Video Games – What Are You Playing?

Topic

From Playstation to Xbox, through smartphone, Steam and Switch – what’s pushing your buttons?

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Dave wrote:

Ben wrote:

They have destroyed their own game on the altar of difficulty.

Oh that reminds me, the new Cuphead DLC is out!

If you liked the OG Cuphead, the DLC is enjoyable!

I love Cuphead, even if I do find it tough. It’s just a beautiful game. And the new stuff looks great.

It’s tough alright, that’s part of the appeal for me. I find it very well balanced for us who grew up with (for us as children) nigh impossible video games. Hard yes, impossible no.

So satisfying to beat the game.

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Dave

Talking of stuff gone active, you can now preorder God of War: Ragnarok.

For those with PS5s, there is no free PS5 upgrade so go straight for the higher version.

Back to Edge of Eternity and, to no one’s surprise, I went with the What Would Martok Do approach.  Answer? Kill its arse for vengeance.

So retweaked the party so another member could do fire attacks.  Set the fat bastard on fire and killed it fast enough so the fight didn’t progress to the point it did before.  Even so, there was a whole lot of bullshit in that boss fight and the entire section.  It does a lot of damage to the game.

What only emphasises the weirdness is what follows.  There’s about 3-4 more major fights, all far easier.  The characters also get a special attack.  That would have helped on that boss fight no end, why only grant access to it now?

On one boss fight I used a bomb to split the enemies up, killed the mage then the fighter.  Just a far, far better boss fight.

Plus the areas you get to access look really good too.

Is that roadblock of a section warranted then? Nope.

Ben wrote:

Talking of stuff gone active, you can now preorder God of War: Ragnarok.

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Bruce, Ben

Went with Base for £59.85 for PS5.

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Dave

That’s not bad.

They’re good and they look to match to their lower price later.  I’ve pre-ordered at a higher price but been charged one that’s a bit lower.

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Dave

Star Wars Battlefront II (aka Thank God for Game Pass)

There is a campaign to this.  That means a story that probably links into others and, since I like the Operation Cinder concept, I ought to give it a go.  So I did and it died fast and nasty.

From the way it starts you will think this is going to be good.  It looks and sounds right.  Unfortunately all the good things end here and they even screw up on the sound.  There is subtitles but they are partial!  You want to better follow Ackbar’s holo-speech? Too bad, it’s hearing or nothing.  Am I to believe that EA couldn’t afford to do full subs? One of the biggest game companies going?

From there it does a crappy stealth sequence with poor indicators of both direction to go and interactive triggers.  Blue circles in a starship do not stand out! Still, you get a gun and can start shooting, it’ll get better, right?

Wrong.  The shooting is bad.  The aim assist is bad.  Your fragility is high.  Direction of fire from and visibility of enemies is bad.  It’s a recipe for frustration.  Also, your enemies are telepathic.  Stealth takedown two enemies, suddenly the rest are on alert.

What’s incredible is Dice is supposed to be good at shooters and FPS.  This? This is goddamn awful.  It plays terribly.

Dice do have some talent.  It takes some real effort to totally wreck a Star Wars game.  And they really put the work in, because this is wrecked all right.

The difficulty is, even on the lowest setting, absurdly unbalanced.  You’re supposed to be this Imperial Forces supersoldier – who dies in three hits.  Cover system? What cover system? There isn’t one.

You want to get the story part of this? Watch it on YouTube.  Let someone else have all the pain of going through this deeply, deeply irredeemable piece of crap.  It will be far more enjoyable.

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I have played Battlefront II and not only do I agree with Ben, I want to make the point that reading Bens above review is by far more enjoyable than trying to play this piece of shit game.

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Ben

Voiced by Peter Weller, apparently. Gameplay looks kinda choppy, if that is gameplay, but they’ve got a year to iron it out.

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Bruce

That was my response to it too. Polish gameplay up and I’ll probably buy it for a dollar.

In other 80s franchise video game news there is a Terminator survival horror game in development. No details beyond a brief cinematic announcement trailer tho…

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Despite its best attempts to axe itself from time to time, Chapter 3 being nearly successful, decided to stick with Edge of Eternity.  There’s been nothing to match the sheer stupidity of that chapter.  Yes, the chapter 4 puzzles were not good, nor was its boss fight, but it isn’t equal to chapter 3.

In terms of enemies since then, nothing comes close to it.  Even a notorious boss fight proved more straight forward than expected.

Just now, at the end of chapter 5 and start of 6 do I have the full party.  It feels quite similar to Final Fantasy XIII.  Doing a battle against a set of four enemies with the entire set was very fun.  Not least as you can combine their abilities.  It felt very neat to play.

But how many people are going to even see this version of the game? The XB achievement stats tell their own story with these being got by one to two per cent of players!  And I suspect that’s a combination of the rough start and chapter 3 killing interest.

[Ben]

No Man’s Sky got a new update.  It’s a smart freighter overall.  Looked really, really good. You can guess where this is going? Of course you can….

And, for the sake of whinging crapbags on the internet going “it’s too easy”, “it needs to be harder”, they fucked it up.

To access the new freighter parts you need Salvaged Freighter Modules.  But there is no guaranteed, easy way to get them.  There is the derelict freighters but those have had a stupid difficulty increase.  They were bad before and they’re worse now.

Any level that says “saving disabled” is screwing around, but at least there were plenty of heat points before.  Now? Sweet fuck all.  Oh and lots of creatures, who are immune to grenades, take numerous shots to kill, there’s no aim assist.  The whole temperature shield falls and if you go to manually fix it? The menu always comes up on the Starship tab, not the Exosuit menu you need.  Oh and you can only walk, very, very slowly.

Having gone through 2000 rounds of ammo and getting sweet fuck all for it, I very slowly got the fuck out of there.  Absolute stupidity.  Clearly tested by a QA crew who view root canal surgery as fun!

The saddest part? The new parts are damn cool, why make it so hard to access them?

Edit – Looks like I might have had a spectacularly bad dice roll with few heaters and infestation.  But that doesn’t help much, especially as the model generating all this would have been set up a certain way.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 4 months ago by Ben.

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So, No Man’s Sky, turns out there is an easier to get those Freighter Salvage Modules you need for the base parts.  And the answer is? Piracy.  Yes, piracy.

In the game there are regular freighter convoys, but until now I had no reason to look at them as they had nothing I needed.  If you fly around you can see what is being transported, including the parts you need.  So blow the crap out of the ship to nab it and you’re good to go.

Doing this before the Outlaws update would have been suicude, as the game would have inflicted infinite sentinels on your arse.  But do your attack in a lawless, outlaw system? It’s all fine!

