. Attacks through another enemy, attacks while standing in the same space as another enemy you’re hitting, walking right through you then hitting you. Yeah, it is very cheap.  It’s not helped by, at times, oddly unresponsive controls.  You may think you have clicked left for your character to turn left but they don’t do it.

The bigger problems are mandatory to progress mini games and bad bosses. The mini games are the worst as you have no counter to them. They are often unclearly communicated,the rules hard to work out and, even when you know them, there’s an element of luck to them.

One aspect common to all the bosses is invulnerable states that go on for too long. Another is unevenness. I found the mid game bosses far harder than the endgame ones, save for a ln idiotic helicopter boss that I could only damage with grenades. Oh and it stealth emptied my food items before that battle. Not cool.

There’s also times when it’s design is unclear. The woods section really shows this up – you’re supposed to follow these symbols, but on one section there was any. Did that by sheer luck in the end.

So why play it? Because, when it is on form, and isn’t being very stupid in its design, it is very fun.  Enemy reactions as you beat them hell out of them are great.  There’s a good variety and diversity to the enemies. A wide array of weapons and objects to batter them with.

I’ve got one character’s stats maxed out and one smart improvement is that characters you are not playing also gain XP and money. Unlike the first game, if you die, you can restart from a hideout, with no money penalty. In the first game this was very irritating, so good to see it rendered as optional.  The food and item stays increase system was one of the best things in the first game, so good to have it back.  With an improvement where it indicates things you have not gotten the stat increase from.

One other major weakness is the level designs often restrict your view of the action too much.  It’s hard to batter someone if you cannot see them.

If you can accept or tolerate that the game will frequently get in its own way, often terribly, there’s fun to be had here. But it did throw in too many not very fun sections that nearly wrecked it.

Now I’ve the game world all unlocked, I’ll likely get the other characters powered up. As that central aspect of running around, buying items and moves and smacking up loads of enemies remains very fun, mostly.

Starfield

Sigh, I want to like this game more than I do. The name of my pain? Outposts.

It’s so unclear how the resources work, where they should be stored to be able to use, with the result that I never have what I need.

Placement is less than great, no grid system, no help in linking stuff up. As for power, that was weird too.

Never mind finding a good spot for an outpost. Or worse, you want build for inside.

It’s vague and clunky.

So opted for a different solution: Killing Ecliptics.

That worked and it was far more fun.

Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin

The idea of Team Ninja doing an action version of Final Fantasy, hmm… yeah, OK. Only problem is Team Ninja are known for games like Ninja Gaiden, Nioh and Wo Long.  Those games do not take prisoners so not for me.

They did put out a couple of demos that I could access and they had added difficulty settings. That enabled me to enjoy it.  Then the full version, PS4 disc, still with a free PS5 upgrade, was going absurdly cheap, worth a punt.

Have done the first two levels twice, as after completion a side mission version of each becomes available. One of those was in the demo, the other was not.

So far, it is a game I can play. It uses familar systems – break gauges, special attacks when the enemy is weakened, smart party members, but it also has a rather job / gear system.

It is also a trip back in time to the games of the late noughties, where the lead was a gravel voiced hard man, with a token woman character sometimes added. And that is the party here, in one bit all the lead character, Jack, does is a “grunt of acknowledgment”.

For all the unintentional comedy, it works well.  Good environments, a strong combat system, FF enemies.  The only flaw so far is, despite having settings to max, it is a bit too murky at times. (It’s true in Final Fantasy XVI too .)

No idea how the rest of the game goes but it’s a good start.

Starfield

Many hours in and I finally work out where I should be keeping the resources, work out how to increase ship cargo space and find the Constellation mission board.  Yep, it is that kind of game.

Together these are quite a game changer, as the Constellation missions pay well and I’ve my place in The Well looking far better. Next is outfitting the penthouse and the Akila apartment.

Other than this, been exploring, jumping from system to system, getting in the odd dogfight and blowing up ships.  One very smart planet was an arctic hellhole, went south and found a totally different biome, which was cool.

Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin

Well, the bullcrap I was expecting to appear has arrived – 4th mission boss was a cheap bastard. One who will be subjected to many repeat kills by a levelled-up party.  But even a mission boss pales in comparison to a side mission where you have to kill…. three Master Tonberries!

And yeah, Tonberry is bad enough but the Master versions are far, far harder.

Apart from those brick walls, it’s going well.  Started using other jobs, have found the Smithy, noticed unlocked jobs acquire XP even when not being used, albeit at a lower rate.  Also have starting unlocking Advanced jobs, which then lead to further unlocks! The gear system is making more sense too, along with the combat.

With so many games being open world now, doing a game where you are in a linear level, of getting from A to B, is quite refreshing. The side missions use their locations well too.

It looks like, if I wanted or needed to, I could redo levels, get crystals and seriously upgrade gear to a ludicrous degree and go through a level nuking / one-shotting everything.

Valentine’s Day…Lara Croft’s birthday
And the 5 classics have been remastered and available. Yay

Piledriving armoured enemies into the ground, turning a Tonberry to crystal then exploding it, body-slamming ogres and griffins, it can only be the chaos of Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin.

Do seem to be getting better at evading, both types of blocking and using special moves more, which was how the Tonberry got obliterated.

[Sean Robinson]

Was supposed to be Peacemaker for Mortal Kombat, but too sensitive…

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• This reply was modified 9 months, 3 weeks ago by Sean Robinson.

I’ve ended up bailing on BattleTech. I spent ages last weekend trying to do one mission, Liberate: Smithon. Your four mechs are dropped just to the south of an ammo supply base. It’s covered with turrets and a lance of 8 mechs. Your mission is to destroy all the mechs and, if you can, a couple of supply trucks that try to escape. There are explodable ammo dumps around the base that you can destroy if you want, but you’re rewarded for saving them.

The entire mission is an absolute pig. You’re massively out-gunned from the off. The turrets can be neutralised, but until you do the fast moving enemy mechs (of which there are about five) will spot for them (and the heavier mechs) meaning you’re open to long range fire wherever you go. The small mechs usually end up hiding in mineral patches, which make them harder to hit, so you’re getting continually torn up while trying to neutralise them. The supply trucks fuck off within a couple of turns, so are impossible to destroy unless you send a very fast, light mech after them, but that’s likely to get chewed up completely by the turrets. You’d think that blowing up the ammo dumps would be the solution (and that’s how to neutralise the turret power generator) but any time I blew one up with a mech near it, it barely did anything to the mech. There’s a very light mech called a Firestarter that is often near one at the start of the mission and despite being pretty much standing on the explosion, the worst it would ever do is take its arms off, meaning it could still spot for the larger mechs and somehow shrug off fire aimed at its torso.
It’s a huge spike in difficulty from the rest of the game and looking around online, other players agree and say the best way to do it is by having loads of heavy mechs (which I’ve not encountered to get yet).

I did finally manage to do it on like my 9th attempt (the one where I said to myself “if I fail this, I’m done with the game”). Most of the mechs I took were fucked up, multiple mechwarriors out with injuries.

But even though I beat it, my desire to play the game again has waned. I went back to it this morning though. Started a non-story mission. One of my mechs got absolutely fucked out of nowhere and I’m done. The repetitiveness of the game was beginning to drag anyway but throwing in a punishing difficulty that just straight up feels unfair half the time has robbed it of the charm it had.
After how much I loved MechCommander, it’s disappointing really.

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lorcan_nagle

Oh and meanwhile, because missions on BattleTech are big timesinks, I’ve been breaking my cardinal rule and playing something else alongside it: Darkside Detective: A Fumble In The Dark. This is the second game in the series and initially I was struggling a bit with it because it goes heavy on expecting you to remember every incidental character from the first game which, even though I only played it 18 months ago, I do not. But that aside, it’s really good. It’s broken up into individual cases, which are longer and more complex than the first game’s (which was overly easy for the most part). That makes for a lot of variety in location and story – an old people’s home where the residents are acting like teens, a theme park where people are disappearing, an Irish castle.

The crucial thing is though that it’s very funny. Moreso even than the first game, I think, and it really leans into fourth wall breaking humour about the game, its graphical limitations, the genre conventions etc.

[Sean Robinson]

Sean Robinson wrote:

Was supposed to be Peacemaker for Mortal Kombat, but too sensitive…

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• This reply was modified 9 months, 3 weeks ago by Sean Robinson.

Eagly!!!

Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin (PS5)

Having finished this yesterday, it’s a rather difficult title to review.  Its endgame duo of levels were utterly awful, yet the levels preceding them were a lot of fun.  And, after doing those two final levels, I regained access to all the others.

This is a game all about combat and, in that respect, Team Ninja know what to deliver. Yet, they have also tempered it, you need to be alert but this is not Ninja Gaiden.  They have also set up a huge array of jobs, structured around the elements of earth, wind, fire and water.  Add in physical and magic blocks, evades, special moves, stamina and break gauges and you’ve a system that’s fun to play, but with a lot of depth.

The gear and job systems link up effectively too. The only weaknesses are I’m not as impressed by the Expert jobs as I was the Advanced ones. Similarly, the upgrades to equipment aren’t akways evidenced when in battles. But these are endgame quibbles, for the bulk of the game it works fine.

Playing this game, with the talk of how FF XVI’s combat does and doesn’t work, along with the FF VII remake trilogy, is interesting, as Team Ninja steer a course between them.  You control Jack always but can change team members and command them in battles.

The game also combines pieces from all of the Final Fantasy games, up to FF XV.  It’s fun recognising levels, which can tip you off as to the enemies you’ll be dealing with. And the full FF roster is here. The one irritant is that enemy grab moves phase through everything, including special moves! Still, the special moves you get on broken enemies do tend to be spectacular, especially on bosses.

I’m never going to like the main game’s endgame, it was too narrow and had a far, far too cheap boss, but that was a fraction of the whole.  And the whole is mostly very good and very fun and, via a good set of difficulties, open to everyone.

Finally, I got this at an absurdly cheap price and nabbed the free PS5 upgrade for it! So I can’t complain too much, but those endgame levels deserve it.

Skull and Bones

Third attempt to get anywhere on this and it ended the same way as the others.

This time it threw in an outpost whose cannons have infinite range, and this is just the first mission, the one that says sink two ships. About to die again and I severed the game. Screw this, there are better designed, more fun games that actually want to be played and know how to on-board players. This pile of dreck doesn’t.

“Oh but it gets cool later on!” Doesn’t mean a thing if I never get to access it. The ship controls terribly, the attacks are pathetic, it’s not good at all.

