The Video Games Thread

Topic

What are you playing? Talk video games here.

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Playstation FINALLY had Shadows at 25% off and I got it on the last day.

Now I got Shadows, Sekiro, Frank Miller’s DD run, Frank Miller’s Ronin… 🤣

Prepare your arse for obliteration in Sekiro Al.

Ben wrote:

Prepare your arse for obliteration in Sekiro Al.

I know, I know. But I am somewhat of a floater. I go from game to game. I have about 3-4 incompletes. I’ll get back to them.

Thing is I get into gaming, binging shows and movies etc. when I have the time and mood. When there is a lot on my mind for work or someone in the hospital, or managing to pay bills, that is not the time to want to spend the next few hours on PS5, Steam, or streaming.

 

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Ben

I think you do have to be in the right frame of mind for anything, but it’s more so for games and the various genres of them.

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Al-x

I finished Yakuza 0 tonight. Across the best part of two months, I clocked up 74ish hours and somehow only got a completion rate of less than 50%.

I say “somehow”, I know why – I stepped away from some of the mini-games (which in the case of Real Estate Royale and Cabaret Club Czar is a misleading term) to just focus on finishing the main story. Mostly. I still ended up going back to RER especially just to grind for cash to get ability upgrades. But it was quite strange being incredibly single minded on the just doing the story around chapters 11-14 and seeing how quickly they went by, given that the early chapters seemed to last weeks each. I remember getting to chapter 5 and thinking “well, I’m halfway into the game now, surely”. Friends, I was not even a third into the game.

Anyway, I really enjoyed it. I must say to Ben that you were right, I probably would have been better off playing this one before Kiwame 1. But about two hours into this I realised that it had been longer than I thought since I played that (three years, possibly? Whenever it was that Prince Phillip died. EDIT: four years! cripes) and I could remember next to sod all of what happened in that. I’m going to try and find a story summary of it soon. That said, even from what little I remember of that, I spent the entirety of this game expecting two things to happen: 1) that Majima and Kiryu meet and possibly even fight a bit and 2) that Kiryu ends the game going to prison, which sets up the start of 1, which picks up with his release.. Neither of those happen. Well Kiryu and Majima meet, but it’s literally in a post-credit cut-scene. So I feel a bit wrong-footed by that, but again that’s partially due to me barely remembering much about the first game.

But yeah, it’s crazy how much there is to do in this. As I said, CCC and RER are big enough that they’d have felt like plenty on their own (and CCC frankly could work as a small indie game on its own). But on top of that there’s darts, bowling, batting cages, a fight club you participate in, a fight club for women that you bet on, telephone dating, mahjong, shogi, a full Western casino, fishing, a range of Eastern casino games, karaoke, a nightclub dancing rhythm action game, slot car racing and probably more that I’m forgetting. Plus loads of side-stories. Frankly, it’s too much, actually. Oh and four old Sega arcade games emulated in it (speaking of, I have played enough Space Harrier and Outrun to last a lifetime now).

Another problem with it I have is that it is quite skeevy. All but about two female characters in the game are played by porn actresses and the game rewards you for interacting with these characters (whether that be them being club hostesses you’ve trained, women you’ve met in the awful telephone dating thing, women whose friendship you’ve gained through repeated interactions or just randos in one off sub-stories) with short (very) softcore gravure vids. Which is just dodgy as hell, frankly.

In all, it’s a lot and I can see why it Kiwame feels more recent in my memory than it actually is, because of how big these games are (even if I’ve forgotten 70% of the plot). And the crazy thing is the rate at which they make them. When I played Kiwame in 2021, it was with the aim of it being the start of going through the whole series. In the four years it’s taken me to play a second, they’ve released five more games. I’ve made progress of negative 4. Partly that’s on me, obviously, but also, calm down RGG.

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Bruce, Ben

Watching a few YT videos on AC Shadows before I immerse all my hours into it. These tips and tricks, what to look for, should do etc. is Ok. AC games have you climbing the highest structure in a given area and you look out and everything is mapped out for you. I had something like that with Spiderman 2 which I will get back to… someday.. 🤣

All these RPG games, adjust settings, learn controls, look at skill tree, farm/grind XP, build up skill tree (usually health and defense upgrades first) and so on…

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Ben

Tales of Arise: Beyond the Dawn

This is one of the weirdest expansions I’ve played. It’s not a full sequel, but neither does it continue in the game in the way you expect. You don’t carry over gear or levels, skills are partially reset, your party starts at Lv 65. It’s very strange.

The story is, at best, forced. It has zero subtlety and, while there is some vague hint of Naxamil being coerced by the technology she finds, it is never made clear. It makes for an odd final resolution, she nearly enslaved the world but hey, her bad.

It has quests where you are to get specific materials. But the way in which you get them is by using one of six specific attacks on a specific enemy. Which one works on what? Well, either you do a stupid amount of trial and error or look up the answer online.

Add in a difficulty akin to the most chaotic line chart you’ve ever seen and the combat is very variable. Even on Very Easy. It can be fantastic if it all works well, or it arbitrarily resets your combo whenever it feels like it, has you hit by off-screen hits, or requires you to dodge but the dodge is not entirely reliable or you can’t tell what you’re supposed to dodge. Sometimes, you get hit by the lot.

Does it have anything good going for it? Well, I still like these characters and the skits have a great style to them. World design, both areas and towns and cities are great. Soundtrack is good. And the final sequence in the final boss did really work. It was almost riffing on FF XVI’s final boss hit. And like there, it was a brilliant sustained bit of audio-visual presentation.

Should you play this? For all that part of me wanted to get it over with, I did want to see how it played out. And I did like the final dungeon. But I also enjoyed the main game, which likely shares some of the flaws here. If you’re going to go for it, buy when on sale.

Gamescom news:

Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight

Think of the Batman Arkham games but with lego, with Matt Berry as Bane. Out in 2026.

Absolum

An original, medieval beat ’em up from the makers of Streets of Rage 4, this now releases 9 October.

Shinobi: Art of Vengeance

Early thoughts after the first three levels.

The bad:

– Chase / scrolling screen sequences are rubbish.

– Mandara was a crap boss 40 years ago and the new version is no better.