Are the new base parts worth it? As you’ll be having to go from system to system to bab them 1-2 at a time and will need to grab quite a few!  Yes, they are.  They look good, have a good few possibilities and there is new tech systems too.

The first time you set up an exterior catwalk and go from one part of your freighter to the next, with members of your crew also using it, is very cool.

What I like about this now is the combination of the systems.  You now have a reason to check out convoys, attack in the right system and you can avoid sentinel enforcement, loss of standing? Blow up a pirate or two to restore it.  It makes for a smart combination.

Other aspects I haven’t talked about – lots of little visual improvements, especially asteroids.  They’ve made it much easier to tell which asteroids supply which material.  Watch your shots though, you won’t be the only ship mining asteroids anymore.  The sheer density of the asteroid fields is very impressive.

Finally, I think my previous derelict freighter runs had been AI crippled, so hadn’t tried an infestation one.  And won’t be going back to it.

Huh, so God of War just… finishes like that? I felt like I might be only a quarter of the way through the game, but no – that storyline is the main thrust, and that baddie is the big bad? There are still worlds/areas that aren’t accessible but the credits rolled so I guess they’re just for side-quests and whatnot.

There’s a another PS4 online sale at the moment but the only thing that might grab me is Hitman 3.

The worlds you didn’t visit in GoW are very likely to be in GoW: Ragnarok.

The only subquest / post-campaign area is Niflheim.  It sounds great for gaming masochists who want to craft the best gear.  I gave its health-draining environment a miss.

Andrew wrote:

Huh, so God of War just… finishes like that? I felt like I might be only a quarter of the way through the game, but no – that storyline is the main thrust, and that baddie is the big bad? There are still worlds/areas that aren’t accessible but the credits rolled so I guess they’re just for side-quests and whatnot.

There’s a another PS4 online sale at the moment but the only thing that might grab me is Hitman 3.

How did you like the game? Other than it coming with that surprise ending?

Anonymous wrote:

Andrew wrote:

Huh, so God of War just… finishes like that? I felt like I might be only a quarter of the way through the game, but no – that storyline is the main thrust, and that baddie is the big bad? There are still worlds/areas that aren’t accessible but the credits rolled so I guess they’re just for side-quests and whatnot.

There’s a another PS4 online sale at the moment but the only thing that might grab me is Hitman 3.

How did you like the game? Other than it coming with that surprise ending?

It was fine. Not an all-timer as it didn’t really seem to build in intensity in the way I expected, and I feel like there’s still so much upskilling of Kratos and upgrading of his gear to get through but no real reason to do so. I don’t mean to offend anyone who loves the game or series but I kind of expected so much more since it’s so highly regarded and rated – quite short/quick too, compared to like GTA5 or RDR2 or even the FarCry games.

I bought Hitman 3 but haven’t started it yet – instead I fired up FIFA 22 while waiting for the DL to complete and started career mode for the first time – pretty interesting angle.

GoW isn’t a big, open world game.  It’s a focused, compact experience.

A more like-to-like comparison would be Far Cry vs Spider-Man. Or Red Dead Redemotion 2 to Ghost of Tsuschima.

Ben wrote:

GoW isn’t a big, open world game.  It’s a focused, compact experience.

A more like-to-like comparison would be Far Cry vs Spider-Man. Or Red Dead Redemotion 2 to Ghost of Tsuschima.

Oh, it’s compact alright!

A game I’d really like to play again but it’s not on PS4 is Max Payne 3 – that was good fun.

I replayed Mortal Kombat XL the past few weeks. Went through the story again, which was a lot of fun, and did various amounts of mindless grinding (while listening to podcasts) to actually unlock everything in the Krypt. Slightly ridiculous how much currency it takes to get all that. Great game over all though.

I also ended up playing through the story mode of Injustice 1, which I got as a freebie on PS4 a couple of years back. I played it on the 360 when it originally came out and remember it being ok. It has not aged well. Some of that might just be down to the port – the really janky cut-scene frame rates – but the terrible costume designs, the story being a rip off of Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme and the unsatisfying control scheme (which really needs a block button) are inherent to it. I had absolutely no interest in doing anything with it after the story, compared to MKXL, where I was continually doing towers and one-on-one fights etc (and not just to get koins).

Started Two Point Hospital now, which is another freebie (from Prime Gaming). I was a little dubious how much it’d grab me, but I spent a good few hours with it last night. Nice sense of humour and building stuff is easy to do. There’s lots of granular systems and controls for your staff and hospital, but it looks like you can get away with not using those much, thankfully. And you make Sonic costumes one of the staff uniforms, if you want, which is something.

Andrew wrote:

Oh, it’s compact alright!

See, GoW is about right for game length for me. Anything much longer I struggle to find the time for without it dragging on forever. I’m not a believer that longer games are necessarily better.

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Ben

I agree, I found RDR2 too long for one.

Playing FIFA22 Career and my player (Andre Ross) broke his ankle and was out for three months – Man City dropped him! There’s emails from the manager complaining about my “under performance of late” – dude, he can’t walk!

Andrew wrote:

There’s emails from the manager complaining about my “under performance of late” – dude, he can’t walk!

To be fair, that would severely limit his performance, wouldn’t you agree?

The remake of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic has been delayed indefinitely.

Why? Internally the developers was telling management to go for a 2025 release.  Management were externally saying 2022 release!

Yes, in a post Cyberpunk 2077 world.

I read about the cancellation/ delay in KOTOR remake. Sounds like a shiteshow.

 

https://kotaku.com/star-wars-knights-of-the-old-republic-kotor-remake-hold-1849335104

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Ben

Edge of Eternity

Well, this was certainly an up and down game, but at the time of posting, I am in the 0.39% of players that finished it!

It’s a strange conclusion as while its main story concludes, a great deal is left up in the air and forgotten about.  There is post-game content planned that I hope gets released, as it can only help the game.  For all that it is flawed I am inclined to buy a copy to support it.

What’s wrong with it? Chapter 3 is awful, chapter 4 has terrible, mandatory puzzles, chapter 6 has a very irritating, untelegraphed instant kill spell – where there were none before, chapter 7 has the same irritating boss and the final boss is a slog.  Multi-phase final boss? Well, OK, but five phases that rack up to a 90 minute brawl? No.  And parts of the final dungeon boiled down to: Why can’t I move there? Because we say so.  There was also a very strange and blurriness on the final boss fights that seriously impaired my ability to see what was going on.

It’s a strange game as you only get a full party at around the two-thirds mark, which in turn greatly changes the combat for the better.  Its sidequests are a bit too fond of going “search this large circle manually” and some of them you would not do without a guide.

Still, I finished it so it must have something going for it.  And so it does.  World design is fantastic.  There’s a good set of towns and locations, along with some good dungeons and excellent weather effects.  There’s also a day and night cycle.  Both of these impact on elemental attacks too.