The weird thing is UbiSoft know how to indicate to the player, but all of that is stripped out here. It’s hard to know where you are on the map, to tell what level ships around you are, putting up the sails is slow, it’s as if they forgot everything they knew

Final Fantasy XIV

Having just finished SoP:FFO, the plan was to pivot to Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, but after a bad time on Skull and Bones, I decided to boot this up once more. That may have been a mistake! Not because it isn’t good, far from it, the problem is its very good. Though I’m now more open to it taking over my gaming for a while.

Did a few sidequests and a couple of dungeon main quests, with party support. I don’t think I have played a game with smarter AI. The companions in both SoP:FFO and Tales of Arise are very good, but the way the party works here is amazing. Independent targeting, attacking, healing, including my character, along with evading enemy special moves, it is a work of art.

Got a major story chunk too, which only encourages me to keep playing. And, by reputation, this is the game at its weakest!

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

It would be fair to say late game difficulty spikes really blighted the concluding sections of the main game for me. That the trophy completion on PS5 is under 42% is telling. Of course, some players do love slowly chipping away at an immense health bar, each attack doing tiny damage. I’m not one of those players.

Still, when it isn’t doing its best to do itself over, the game is very good, often hitting heights of excellence with its storytelling, characters and soundtrack.  The music for some of the finale bosses was distractingly brilliant, had to try to ignore it to duff up the boss!

Should you skip this? I say no. Skipping it means you’ll have no clue of who or what or why. And it’ll take you the 50 hours of this game to get a sense of the numerous systems in it, never mind the world geography, politics, societies and history.

[Martin Smith]

I’ve been playing GBA games lately.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Battle Nexus

This is based on the mid-00s TV series (which is great) and is an action platformer, mostly. The graphics are decent, but there’s a strong stealth element to the gameplay. I guess I can see why they went for that, given, you know, they’re ninjas, but it’s not fun (especially starting every level without your weapons for really contrived reasons). When you do get into combat, it’s stiff and unsatisfying. The game is properly hard too, so not much fun. A big disappointment.

Peter Jackon’s King Kong: The Official Game Of The Movie

Which should really win an award for clunkiest title of any game. I can’t remember how I was put onto this one, but it was recommended on the strength of not being a great game, but an interesting one that’s better than you’d expect of a movie tie-in on hardware that had already been superseded. And that is true. It’s not a great game, I’m not sure I could fairly call it a good game even, but it has some nice ideas. You mostly control Adrian Brody, Jack Black and, later on Naomi Watts. They travel around in a line, like a Dragon Quest style RPG, but you can freely switch between them and split off (though you regroup by just walking into the others, which is very easy to accidentally do as soon as you split off). They each have different abilities/weapons, so you have to switch between them to explore Skull Island and its various temples, solving a lot of block shifting and switch puzzles. All of which is solid, though a little fiddly in switching between characters and abilities (I was constantly accidentally throwing grenades as Jack Black when I though I was on his block moving ability or using someone else). There are survival horror vibes to the game, with tough dinosaur encounters, limited ammo, constantly respawning smaller enemies and a rudimentary crafting system. Oh and the noise the game makes when you open the pause menu is straight out of Eternal Darkness, I think.

You also play as Kong in parts, which are kinda dull really. A very shallow belt scrolling beat ’em up set up that only evolves in upping the difficulty. The biggest element of difficulty in the main sections are navigation, in both a micro sense (getting around the levels) and a macro sense (knowing whereabouts you are, where you’re meant to be going and how to get there). The world map in the pause menu is really unhelpful. The game also has a couple of moments where Ann can get captured by Kong again, if you’re not out of sight when he appears, which means you have to go trekking across the island again to rescue her. F that. I reset the system and redid a tough boss battle to avoid doing that, that’s how much of a pain it is navigating the island.

So yeah, not a game I’d recommend, but it is interestingly ok.

Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge

Now this one is odd, because I didn’t even know it existed until a few years back. Which is weird, but it came out in 2003 and I was still reading specifically Nintendo gaming mags at that time, as well as reading Digitiser every day. But if I did hear about it, it made no impression. I wonder if it was sour grapes after the Microsoft buyout of Rare? Because this is on the GBA but it’s published by THQ.

What makes it more surprising that no-one seems to talk about it now or then is that it’s pretty damn good. It’s an 2.5D platformer (I’ve seen people call its isometric, but it’s not really) that makes to recreate the style of Rare’s N64 3D platformers on a handheld. There’s a hub world that gradually opens up access to other levels, which are sandboxes containing various collectables, crucially Jiggies, that are earned through solving puzzles, platforming, mini-games etc. It’s not got the depth of the N64 games, obviously, but there’s a lot going on here, including Banjo’s abilities, which steadily increase. It looks pretty good for a GBA game using pre-rendered 3D sprites and plays well, with the only issues I’ve had so far being a few instances of not being able to tell relative position/height of platforms and a couple of cheap enemies. The script is sharp too, which is something I think Rare don’t get enough credit for on these games. And it’s quite generous on difficulty. You can die, but there’s no real penalty for it, you just respawn at the last area transition you went through. You can save whenever you like too, which is a godsend for a handheld game.

I think this is unfairly overlooked really.

• This reply was modified 9 months ago by Martin Smith.

Dragon’s Dogma 2

Easily my best and most extensive run so far. Felt like I understood better what I was doing and how. A large part of it was remembering how games were pkayed when there was no lock on, no circling camera, what were tactics and strategy? Often it was not to rush in, spot enemies, hit, counter, block, kill.

Took on a Cyclops, which was not the smartest idea. My main pawn evrn quipped that we were in over our heads! Still, if we keep stabbing, shooting and blasting it, it’ll go down, right? Got it unbalanced and knocked over a couple of times, then it fell into a pool which gave the party the high ground to finish it off!

Did the first dungeon, a goblin-infested mine – aside from some pawn idiocy, one walked off a bridge, the other exploded a bomb – it was a very fun run of slaughter and looting.

Had a camping night attack too – involved ghosts and bandits. Next day, went for a different quest, evading a griffin along the way. This time it was Saurians.

Two things were demonstrated in this section – the pawns can be smart. At one point, it’s a punch-up with three Saurians in a close quarters tunnel and I’m not winning. Get close to death, one of my pawns heal me just in time. Eventually one of the Saurians is killed, that gives us the edge to kill the other two. Despite the number of hits, loss gauge impact is far less than expected- 20-25%.

After saving the soldiers from the Saurians, one asks to be escorted back to the entrance. Do that and then get asked to help free the village from Sauriabs, I take them out, get an invite to return in a few days. These quests flowed into each other very well, each emerging from the conclusion of the preceding one.

I then return to Vernmouth to wrap the quest up, store and sell items as needed, plus buy some new gear.

One thing that really stood out to me was subtle haptic feedback, which really helped in the fights, well, some of them. It is a game that demands you either bring your A-game or go home, but if you do? It can be very good, even excellent.

I finally started Hitman 2 recently having bought a pre-owned Disc version with a Christmas voucher – the first and third Hitman games I’d managed to snag digitally, but 2 just wasn’t available. They really are well done and immersive and use a part of your gaming brain that doesn’t get flexed much otherwise I think.

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Ben, Martin Smith

Stellar Blade demo

Companies should always be commended for issuing demos.  And this gives a good chunk of the game to play with, though it doesn’t extend to ranged combat. I’m also certain it’ll also find an audience beyond the obvious one it’s going for.

The first section was an effective intro, also putting the Dualsense to good use.  The second section suffered from being too murky, to the degree that I flicked high contrast mode on so I could see what I needed to. It also had gates that I couldn’t open despite being prompted to. Ditto passcodes that it isn’t clear where they should be used.

Combat? It’s variable. The dodge move is too slight for me to really see it, which is a pain when the game requires it to be used. Similarly, slicing up an enemy only for it to do a combo series as if you were tapping it with a feather is weird.

Does the game explain its combat systems well? Since the demo reel at the end showed a move with the boss I never got to do, I’m going with no. That same boss also did homing attacks that were colour tagged when the sense I had was those were more fixed direction strikes.

Do the Souls-like features help it? I’m really not sure. Similarly, the difficulty options of Story and Normal. Story is a good bit harder than most settings of the name in other games. So this could fall between the two – too hard for casual players, not hard enough for Souls fans.

For me? I’m not sure. I like the world and enemy design, the way it taps into the Dualsense. The difficulty, even on Story, does deter me and I’m not convinced the Souls aspects are needed.

It’s an interesting mix of Nier Automata and Bayonetta influences.  If I see it going cheap on disc I might give it a shot, but I don’t feel confident enough to drop £50-70 on it next month.  Those with better coordination and 3d processing will likely have more fun with this than me.

Guardians of the Galaxy

Given my experience with this game, how the hell do I review it? It’s tempting to say skip it, lots of other games to play. Yet its high points are a match for any game going. The soundtrack is superb and, when combined with top notch story moments, really delivers.

You can play it by GamePass or PS Extra? Do that and play the first four chapters. By the end of chapter four you’ll have a sense of how it works and if it is for you or not.

If you’re considering buying? The sale price is too tempting? Look at some gameplay videos of the combat videos first. For all I can put part of my experience down to dyspraxic coordination, there’s a lot of posts online of how hard people found the combat while playing on “easy”. So, it’s far from just me.

That I put up with the combat – OK, yes, it’s a non-refundable digital PS5 copy too – is testimony to how well most of the other pieces work. The story is very, very good. The world and character design is excellent, as is the voice acting.

The big roadblock is the combat. The sad thing is it would take little to make it really fly. First, have option to disable photo mode at all times and visor view in combat. Have the Guardians have more health, shorter or zero cooldowns, plus smarter. FF XIV duty support NPC members? Yeah, that level. Plus, no spamming additional enemies, no ” oh yeah, while you were shooting those two enemies, we spawned ten more behind you”. Oh and a lock-on that works and does not require holding L2 the entire time. Wait, another one, guns that do actual damage.

For combat or puzzles, I found its signposting and communication as to what to do and how to be poor.  Its choices mechanism, and how they play out, entire levels later, possibly making a hard game even harder, feels opaque and unfair. If you’re going to play this, use a guide for those bits.

It’s a shame this sold low, as a sequel might have seen the flaws corrected. Alternatively, they might have doubled down on them.  Its other big flaws is having an easy setting that isn’t and accessibility settings that didn’t make it that accessible to me.

Should you buy or play this? I don’t know. How are you at keeping track of multiple, agile enemies in full 3d environments, where more will be added to it? How do you find third person shooting? If you find those things easy, maybe you’re the person those harder settings are for. On the other hand, if like me, you’re looking at this and thinking it’s worth a punt due to having difficulty settings and accessibility features, then be more wary, as those may not play out in the way you expect.

