What are you playing? Talk video games here.
The Video Games Thread
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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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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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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. -
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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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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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.
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Ah, interesting. Yeah I did feel like you unlocked a lot of magic stuff pretty early in the demo.
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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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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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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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This is superb.
A new Ghost of Yotei video:
Beautiful.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Yotei has arrived, currently installing.
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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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Yotei has arrived, currently installing.
See you in a few days!
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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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