Some of the environments are very well designed.  The corroded swamps are particularly creepy and alien.

The combat system is quite good too, but you only get to see it fully after a long time.  Having earlier access to some of the endgame moves I was doing likely would have kept more players engaged.

The idea of crystals powering up weapons, with the weapons gaining XP to allow more crystals to be fitted is effective.  Although often combat can be nerfed by going for elemental weaknesses.  You can also enhance crystals by combining them, along with crafted weapons and armour.  I did far more weaponry than armour.

It gives you a good amount of tools to play with for your characters.  You might want to pair a fast melee fighter with a fast casting and agile mage abd the game will encourage you to do so.

The soundtrack is often execellent.

It is clearly an indie game with some major ambitions.  Bad decisions really get in the way of it achieving them, but even so…. I would like to see this really tap the potential it has, either by post-launch content or a sequel, it has material enough to do both.

Taking off the restraints would also help – there were times when the game was being deliberately narrow, but to its detriment.  Especially in battle items, which you can only have 2-3 of and only limited use.  The result is you will have a vast inventory of consumables you can’t use.

If you can endure or manage the major down points, this can be a seriously good game at times.  At other times you will be wondering what on earth they were going for.  And towards the end you’ll be doing fights where you can very cleverly control the flow of it, if you make the right moves.

It does start off pretty rough, is never the most stable of games but if you can access this via Game Pass and you like JRPGs, this is a worth a look.

Man, I’m surprised by just how much I’m enjoying Two Point Hospital. I’ve not played a god sim type game like this since… Theme Park and Settlers II back in the 90s, I think (ignoring an attempt to revisit Theme Park a few years ago, which didn’t run properly).

It really gets a nice balance between things you have to keep an eye on, things that will keep ticking over on their own and silliness. I’m still really on the training levels, so I’ve not experienced the full onslaught of staff training and happiness levels, I suspect, but it’s a lot of fun.

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Andrew, Bruce

I watched a Midnight Sons cinematic over the weekend. Looks pretty.  says it is coming nov 7.  anybody know whats the deal?

 

Martin Smith wrote:

Man, I’m surprised by just how much I’m enjoying Two Point Hospital. I’ve not played a god sim type game like this since… Theme Park and Settlers II back in the 90s, I think (ignoring an attempt to revisit Theme Park a few years ago, which didn’t run properly).

It really gets a nice balance between things you have to keep an eye on, things that will keep ticking over on their own and silliness. I’m still really on the training levels, so I’ve not experienced the full onslaught of staff training and happiness levels, I suspect, but it’s a lot of fun.

I’ve added it to my wishlist, thank you!

I have many fond memories from bullfrogs old Theme Hospital. It seems like they’re very, very similar.

Rocket wrote:

I watched a Midnight Sons cinematic over the weekend. Looks pretty.  says it is coming nov 7.  anybody know whats the deal?

 

Do you like card-based tactical games?

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Rocket

Anonymous wrote:

Martin Smith wrote:

Man, I’m surprised by just how much I’m enjoying Two Point Hospital. I’ve not played a god sim type game like this since… Theme Park and Settlers II back in the 90s, I think (ignoring an attempt to revisit Theme Park a few years ago, which didn’t run properly).

It really gets a nice balance between things you have to keep an eye on, things that will keep ticking over on their own and silliness. I’m still really on the training levels, so I’ve not experienced the full onslaught of staff training and happiness levels, I suspect, but it’s a lot of fun.

I’ve added it to my wishlist, thank you!

I have many fond memories from bullfrogs old Theme Hospital. It seems like they’re very, very similar.

I think Two Point Studio is made up of ex-Bullfrog staff.

Martin Smith wrote:

I think Two Point Studio is made up of ex-Bullfrog staff.

A bunch of centenarians plagiarizing themselves? I mean, as long as the game’s good I don’t see the issue.

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Have returned to Octopath Traveller.  Got two more of the party, two to go.

As usual with a JRPG it gets better as you play it.  Have started using a strategy on the bosses of initial attacks to determine weaknesses, then some defence to whack the boost gauge up, boost attacks take down the shield clearing the way for the mages.  And the mages?

“On my signal, unleash hell.”

And they do.

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Well, in an unexpected move, No Man’s Sky returned to hogging my attention for the last week.

How? Well, part of it was the freighter update and my wanting to get them all unlocked.  After that I made one mistake – I noticed in combat that the sole squadron ship I had warped in automatically to assist! I had thought it was manual.

So then I decide I need to expand the squadron, increase it to two but to get three and four? Requires a lot of nanites which take time to get.

In the middle of this nanite gathering, funded mostly by piracy missions in pirate systems, they drop an update adding stairs, internal and external, to the freighter base building.

Oh and I start to really like the Infra-knife, so decide to massively upgrade that with a trio of S-class boosts costing, you guessed it, lots of nanites.

To do all this? Took me the last week.  Worth it? Yes.  The upgraded Infra-knife is massively destructive.  Having a full roster of S-class pilots is fantastic.  Had a pilot that had “a rebel mindset”.  Translates to flying into me in combat, getting in the way and being a pain.  I fired his arse and got in someone who knows how to coordinate attacks.  My squadron is one exotic, two fighters and a hauler.

Where it got gloriously nuts is a load of pirates pick a fight with me outside a station.  A couple of freighters are in the area, plus mine.  It all kicks off, seven pirates warp in, my squadron warps in, all the freighter guns start firing and launching their own ships, with a couple of passing ships joining in! What follows is a couple of minutes of utter chaos where 10-20 ships, with three capital ships in support, systematically annihilate the entire pirate gang.

At the point now where, once more, I will probably put it aside until the next update.  Probably.

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I downloaded Assassins Creed Odyssey and the amount of stuff it is throwing at me (missions, map size, mechanics) is giving me anxiety. Good job I got the version with all the extra content added to it.

Odyssey is massive but a UbiSoft game.  You will do lots of the same stuff.

What gets overlooked is why it works.  Most of Odyssey’s quests are straight forward.  Its designed for people playing after work, not being too taxing and fun.  And it’s very good at supplying that.

Bruce wrote:

Good job I got the version with all the extra content added to it.

Translation: Good job I got the full game.

Is Odyssey the ancient Greek one? I have to admit, despite not being that into Ubisoft open world games, I am tempted by the settings of some of the later AC games for a bit of historical tourism.

Yes. Odessy is set in Greece. I’m about 12 hours into it and there hasn’t really been any assassin lore or anything – it’s all just you kicking about with Spartans and other factions.