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Dave

Dragon’s Dogma 2

Booted it up, with the intent to just do a couple of quests, that was the intent, a short go.

Five hours later and:

– Two dead Ogres

– Multiple Cyclops dead, including one that walked into Vernmouth

– More dead wolves, goblins, harpies, hobgoblins and saurians than I can keep track of

– One fended off Grifffin

– Evaded Drakes and Minotaurs

I have far more of the world mapped, have Battahl unlocked.

That’s why I am doing lots of exploring, as that’s a step up and I need the cash to get better gear.

I think, due to its nature, the emergent part of the game makes for an inevitably unstable experience. It will either be very, very good or very, very irritating, and able to go from one to the other very quickly and back again.

A case where it worked incredibly well: Cyclops walks into Vernmouth, it gets attacked by my party and 10-15 NPCs! It was a gloriously chaotic slaughter.

I’ve been playing Romancing SaGa this past week or so. It’s a SNES JRPG by Square. You might be more familiar with it than you think – it’s a side series to SaGa on the Game Boy, which was called The Final Fantasy Legend in the West.

The game’s big idea is that it takes influence from Western RPGs and offers total flexibility. There’s no one main quest. Well, sort of. There is a final quest you go to, but it’s not a singular narrative like in an FF. You pick one of eight characters to be your main and they each have their own introductory quest. After that, you’re free to just wander the world map as you see fit and pick up quests here and there. You can run into the other main characters you didn’t pick and recruit them as party members, along with some secondary characters, which open up some of their opening quests.

That total flexibility extends to characters creation as well. There are no classes for characters. Each of the Mains has set stat growth levels that mean they’re better with a certain type of build, but you don’t know that as you play and you’re free to do what you like with them. You can equip them with any weapon you have or buy any kind of magic for them to use. I picked Barbara as my main character, who is described as being a touring dancer. She has ended up in my playthrough wielding an axe that she’s both deadly and surprisingly accurate with. She’s also good with a mace and knows some fire magic.

Characters don’t level up in the traditional way. As they gain xp from battles (and there’s no visible number on those gains) their individual stats, like charisma, agility, wisdom etc, will go up. It’s a little disorientating but quite freeing from the rule of level numbers. As well as stats growing, weapon proficiency grows in the same way, sort of. The more a character uses, say, a rapier, the better they get with it, going up proficiency levels. Every third level, they’ll learn a technique for it, which functions like magic. You can use them a certain number of times, depending on your stats and what level the technique is, before having to rest at an inn to recharge. Trouble is though, that if you unequip a weapon, you lose all those techniques and proficiency, even if you re-equip it. It also doesn’t carry over if you buy a better version of the same weapon type, which has discouraged me from bothering with upgrades (also the cost – money is quite tight in the game, I’ve found).

Magic works in a similar way. Rather than a basic MP pool, each type of magic a character knows – fire, wind, spirit etc – has its own MP pool, which increases the more you use that magic. You don’t get new spells from this though, you have to buy them from shops, which does mean you can completely customise your spell options and not have to bother with things you won’t use.

The flipside to all this freeform gameplay and customisation is that the game does a pretty terrible job explaining most of this. I’ve been readily using guides to get my head around it. A lot of this is down to the technical limitations of how early a SNES game this is. It’s dated 1991 and so like with many third party SNES titles from that year, it just feels like a slightly souped up NES game. The graphics are fairly basic, but more colourful than a NES game. The menus are finnicky, I would say. There’s that weird thing some early 16 bit Japanese games have where any button press, even on the d-pad, can dismiss a menu or bit of dialogue, which is weird.

There’s no real quest log, either, which I think is the biggest issue. You expand your map locations by talking to people in towns. If they mention a nearby lake or dungeon or whatever, it means it’ll be unlocked for you to go there. That’s cool. You get wind of quests through word of mouth too, but usually have to go get it from a barman in a pub or a king, but not always. But there’s nothing to help you keep track of what it is you’re doing and you can have multiple quests on the go, I think. There’s often no real point where it says it’s done either. Some, like rescuing a kid kidnapped by monsters, will automatically return you to the quest giver or settlement when you’ve finished, but others will just give you an easier exit from the cave or whatever you’ve ended up in and then you’re just left to your own devices.

Despite that, I’m having a lot of fun. It can get a bit repetitive at times. Not necessarily grindy – I’ve never felt like I have to go level up to get through something – but monster encounters aren’t entirely random, they’re activated by walking into sprites on the field (and then what you fight is slightly randomised). For some dungeons, this can mean a horde of a dozen or more sprites blocking your way. Which does actually give a bit of atmosphere and intimidation to it.

Romancing SaGa didn’t make it to the West until much later on, with a PS2 remake of this game called Minstrel Song. I wonder how different the JRPG market would have been in the West if it had. It’s such a different experience to FF mechanically, it could have carved its own space alongside that and the Mana series on the SNES.

I wouldn’t entirely recommend this game, given its technical limitations, but there are HD remasters of the second and third SNES games available on Switch, along with a remaster of the PS2 remake and newer entries in the series (and also a compilation of the Game Boy SaGas). I’m really keen to check out all of those now.

Crazy – The Xbox controller triggers RT and LT started getting stuck during gaming.
I had to go online about it and what worked was actually taking off the shell covering and applying
a Q tip of rubbing alcohol to the insides where the connection is made.

The controller no longer looks so new, but it no longer messes up my gaming.

Dragon’s Dogma II

Had a pretty epic session on this today.

Started off on the main quest, through Stormwind Cave, into a newly opened up area, major plotbomb gets dropped, get indicated to use a different exit to head back to Bakbattahl. That trip did show up how well designed the game world is. Came out in a crumbling ruin, surrounded by the, head back to land carefully as, in this game, swimming will kill you. It looked very, very good.

Finished off that quest and I may be at the jumping off point of the main plot as it’s told me I need to kill Drakes and I can’t yet do those bastards. While doing that I stumbled on stuff to resolve another quest, which was rather neat.

Did a number of sidequests too – one was for sword restoration. Bit of a pain as it was go to this cavern to collect ore, but what I got felt random. Then later it did a timed exit run out of a cave, that one I got lucky on.

Of course, getting to that area took a bit of doing, involved going through a grotto, taking put a cyclops and later a wall. The enemies in the Volcanic Islands are also very nasty. It wouldn’t be DD2 without some unbelievably underhanded bullcrap and so it proved: Cyclops plus two hounds with instant sleep attacks, elsewhere Rockscallers, Oozes and Harpies all showed up! That was not fun.

Did a quest where the NPC was dead, so found his body in the morgue, revived him, then did the quest – which turned out to be a quite clever one.

Most epic moment of the run? I’m out exploring and a Golem shows up! Great, fine, all right, let’s go. As I’m fighting it, got it down to its last health bar, a Griffin turns up! Yep, two major enemies at once. Finished off the Golem, started on the Griffin. A few minutes later there was both Golem rubble and a Griffin corpse decorating the landscape.

I had a quick go on the demo of the Princess Peach Showtime Switch game earlier. That seems pretty fun. I did not have a go on the demo for the new Prince of Persia, because Ubisoft requires you to sign up for a Ubisoft account to play it. A single player demo. So fuck that. (I do have a Ubi account from playing South Park Stick of Truth, but there’s no way in hell I’m going through all the rigmarole of getting into it on a different console for a sodding demo).

What are playing on Martin? As the PoP demo didn’t ask me to set up a UbiSoft account on PS5.

Ben wrote:

What are playing on Martin? As the PoP demo didn’t ask me to set up a UbiSoft account on PS5.

I was playing on Switch.

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Ben

Odd, that would be irritating.

Dragon’s Dogma II

With a new gear set-up and a lot of spent cash, the dead enemies tally for today’s run is:

• Numerous goblins, hobgoblins, orcs, saurians, stupid bandit humans
• One Ogre
• One Golem
• Two, two Chimeras!
• And..  wait for it…One Drake!

And that Drake was sofa king cheap. Seriously Capcom? It’s not enough that the thing has  fire breath, that it can do while moving or flying backwards; that it has a crapton of armour and can fly; that every hit from it hits for health and stamina? No, you added lightning and meteor spells!

Now, there would have been a Griffin added to the tally, had it down to its last health bar and it legged it! Then later I am convinced that same Griffin did a fly by, spotted my party and went: “Oh no, not you lot, there’s easier ways to get lunch.” and flew on.

Watching the big boss enemies health bars get shredded was immensely satisfying. Whacked a Griffin in the head and watched a good 50% of a health bar go up in smoke! Stabbed an Ogre twice in the head, once as he stood up. The new gear’s knockdown resist helped on every fight but the Drake, plus High Hallidom is a neat support spell.

Dragon’s Dogma II

How to review this very odd game? Well, I did finish the main quest, unlike its predecessor, nor do I care about it’s real ending. I did put 85 hours into it so it must have done something right.

Let’s start with story and quests. The former starts off OK but falls apart and I can’t say I felt invested in it. Characterisation is weak and the main villain barely registers. Quests can be good, but they suffer from the game’s general vagueness on information. The characters in them can be good but after the quest is done? You never see them again, there is zero follow-up.

About the game being vague, it is a problem, you’ll get details like “check in a few days” or “return in a while”, with quest failure if you take too long. It extends to the description of skills and items and weapons. Quest givers are not indicated visually and can, when you go looking to report to them, be dead! Enemies will not always be indicated either, only them trying to attack you tips upu off.  The very deliberate lack of clarity does not help the game.

And then there is the lack of balance – this is a game with no level scaling. Thus, at the start, if a major monster shows up, you have no chance. Later, you start to take them out, then a bit easier and the endgame is your party obliterating them. Yet, even in the endgame, the drakes are major enemies, turning out to be stronger than the endgame boss! This, combined with its health loss over time, makes for a brutal opening few hours that will likely deter a lot of players from continuing.

That’s what it gets wrong, what does it do right? Locations, world design, combat styles and combat.

It takes a page out of the Yakuza / Like A Dragon series by having a finite set of locations you’ll spend a lot of time in. These all work very well, with a high level of interaction, interiors and chatacters to engage with. The three regions of Vermund, Battahl and the Volcanic Islands all feel distinct and are good to explore.

After the opening hours combat gets better, as does your party. Better skills and magic aids this. The various combat styles mostly work, save for magic which demands a bit too much manual coordination.

The day / night, light and dark environments are good. There are times, even in daytime, when you’ll need your lantern. The restriction on fast travel isn’t a problem most of the time. The only locations where it gets noticeable is those without oxcarts.