– Bonus stage with the wolf – your offensive options are too limited and it can be hard to see what you need to. Then again, the old Shinobi bonus stages weren’t great either.

The good:

– When it works, combat is fantastic.

– Good combination of audio-visual + haptic feedback

– Level design, they are huge and returning to nab secrets is great.

– Enemy variety is pretty good.

– Despite the cheap crap of them, got through the spikes section in the first level.

The irritating:

– Demo save data does not carry over. They did say but who reads the screen text? And the game proper does show why it can’t.

– Sometimes you can’t quite see what you need to in enough time, or foreground graphics get in the way.

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Dave

Ben wrote:

Demo save data does not carry over. They did say but who reads the screen text? And the game proper does show why it can’t.

Have they changed the opening from the demo?

[Ben]

Opening is the same, the demo gave various abilities much earlier than the main game, plus the shop was far more stocked in the demo.

• This reply was modified 3 months, 3 weeks ago by Ben.

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Dave

Ah, interesting. Yeah I did feel like you unlocked a lot of magic stuff pretty early in the demo.

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Ben

Shinobi: Art of Vengeance

Neo-City level

Aka an immensely irritating level almost designed to encourage me not to play it.

First, it introduces purple aura enemy as indicator of unblockable move. That’s OK, but enemies being in that state permanently comes across as far too underhanded. Which sums up the level well.

From the controls responsiveness changing to a more zoomed out view that hinders to a immensely crappy chase / escape combo, I got to the end and, at that point, it was successful, I didn’t want to keep playing.

I’ll come back to it, sure, but it feels less a question of if and more when it becomes too irritating and cheap.  Which’ll be a shame but it might happen.

And the cause will be something a lot of old game remakes / remasters do, which is reincarnate old sins.

There was a lot of Revenge of Shinobi in this level, but not the good, only the bad.

It did throw in some new offences, like hard to see dull red spinning swords.  There’s times when it’s hard not to conclude the game is input reading.

The last thing is it really plays fast and loose with the execution gauge and how it triggers, or not. Again, underhanded stuff it doesn’t need.

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Dave

007 First Light

For all that the lack of subs in this State of Play hurt it, I still liked a lot of what this showed off.

• Environmental interaction
• Car chase
• Excellent world design
• Lots of explosive things to shoot
• The plane hacking and tilting was clever

March next year is far sooner than I expected too.

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Dave

In the train, sometimes I notice game apps on phones and I catch the name. A few targeting games, but a few fighting games. Now I want a mobile game of sword play. I really want a game where I use a lance like Grendel…

This is superb.

A new Ghost of Yotei video:

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Dave

Ben wrote:

007 First Light

For all that the lack of subs in this State of Play hurt it, I still liked a lot of what this showed off.

• Environmental interaction
• Car chase
• Excellent world design
• Lots of explosive things to shoot
• The plane hacking and tilting was clever

March next year is far sooner than I expected too.

I watched the video and this looks pretty good. Hoping it lives up to it.

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Ben

Ben wrote:

This is superb.

A new Ghost of Yotei video:

Beautiful.

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Al-x, Ben

Another game set in feudal Japan. I will be broke soon…

Ghost of Tsuschima : Iki Island

Part 1

Hmm, Iki Island plus a four year break from the game does make for a rather nasty difficulty spike, even on easy. I’m not a fan of enemies changing stances either, as that complicates it a bit too much. Oh and Shamans? Not a fan.

Still, despite it hitting about every expansion sin going, I’ve somehow done the first four missions of the main story. Plus a side story and found and done the cat shrine.

Don’t know how far I’ll get in Iki Island before I cut my losses, but will see how it goes.

Part 2

Iki Island story mission 5 started off similar to the preceding lot – complicated, difficult, frustrating then, mid way through…

Like Hot Rod receiving the Matrix, Jin remembered how to play the game. Right, better commit to that reference, so all the Mongols who had been riffing on Megatron and Galvatron suddenly became Starscream and died many a poor, comedic death.

Story mission 6 was even better and more epic. The difficulty there was telling who was on which side, as you have a lot of help. Cue the game’s first boss duel, with no Shaman boost, and it was straight-forward fun. Basically? Be very aggressive.

After that did some side stuff. Found a couple of animal sanctuaries plus took out a couple of Mongol camps. One of them, I had thought was without a Shaman, wrong. But still killed a couple while locating him, took him out and it was open season.

And by then I was more in the habit of switching stances, so Jin went full John Wick on that camp.

“Just…leave.”

Nope, they were never going to.

Part 3? To be continued.

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Dave

I finished Iki Island! Given how it started, I didn’t expect to, but yeah, finished the main story today. Then cleaned out the map, booting out Mongols and getting animal sanctuaries. It’s not entirely done, pile of collecting stuff and things I don’t understand remain.

I also, when exploring, came across a Mongol mob, with two Shamans, akin to the bunch that near killed me at the start. And this time around, they got obliterated. Revenge can be fun.

The main story works well on multiple levels. As an examination of Jin’s relationship with his father, his father’s legacy on Iki, as an epilogue to the main game that shows Jin’s unease with the samurai began long before the invasion.

Shamans are a pain of an enemy, though, once found, they die fast. They also never top their creepy debut on Tsuschima, which tapped into the DualSense speaker.

Talking of, Iki Island was the first time I played it on PS5. There’s the haptics, which aid the sense of playing immensely. But the controller speaker in haiku composition elevates already great execution of a smart concept even further.

Iki Island starts off with a major difficulty spike, but moderates that in its story missions. It improves as you go along and the various Tales, with one exception, the horse armour one had rubbish platforming, are very good stories.

Graphically, even four years later, it is stunning, proving art direction is as important as technology.

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Dave

Ben wrote:

Graphically, even four years later, it is stunning, proving art direction is as important as technology.

I think this is under-appreciated. There are games that are getting on for a decade old now (or more) that are still stunning-looking and outclass many modern titles. You look at the Batman Arkham titles or The Last Of Us or any number of games where people have really put the effort in, and you realise that processing power is just a small part of the equation.

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Ben

Star Ocean First Departure R

A Japan-only 1996 release, this was remastered with a graphics touch-up, new voice work, new cutscenes and released everywhere 2019. Which is the key point to remember if you’re going to play it. It is a near 30 years old game and it plays like it.