Origins – the Egyptian one – might be up your street. It has a dedicated tour mode that removes all quests and combat from the game and just lets you wander about activating audio tours. A quick Google reveals that there’s one in Odyssey too (though I’ve not noticed it under the mountain of content!).

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Martin Smith, Ben

Also video game related- the eldest and I made a paper machie Kirby.

 

It’s lumpy as shit and will most likely fall apart but it’s earned me some dad points.

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Dave, Martin Smith

Final Fantasy XIII

Granted, it’s over a decade since I last played this, but I really don’t remember it being the total bastard that it currently is.  It’s also uneven in its bastardry, with it being entirely possible for your party to breeze through a boss fight then lose to a set of normal enemies.

How? Part of it is your skills are limited, you can’t over-level.  The other part is you don’t choose your party members.  At the start this is further compounded by role limitations.  Being stuck with two Ravagers that can’t stagger an enemy, when the combat system is built around staggering, is hugely frustrating.

Other stuff is reflective of JRPGs developing since 2009-10.  Your party can ambush enemies but only by running up to them, there’s no attack ability.  The enemy sight cones are poorly indicated and the camera is often drunk in its movement.

The bosses can be particularly cheap, especially when combined with its leader-dies = party KO / instant loss mechanic.  Two bosses so far pretty much had an attack that can wipe your party out if not fully healed before it hits.

So why persist with it? Because when it is on-form, and it is a pretty even split in the early game, it is very on-form.  It is very satisfying switching between the attack paradigms, using timing to interrupt enemy attacks and seeing your party cut a swathe through their enemies.

Great article here on the making of Goldeneye 64. Well worth a read if you have any interest in the game or this era of gaming.

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/aug/19/nintendo-64-n64-goldeneye-007-rare-james-bond-making-of

 

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Bruce

Credits to this modder for making the mod we didn't know we needed #spiderman pic.twitter.com/lPdv2u0Skq

— IGN (@IGN) August 16, 2022

I’ve been playing Darkside Detective this weekend, a comedy horror point and click. Very blocky pixel art (intentionally so) which is a bit weird at first, but quickly works. The game is broken into cases and the main set of six aren’t particularly long or at all difficult (there are three bonus chapters, of which I’ve done one so far, that seem a bit longer and more complex). But they are very funny, which is the main draw, which compensates ably.

I got the Marvel Future Revolutions mobile game on my PC using the Blue Stacks emulator.
I found this tutorial YouTube video on getting the Xbox gamepad to work.
The assigning each control to a button was tricky, and it is some trial and error to figure out
which control best fits which gamepad button that works for you. (I was so used to the xpadder configurations…)

It is an Ok game with more characters than the Avengers Steam game which is just introducing new characters that
are the female counterparts to the current ones.

The interlude videos (FMV) are great and vivid, but the overall play as compared to the Arkham games.
Well.. It is a mobile game and you have to chip in money to get more arsenal and level up.

Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns

Way back when the demo for this came out, on PS3, I never got past it.  The reasons were that the demo could only be played on Normal and this is not an easy game, even on Easy.  The other reason was due to a graphical stagger indicator that I find far harder to use than the numerical version in the preceding games.

Jump forward eight years, it’s on GamePass, could try it again on Easy.  So I did. 40 odd hours later, to my surprise I took out the final boss!

Part of that lay in the fact that the game indicates very obviously that you need to do these four trials.  If you do, you get a better sword and shield.  The problem? Some of the standard enemies here hit harder than the final boss! (And that includes when said boss is throwing star systems at you!) In the end I triggered the final boss fight expecting to lose, not win.

Which is one of the game’s biggest problems – it is massively uneven.  You think you’re ready for a boss fight because you’ve been finding it easier with the standard minions.  Then you start it up and it’s a major spike you couldn’t prepare for.

The other big problem is the time limit.  It isn’t well integrated, it expects far too much manual memory and, often, quests will be designed around wasting time.  For this quest, talk to this guy in the morning, next step? Talk to someone else at night.

A moderate issue is the map often being vague and imprecise.  It’s not a huge open world but it’s big enough to be a problem.

So why stick with it? In my case I had played and finished its two predecessors.  I wanted to see how this trilogy concluded.

Even with that as motivation there were times when this was a profoundly dispriting game to play.  Artificial difficulty – from the speed by which ATB is spent versus refresh rate, the fact enemy buffs and debuffs last far longer than mine, that goddamn graphic stagger indicator.

What does it have going for it? Excellent world and enemy design – even eight years later.  Even with all the spanners the game throws into it, the combat system is smart, especially later when you get far stronger abilities.  Unleashing an attack that hits with a Firaga spell was quite the surprise. Combine that with the Schemata concept and you can create custom setups for specific sets of enemies, taking advantage of their weaknesses.

The most difficult part of the combat is the timing.  Crack that and you will probably find this game easy.  But it also enables interruption of enemy attacks, others will result in an instsnt stagger if blocked, not always with perfect timing required.  Put this with excellent graphic and sound design and the result is very impressive, even years later.

There is also a system that I haven’t seen anywhere else.  Kill enough of an enemy and you get a much stronger, Omega version turn up.  Kill that and the enemy is rendered extinct.  They never show up again.  There’s about 30 enemy types.  On this first run I went and racked up 2-3 extinctions.

Even with a guide, a first run will be uneven. It will vary from being spectacularly good to awful and back again.  A good few quests will irritate, as will certain mechanics – including a life sapping temple, timed doors in an underground ruin and elsewhere.

Overall, I’m glad I played this and got to the end.  If I hadn’t played the first two? Perhaps not.  The post boss ending sequence was very epic and worked to wrap up the trilogy very effectively.

And the new game plus? A huge amount of fun.  Just tearing through everything is immensely fun.  Also got revenge on a chaos-enhanced Chocobo Eater I couldn’t take out on the first run.  That was satisfying, but still took an absurd level of damage to take it out, due to the health regen it had.

Given what has been seen of it to date and, given my experience of this game, I can see an influence on Final Fantasy XVI.  Real time combat, single combatent, stagger mechanic – it looks to be all there.

In other news, Midnight Fight Express died very, very fast.

I’d set my health to 200, in place of the standard 100, dialled back everything else… Got to a point with two weapon enemies right at the start, died in three hits. Ok, I’ll take the hint – you don’t want me to play or recommend your game.

There’s also something weird with the isometric view for it all, nor is there much control over targeting.  This is where the invoking of Arkham combat breaks down for me, as that game does a number of subtle assists for the player that this one doesn’t do.

Nor does its controls work for me.  X as a main attack, A to dodge, Y to block, with hold X for heavy hit – cue my usual objection to that entire concept, how long do I hold it for compared to normal? – and LB for some perfect block counter, like I’ll ever be using that.  It’s a strange set up that doesn’t make sense to me.