It has a neat line in random events – major and minor monsters can turn up in towns, at both day and night. Sometimes they get killed or, in the case of drakes, fended off. Enemy placement in the open world is mostly fixed but with some variation. There are times when it goes overboard with it and you get hit by wolves and harpies and a griffin.

For some the enemy variety is too limited, but for me, with everything else going on in fights, with a lack of lock-on, indicators, an unhelpful camera, more variety would have made it far more difficult.

One of its most variable cards is climbing on large monsters. It can work on ogres and cyclops, less so on chimaeras, minoataurs, griffins and drakes. When it works? Fantastic. When it doesn’t? Frustrating.

While the AI of them is far from perfect, the pawn system remains a clever innovation that sets the game apart. Once you have a group that works well, the game goes up a notch.

This mix of exploration, combat, the pawns you can hire, gear, combat styles, is what kept me coming back despite the game’s flaws.

Is there anything else like it? Not really, save for its predecessor, which it is an improvement on.

One area where the game fails in a more serious way is accessibility. It has control remapping and subtitles, but the subtitles are directionally displayed. Some control combinations are hard to coordinate. There are no difficulty options. Another serious flaw is its single save slot and the erratic way autosave activates. Workarounds can be found for these but they shouldn’t have to be.

Due to all this, due to how its systems work, your experience will be uneven. It will be fantastic and maddeningly frustrating. If you can adjust to and live with this aspect of it, then maybe it is the game for you.

I’m at the final stretch of Romancing SaGa and unfortunately it hasn’t held up quite as well as my initial impressions. Though it doesn’t make you grind, it does get to be a slog. A lot of my play time has been spent doing a linked chain of quests going through dungeons to talk to dragons to get things they’ve borrowed off each other. Fine on the first way round, but then having to actually take all the bits back, you have to go through most of the dungeons again entirely, fighting through all the creatures again (especially weird given the last two have the monsters refuse to fight you). Because of the game’s non-linear nature and lack of normal levelling, it scales the enemies you fight based on your total encounter rate (which also dictates when certain quests are available). This meant that fighting through to get back to the first dragon just to return his bangle, instead of just breezing through all the scrubs I fought the first time around, I was having to fight through monsters scaled to my level. And at this point, the game is throwing things at me that are, in other areas, considered mid-bosses in their own right. Trios of Elementals that can almost wipe out the party in one attack.

Being stuck in the groove of this quest has also meant that my encounter rate has barred me from other quests. Which is fine in a way, the game is designed so you can’t do everything. But it’s pretty frustrating because I dumped one of my party to swap in one of the other main characters to do their quest chain. When you recruit a character in, they’re under-levelled but earlier in the game quickly grow as they fight (think of it of having a level 10 character in your party of level 40s). Unfortunately, with the monster level as high as it is now, they keep getting killed before the end of a battle, which means they don’t get any xp. Or the rest of my party kills the monster(s) before the scrub can attack, which means they don’t gain any weapon experience, so they’re still underpowered on that front. I decided to get rid of them and try and recruit back the guy I let go but… I can’t find them again. I’ve checked pretty much every pub in moderate travelling distance from me and found every other player character, but not this one. Frustrating.

Just got the final dungeon to do later. I am still keen to try more of this series, including the Minstrel Song remake of this, but this entry feels a bit too broken to ever really return to.

Last night, I started playing Spider-Man. Not that one, the PlayStation one. I mean the PlayStation One one. The first game by Activision (published by Neversoft) from 2000.

I had this on the PC back in the day and loved it. No idea where my copy went, so when I got my PS1, this was top of my hitlist. And man, it holds up so well. It’s just so much fun. I love the Insomniac Ps4 one but there’s a sense of freedom to this game that the recent one – arguably any Spider-Man game in the past 20 years or so – doesn’t have. I don’t mean freedom in gameplay terms, but in that it’s not trying to be more than it needs to. It’s a 3D action platformer type thing without any kind of open world element and that’s fine. It’s a Spider-Man game – I think vaguely based on the 90s animated series but it’s not slavish to that – but it’s from a period when it can freely throw in cameos by Daredevil, Captain America and Uatu, because why the hell not.

I’m pretty sure this was the first game that included alternate costumes and collectable comic covers too, which are great inclusions. I played this before I think I ever properly got into US comics, so those were really engrossing windows into the long history of the character that I didn’t know about.

It’s not perfect, obviously. Movement is a bit clunky (digital tank controls rather than anything analogue), it’s crying out for a camera control on the right stick, some of the in-engine cut scene scripting is janky (a skylight explodes into shards before Spidey hits it) and the less said about the character model for Black Cat the better. But it is just so charming, so pure in its conception that I can look past all of that.

I’d love it to get remastered. Slap some higher res textures in there, maybe more complex character models for Spidey and some others, analogue controls and camera movement and it’d be great. It’ll never happen though. Not just because I think Microsoft now owns this game (from buying out Activision) but because Spider-Man, and pretty much any licensed super-hero property now, just can’t be a game like this any more. I don’t think any game can be like this now, frankly. The industry has moved beyond it and that’s a real shame.

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Dave

Oh, I loved that Spidey game. We had it on Dreamcast and it looked great. Really vibrant and fun, and really good cartoony voice acting too. Loads of cool collectibles as well.

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Martin Smith

I’ve got the sequel, Enter Electro, as well (though I’m not going to play it right away). Which I actually bought back when I first got my PS2, as that was a PS exclusive and I hadn’t had a PS1. But I only played a tiny bit of it, didn’t really bother with it and then sold it off (same with the PS1 Final Fantasy 1 and 2 remaster double pack). I think it felt too primitive to hold my attention against PS2 and GC games at the time. But I’m really looking forward to that as it’ll almost entirely be “new” for me.

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Dave

Starfield

Finished the game, insofar as it is possible to. Do still have some things to do in it, like cracking ship building.

Can’t say the final missions for it worked that well for me. The first is your usual end-of-game slaughterthon. One good surprise was talking down both the Hunter and Emissary, having previously told them both to get stuffed.

The final “choice” isn’t much of one as the quest only completes when you go through the Unity. Return to your ship? It doesn’t complete.

When I went through? New ship, new suit and everything else is gone which does not really work for me, especially given how other NG+ work in other games. The story twist at Constellation is interesting but I’m not sure it outweighs the loss of everything else.

The final bit at the Unity was funny, “part of you will explode”. Er, yeah, not really selling me this other-me. The bits with what happens to Constellation and the other factions were good, got a positive set of outcomes, though I was also wondering if the budget ran out.

Guess the story is that it’s about the journey, not the destination.

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth

Have returned to this and had forgotten how much fun it is and how much it improves on its predecessor.

The way positioning works in battles allows for some very neat moves, weapon attacks or impromptu team up attacks. It even extends to where you choose to fight too.

On the topic of Yakuza/Like A Dragon…

https://www.gamesradar.com/entertainment/drama-shows/like-a-dragon-yakuza-tv-show-amazon-kiryu/

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Ben

Surprisingly, not only did the new Perfect Dark appear in the Xbox showcase last night, it had actual gameplay shown off.

My main thought is that while lots of it looks good, I’d prefer it be third person for most of things it’s doing.

 

 

Xbox had an excellent night.

Games out in 2024:

• Dragon Age: Veilguard – really like the look of this. And it is out later in the year.
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – is there anyone who doesn’t like decking Nazis?
• Avowed – looking very, very nice.

 

Expansions in 2024:

• Diablo IV – probably be fun but I need to finish the main campaign first.
• Starfield – really like the focus on House Va’Ruun, plus new content tonight. I clearly finished the main game at the right time.

 

Stuff for 2025:

• Doom: Dark Ages – This looks wonderfully bonkers.
• South of Midnight – I’m now far more interested in this one, neat design and gameplay.
• Clair Obscure: Expedition 33: Good world design and interesting take on turn-based combat.
• Perfect Dark – I have no history with this, really liked how it looked and played.
• Fable – ye gods, this looks fantastic.

 

Yep, that’s 10 items I’m interested in.

Just did my first Strike run in Destiny 2 – Scarlet Keep.

Two clan members pitched in on it and it immediately became a masterclass in how to really tear through the place! Which in turn showed how the game can really be and why  people keep playing it.

I’ve talked about doing an epic catch-up for ages, but that does look to have started.

There’s going to be a Nintendo Direct tomorrow afternoon, focusing only on Switch stuff out for the rest of the year (and explicitly not the next console – I like that Nintendo spell that out now to quash bullshit rumours). Which makes me realise, I can’t think of anything due out for Switch for the rest of the year apart from the Nintendo World Championships game.

That was a pretty solid Nintendo Direct. I did think, when they revealed they’re porting Donkey Kong Country Returns again, that they were scraping the bottom of the barrel to kill time before the next console, but there’s some pretty good stuff due:

a new Mario & Luigi, an always fun but under-rated series
Perfect Dark on NSO with online multiplayer
A sequel to Phantom Brave
Marvel Capcom collection
Romancing SaGa 2 remake
Dragon Quest 1, 2 and 3 in 2D-HD
Metroid Prime 4 actually exists and looks pretty good from what little they showed
A new Mario Party
A new Zelda game, in the Link’s Awakening remake engine, where you finally get to play as Zelda! Out in September.

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Ben

Martin Smith wrote:

Marvel Capcom collection

Wow! I’ll definitely be picking this up, if only for MvC2. I’ve also never played that Punisher game, which looks great.

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Ben

I’ve never even heard of that Punisher game. I’m not sure how much use I’ll actually get out of that collection, but I’ll pick it up at some point. After I eventually get the Darkstalkers one.

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Ben

Yep, it was quite a line-up.

The Punisher is a fun, Capcom on top form 93-94 beat ’em up, with Punisher and Fury as playable characters.

Non-exclusive:

Dragon Quest III – this is looking superb.

Marvel Capcom Collection – did not expect this. Wanted for a long time but suspected it was blocked by licensing issues.

Exclusive:

The Thousand Door Paper Mario must have helped, along with Mario RPG, as there is a new Mario and Luigi RPG with some very creative gameplay showed off.

Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD looks great.

Legend of Zelda – with Zelda as the lead looks very intriguing, with some very clever gameplay.

Metroid Prime 4 Beyond – what a way to close. The style. The soundtrack. This is looking superb.

I play the Star Wars Squadron and some of the Jedi Survivor.

Now I see this Star Wars Outlaws and it looks so good!

If I get it, I will most likely wait until the Cyber Monday after Thankgiving for a sale.

I am sofa king inundated right now with games I am playing. 🤣

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Ben

Decided to try a couple of fighting games, as they were on sale.