Once you start adjusting to the fact the game tells you next to nothing most of the time, playing with guides is recommended, there’s a good time to be had. But in certain places, like when the game all but forces you to learn the RNG heavy item creation, you will need those guides. I have no idea how anyone worked that out first time around.

Other weaknesses are some confusing dungeons, especially towards the end, plus some nasty difficulty spikes. And enemy HP becomes absurdly high. The post-game dungeon? Do not touch.

But those are mostly countered by the fun of your party battering the hell out of enemies. Mages are particularly dangerous in this game. If you have your party powered up, you get to batter bosses without much interruption, unlike just about every other later game.

Also, it’s a game without much flab, save some backtracking in the middle. I was finished just over 25 hours. Note that you can’t do everything in one playthrough if you want to do 100%.

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Martin Smith, Dave

Ben wrote:

Once you start adjusting to the fact the game tells you next to nothing most of the time, playing with guides is recommended, there’s a good time to be had.

It is often funny playing old 80s and 90s games with the kids and seeing them being completely confused by the frequent lack of a tutorial to ease you in and teach you the controls. When I tell them to start hitting buttons to see what happens they look at me like I’m insane.

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Todd, Ben, Sean Robinson

Rogue Flight

Completed the game a while back but you only get the true ending by completing it on New Game Plus. And it’s a surprisingly fair one. A longer run, but no difficulty hike, unless you want it.

As to what it is? Do you miss on-rails flight shooters? That is, the likes of After Burner, Space Harrier, Galaxy Force, Starfox? Yes? Then this is the game for you.

Superb production values that riff on 80-90s anime, with smart level design and a soundtrack to match makes for a great package. It’s not a huge game, you can do the entire in 3 hours, but it’s a quality three hours.

It was also an interesting accessibility experience. I was finding it tricky to target with the default green HUD. Changed it to cyan and, suddenly it was so much clearer and I was able to play it far, far better.

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Dave

I downloaded the free demo of Sonic Racing Crossworlds to have a quick bash, as its predecessor Team Sonic Racing has been a bit of a family favourite since it came out.

Much like that game it’s a fun Mario Kart ripoff cartoon racer with a wide variety of colourful courses and bonus item boxes – but the big gimmick of this game is that the second lap of every three-lap race catapults you into a different racetrack through a glowing portal, Ratchet And Clank Rift Apart-style, with the leading racer in lap 1 getting to choose the destination and with everyone getting returned to the original course for the final and third lap.

It’s a fun idea but I wish it was an optional one, as the Sonic Racers have always felt like slightly more chaotic and unpredictable (and not 100% fair) counterparts to their Mario cousins thanks to the more extreme course obstacles and less balanced power-ups, and this just ups the unpredictability factor even further by throwing you into a level that you may not be fully equipped for or familiar with.

Plus, for me the three-lap nature of these cartoon racers has always made for a nice initial learning curve where everything is new to you on lap 1 but you gradually get used to the tricks and traps of a track on laps 2 and 3. Here, you suddenly have a new course to deal with on lap 2, and by the time you return to the original course for lap 3 you’re thinking about the new course instead.

Ultimately, whether you enjoy this will probably depend on whether you like these racing games to allow you to win fairly or whether you’re happy for them to be chaotic party games where winning and losing isn’t important and positions can change at any moment, even in the final seconds of a race.

Outside of that, everything is pretty much as you’d expect for a modern kart racer – colourful pin-sharp graphics, a wide variety of courses with fun themes, loads of customisation options and seemingly lots of different play modes too.

I do wish the demo had a two-player option though as that’s always been how we’ve played these games at home and knowing how well the crossworlds gimmick works in multiplayer would probably have helped me to decide whether to pick up the full game on release or not. As it is, I’ll probably just wait for a sale – possibly a good Black Friday price.

The sheer rubberband AI kerbstomping me on the first race put a big sign up of: Bugger off!

Yeah, reckon I will.  After killing and BBQ’ing Tails

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Dave

I’ve been playing Xenoblade Chronicles 2. I’m a big JRPG fan but never played these as they never got a PC port but my son got a Switch last Christmas. The first Xenoblade was decent enough, good story but there’s a lot of walking around rather empty massive maps and the fighting is rather passive, it’s mainly about trying to position yourself behind baddies.

XC2 is a big improvement for me, the maps are far more interesting as is the combat which adds a lot of different combinations to try.

The biggest winner though is the script and voice acting. I have never played a game that made me laugh out loud so many times. The cast are excellent. The original Japanese plot goes some very ethically dodgy places, your main characters are ‘drivers’ that basically control the ‘blades’ assigned to them (most of which are sexy women who may fall in love with you even though it isn’t clear they are human).

The ick is saved by how they make them take the piss out of the bosses half the time and I think it’s helped by how an obviously British translation team doing it made some changes to the norm. None of the leads really have an RP accent, the only one is Zeke who is basically the posh idiot character Jack Whitehall played in Fresh Meat a few years back and always had me chuckling.

 

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Ben, Martin Smith

I will eventually get to XC2 and 3.

That MonolithSoft can get the Switch to do what it does is technical magic. Combined with world design you will never see in any other game, the XC games are amazing.

I had a great time with the first game on the Wii. XCX is good too.

Well, that’s finally tipped me over into needing to get a PS5.

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Ben, Dave

It was a good State of Play, my hitlist from it was;

Deus Ex Remastered

Crimson Desert

Lost Epoch

Possibly: Saros – need to see more of it, but might be improving what they started with Returnal.

Interesting to see MS Flight Sim hitting PS5.

News just in is that Forza Horizon 6 will be Japan and out in 2026.

 

Ninja Gaiden 4

Only game of this I played way back was Sigma 2 on PS3. It was good, with some very aggressive AI, but it gave you the tools to fight back. That said, even on easy, it was never an easy game. I completed it once and never did again due to that boss duo.

Thing is, NG is known as a very good, very hard series and that reputation can deter people from buying! So, if you’re making NG4 and want to boost the sales, what do you do?

Well, what they’ve done here is add a load of difficulty options.

If you want to be obliterated, that is available.