Still, does make taking a break from GamePass far, far easier, which is why I was blitzing FFXIII:LR. I’ll be doing what on the Fallout duo – wait to bag on a proper sale.

While GamePass is quite the value proposition – I’m not sure it is that good for me.  In that I’m drawn to play games more with it, in a way that doesn’t happen on Netflix or Disney+.

Bought DOOM as it was on sale on steam. Love the game up until the point where you have to scale Argent Tower. Am now seriously considering demanding a refund. I fucking hate platforming shit like this, I bought this game for the violence, not the mirrors edge bullshit.

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Ben

My faith in the awesomeness of the game was restored as soon as I had cleared Argent Tower (and destroyed it).

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Dave

You mean after you got done with the platforming crap, ended up in Hell and got back to killing everything in sight, it got better?

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Ben wrote:

You mean after you got done with the platforming crap, ended up in Hell and got back to killing everything in sight, it got better?

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Ben

You might want to skip Eternal if you didn’t like the platforming crap in D2016 =P

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Ben

Oh boy, yeah, that section at the end of level two of Doom Eternal.

I’ve watched some speedruns of Doom Eternal and know what you speak of. Might get it, might skip it.

I can’t say I found the two levels easy, but when I was doing it well, it is quite smart.  Can easily be a love-hate game.

In other news, SkillUp’s review of the PS5 version of The Last of Us Part 1 is well worth watching.

Ben wrote:

I can’t say I found the two levels easy, but when I was doing it well, it is quite smart. Can easily be a love-hate game.

After now having finished DOOM on Hurt Me Plenty, I will transition to playing it on Nightmare and await Doom Eternal being on sale . I can wait for years, I don’t mind. My wishlist is full of games anyway.

DOOM was really fun, btw. I did feel slightly cheated at the end as I really wanted to kill Samuel Hayden. I didn’t expect Olivia to be the final boss.

But that said… good game. Even though I hate platforming shit like that argent tower, it didn’t take away from it being an otherwise well designed game, with inventive weapons and fun-to-murder enemies.

Nightmare is going to be a fucking challenge, I can tell.

Finally picked up Soul Calibur VI as it was going cheap and I thought the kids might enjoy it.

It’s tons of fun. For fans of the early games (I used to play Soul Blade on PS1 and Soul Calibur on Dreamcast) this has a nice back-to-basics approach that ditches a lot of the faffery of the more recent instalments and feels more like those early games.

It reminds me of the classic appeal of the likes of SFII and MK in its combination of immediate simplicity and hidden depths, with a nice roster of colourful characters.

Good fun.

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Ben

Wow, you weren’t kidding – £12 for the deluxe edition!? On sale until 14 Sept too.  Very, very tempting.

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Dave

Sony just dropped a rather excellent new trailer for God of War: Ragnarok.

Other stuff that looks great is the Like A Dragon: Ishin, which is a remake of the Yakuza spin-off PSP title that never got a western release.  This has been wanted for a long time and is partly why I’ve been buying Yakuza games at launch.

Project Eve looks like it could be an excellent action title.

Rise of the Ronin could go either way but Team Ninja have time as it’s set for 2024.

Ben wrote:

Sony just dropped a rather excellent new trailer for God of War: Ragnarok.

Yeah, looks pretty epic.

Octopath Traveler II was announced in the Nintendo Direct yesterday. That looks pretty good, although largely more of the same.

I’m quite interested in the remakes of Front Mission 1 and 2, which were shown too.

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Ben

Looks like a load of GTA VI footage has been leaked, confirming that it’s set in Vice City (at least partly) and one of the playable protagonists is female, as has been trailed for quite some time now.

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Andrew

Started the Dawn of Ragnarok DLC for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.

It hasn’t started well.  The opening was OK then it did a very crappy boss fight that was no fun whatsoever, complete with a camera on crack and lots of unblockable attacks.  Oh and how could I forget? Lots of lava and fire attacks which can kill you quick.

It better improve.

It also has annoyingly long load times for intro sequences with no option to move to the scene from an opening quote, just skip it all or wait.  And you will wait all right.

AC Dawn of Ragnarok has gotten back on form.

Once you’re past the rubbishly narrow intro quests, it opens up and returns to being the game you know in a very well designed new environment.

Meanwhile….

Courtesy of its god mode setting, I’ve started to see what is so liked about Hades.

The god mode setting grants you 2% of physical resistance per run.  You start off with 20% and, a few runs later, you do see a difference.

The result is I got past the first boss, which is where I got on the XB run, but this time got further into the second zone. Then got to the second boss, died, got back to it and killed its arse. Got as far as the third boss, who I’m going to kill – and his pet bull too.  Just not today.

Initially, the go back to the start rule looks absurd.  But once you start getting to the second or third areas you’re pretty much tearing through the first area and using it to power up.  It goes faster than you expect.

The other attraction is what you do inbetween runs, in the House of Hades.  This is where some sharp writing and smart characterisation come into play.  You can also gain items to assist on runs via gifts.

It does take time to get used to.  Without god mode it’d be too brutal for me, but with it? A very fun game that, sooner or later, probably later, I’ll complete.

I’ve been working on a mod project recently: a FunnyPlaying Retro Pixel laminated Q5 v2 for the Game Boy Color.

It’s basically a backlit screen. I think they’re using old mobile phone stock and pre-laminating it with the GBC screen. The display area is bigger than the original GBC, so it requires a bit of cutting of the casing to fit. And by a bit, I mean a heck of a lot. The screen supplier recommends not modding an existing shell and buying one of their custom ones, but I really wanted to use the Berry colour (with lime green buttons) which they don’t do. So cue lots of use of the dremel and some scalpels.

Took two attempts. I cut too much off the top the first time and had a very noticeable gap above the screen. Second go went better (though I’m not convinced the screen is actually in entirely flat).

The features are more extensive than just a backlight though. There are multiple levels, controlled by a touch sensor sitting at the top of the console (how it works through the plastic, I have no idea). Long-pressing the sensor changes the display mode from normal display to various scanline options, the best of which emulates the dot matrix screen of the original GB.

That’s all from just plugging in the ribbon cable (meaning if you use one of their custom shells it’s a drop in mod). If you solder it in, you can adjust the screen position, use higher brightness levels and change the colours of the lit-up logo. I’ve not done that yet. A little hesitant to now I’ve got the screen fit and working.

If you’ve got a GBC that you want to make more use of, I definitely recommend this. A screen kit is about £45.

Just preordered Like A Dragon: Ishin as Base dropped the PS5 price for it from £63.85 to £43.85!

The problem with the bulk of one-on-one fighting games on console is they simply aren’t designed for the controllers.  These things are best with a heinously expensive SF2-style, six-button joystick.