Street Fighter VI

This is both rather clever in its structure and works as an introduction to it. Setting it in Metro City, where the Final Fight series was set, is both a smart use of Capcom’s history and a way to set up the story idea of anyone fighting anywhere. There’s a surprising, and welcome, diversity to the citizens of Metro City, with personality to match.

The World Tour is pretty much Street Fighter meets Yakuza, minus the intricate melodrama plot. There’s a neat sense of humour to some of its scenes too, like Chun-Li instructing a class with a final move that almost everyone fails.

The modernised controls do work better with the DualSense button layout too. I’m likely to continue with this.

Mortal Kombat 1

For all that they want to sell this as a starting point for those new to the series, it really isn’t.

That’s a shame because it has a good roster of characters and the story and cutscenes are well executed. The stages are stunning, as are the character animations.

How then does it go wrong? Very intricate controls, which require a high level of dexterity, with severe timing for combos and AI that is far, far too good. There is a “very easy” setting, which is nothing of the kind. The combination really undermines it for me.

What would make it better for me? A stream-lined control option, with fatality assist or even an auto-fatality option. Were it not for both Street Fighter and Tekken implementing this kind of system its absence would not stand out so much here, but they did and it does.

If you have a Pulse 3D headset you better not lose the dongle or you’re stuffed.

Oh and that nigh-on identical PS Link adapter Sony sell for £20? Does not work for Pulse 3D headset, only “most” models.

Looks like I’m far from the only one conned.

Even if it had worked? The PS Link button is an icon so small I can barely see it, as along with the tiny size, it is dark grey on black!

It is an incredibly anti-accessible bit of hardware, utterly abominable.

Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth

I have escaped from Dondadu Island!

Having got it to 5-stars it’s time to return to Hawaii

Lego Marvel Superheroes 2

This is the first Lego game I’ve played for a while. Previously I’ve played one of the first Star Wars ones as a rental (which I thought was dumb fun, but I’m not too into SW, so it didn’t grab me much), Lego Batman on the 360, which I 100%ed and was so sick of by the end that I immediately traded it in and then Lego City Undercover on WiiU, which I remember being pretty fun, save for the awful loading times (which I blamed on the WiiU, but given the poor loading times here I’m not so sure).

And I was fine ignoring the Lego games. They’re quite limited and I’d had my fill. But I saw Lego Marvel 2 last October at the Cardiff Games Market and noticed that it had Spidey 2099 on it, then the general multiverse thing going on it and it caught my interest. It was £5 on a Switch eShop sale the other week (down to £3.30 with gold points, back up to £5 when I decided to get all the DLC too) so I took a punt.

Not a great choice.

This is, from design to implementation, a thoroughly awful game. Pretty much every aspect of it is dire.

Visually it fails. The graphics are fine – I’m certainly not a graphics snob at the best of times anyway – but the camera is terrible. It’s always too far zoomed out to be of use while the free camera controls in the open world section are unhelpful at best. While the proper cinematic cut-scenes are well made (but lack the charm of the earlier, dialogue-free games) any time the game takes control of the camera to show you something it is an active hindrance. It doesn’t always make clear what it’s showing you, which makes objectives frequently difficult to understand, and the game doesn’t pause NPC activities while it’s happening, so you can be killed by enemies while the game’s taken control away from you, which is just ridiculous. Sure, death is irrelevant in this game, but it just demonstrates the lack of care in the game’s construction.

Audibly it fails. While there are a few highlights (Colin McFarlane as Heimdall, Sacha Dhawan reprising his role of Davos from Netflix’s Iron Fist, whoever it is they’ve got as Captain America), the voice acting is broadly dreadful, featuring genuinely the worst Spider-Man I’ve heard in any medium. Dialogue is poorly implemented in the game. Random dialogue from passers-by can not only interrupt each other but story and objective critical dialogue from main characters too. Sorry She-Hulk, I’d love to hear what we’re supposed to be doing now but that NPC has to repeat their not funny line about getting a nexus fragment I’ve already got for the 9 millionth time. By the end of the game, I was totally with Kang, wanting to cruelly subjugate the lot of them.

Your characters aren’t any better. The companion AI here is terminally brainless. They will continually walk in the way of what you’re doing (following a clue trail for instance). Put one character on a pressure switch and change to another to interact with what’s just been activated, and more often than not the now-NPC on the switch will wander off. Frequently, they will get stuck on a bit of geography and completely lose pace with you. I switched character while in Manhattan Noir (which I should point out has a fun dynamic desaturated visual effect when you go there) at one point to find that my companion was still hanging around in Lemuria. The game will sometimes respawn your companions nearby if you get too far from them, which is fair enough in theory, but in practice, as with so much of this game, glitchy to the point of broken. There were several instances where characters respawned inside looked rooms – a glass skywalk in 2099 where you’re supposed to mind-control the people inside, a locked cell in the Old West, a cave with a sealed entrance in Wakanda. For the latter, I switched character, not realising they’re spawned inside the locked caved. The game then respawned my other character inside too, meaning we were both completely sealed inside and I had to reboot the game to get out. Just so dumb.

Speaking of dumb, combat is brainlessly terrible. This is largely due to the fact that the game is still using the same control scheme from the first Star Wars games, just with more functions awkwardly bolted onto it even though it clearly needs a ground-up redesign. All combat is on one button, which means it’s an absolute crap shoot as to whether you do a ranged or melee attack. Frequently, characters just airbox at no-one instead of range attacking enemies a few metres away shooting you. Even if you get them to range attack, the auto-targeting is completely borked and more often than not, you’ll end up shooting your companion characters (why does this game have friendly fire?). This is completely compounded in irksomeness near the end of the game, when you have to fight a large floating boss that you can’t get near or fly to, who is surrounded by scrub enemies including some that are just invincible and you have to ignore while putting up with them frequently killing you. Which would be bearable, maybe, if the auto-targeting didn’t keep just homing in on them instead. You can manually target by holding down the attack button and moving a cursor around, but it is so slow, clunky and inaccurate that it is functionally useless (plus some characters don’t do their normal ranged attacks with it).

The root of this issue is that the game supposedly has context-sensitive controls: multiple actions are assigned to the same button which the game will smartly know which one is appropriate based on what’s going on. However the game is about as sensitive as a 1950s father. It hardly ever knows what it is you actually want to do, whether that’s using the attack button or the action button, where other powers live. None of this is helped by some characters having half a dozen or more powers (Dr Strange is particularly cluttered with actions and trying to get the game to do the one you want is a nightmare) and the inconsistency between interactions. It is never clear when you have to just press a button for an action or hold it or repeatedly tap it (not helped by the game not recognising all of these well – it was forever starting a charged boost jump when I’d simply tapped the jump button). This even despite the fact the game frequently puts prompts up. The trouble there is that they all look the same, a bland button symbol that gently fades in and out. If you want me to tap it repeatedly, but some action lines around it or some colours or some kind of helpful animation FFS. Powers don’t work consistently between characters either, so I never had confidence that the game would ever do what I intended it to and so tended to stick to just a handful of characters that I’d largely sussed out.

But even just switching characters is a pain. You press X to switch to a companion character or hold to bring up the (tiny, nigh on impossible to read) selection menu. But the shifting action is as brainless as every other system in this game, almost pointedly never going to who you want, however much you direct it with the left stick, while some characters shift into an alternate form on a long press of X (which, as with so many of its functions, like the camera, the game doesn’t tell you), so you have to do it twice to get the menu up… if the game bothers to recognise this and doesn’t just have them change form again. Or switch to a companion.

There are so many other little things in this game that are just badly made. Captions for quest givers’ dialogue appears in boxes but instead of appearing in one go or gradually revealing, the game types out each word as its spoken, with the text auto-justifying in the box as it goes, meaning it constantly jumps and jerks around as it goes. Platforming is utterly dreadful. There’s no element of adhesion when walking on tight ropes, so you can just fall off at the merest step. Even jumping between acrobatic poles is dire, as you can, despite having no ability to change your positional aim, fly off at completely the wrong angle to the next pole, as if it’s all just random bits of scenery you happen to be on, rather than a specific interactive path you’re meant to be following. The Cloak and Dagger DLC mission has a section that is genuinely one of the worst bits of game design I have ever encountered (you’re required to double jump across a gap with Dagger, who does not have a functional double jump). The flying controls are staggeringly bad, especially if you want to adjust the camera when changing altitude. Movement is only partially analogue. You can creep slowly with a gentle press, but running full tilt happens not from your use of the analogue stick but automatically when you’ve been moving in one direction for long enough. There’s more that I’m forgetting, I’m sure, but it all adds up to an hugely frustrating experience.

And yet…

This game is Ralph Wiggum, tasked with making a diorama and being so thunderingly stupid and inept that he just puts a load of MOSC Star Wars figures on a cardboard tray. And I am Principal Skinner, giving it first place.

Because this game is objectively horrendous in so many ways, but my god, the fan service! The story is by Kurt Busiek and it really shows, because this story (about Kang bodging together cities from different time periods to create Chronopolis) is crammed with deep cuts. Although not aimed exclusively at kids, it could have got away with just having the characters well known from the movies and mixing in a few then-current comics characters (like Jane Thor). But it goes beyond that, throwing in (some as DLC at least) the modern version of the Champions. It includes the Runaways, with a story based vaguely around their original run from the mid-00s. It has the Agents of ATLAS, the original Guardians of the Galaxy and Hellcow. Gwenpool runs the unlockables section and introduces the side-missions. You go on a mission with Rick Jones, in his A-Bomb form, who rants about his entire 60 years of continuity. One of the first villains you fight is the Presence for god’s sake. You can unlock not just the Two Gun Kid, but the Rawhide Kid, Redwolf, Phantom Rider and Kid Colt. And even Colt’s modern retcon partner Arizona Annie, who was only in about two stories 15 years ago. Stingray is not only a playable character but a part of the main story. Stingray! God knows what any kids playing this make of some of these character choices but I was loving it.

And that is how I ended up spending 35 hours playing an fucking awful video game.

I am Homer Simpson and this game is the mouldy 10 foot sandwich. I know I shouldn’t, but I just couldn’t stop myself.

A small ramble: I took a hiatus from the Spider Man games and looked into what I also had.
I went a little crazy and am switching between Gotham Knights, GotG, Fallen Order, and Squadrons.
I have my choices and when I am in the mood I decide.

All these RPGs:farming for XPs to build up points, applying the points to some skills tree to enhance your
health, defense, and fighting abilities, always some treasure chest, some fast tracking on the map…
Favorite one so far is Fallen Order. There is a LOT of Sekiro, Dark Souls, and Tomb Raider in it, especially the climbing, jumping, running the wall, and backtracking to the planets you were in before.