But if you want go be able to enjoy the artistry of the combat, without the stress, that is also available! And that opens the game up to far, far more people. People like me.

Take a look at the new NG4 difficulty video, it’s smart stuff. And the demo of it on Master Ninja is wonderfully bonkers.

[Martin Smith]

I finished off Valkyrie Profile 2 Silmeria last night, which took me just shy of two months. Or more accurately about 16 years. I bought it in 08 or 09, got partway in and dropped it for something else, as was my style at the time. I went to replay it a few years ago as a one of my “replay an old games before Christmas” deals, but played a few hours on like the 17th December and (correctly!) realised I’d never get through it all in time.

Because this is a long game – I racked up about 70+ hours I think (that’s with skipping some of the optional dungeons in the third quarter of the game and not bothering with the end-game super levelling dungeon) – and it’s not one that particularly respects your time either. The game is split into six chapters, but not very evenly. Chapter six took me a few days. Chapter four took an evening. Chapter three took about four weeks. That was partially because, despite doing the optional dungeons in that too, I hit a difficultly spike and had to spend a few evenings levelling up by just grinding a replayable boss fight, but it is also just disproportionately long and almost entirely devoid of any story content to pull you through that section.

One of the strengths and weaknesses of the game is its einherjar characters (I should say, it’s all very loosely based on Norse myth). These are essentially just filler characters to bulk out your party. Your first thought might be to ignore them, which would be fair, but the game dicks you around with taking away all your main party characters at various points, so they’re essential to have filling those gaps and as replacements for dead characters you can’t revive when in a dungeon. So keeping them all levelled up enough to step in is a chore (the game doesn’t give you an XP share type power until relatively late and even then it’s expensive to claim permanently). By the last chapter, I’d settled on a core party of four characters, three of whom were einherjar, and focusing on just them did speed things up and meant they levelled up at a degree that kept them powerful enough to deal with almost everything pretty easily.

Partially this was from utilising the other benefit of the einherjar. Each one has a “release level” which is the point at which you can bin them off from the party, they get properly reincarnated to go off and live new lives (you can go and find them in the towns and dungeons and talk to them). When they go you get stat boosting items and the stuff you get is relative to how much higher the einherjar’s level is than the release level and what gear they’ve got equipped (which goes with them). So before the final dungeon I released all my einherjar bar the three in my core party, equipped with all the second best armour that I hadn’t sold, and got absolutely tonnes of stat boosts that I concentrated on those core four. So even the penultimate boss proved no problem (the final one was trickier because the game decides that only one character can cause any real damage to him, which is a hindrance).

It’s an interesting twist on the Pokemon format, in a way, incentivising you to use all the characters but also to let them go. The other impressive thing about the einherjar is the story telling with them. They don’t participate in the main story, they don’t get to appear in cut-scenes or anything. But they all have text back stories, detailing their lives and these are mostly interconnected, covering several wars and conflicts and fallen empires across a few hundred years. The text summaries though aren’t the full story and you get a fun insight into that when you have certain pairings of characters in your party. For instance, the archer Lylia is said to be the queen of a city-state who was kidnapped and missing for six years. When she was finally found and returned home, she committed suicide. Her captor was the mage Woltar, who you can also get, who is described as a reclusive dark mage who kidnapped Queen Lylia and then was killed by the state’s army when she was discovered. But put Lylia and Woltar together in your party and you will sometimes get the following exchange at the start of a battle.

Lylia: I prayed a thousand times that we might one day be reunited.
Woltar: I too, my love. We must thank the fickleness of fate.

Yes, they were really lovers. When you talk to Lylia after she’s reincarnated, she reveals that her marriage to the king was an arranged thing, she was 16, he was in his 60s, so she escaped and met Woltar and they had a baby (who is also an einherjar). It’s a really clever bit of world building and there’s loads of examples of it. Unfortunately, it’s complicated by how you get the einherjar. You get them when you find sparkly weapons out in the world but (most of the time) the einherjar you get from that is one of two or three, with a set percentage chance of which you get. Some characters, according to guides, only have a 10% chance of appearing. I suspect this is to encourage replays (which is bold, of a game this big), but the chances of getting all the characters that have connections to each other is really slim.

All that aside, the game is, at it’s core, pretty fun. It’s mostly in a 2d side-scrolling platformy type thing – think Zelda 2 – but when you start combat you move into a 3d arena. You can move your characters freely, either as a group or your split them up for tactical stuff like pincers movements (rarely if ever necessary tbh). It’s not real time, as your enemies only move when you move. Your actions are limited by an AP gauge, which also only recharges as you move (or you press a specific recharge button, during which your enemies can move and attack). Actual combat switches to a side perspective again and you trigger each character’s attacks with an assigned face button. The trick is in getting a nice rhythm between the four, so that one attack isn’t missing because of the other. Ideally, you’ll be getting enough hits in within a short enough time that (assuming you don’t just kill the enemy first) you can trigger characters’ special attacks. Or your attack might hit an enemy’s weak point and break part of it off. This can get you new equipment (weapons, armour, accessories) which is cool but also a pain when you find yourself farming a certain type of enemy from a certain angle in hopes of getting a certain accessory that has the right coloured rune you need to equip in order to let you learn a new skill. As with so much of the game, there are lots of complications. But when you get in the zone, as I did in the late game, it really sings.

I’m glad to have finally finished this. I wouldn’t really recommend it (not least because it’s on the PS2) and I’m not sure I’d ever play it again. But if it ever happens to get remastered, I think it’d be worth a look.

• This reply was modified 2 months, 4 weeks ago by Martin Smith.

EA is now owned by Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner, via leveraged buy out. So expect a lot of cost-cutting, layoffs, studio closures and more Saudi teams in Not-FIFA.

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Todd

Ben wrote:

I will eventually get to XC2 and 3.

That MonolithSoft can get the Switch to do what it does is technical magic. Combined with world design you will never see in any other game, the XC games are amazing.

I had a great time with the first game on the Wii. XCX is good too.

Having played a few Switch (or Wii originally) games now after being a PC only gamer for a few years I think they are very clever. The more cartoony but often beautiful renderings from the likes of Zelda and Xenoblade are less processor hungry but work just as well if not better. There’s less risk of ‘uncanny valley’ stuff going on.