Street Fighter V takes this foundation and really builds on it in all the wrong ways.  It is an always online game – don’t like these. It has a crappy tutorial that has lots of double button presses.  Ugh, I loathe these as I can rarely pull them off.  It then finishes itself off with cosmetic DLC ads before you start a fight.  There’s lots of talk of how great SF6 could be, but if it follows this one it could be a spectacular failure.

Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown is better but still suffers from a control scheme designed for the arcade, not for consoles.

Maybe the downloading Mortal Kombat X will succeed where these failed, but I’m sceptical.

Yeah SFV was quite a disappointment.

I liked MK X though, so be interested to know what you make of that.

Hades

I didn’t expect to get to the technical end of this quite so soon.  But after duffing up the third level bosses, the final area is surprisingly compact.

The final area throws in a couple of curveballs with poison – and in this game poison is very much poison! – plus the last boss gets to regenerate health.  Both of these feel cheap in a way the preceding areas weren’t.  There are antidote / cure fountains but it can be hard to tell you’ve been poisoned with everything else going on.

Thing is, even with getting to the technical end, the game is far from over.  I’ve a pile of upgrades to get, things to get and there’s a load of new game plus modifiers for future runs.  Add in that there is a surprising amount of strategy once you get a sense of how the boons work. You can combine them in ways you would expect the game to block but it doesn’t! On one run I picked up triple jab attack and then later added flurry, which speeds up attack massively.  Add in powered up dash and the result was near total slaughter.

There’s also the other choices the game gives you – do you go after keys, gems, upgrades, life up, gifts or boons? It makes for a varied set of combinations. You can also add heal rooms to the dungeon areas which act as a brief respite from the onslaught.

The other ace card it has is what you do inbetween runs, in the House of Hades, matters as much as your escape attempts.  Gifts you give unlock items to use and the writing for the characters that you want to find and talk to them.

It all adds up to a game that, in the end, more than lives up to its reputation.

Mortal Kombat XL

There’s a lot here to unpack but I think I’ve found the problem for me with these games – analogue sticks.  If you can adjust to them and be accurate with the directions it probably works great, but I don’t have that level of accuracy.

Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty Demo

This is a bit of a mess but, if you like the whole R3 lock on / switch targets set-up and can translate a circular radar into the 360 degree battlefield, quickly and accurately, you might like it.

The health and other displays being bottom centre is odd.

Enemies are nothing new – blocks, unblockable red attacks, arbitrary level system, respawn if you use a rest point.

Graphically its all right but not stunning.

The biggest problem is its very unclear with its systems and enemies do not indicate attacks.  Add in a very small window for its deflect skill – I had to abandon the tutorial because it was so small and badly explained – and you have an unforgiving game that some will like.

Star Ocean: The Divine Force Demo

This starts off OK then slowly falls apart the more you play it.  The biggest problem is its AP-based combat system as the AP runs out far too fast.  It also places stress on positioning but gives you a terrible view of the battle and where enemies are.

The first boss fight shows up these flaws and more.  In that it drops this VA attack system but gives you no opportunity to practice it, the on-screen info arguably gives you the wrong info and, at one point, I was following what it said on-screen and nothing was happening.  In the end it translated to attack the head, but why not just say that?

After that fight you’re low on healing items and the game decides not to supply a camp site for healing.  So to get through that I legged it from point to point until one came up and kept doing that because just isn’t good.

Made it to a village and stopped. One area where the demo works well is the world design.  It’s not stunning but looks good enough.  Some nice ememy names like Theiving Scumbag and Chief Scumbag.

But on the whole? It’s a mess and its own systems frequently trip it up.

analogue sticks. If you can adjust to them and be accurate with the directions it probably works great, but I don’t have that level of accuracy.

why not just use the d-pad? I can’t imagine trying to play a fighter with analogue sticks.

Did try that, was a bit more successful but still difficult to pull off a hadoken or dragon punch with it.

It does show up just how well put together the Megadrive pads were.  For a d-pad and three buttons, they did a lot with them.

I think the attraction of games like SF2 way back when lay in the sheer amount of moves.  Then there was nothing like it, now? It’s become the norm, especially with sheer number of inputs available.

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Dave

Mortal Kombat (and Injustice) are kinda designed to be played with a pad though… you don’t actually have to do a classic hadouken motion, but just down > forward, so in theory you should have an easier time with a pad or a keyboard (probably better), or a hitbox of course.

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Ben

I couldn’t be more delighted that the 100,000th forum post was about the precise control mechanics of arcade beat-em-ups.

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Todd, Ben

Hmm? Oh yeah.

Dave wrote:

I couldn’t be more delighted that the 100,000th forum post was about the precise control mechanics of arcade beat-em-ups.

Fighting games, please… not the same as “beat ’em up” =P

And yeah, I got the 100,000th post… yay me… where’s my totally real and not clickbait bullshit price? xD

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Andrew, Dave, Todd

Kena: Bridge of Spirits

Having been discouraged enough to give up, decided to return to see what the accessibility extras were added to it.

In some ways it is a bit better, combat seemed tweaked to be a bit more forgiving but adding accessibility features and not adding auto-aim is a strange decision.  The auto-lock-on is OK but limited by distance and not being particularly smart.  A boss fight with a teleporting mage that the camera doesn’t automatically follow showed up the limits of this.

This shows up Ember Lab’s lack of understanding for accessible game design.  Even on Story setting, this game is more difficult than it needs to be.  The difficulty gets in the way of you appreciating the game’s best aspects.  They’re clearly trying but haven’t quite grasped it – for me to do another bit of the game what I’d need is a better visual cue of where to go, auto-aim to quickly hit the targets and a more generous time limit.  None of this should be that hard to enable.

It’s a pity they didn’t take the opportunity to improve the haptics further too.

Still, did do part of the game I hadn’t done last time.

Kena: Bridge of Spirits

“We have unfinished business.”

And so it proved.  An initial play of the game with its anniversary upgrades suggested that it hadn’t changed much.  But further play revealed that they were there, just more subtle.  In the boss fights for the Toshi quest, it was a bit more forgiving.  That and using the dash ability in combat helps massively.

The result was that I got to the game’s final bosses.  The first of these was pretty good, being a combination of the preceding three bosses.  The final boss, however, even with some major tweaks, is a disaster.  Its combat sections are weak, the timed platforming section is awful and the final phase suffers from terrible visual communication of what you need to do and how.  Even when you know it is still difficult as you have to get close enough to trigger the prompt.

Despite all the game bosses working against its story, you don’t feel particularly forgiving of the characters you are supposed to guide on, the quality of the animated sequences manages to diffuse whatever you may be feeling quickly and get you back into the story.  This is especially so with the final boss.