It might be a while before I get back to the Spidey games. 🤣

The good part is that some of the gamepad controls like B is to dodge/evade on all of them.
And it is no “sin” to adjust the settings to easy if you’re stuck in a boss fight.
I always felt that PC games are better than the console, but the PS5 is amazing.
I plan to get the Star Wars Outlaws on it and be further inundated. Because I can! 🤣

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Ben, njerry

Fallen Order is a surprisingly accessible light soulslike. Great as it is, Survivor is even better.

Oh, wait, I shouldn’t be adding games to your hitlist.

I got Survivor on Steam.
When I finish Fallen Order
I will install it.

What creeped me out was when I saw a video and the ginger guy was real!

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Ben

Where are you up to in Fallen Order Al?

A little early. I’m on the planet where I’m looking to attach the saber and be like Darth Maul.

After I want to go back to the first planet and “push” a few things and get to other things that I couldn’t before. But first, to be like Darth Maul.

Dathomir can be tough early on. FO drops its best plot bombs in its second half.

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Al-x

Ben wrote:

Oh, wait, I shouldn’t be adding games to your hitlist.

And now Sekiro is on sale for Playstation until 8/1

Well, if you really want your arse decked, Sekiro will do it.

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Al-x

Visions of Mana (demo)

This is a weird demo. It throws a few too many systems at the player, with a messy combat systems, along with some other systems I’m not sure of. But, as you keep playing the demo, it does start to improve.

The game’s best card by far is its graphics, it looks great.

There’s odd use of the Dualsense – lots of speaker use, which is annoying and distracting, zero haptics for weapon strikes in combat, which would have been helpful for me.

Talking of help, a visual cue for where you are on the ground when in the air, would be good for both combat and its platforming sections.

World navigation is OK, with use anywhere fast travel which helps for some sidequests.

Combat is OK, but could be better. Enemy lock-on without camera tracking isn’t that useful. Your party members are pretty smart though.

It’s a mixed bag, but after just under an hour I haven’t finished it, so it’s not a small demo. Even so, I can’t see myself buying this at full price, but when cheaper? Maybe.

I got Sekiro. 🤣 Don’t know why after 5 years there was no sequel.

Side note: These 10 minute YT videos on Tips and Tricks of a given game are great.
It’s where I got the strategy in Fallen Order to go to Dathimor next.
And I saw the ginger guy before. He had a role in “Shameless”. I just didn’t recognize him because I didn’t remember.

I think FromSoft concluded they couldn’t top Sekiro with a sequel, so did Eldin Ring instead!

Attention UK posters who have bought from Hit.

They might have a return on the cards. As http://www.hit.co.uk is no longer returning a “not found” result, but instead “opening soon” and a box to sign up for notification of when they are.

That’s good to hear, though I’m a little dubious about buying from a company that randomly changed its name (again) and then suddenly went dark with no explanation and then reappeared.

Yeah, it was odd, especially the speed, but I’ll give them a shot with the preorders I had with them. And they do take the money at despatch, not order.

With everything that’s going on in the economy, I could see a company going off the rails with a couple of surprises hitting them.

[Martin Smith]

Batman: Arkham Knight

This came out about 9 years ago now and I have successfully dodged spoilers for it in that entire time. All I really knew was that a) the PC launched was bungled b) people didn’t really like the Batmobile sections (or the amount of them) and therefore took its general critical reception to be a bit muted, lower than the previous two games.

And that probably contributed to me not getting it for so long. Moreso that I didn’t have a PS4 for the first four years of this period, but even when I did, Arkham Knight wasn’t top of my list of things to catch up on and I only really thought about it when I saw it cheap last year.

I’m really glad I did play it though, because I think it’s the best of the series. Certainly better than City, which I replayed a month or two back.

Admittedly, as soon as the Arkham Knight appeared on screen and first said something, I instantly twigged as to who he was and what the story was (which I hadn’t before playing, somehow, which goes to show how little of the game I’d seen). It’s definitely not the wholly originally character they were claiming before release and it took some slightly awkward expositional crowbarring to make that story work, but it mostly does.

I can see people’s points about the Batmobile sections. There are quite a lot, arguably too many, but I actually really enjoyed them. Most of them. The final Riddler race and the boss fights against AK in the car can get fucked (though they’re easier if you switch to first person perspective, which gives the car better handling, weirdly). But the Batmobile is generally a fun way to get around the city, I liked the drone battles and I really liked how they integrated the car into the puzzles (and I’d say that this game has the best set of Riddler puzzles).

I did look at the percentage completion rates of side missions when I was about 2/3 of the way through the game and think “there’s *more* drone battles?!” but by the time they came around, they didn’t feel overwhelming and that’s true of the Watchtowers and roadblocks as well. The game does well in parcelling those out and I liked the flow of those side-missions, as you’re constantly fighting to resecure Gotham, which gives gameplay advantages of making the open world safer. (Compared to City and Insomniac’s Spider-Man where it just progressively just gets more of a hassle as you go through the game and you can’t really do anything about it until the story is done).

I also really liked how the side mission here aim for different aspects of gameplay. So the Firefly strand is about Batmobile chases, the bomb missions are Batmobile battles, the Watchtowers are predator challenges, while the roadblocks are (usually) more combat based. The Two-Face missions are specialist predator challenges while the Penguin ones are specialist combat ones. It feels like it’s got more clarity of purpose than the side mission in City.

Gadgets and combat skills are at their best here too. I really liked the improved sabotage disruptor thing, which expands from just disabling guns into setting traps. I loved double-firing on enemy’s guns so that they’d be incapcitated upon firing and then hitting them with the electrical thing, forcing them to fire. Sabotaging ammo dumps and then using the voice replicator to direct enemies to check them out was really pleasing too. Being able to use dropped weapons in combat is a nice addition and I liked the environmental takedowns, though they’re a bit finnicky.

Where the game really excels is in the use of unreliable narration. Ok, so that’s used to make a massive cheat in the story that doesn’t entirely hand together when Barbara is shown killing herself and it’s explained away as just a fear gas hallucination but generally, the way the game weaves delusion into reality is smartly done. The epitome of this is Batman’s schizophrenic manifestation of the Joker (and I like that it’s taken by the characters to be due to the Joker infection he had in City, but is really all explained away by the fear toxin). Finding a way to get the Joker in here after his death in City might seem a bit desperate (it definitely felt it in Origins, when it bait and switches) but it really adds to the game, having him chatter at Batman constantly (always one-sided). It’s also a handy subtle hint system guiding you on where to go in sections, which is cleverly done. On top of this, it uses the Joker’s influence on Batman to force you into actions that make you question yourself and if you have a choice. There’s a point where you’ve got Joker in a headlock and the button prompt is “mash square to kill Joker” by snapping his neck and there’s no alternative. You have to do that.

I also really loved how it visualised how many enemies you’d taken out by having them all in the GCPD lock-up, which you can walk through whenever you want. That’s a cool idea.

It’s not a perfect game though. As I said, a couple of the Batmobile battles can absolutely fuck off. The pathfinding for the car is ditzy at times and it would remove my custom waypoints for no reason on a couple of occasions. The chatter from the thugs and militia in Gotham are interesting, but they’re overplayed, which can get annoying, and there’s a couple of instances where they give away what’s going to happen in the plot later, which seems silly (and in a more overt design flaw/bug, the Riddler came over the city PA to tell me he’d hidden trophies in Scarecrow’s hideout in the shopping mall long before the story had me going there or even knowing where it was). The Hush side-mission was a random bit of nothing too. I feel like that could have/should have been more. Oh and the ending coda you get for 100%ing the game is stupid, but hey-ho.

Overall, I really loved this game. I’m glad I went into it with both low expectations and no real knowledge of the story, not because said story bowled me over with its novelty, but because it meant I didn’t have expectations of it colouring my enjoyment.

• This reply was modified 4 months ago by Martin Smith.

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Dave

Martin Smith wrote:

expositional crowbarring

I see what you did there.

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Martin Smith

[Al-x]

Fallen Order

So I followed the tip to go to Dathomir next and I made it to the workbench (in one of most unlikely of places to have one) and made the attachment to the saber. I can now be Darth Maul! (I plan to get the Vortex mods to change one the colors to purple. Darth Windu!)

I can do more but there is this creepy shrouded guy in the path and I can’t jump across YET!… I like farming and I know just where to reset: There is a reset circle and then you do a small sequence of fights to get a skill point, and then return to the reset circle and repeat the respawned fights to get a lot more points for the skill tree. Makes for good practice. 🤣

I got to the planet Zeffo (windmills, pistons are a PITA), the huge marbles puzzle. For a while, the whole level resembled Tomb Raider. When I got further and the skill tree opened up making more powers available, I cashed in all the points I farmed and picked up 8 powers.

(That section in Dathomir is where I am going to farm.)

You know… Everyone figuring out the same strategy is like in the Price is Right: Just hear what the guy before you bid and just bid 1 dollar more, Wheel of Fortune always say RSTLMN, Asteroids video game: Leave one rock and hunt the small ships as they come out.

• This reply was modified 4 months ago by Al-x.
• This reply was modified 4 months ago by Al-x.
• This reply was modified 4 months ago by Al-x.
• This reply was modified 3 months, 4 weeks ago by Al-x.

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Ben

Street Fighter VI: World Tour

This is a weird game, yet one I’ve spent 40 hours on, so it must get a few things right. Those things are world design, characters, its fighting system and its presentation.

World Tour is at its strongest at the start, where it’s introducing stuff and there’s a good sense of progression. As it goes on, it gets weaker and the AI gets cheaper. It also becomes a game requiring a lot of levelling up, while frequently lying. You think level parity gives you a good shot at that enemy? Think again. At the same time, the penalties for losing at the start are far more severe.

There’s also a variable nature to enemies that works against it – one set you’ll slice right through, a similar set you won’t, depending on the AI. It does mostly make SF’s one-on-one systems work with multiple enemies, save Copy Fighters.

Most of the fight system works well, except projectiles. These are often infuriating, cheap and their physics are all over the place. Nor is there a limit on their use.

The full on, 3 rounds fights are OK, but suffer from very variable opponents that you can’t always accurately assess before a fight. The tournaments in it are a sequence of fights that you can’t do anything else while you are doing them. It’s easy to end up in a fight where you have no chance due to how the game stacks the stats against you.

Which sums up the late game and post game material. It is likely why the PS5 completion stat for World Tour is at less than 7% of players. You want to unlock Akuma and Bison? Cue even worse quests, with enemy levels through the roof. They keep going in the way they have and that Level 100 cap is going to have to go.