In a  weird way it reminds me a bit of a long time ago with Spectrum v C64. The latter had the jump on memory and processing power but there was something aesthetically pleasing about how the Spectrum generated more rounded graphics and I think the programmers worked a bit harder to get the best out of the system.

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Dave, Ben

garjones wrote:

Ben wrote:

I will eventually get to XC2 and 3.

That MonolithSoft can get the Switch to do what it does is technical magic. Combined with world design you will never see in any other game, the XC games are amazing.

I had a great time with the first game on the Wii. XCX is good too.

Having played a few Switch (or Wii originally) games now after being a PC only gamer for a few years I think they are very clever. The more cartoony but often beautiful renderings from the likes of Zelda and Xenoblade are less processor hungry but work just as well if not better. There’s less risk of ‘uncanny valley’ stuff going on.

In a  weird way it reminds me a bit of a long time ago with Spectrum v C64. The latter had the jump on memory and processing power but there was something aesthetically pleasing about how the Spectrum generated more rounded graphics and I think the programmers worked a bit harder to get the best out of the system.

Yeah, it’s interesting how well, amid the push for ever more detailed graphics, see Yotei, the cartoony and cel-shaded styles hold up over time.  Most of the JRPG remasters of games from 10-20 years back is making them work for HD screens, the style and design is left unchanged.

Though, talking of change, EA is to be bought for $55bn and rendered a private company. No idea how it plays out, though there’s a good deal of plausibly pessimistic speculation.

[garjones]

It’s interesting looking at what my kids and their friends play.

Tech jumps are smaller than they were in our day. A move from 16 to 32 to 64 bit transformed what could be done in a few years. It’s not true now, Breath of the Wild was made for the WiiU but fits perfectly well into Switch games.

They do play a lot of indie games and are not badgering me for a Switch 2 because there’s no evidence right now it will offer much more than they have. For teenagers Hollow Knight has always been a bigger deal than Red Dead 2 or other AAA games.

• This reply was modified 2 months, 3 weeks ago by garjones.

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Dave, Ben

Currently I can’t see how the PS6 or XBNext can be sold. This time around the clear sell was 4k gaming, with a side of SSD fast loading. On PS5 it was load speed and DualSense that was the big surprises.

If you show me PS5 and PS5 Pro vids running side by side I’d have to work to spot the difference. Can’t see the easy sell point, but it’s all years away.

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Dave, Todd

Ben wrote:

Currently I can’t see how the PS6 or XBNext can be sold. This time around the clear sell was 4k gaming, with a side of SSD fast loading. On PS5 it was load speed and DualSense that was the big surprises.

If you show me PS5 and PS5 Pro vids running side by side I’d have to work to spot the difference. Can’t see the easy sell point, but it’s all years away.

We’re reaching the limits of human vision and biology to actually perceive the difference.

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Ben

Time for Sony and Microsoft to sell bionic upgrades to improve your eyesight, so they can flog you 8k displays in the next console generation.

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Todd, Ben

8k is dead Dave, 8k is dead.

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Todd, Dave

Todd wrote:

We’re reaching the limits of human vision and biology to actually perceive the difference.

I think that’s been there with TV tech for a while. I stand in the electrical shop and the basic HD TV is a fraction of the price of the highest definition OLED and I’m squinting to spot the difference in the picture.

Similarly with digital camera definition everything was about megapixels 5 or so years back, the marketing has shifted because there’s a realisation that just increasing that number has reached a point where it makes no real difference.

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Todd, Ben

Yeah, I think resolution on TVs has topped out now. The real draw is an interface that won’t make you want to throw the remote into the screen when trying to do something simple. I was round a friend’s house recently and we were trying to access the basic RF input (to use an N64). Absolute hell. The option to scan for frequencies was incredibly hard to find but even then, getting to the analogue channels required going to the digital ones first, and every time we went to those, it started with BBC Three (for some reason) which would immediately move us into the iPlayer app.

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Todd, Ben

Martin Smith wrote:

EA is now owned by Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner, via leveraged buy out. So expect a lot of cost-cutting, layoffs, studio closures and more Saudi teams in Not-FIFA.

Well that’s depressing.

I don’t get to play a lot of games anymore, and I haven’t played an EA game in a looooong time, but… I still remember how it felt to see that logo while I was waiting for The Bard’s Tale to load on the C64.

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Todd

My copy of Ghost of Yotei is on the way.

Although, it only went as low as £61.85, by  despatch, where AC Shadows hit £56.85.

If that’s the future for PS5 RRP £70 games, I’ll likely switch to The Game Collection, as they tend to be £3-4 more, but do £10 of points with certain pre-orders.

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Dave

Yeah, games are getting more expensive now. Although I still think the top-tier titles represent great value for money given the sheer number of hours of entertainment you get out of them, compared to other media.

And given that I was paying £40-£50 for a new game back in the ’90s, they’ve bucked the inflationary trend pretty impressively, especially given how much more complex and costly to develop they are these days.

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Ben

The highest I’ve gone is £63 for Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart.

And it was absolutely worth it as the game is near-perfect.

The promo vids for Yotei look amazing too.

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Dave

GTA VI pricing is going to be interesting. I wonder if they’ll be tempted to break the £70 barrier.

Dave wrote:

And given that I was paying £40-£50 for a new game back in the ’90s, they’ve bucked the inflationary trend pretty impressively, especially given how much more complex and costly to develop they are these days.

Yup, a point I was making recently, a PS1 game was often £50. Using an inflation calculator that’s £103 today.

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Dave

They were kinda taking the piss a bit with PS1 games being £50 though. They were just matching the average price of cartridge games (and to be fair, Sega did the same with the Saturn) because they could get away with it (and for the perception of value), even though the manufacturing cost of a CD game is a tiny fraction of a cartridge game. Prices stayed steady for so long simply because there was an awful lot of profit margin that could be sacrificed through the mid-90s to recent past.

There’s always a bit of shenanigans like that. When they moved to downloads the price of games didn’t really drop despite the cost savings (or cinema ticket prices when they stopped shipping heavy $5000 cans around the globe). I think in both examples they are, as any business does, looking at what the customer perceives as value. The packaging and distribution are very low down the list compared to how much fun the game is and how many hours you’ll get out of it.