Would it have been better for the corruptions to be purely external? For the boss fights, yes.  Remove the bosses and less of a combat aspect to the spirit redemptions might have made for a more cohesive game.

For a game that is so well designed aesthetically, it is strange that its visual communication can be severely lacking.  When combined with timed platforming sequences it can be frustrating.  Ditto for some puzzles.

Its version of New Game Plus is odd.  It transfers your abilities and rot, but not your health extras which irks.  Although it does transfer the extra rot slots which enables easier healing.  Even so, it may not be the NG+ you were expecting.

I don’t think I would have finished this a year ago in its original state.  In that respect the upgrades work very well.  They don’t entirely remove the edge, it will kill you fast if you’re not careful but it is far more manageable.

Overall, should you play this? Even with that final boss? Yes, you should.

No Man’s Sky got a major update.

The biggest bad change it got is, if you had fully fitted out a ship, with a full set of upgrades, this update halves them! As it removed an entire set of ship slots.  As might be expected it hasn’t gone down well.  The game has been slowed down for no good reason.

The defence for this is that was always intended to be a limit of three upgrades, not six.  But you could do six for the last four years.  Too easy with six? No one’s forcing you to go the whole way if you find it too easy.

I suspect there will be a fix applied, perhaps doubling the three upgrades.

Outside of that, there are a lot of good inprovements here to how it plays.  It’s a pity the upgrade reduction will, for a time, eclipse those.  The most major is a set of difficulty sliders. Yes, sliders – and they allow for a very customisable experience.

Graphically, the extra touches added here do look very good, making an already great looking game that bit more so.

I usually don’t participate here because I pretty much don’t get to play games anymore, but as I mentioned in the random thread, my kid left his occulus quest at my place and I just played forty minutes of Until You Fall and I really do feel like falling down. I’m sweaty, my heart is racing, my hands are still shaking. Fantastic workout, really, by way of a hack’n’slash action rpg kind of game. The name is pretty self-explanatory, too :)

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Andrew

I’ve been breaking one of my cardinal rules lately: I’ve got two games on the go at the same time.

I used to do this a lot in my teens and it’s always a bad idea because one always ends up getting neglected and then forgotten about and not finished. In this case it’s Mario 64 DS which is, well, a Nintendo DS port of Mario 64. I’ve been playing it for about a month now and, well, it’s fine. Ish.

To be fair to Nintendo, it’s not just a straight port. As well as touch screen controls (which I’ve no interest in using), various mini-games (which I’ve only glanced at so far) they’ve rejigged it fairly significantly. Rather than playing as just Mario, you now play as Yoshi, initially. Yoshi has to rescue Mario, Luigi and Wario through the game, who you can then switch to when you want. Or you can grab one of their hats off enemies to turn into them (but keep the original character’s voice, which can make for the very odd sensation of playing as Wario who’s making Yoshi noises). The reason you’d want to switch around is that, as well as differing movement speeds and jump strength, the original power-ups from the game – the wing cap, the metal cap and the other one that lets you walk through things – are now character specific to Mario, Wario and Luigi respectively (plus Mario also gets a balloon mode thing which I don’t think was in the original).

This kind of works, but it’s a bit of a ball-ache going to do a star and finding you’ve got the wrong character for the power-up you need to get to do it. If you want to properly change characters, you have to go to a certain room in the castle hub, which just takes an irksome amount of time. The hats are a quick work-around for that, but you lose them when you take a hit from an enemy and they wander off, usually to halfway around the map, which can make it really tricky to successfully do things as you’ve got to do a no-hit run for it. Plus, there’s no way to quick change into Yoshi, who is more useful than the humans at times, for his enemy-eating egg-making ability.

The biggest problem the game has though is controls. Mario 64 was so monumental at the time because it was a working proof for analogue controls in a 3d space. The DS does not have an analogue stick, however. So the game has been forced to work with 8-directional controls on a d-pad and it just doesn’t particularly work. It never feels precise enough (especially when jumping) and the turning circle of characters is a pain (if you press right, for instance, Mario doesn’t just face right, he starts to turn right in a small circle, which can have you off the edge of a platform in no time). There are multiple times when I’ve failed a course because the basic movement controls have done me dirty.

So my attention is being stolen away by the other game. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on the Switch. I’ve held off buying this for ages because I had the WiiU release, which is perfectly fine and I wasn’t desperate to spend £35-40 on a near direct port. But then Nintendo announced the DLC tracks. I was in Cardiff the other week, retro game hunting with limited success, and so picked this up to make it less of a bust. I ended up playing a bit to destress the last week or so and it’s quickly ended up dominating my evenings, as I go through all the cups on all the speeds again.

There are more differences than I first appreciated. The double items feature is good (I’m fairly sure that’s not in the Wii U version). The addition of the ghost item is… well, actually it’s kind of annoying, because I’ve only been on the bad end of it so far. It feels like they’ve rebalanced the item distribution though – I’m getting hit by lightning and blue shells far more than I remember, but that might just because it’s so easy to pull out massive leads in 100cc, let alone 50cc. But I always remember thinking MK8 on WiiU was fairer than, say, Mario Kart Wii, where you can get just absolutely mugged by a barrage of item attacks and that’s closer to the experience I’m having here.

I bought the DLC pass the other day and I’ve done each of those on 50cc. Most of them are retro tracks, but they’ve had extensive changes, especially the N64 ones. Choco Mountain has had a massive facelift and looks excellent, while Kalamari Desert now sends you through the train tunnel for one lap (which was a little confusing). This feels like a new favourite gimmick of Nintendo’s because it’s a staple of the Mario Kart Tour tracks that are also here. Each one sees you taking a different route for every lap (including on the Paris one where you’ve essentially doing the track backwards for lap 3, so can go head-first into people still on lap 2), and it’s a novelty that I think will wear off quickly. It doesn’t feel more interesting than just having a good track you can do three laps of. Thankfully, there are actually a couple of properly new tracks, which I’d seen people dismiss as being Tour tracks pre-ported to Switch, but they feel much closer to “proper” Mario Kart tracks than the Tour ones. Stable track layouts but with lots of alternate route options. Ninja Hideaway, which goes through a medieval Japanese castle, is particularly fun.

I am determined to finish Mario 64 DS, but given I spent about 90 minutes struggling against the controls and camera to get one star the other night, the immediate thrill of Mario Kart is hard to resist.

A new No Man’s Sky patch dropped on Friday.  And it fixes the technology mess created by the 4.0 update.

It was the logical solution: The upgrades permitted have more impact, which practically replicates the six upgrades effect that was removed.  They also added more tech slots to ships that were fully upgraded.