This is why it’s an odd mode. Capcom know how to do RPG and gear systems, but a lot of that is absent here. There’s gear for late game, but nothing for postgame which needs it far more.

While the idea and use of master styles in combat, in various combinations, is well executed, the master characters suffer a bit. Mostly due to them offering you the chance to “spar” and then the AI goes overboard as you lose very fast.

I stuck with it as those central systems are both strong and fun enough to make up for the flaws, which there is a good few of. One area that is both success and failure is the modern controls. They mostly work, but have their blindspots and unpredictability. They do make SF6 more accessible, but only to a point.

There’s systems in the game which, if you have the dexterity and reactions for, are likely more interesting. Hint – I don’t, see Drive Impacts, Rushes and Parries.

Overall, it can be very fun, with a great sense of style, but it can also weirdly frustrating, and cheap, in places.

[Al-x]

The more I play Order the more it takes me back to the good old days of Tomb Raider, which is a good thing.

I know it’s a game with graphic skins and all, but I find myself in the game, swimming underwater, jumping on these springboard mushrooms, swinging from the flimsiest of vines like Tarzan with some abyss below me, then swinging into two wall runs, climbing vine walls, sliding/platforming, then clearing a jump and sticking the landing all for either a new paint job for either the ship or the tiny robot, or a new poncho.🤣 (All that work and what did it get me?)

But it’s still a LOT of fun. Even the tedious farming, building up 15 points so when the skill tree opens up, you can cash them all in and pick up 10 more abilities.

Some of the labyrinths are a bit too long, doing all that and then ending up on some cliff right above where you started it all. Very elaborate mapping though.

I only wish now that the ones who now own the Tomb Raider franchise learn a thing or two from this game.

• This reply was modified 3 months, 2 weeks ago by Al-x.
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For those in the UK, Hit look to be back, for how long for is anybody’s guess.

Have asked if the preorders I had with the old shop have been transferred.

Edit: Nope, no transfers, which makes things neater.

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Martin Smith

A little while ago, I was listening to an episode of The Back Page podcast (which is hosted by Samuel Roberts, former PC Gamer editor, and Matthew Castle, former editor of Official Nintendo and Xbox Magazines) and there was a reasonable argument made about Metroid: Other M. Other M is easily the most reviled game in the series. It came out in 2010, which is when I’d stopped paying attention to the Wii and it forewent the FPS approach of the Prime games in favour of a 3D graphics on 2D plane(s) approach (ala Crash Bandicoot really) with first person stuff mixed in. What makes the game so immediately hated is that it absolutely slaughters the character of Samus. Where previously she’d been a silent protagonist, here she gives a running commentary that can best be described as “rambling daddy issues”, all performed pretty woodenly. But Matthew Castle’s argument was that the game deserved to be seen beyond the internet dunks on the story elements and that it’s gameplay is worth a look. So, convinced by this reasonable argument, I picked up a copy from CEX for £4 and I’ve been playing it this week.

It fucking sucks.

All the story stuff is as bad as I expected, but the game’s writing generally is terrible. The root issue is a poor localisation, I think. Even the plot summary reminders when you reload the game are badly written. But the gameplay’s shite too. The platforming is imprecise and woolly, the combat finnicky, with an auto-aim that occasionally fails and reliance on context sensitive moves (like jumping onto an enemy and doing a charged shot point blank in the head) that just don’t work most of the time. The map makes no sense – the mini-map that’s always on screen constantly rotates, meaning it’s really hard to compare it to the full map in the pause screen, which near the point at which I bailed on the game had just given up showing where I was. The biggest issue is the first person stuff. You’re constantly forced to use it to examine the environment in lame pixel-hunt moments (not a patch on Prime’s scanning visor stuff) and it’s the only way to fire missiles. But you can’t move while in it, meaning you’re a sitting duck any time you want to fire missiles. And the button to pan your view is the same as the one to lock onto things, which is annoying. But the worst bit is that you switch into by aiming the Wii remote at the screen and exit by returning it to the horizontal orientation, meaning you constantly have to change your grip on the controller while playing, which is just annoying.

So yeah, some times shit games thoroughly deserve their reputation.

Star Wars Outlaws

Copy has arrived and I’m two hours in.

The general design of the world and its characters is excellent. Everything looks and sounds as you would expect for a SW game.

Where it is far rougher – and I expect this to improve as UbiSoft games tend to be weakest at the start – is the gameplay. There are some surprising accessibility gaps in places, despite that being very good.

Things like weird colour choices for game text, which I eventually fixed, and very fast disappearing of hint / explanation text, which I have found no solution to. This can be frustrating as the info vanishes quicker than I can process it.

For the stealth sections I’m still not seeing how Nyx’s camera distraction works. If you carefully take out all the guards in an area, then take out a camera, two more will warp in. You disabled the local alarm? Doesn’t apply to the camera. It feels underhanded and cheap.

When you are in a firefight, the direction indicators are poor for enemy location. Here I suspect there might be a high contrast setting I haven’t found, as I think I’ll need it to be able to see enemies. Too often they are dark figures on a dark background.

The minigames? The lock-picking one is useless and abysmal. The Wordal one was surprisingly all right, but I’m playing with every assist I can find, including the blaster auto-cool.

The biggest problem I have is it can be frustatingly vague in its directions and signposting. Unusual for a UbiSoft game true, but I think this is them over-compensating for past games.

I think it’ll get better, especially if I find those further accessibility options, but it’s a rough opening. Oh yeah, that fixed falthier race at the start? Total con.

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Dave, Al-x

I think I might be done with this abomination of a game.

The “stealth”? Crap. “Shooting”? Crap. “Aim assist”? Might as well not exist, it’s non-existent. Enemy direction of fire? Crap, even with high contrast it’s too difficult to see what I need to.

Outposts get to infinite spawn enemies.

World immersion? Killed by game bullcrap, a ton of it.

The Gorlak base mission? “Stealth” gameplay that was outdated over a decade ago. Oh, binoculars and marking targets? Great. Except I can’t see what I need to and so can’t play it easily. Took out 2 alarm panels, nope there’s another one I didn’t get.

Even at the start I was nearly blocked because, having activated high contrast mode, which includes interactive objects, the vent I needed was not highlighted!

“Fall protection”? Another total lie.

Decided to explore a bit. Tried the treasure dealer for Nix, nope. Turns out you have to do another quest to unlock but it doesn’t explain that.

On another you get a prompt that someone knows a password, so I have to go talk to someone. No, you instead have to stand in the right location and eavesdrop, not that you have any idea you can do that because the system hasn’t been introduced. Even if it had the directions are off.

Then tried doing the Sabotage mission, which was even worse. Climb up, here’s some guards that I’m supposed to take out with no cover! Oh and the enemies are a definite hive mind.

Speeder combat? Utter rubbish, there’s no way to easily see the enemies outside of its crappy, timed Red Dead bullseye bollocks. So it’s drive around, wait for meter to fill up, activate, look for poorly indicated enemy, mark and shoot before it runs out. That’s all it has.

And, this is with it set to Story, which is stupidly difficult.

Is the game mis-sold? Yes, it is, it absolutely is.

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Al-x, Martin Smith

So, Atari in my youth, Sega Genesis in the early nineties.
When my best friend announced he was my roommate (there was a reason…) then I had a Playstation, and collecting employment insurance.
Year? I played Tomb Raider 1 & 2. Late 90’s?

But I did realize I have some addictive behavior, and did not proceed further, but it would be so damned easy.

I guess I missed out, but so much genre stuff fills my life, and I try to have a life, keeping a job gets in the way.

Just rambling, but I love your posts Ben. Martin too.
All you guys.

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Ben, Martin Smith

While my WiiU is set up, I decided to go back and finish off the single player campaign in Splatoon. The online services for the WiiU were turned off last year (there’s a fan-made alternative server system set up, but I’ve not gone into rigging that yet, if I bother at all) and that’s the core of Splatoon. The game’s main hub has other online player’s characters milling around and you can talk to them, so I was expecting a ghost town. But no, there were still people in there. I guess they’re just remnants of the last people I saw online. I was a little surprised that, with the servers off, you can’t even browse the shops for gear, but I suppose that makes sense given it’s only used online.

Anyway, single player is offline, so is unaffected. I couldn’t remember how far I’d got previously and it turned out to be most of the way – about 21 of the 27 levels done. But I redid all of them, for the experience and to get my head back into the game. I’ve always liked Splatoon, but I’m not particularly good at it, multiplayer-wise anyway. Single player, I did ok, but it’s not nearly as tough as MP can be, until you get to the final boss. Oooo boy that’s a challenge. It’s an octopus guy in a flying mech orb thing. It fires missiles at you and then its two fists. You basically have to shoot the fists so they swing back and punch him in the head.

Now, this being a video game boss, you’d probably expect to do that 3 or maybe 5 times. But nope, you have to do it about 12. It’s a huge sprawling fight. Every time you get a rebound fist hit in, he back his mech up deeper into the level and every third time, he starts firing a massive subwoofer thing at you, which you also have to ricochet back, but three times in succession. By the fourth cycle of this, you’re dodging two waves of four missiles, a sonic attack, bombs that spawn enemies plus then the fists and subwoofer, while also negotiating tricky terrain and patches of opposing ink (which slowly deals damage if you stand in it). It’s tricky as hell, and probably took me longer to do than most of the rest of the single player alone, but immensely rewarding to beat.

That happens quite a bit towards the end of a few Nintendo games.

Due to other things that it really nails, I’m sticking with Star Wars Outlaws. If it was from any other company, the stealth would make more sense, but as it is? They know how to do this, or most of their studios do. Still, got some new stuff to try out that might aid it for the better.

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Dave

I’m thinking I might grab Outlaws if I see a good Black Friday price on it later in the year, so definitely interested in hearing your thoughts Ben!

Ben wrote:

That happens quite a bit towards the end of a few Nintendo games.

Due to other things that it really nails, I’m sticking with Star Wars Outlaws. If it was from any other company, the stealth would make more sense, but as it is? They know how to do this, or most of their studios do. Still, got some new stuff to try out that might aid it for the better.

I watched Outside Xbox do a stream of Outlaws and Andy, who is a master of stealth in Hitman, spent the best part of an hour (it felt like, I wasn’t timing) stuck on one insta-fail stealth section in an Imperial hangar. It looked supremely frustrating.