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Todd, Martin Smith

And like a lot of business models they’re now increasingly trying to push people on to a subscription model where you don’t ever really own anything but pay a monthly fee to use it.

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Martin Smith, Ben, Todd

Yotei has arrived, currently installing.

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Dave

Dave wrote:

And like a lot of business models they’re now increasingly trying to push people on to a subscription model where you don’t ever really own anything but pay a monthly fee to use it.

Microsoft are already into the ratchet up the price phase, which I think they’ve gone to too quickly to pull off.

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Dave, Ben

Ben wrote:

Yotei has arrived, currently installing.

See you in a few days!

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Ben

Ghost of Yotei

The first couple of hours. In short, this is a very polished game, but also has some remarkable accessibility blindspots.

The intro is superb. Excellent visuals and sound, combined with superb use of the Dualsense haptics. I wasn’t expecting a Fistful of Dollars homage either. Nor what followed.

Like other games this year, its aesthetics make the case that 4k graphics are nothing without art direction. And this has has it. Plus, haptics.

Now, those accessibility blindspots, they are sequences without any alternative controls. I was surprisingly OK on the sketching. But the Shamisen was a poorly indicated abomination that I could not work out at all. The forge was not as bad but not far behind either. Sucker Punch need to enable alternate controls for these.

The other oddity is the subtitle limitations. The usual stuff is here, size, colour, background but God of War: Ragnarok added directional arrows to indicate speaker location. I would have liked those to be here.

That said, they do deliver some sharp humour:

<pained laugh>

Thunk!

<dying gasp>

The combat is mostly very good, but will take some getting used go. Giving the very annoying brutes sequential unblockable attacks is very irritating, and they hit hard given I’m on casual. One weakness is its made it more hazy as to what to use on who.

Done limited exploration, but what I’ve done has been very good. Got the double katanas, couple of techniques unlocked, katana upgrade, minor charm and the bow.

Oh yeah, also got killed by a bear because Atsu didn’t draw her katana on it!

Ghost of Yotei

Unlocking new abilities, getting health and gear upgrades all help the game. The dodge roll is particularly good. Done a load of bounties plus some sidequests.

I’m not a fan of the disarm attacks as they pretty much cheat by acting as a homing missile hit. Do have the improved counter so that may help. Unblockable attacks also feel worse, enemy starts one, I stick a katana in their guts, enemy acts like nothing has happened.

There’s also a streak of dishonour that crops up. Attacks that seem to start before a cutscene ends which you’ve no way to react to in time. And the bears are way overpowered. It also assumes a bit too much that the player has played its predecessor and remembers how it worked.

The biggest weakness is the minigames. Both of the camp ones add nothing, are poor for accessible and, far from boosting immersion, they break it. They’re so discordant it’s as if they were done by a different team.

A lesser weakness is its signposting can be less than great in terns of where you need to go.

Still, I do like the way Atsu gathers the intel pieces. A random fight can supply info of use.  Taking over enemy camps is always fun and more characters are entering the story.

Did the Road to Isikari Plain quest. No spoilers, but holy hell, if you know… you know.

The soundtrack also once again declares its doomed, but very strong attempt to take Expedition 33’s crown. It’s that good.

And yet, amid a stunningly polished game, of creative and aesthetic brilliance, those minigames stand out so very badly. I did the Shamisen Master quest, but needed help to fo because its so unclear as to the pressure needed to trigger it, without bringing up the map.

So, you have this quest, amid stunning surroundings, which absolutely works in narrative terms, fast collapsing into an exercise of frustration at its climax.  I can’t buy that a studio as creative as Sucker Punch could find no alternative solution. It is such a discordant note.

Tell the vibration difference between the notes on the touchpad? No, can’t sense it. When it is actually playing via the DualSense speaker? Very cool, so why make it so hard for me to trigger it?

On a more positive note, did pull off my first disarm counter!

One thing that’d help, in fights where you have allies, is clearer indication of each side. Tsuschima also suffered from this, but would have good for Yotei to have improved on it in this respect.

Oh and I had the fox celebrations at the bamboo stand.

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Dave

I started replaying Eternal Darkness on the GameCube yesterday. It started throwing up a disc read error in the boot menu and I wasn’t entirely convinced it wasn’t an insanity effect I hadn’t encountered before (ok, that’s a lie). It’s not my original copy (I foolishly sold that about ten years back) and this replacement is a little scratched. I thought maybe that was the issue. Booted up F-Zero GX no problem and then Eternal Darkness ran after that. Almost like a jump start, I guess.

No luck today though, as it’s just refusing to read anything. After a few attempts, the motor just isn’t making any noise now. Which is disappointing. Annoyingly, I accidentally tipped the big storage box my GC and few other consoles are in yesterday, when I was getting it out. Would be ironic that it’s survived literal decades of laissez-faire storage only to get broken when put into a safer box.

I’ve been reading scans of Super Play (90s SNES mag with a decided weeb bent) recently and there’s a piece in the December 93 issue about game prices that I thought was interesting given what we were talking about recently.

There were comments in earlier issues about how some of the really high prices (£70 or whatever for Street Fighter 2) was down to Bandai – who had control of Nintendo’s UK distribution at that point – probably just price gouging.

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lorcan_nagle, Todd

Grand Theft Auto VI is Now Set to Launch November 19, 2026

This game is never coming out.

Allegedly the delay’s due in part to an internal revolt over Rockstar union busting and firing 30-40 people the other week. Don’t know how true that is (I mean, they definitely fired people and almost certainly for unionising rather than the bullshit reasons Rockstar gave – just don’t know if the studio is in turmoil over it).

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Ben

Ninja Gaiden: Rage-Bound

This can only be recommended to those who find having their private parts fed into an industrial cheese grater to be pleasant. If you have any nerve centres or ability to feel pain, you should steer clear because that’s all it is.

Mostly, this and Shinobi: Art of Vengeance have little in common except in two respects.

One, they both self-destruct on difficult, extended, instant death on failure sequences, a chase and a glider run respectively.

Two, they offer accessibility options that give a false sense of confidence, enough to risk a purchase, only for there to be no adjustments to the platforming parts. Nor, for NG:RB, does it adjust the timed Kumiri sections.