The result of this is my starships are far closer to what they were before the update.  May be some fractional differences but I don’t notice in the way I was on 4.0.  Combine this with the difficulty scaling and can be very easy to acquire more tech slots for any other systems to be added.

Likely going to be seeing what happens with the base power requirement disabled, as that never worked for me.  It felt too out of place.  I’ve a hyperspace capable starship but my base now needs power cables?  It now feels like the game is back to where it should be, with the actual improvements able to take centre stage without any distractions.

Splinter Cell Remake Director Leaves Ubisoft

Gotham Knights reviews are out and the game sounds pretty rough. Sounds like they’ve taken the Arkham model and removed Batman (you play as only the sidekicks instead), added a load of fussy RPG elements and grinding/levelling up, and the story is not very compelling. A shame but I feel like I was right to cancel my pre-order for it and wait and see.

I’m not sure quite how you take a perfect formula like the Arkham games and piss it away like this, but here we are. I hope the upcoming Suicide Squad game is better.

The Suicide Squad game is being made by Rocksteady, so plenty of reason to have confidence in it.

SkillUp and ACG both did very useful reviews.  One of the best points ACG raised was the light and heavy attacks being on one button, with tap / hold determining which you get.  Problem I have with that is nailing the difference between the two.

There might be a decent game lurking in Gotham Knights, but will WB give it the post-release development it needs? I suspect not.

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Dave

Ben wrote:

The Suicide Squad game is being made by Rocksteady, so plenty of reason to have confidence in it.

Yep, this is what I’m hoping. The concept sounds like a lot of fun too.

Did you see the trailer they put out last year for it? If they can realise all that in how it plays it’ll be fantastic.

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Dave

One of the best points ACG raised was the light and heavy attacks being on one button, with tap / hold determining which you get. Problem I have with that is nailing the difference between the two.

Yeah, on a modern controller, that’s a pretty inexcusable control choice. It’s the kind of thing that was acceptable on a two button Game Boy but not when you’ve got four face buttons and four shoulder buttons available.

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Ben

Other stuff going on was a big Final Fantasy XVI trailer dropping.

Can’t tell quite how it’s going to work but the story is certainly mixing pieces from FFXII and FFXV. Looks pretty ambitious, and they’ve a good chunk of development time with a summer 2023 release.

Ben wrote:

Did you see the trailer they put out last year for it? If they can realise all that in how it plays it’ll be fantastic.

Yeah, that was what got me excited for it.

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Ben

Having unexpectedly finished Kena: Bridge of Spirits a few weeks back, I started looking for other unfinished businesa and returned to Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom.

The game is horribly uneven.  It can be great, but it can go from that to awful in the blink of an eye and back again.

Skirmishes…. It was this utter rubbish that killed my interest in the game first time around and they remain rubbish.  Badly designed, explained and implemented, it would be fine if they were an optional extra, but there are some mandatory story ones.

Turns out I got further than I thought on the first run.  Had thought it was a 12 chapter main story but it’s not, it’s 9.  I was on chapter 5, now got to the chapter 8.

The Kingmaker fights – the water one was actually pretty good.  Logical structure, fun to play.  The lightning one was the polar opposite.  Illogical, messy, with a terrible final platforming section that was massively frustrating.

Due to both the incredible weakness of blocking, it’s awful, and the sheer speed by which you can take damage, the only practical strategy is over-levelling.  Evasion? You don’t have the view of the battlefield for it to work and there are many off camera attacks.  It also limits healing items, you may have 100 potions but you’re limited to 10 in a fight.

I quite like the kingdom building.  The world is well designed, which is shown off when you get the airship.  The combat can be good and enemies do have a sense of personality to them.

Bruce wrote:

I downloaded Assassins Creed Odyssey and the amount of stuff it is throwing at me (missions, map size, mechanics) is giving me anxiety. Good job I got the version with all the extra content added to it.

100%ed the main game and have made a decent dent in the DLC content. Still a few bits to explore too. Ive really enjoyed the gameplay loop of short missions followed by plenty of side stuff to dick about with. Combat is nice and crunchy. Higher level enemies take a bit of damage but your high level skills make short work of them meaning that you have to work to beat them but it is never frustratingly difficult. A dozen hours or so of gameplay left before I’m done i reckon.

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Martin Smith, Dave, Ben

Oh, a dozen hours for the DLC you think?

Meanwhile, just started The Peripheral on Amazon.  It highlighted an element of gaming I hadn’t fully picked up on.  Namely, I have no interest in VR.

Why not? VR replicates me as I am now and that will include my dyspraxic coordination.  The fun in gaming for me isn’t replicating myself in games as I am, but with all kinds of enhancements.  Be that immortality in racing games, great aiming in FPS or actually using a katana safely.

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Dave

Dave wrote:

Gotham Knights reviews are out and the game sounds pretty rough. Sounds like they’ve taken the Arkham model and removed Batman (you play as only the sidekicks instead), added a load of fussy RPG elements and grinding/levelling up, and the story is not very compelling. A shame but I feel like I was right to cancel my pre-order for it and wait and see.

I’m not sure quite how you take a perfect formula like the Arkham games and piss it away like this, but here we are. I hope the upcoming Suicide Squad game is better.

Not for 60 imho…

And you know that how Al? There’s been one trailer for Suicide Squad: Let’s Kill the Justice League.  It looked cool but it was cinematics, no gameplay.  Since that 2021 trailer? Zip.

The whole £/$60-70 RRP is something of a misdirect as the only places that charge that are the online company stores – MS Store, PSN, Nintendo eShop but outside of them for disc copies? Very few online sellers try to sell full price.  They know they’ll get more sales by discounting.

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Dave, Al-x

Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom

There are times when this game is a mess.  For instance, you find a way to deal with the skirmishes.  You start winning and they even start being fun.  Then you do one that has you “escort” two groups of robots.

The problem? Simple:

“Why did you not save me?”

“You charged a machine gun.”

“You’re supposed to protect us.”

“You all charged a machine gun.”

“You failed us.”

“You charged a machine gun.”

If they stayed put, stayed protected, it’d be fine but no, they go running off ahead, right into enemy fire. It’s dumb, stupid, exasperatingly bad, frustrating and lazy design.

Who the hell playtested this skirmish and thought it fun?

Outside of this, it’s OK but hellbent on tripping itself up at every opportunity.  It could be so much more than it is, with but a few small adjusts.

Still, got to the final chapter, so there’s that.

No… they must have got it wrong. It must be 10 years old today, not 20, right?

3 users thanked author for this post.

Martin Smith, Ben, Bruce

I nearly failed my second year at uni because of that game. Good times!

4 users thanked author for this post.

Andrew, Christian, Dave, Todd