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Ben

From a SW perspective, I want to like it because the design is perfect in that respect. Everything looks and sounds right, but the gameplay…

Did The Slicer tonight, it started badly. You have to tell Nix to steal from the right person at an Imperial outpost. Problem is from the best location, the game never brings up the steal option. So you have to find another angle in an area with little cover and enemies with very long lines of sight. There’s been various articles on how stupid or narrow sighted the AI, that isn’t my experience. And even with the high contrast mode on, it was so far away I could barely see who I was targeting.

It got a lot worse with the next bit in getting into an Imperial outpost. In hindsight, what it was going for was showing how the wanted system works, but it does so very, very badly.

The first bit is OK, but the second lacks any real guidance and is literally spawning hivemind enemies in. Get past that and there’s an escape sequence that again, would be far better with more guidance, not less.

Then, adding insult to injury, the game decides I never left combat, so no manual save. Had to trust it wasn’t lying when it said the last autosave was less than a minute ago.

It was a very frustrating 50 mins, including going through 3-4 YT vids for the outpost theft. One reason I, most of the time, enjoy games is they allow me to get away from my disabilities. This game is frequently emphasising them instead.

One way it does that is with the total lie that is the Story setting. It should be far easier than it is on that setting, but isn’t.

I don’t know about this game, might be getting too close to needing to get rid of it.

Out of curiosity, decided to look at the trophy stat percentages for Star Wars Outlaws on PS5.

First story mission completion is nearly 86%. But the completion for the quests on the first planet Toshara? Just over 27%! And it only goes down from there.

Based on the mostly very frustrating hours I have had with it, yeah, that does track. I can see a lot of people bailing on this game.

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Todd

Taken a long, long time but I think I’ve finally got to the game people are loving.

By a minor miracle or few, yes, I was using guides, text and video, but still amazing I got through it. False Flag is done!

The good – the design of the station is superb, but the bigger surprise by far was that space combat has a really good aim assist! I was expecting to find that total murder. As it was? Well, there was murder, but not mine!

Worst part of False Flag? It’s a tie between all the sneaking, though nothing matches the hanger section at the start, and the final stormtrooper assault at the end. It was hard to tell when I could leg it for the ship with everything else going on.

Space combat taps the DualSense in some rather clever ways. Its similar to the Wanted system use but that little bit better.

After that, the game opens up massively. I can take various contracts, use them to boost reputation, plus flogged some intel to the Pykes. Did a timed space smuggling run and completed it with just 10 seconds left.

Tried Sabacc, er, yeah, let’s not talk about that.

Did The Traitor quest which got my Pyke reputation into the good, but Crimson Dawn into poor, hence the timed smuggling mission that got it back into good!

By another miracle I pulled off an Infiltration mission that enabled me to unlock the Lightfoot ability. Also upgraded the blasters on the Trailblazer at Renpalli station.

So yeah, overall it’s been the best run so far.

Concord Is Suddenly Getting Pulled Offline With Sony Promising Full Refunds

Its launch was nothing short of disastrous, with analysts telling IGN it has likely sold as few as 25,000 units. It debuted to a tragic 697 peak concurrent players on Steam, a number that made the 12,786 players of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which was dubbed a disappointment by Warner Bros. Discovery boss David Zaslav and caused a $200 million hit to revenue, look like a titan.

Yikes!

No one now cares about Concord, everyone’s loving Astro Bot.

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Todd, Dave

Star Wars Outlaws

Turns out in 10 days or so a patch is going to drop to make the stealth less punishing.

What this says to me is Massive have picked up that their tuning of it, even on the Story setting, is stopping people enjoying their work. For those who already find it easy? That’s who the You-Will-Die difficulty is for.

So yeah, I’m very likely to be spending the next couple of weeks on side stuff and screwing over syndicates.

PS5 Pro announced:

https://blog.playstation.com/2024/09/10/welcome-playstation-5-pro-the-most-visually-impressive-way-to-play-games-on-playstation/

£700 and it doesn’t ship with a disc drive. Fuck that.

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Ben

Yep, same here, £80 for a separate drive apparently.

If this is the direction the industry goes in they might finally have found the successful self-destruct button.

More seriously, apparently only 20% of the PS4 userbase upgraded to a PS4 Pro, this might be similar or less.

2TB SSD storage also adds to the price a bit.

PS4 Pro had the clear sell of 4k gaming, this doesn’t have that.

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Todd, Dave

It’s a very marginal improvement for a console that is going to cost almost double what the original PS5 did after you buy the not-included disc drive and stand (!) for the PS5 Pro.

I guess they’re mainly aiming this at people who haven’t bought into this console generation, yet rather than people upgrading mid-gen – but even as a newcomer to PS5 I’d sooner buy a standard model and five brand new games rather than a PS5 Pro.

I don’t think so, not with these absurd prices:

• Console £700
• Disc drive separate £100
• Stand £50

No way are you dropping £850 when the standard is just over half that.

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Dave

Ben wrote:

I don’t think so, not with these absurd prices:

• Console £700
• Disc drive separate £100
• Stand £50

No way are you dropping £850 when the standard is just over half that.

I am not a gamer, so I ask this out of genuine ignorance:

What is the point of all of that, outside of capitalist greed?

I vaguely remember seeing an article some time ago that gaming systems were hitting a plateau. Systems would have improvements, but they were decreasing in significant differences from previous models. (Smart phones are kind of like that.)

Is the industry trying to force a move to something else? Or is it something else?

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Al-x

They are definitely trying to force a move to digital-only gaming, as then they each have their online system shop monopoly. I’m not convinced it’s wanted. People will point to 80-90% digital sales, but that doesn’t say everyone wants it to be 100%, especially with the lack of competition in digital marketplaces.

Are they trying it on to see if they can get away with it? Yes, the industry has a lot of previous form for this.

Aside from the price problem, the other issue is no clear sell. The PS4 Pro had 4k gaming, the PS5 does that and better. What does the PS5 Pro have to justify its price? Nothing near that. Plus, to tap the features fully you’ll need a recent TV too.

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Dave, Todd

Dave wrote:

I guess they’re mainly aiming this at people who haven’t bought into this console generation, yet rather than people upgrading mid-gen – but even as a newcomer to PS5 I’d sooner buy a standard model and five brand new games rather than a PS5 Pro.

Yeah, I’m not sure about that. The people who haven’t moved to the current gen (such as myself) are likely holding off for cost/desire reasons. So I’m not sure a slightly better model at such a high price is going to convince any of them. I think this is aimed at the type of people who read Digital Foundry and salivate over ray-tracing and frame rates, the kind that would have had a PS5 from launch. Or idiots with too much disposable income.

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Todd, Ben, Dave

Martin Smith wrote:

I think this is aimed at the type of people who read Digital Foundry and salivate over ray-tracing and frame rates, the kind that would have had a PS5 from launch.

But what I always think about that is, surely these guys would just buy a really high-end PC that outperforms a console either way?

Martin Smith wrote:

Or idiots with too much disposable income.

This is probably more on the money.

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Todd

Dave wrote:

But what I always think about that is, surely these guys would just buy a really high-end PC that outperforms a console either way?

I suspect a lot of them do too, but there’s still a difference between console and PC gaming. Not just exclusive releases, but comfort of playing in front of a TV rather than a desktop.

High end PCs are a lot more than the PS5 Pro. There’s also building it, installing the operating system etc. The attraction of consoles is that’s all done.

 

The PS5 Pro falls between its audiences. Too much for one, too cheap and limited for the other.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C_x013FRKv-/?igsh=NGdhbTNidmM4aWwy

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Al-x, Sean Robinson

New World: Aeturnum

This has a beta out 13-16 Sept.

After a rocky start, it gets better. It’s an OK game, world design is all right, some neat environmental interaction, OK combat, weak to terrible voice acting, conventional story, obvious villains.

It is hilarious to do a quest and watch a group of players melt a boss!

So it’s a conventional, fun enough MMO, the problem? Amazon. By the standards of the video game industry, Amazon is not exceptionally awful but it’s malign shadow casts much, much further. It’s difficult to avoid giving them any cash but you can limit it.

Todd wrote:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C_x013FRKv-/?igsh=NGdhbTNidmM4aWwy

Hell’s yeah! Reminds me a little of college textbook scam where the new edition was just changing a few sentences and pictures and you had to pay 70 for it for class. 🤣 But to the vid and consumer tech, it’s this all over again:

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Todd

Cat Quest III

This is a neat sequel. It has a nice line in world design, riffing on its theme of purr-ates.

It’s also more straight-forward than than its predecessors, possibly a little smaller than Cat Quest II.  The ship addition is a lot of fun.

Its only flaws is some of its hidden pieces are hidden to an absurd degree. There’s also some truly vicious traps that feel misplaced in the overall game.

That said, I like the game a lot. It shows a lot of development, especially compared to the first game. Would I like to see the Apawcalypse in Cat Quest IV? Yes, I would.

Star Wars Outlaws

All right, 55 hours later, top ranks hit for all the syndicates, blaster fully upgraded, most abilities got, all Nix skills got, some speeder upgrades and at the endgame, how to review this thing?

From a SW perspective, it is superb. It is so good in this respect that you are likely to forgive it anything with regard to gameplay. And there is much to forgive.

The biggest problems are the game is far too muted in its visual communication and inconsistent in practice. Along with the hardest Story difficulty setting I’ve encountered.

Its stealth can be good, especially towards the endgame when you have decent tools, health, abilities and gear. But there are times when the enemies go to full alert, suddenly know exactly where you are in ways they shouldn’t. It’s also often hard to know both where enemies are and their capabilities. Combine this with no alarms / do not get caught requirements and its a recipe for frustration.

Combat has a very weird aim assist that isn’t much of one, it lacks clear indications of where enemies are , even when marked and they are way too accurate. Graphically enemies blend into the background far too much.

Quests and exploration tends to work better. Though some treasures are far too well hidden and, in relation to the size of the game world, location hints too obscure. The speeder is good but needs guided route displayed, as the destination point is not enough, the view too low to the ground and you’re going too fast to navigate easily.

Once you have them unlocked – and there’s a rather hefty gatekeep of a main mission to do so – the contracts make the reputation system improve. Faction quests are a bit of a poison pill due to inflicted reduction. Finding brokers is fun, and once you start playing them off against each other, it gets good.

Space flight and combat is all right, suffers from the same flaws of combat generally – enemies can be tricky to see and hit.

Gear and abilities – these are a good combination. As the game goes on you get far more options and can fit for specific need. The only way to improve it would be to have saved sets that you can flick between.

Should you get this? If you are a SW fan, yes, as you will likely put up with its considerable flaws. If not, then hold off until 21 November, or you may be less than forgiving than Lord Vader of those flaws.

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Al-x