Shinobi, however, controls far, far better than Kenji. He is the most useless ninja you’ll ever play, doesn’t even have a double jump. The guillotine boost starts off cool then devolves quickly into sadistic parkour design. But hey, single hit enemies in NG: RB? Nope.

At some point and NG:RB is a perfect example of it, it needs to be recognised that a lot of old games did a lot of bad things. They did lots of unfair, utterly under-handed sections and those don’t need revival or resurrection.

It’s also, like S: AoV, a case of half-arsed accessibility. Like with S: AoV, there were prior seppuku attempts before it succeeded.

Ultimately, I don’t think it is beyond the skill of today’s game designers to revive old properties without their old bullcrap. I wasn’t a fan of pixel perfect jumps 35 years ago so I’m not going to be nostalgic for it now. And that’s where the game goes badly wrong for me.

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Dave

Getting back into Jedi Survivor: These game has this sequences of running along walls, and these jumps that will drive you crazy but wanting to do it right just once is the pull. A pull that will have you doing trial and error for an hour or two. You come close, f up the last move and have to start over again and you don’t come that close again for a while. YouTube makes it look easy. But.. I found out that the feat only gets me these priorite shard things to trade in for styles like a beard and a mullet. I passed on that for now 🤣

You have encountered the true bosses of Jedi Survivor.

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Al-x

Ghost of Yotei

This is a strange game. Overall, it’s good.  It could be great but for some major design flaws. It has some fantastic aspects dragged down by very clunky others. Its story wants to be one thing, its gameplay another.

The fantastic is the aesthetics and exploration. Ezo frequently looks amazing and is great to explore. The use of the DualSense can be very clever, but it is mixed. One thing I would have liked it to keep from Tsuschima is the distance indicator, as the wind direction lacks precision. Being able to keep that displayed would have helped.

The story starts off very strong but falters as it goes on. Suffice to say I disagree massively with some of the story decisions in the endgame. There’s also times when you will be told you cannot fight them all, when that is exactly what you will have been doing.

Talking of, even to the limited degree I could access it, despite the flaws, the combat carried the game from start to end.  What got in the way was a baffling decision to require manual closure of the weapon menu after selecting a weapon. That’s how a bear killed me. Also those things are overpowered.

In the end it was too clunky for me to use with any frequency so stuck to the single katana and battered my way through it all. It’s practical on Casual setting, but even there enemies hit much harder than you’d expect.  Even with armour with a high defence rating.

The yellow disarm attacks don’t add much, with the timing to counter until you get the skill for them being hazy. Which also applies to special moves. I think Tsuschima had the same weakness but that was five years ago. I sometimes did a Kurisagama assassination, but due to the window being so small to hit both buttons at once, more often.

When they brought in the guns, I pretty much gave up on them as soon as they explained them, far too complicated to use in a battle. Then there’s the pickup weapons, but they seem to lack the aim assist on the bows and guns. Again, too big of a coordination requirement.

This weird combination of inconsistency and lack of accessibility extends to the DualSense. Some uses of it work very well, some do not; some can be skipped, some cannot. The only consistent part is no alternative controls.

That itself is weird, as for the last few years Sony has had a major focus on accessibility. That has really reduced here. There’d be times when a speech subtitle would be up but I could not easily see who it was coming from. GoW Ragnarok’s directional indicators on subtitles would have been a huge help.

The wolf and fox sequences are generally excellent, if you can keep track of them as they move. For ne they sometimes got lost in the graphical detail. A small adjust like a high-vis optional outline would be good.

I’m not convinced Sucker Punch care as much about stealth this time around. The spyglass is very directed and not much good outside of it. The hearing you get midway through, even on max skills, is also too limited.  The stealth takedowns are limited and it plays fast and loose with assassinate or chain assassinate options.

As a sequel its probably weakest.  It doesn’t build well on what Tsuschima did. In some respects it goes backwards instead of forwards, especially where accessibility is concerned. Oh and letting brutes do three-in-a-row unblockable attacks, which they quickly repeat is not progress.

The duels are a good example of Yotei’s split nature. Brilliantly presented in audio and visual terms, but weirdly stop and start due to the inflicted sword clash conversations. The result is you never get into the rhythm the fight requires.

Another weakness, one Tsuschima didn’t have, as it went more with disposable villains, is Saito. He is lacking as a game villain, with too many plot contrivances and indulgence.  It attempts to give him reasons for his actions but it never works.

So, yeah, it’s good, but weird. Relative to Sony’s other, big narrative games, it’s probably the weakest.  That’s still good, but too often when I was playing it, I could see too easily how it could be so much more.

My mistake was going straight from Fallen Order to Survivor. Halfway through Survivor I was burned out from the Star Wars setting and I took a break and went to the Spider man games and some Assassins Creed.

Now I have returned to Survivor and parts of it remind me of Tomb Raider. I worked through a maze and level and took this elevator and find out that it opened up to another level I was at before but I couldn’t open the door. Now I went full circle.

Some of these wall runs with no bottom and this leaping from one balloon to the next one sofa king high above the clouds…
Best part is sitting on the meditation circles and fast traveling to another circle way across the whole map.

I was not a fan of the balloon section in Survivor.

Everspace 2 Wrath of the Ancients

Is gameplay important? Yes, because a game can excel in all other respects but poor gameplay can kill it. And so it proves in this DLC. The world design, characters, soundtrack and story are all good but the visual signposting, mission design and difficulty spikes, yes even on Very Easy, wreck it.

The penultimate mission was a strange mix. First combat, then puzzles and combat, a weird combination at best. Then it has an awful, and too long, stealth run that requires a good amount of luck to get through.

The final mission starts off really well, you get the origin of the attacks, then do a fightback against the attackers, this time tearing through them. The gameplay undercuts this great moment with a badly put together boss fight that is more chore than fun.

The next part repeats the pattern, decent start, terrible end, but with a huge amount of graphical clutter, which combines with the poor signposting and a stratospheric diffuculty spike. My solution? Watched the end of the game on YouTube.

Should you bother with this? If seeing the small Okkar systems are enough, maybe. If not, then no. The plot with Dax is done with the first mission, he never shows up again. It relies far too much on protect tasks, or chaos, with enemy indicators all over the place. But it’s the incoherence between its difficulty and other aspects that rips it apart. Does it want the player to experience its story or stop them dead in their tracks? It opts too much for the latter.

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Ben

I’ve still been playing Xenoblade 3 on Switch. This game is unbelievably huge. I’ve been playing for weeks and still on chapter 6 (Xenoblade games usually have 10 chapters) and unlike the first in the series the side quests and discovery stuff is really interesting and not repetitive ‘fetch’ tasks. Others disagree but to me this is a franchise that gets better each time, albeit Xenoblade 2 was funnier, the script had some real zingers.

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Ben

I still need to play XC2, but there’s no one else that does world design like MonolithSoft. Have played XC1 and XCX. Do have a copy of XC3 too.

MonolithSoft apparently have something new cooking as well, don’t know if it’s Switch 1-2 or just S2.

[Ben]

Where Winds Meet

Another game I will not be continuing with.

It managed to kill itself with an atrocity of a boss that is an unbalanced and anti-accessibility abomination.

Dao Lord Part 1? Easy. Done. Start of phase 2 is OK, then it runs itself through with a katana, twists it around a few times to make sure.

There are three mini bosses that have to manually tracked, manually targeted with the bow, while avoiding attacks from the other two.

Plus, it only counts at the height of the jump and then, even if you hit one of them, and good luck seeing it because the camera is useless, the damage window is stupidly small.

It also looks to have to be the bow, use a ranged weapon? Doesn’t count.

To have a chance of pulling off this signed-off stupidity, I need far better auto tracking, an aim assist that actually works, and far smarter companions. Oh yeah, their attacks don’t count either in this phase, even with a bow.

It is absurd to have a boss fight that is idiotically unbakanced in the way this is. I didn’t think much of the Zheng E fight for the same reason.

EDIT:

Well, that was unexpected. Found another guide that gave a couple of tips for not relying entirely on the bow.  And, as I’m very bad at truly giving up on games… Brought in Yang as back-up, and somehow, by blind luck, took out one, then two, then the last.

Does success change my view of this boss? Nope, it’s still an abomination. Its biggest offence is it is easily fixable, it doesn’t need much, yet it won’t get it.

Huh? Wait, that was it for the Chapter 2 final boss? I was expecting the game to level lock it, go away and get to Lv 60, but you can do it at Lv 55.

The road to that boss was a mass of bad stealth, messed-with controls, more bad stealth, a chase / escape that had a lot of hard to follow perspective shifts, then it was boss time. A surprisingly straight forward one save for poorly conveyed must-dodge attacks.

• This reply was modified 1 week, 3 days ago by Ben.

I finished playing Hitman 3 the other day and, well, it was bit underwhelming.

Possibly it’s because I was kinda time-limited in wanting to be done with it before Christmas (though I started in mid-November), possibly it’s that three games into the series the novelty of the format has worn off a bit, but it didn’t grab me as much as H1 and H2 did.

I think a good part of it is that it tries to vary the format a lot – which is laudable for the third game in a successive trilogy – but it’s not very satisfying to play. Pretty much all the missions in the previous games have you guided off-screen by Diana, Agent 47’s handler. I think only one here does. The rest you have either a different character or in a couple of cases, no-one, which just doesn’t work as well. This is all due to story reasons, which is another problem with this instalment. The story isn’t something I particularly paid attention to in Hitman 1, certainly, and it started to encroach in H2. Here it absolutely dominates and ruins the game a little. The little animated powerpointy type things before each mission explaining who your target is and where you’re going are mostly absent and instead you just get cutscenes pushing the story along, which isn’t terribly interesting at all (and ends with a damp fart).

None of the levels here are as good as the best of H1 and H2, I think. A couple are outright bad – the train finale is just crap, certainly and I didn’t get on with the Berlin power station-turned-nightclub. A couple of levels open with these “cinematic” starting locations, seemingly entirely so there’s an option for a director’s commentary (not bothered with, myself) and they don’t really add anything to the levels. Wisely, once you’ve completed the level once, you get an alternate starting location that cuts them out, but it’s a weird focus of attention.

Despite the over-bearing of the story, story missions (which used to be called something else, inspirations, maybe) are thin on the ground. These are the waypoint guided options for completing a level that all hand-hold you through some of the best set-piece kills, like the exploding golf ball in Sapienza and backfiring supercar in Miami. They’re a great way to learn a level so that you can later go back and be more freeform and inventive, going for the other challenges or playing escalations etc. The levels in H1 and H2 had multiple in each, yet level in H3 have three at most (and many are focused on being ways to forward the main story as much as anything) and some have absolutely none. I think it speaks to IO of losing sight of what makes the previous games work so well.

Another thing is that there’s an annoying reliance on a new camera item, which you have with you at all times. This is the game’s photo mode, but you also have to use to disable certain electronic locks (two levels rely on that heavily) and it’s just a bit of a pain because you have to switch into first person mode to do it, aim, wait while it activates, and it just breaks up the flow of gameplay, especially if you’re trying to do a quick infiltration while a guard’s back is turned.

To be fair to the game, there are some other modes, which I’ve not delved into too much. Freelancer is a career mode type thing where you array of weapons and tools is budgeted and you have to buy/scavenge on each contract. I’ve not touched that. The Elusive Target mode is interesting – I got to kill Sean Bean! – but it’s got a high skill barrier that I’m just not at, frankly.

Dave wrote:

…I kinda have to find the time to play this with my (grown-up) kid.
We played the original KOTOR a few years ago, and it was a really good time. But we mostly played through this during a covid isolation, and I don’t expect that to happen again.

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Dave

We’re going to be waiting a while for it.

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Dave

Yeah, I loved the original KOTOR even as someone who isn’t usually into RPGs. It was such a rich and involving world and story.

The visuals look impressive on the new one at least, but the trailer doesn’t give us much to go on – for now I guess we have to wait and see more of it.

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Ben

007: First Light has been delayed from March to late May.

https://www.eurogamer.net/merry-christmas-james-bond-game-007-first-light-has-been-delayed

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Ben

Late May, well now, that is rather more significant – a Bond / Lego Batman duo on the cards!