Video Games

Topic

Games. A love and loathe activity, especially when you can’t nail a section or take out that one bastard boss.

So, what are you buyin’? What are you playing?

Replies

Oh okay, I’ve got a couple of those. I’m not really sure what’s good and what isn’t.

It’s definitely a game I’ve got a long ways to go in before I master. I only just figured out how to pick up items yesterday.  I’ve no idea how to use all the moves/specials properly. I dont even really understand the scissors paper rock match up thing with spirits – like blue is defense and red is attack, but what does that mean exactly?

It’s also so fast and sometimes quite challenging to keep track of your player and who’s on screen.  Especially on stages with environmental hazards, which are most of them.

If you have any general or specific tips I’d love to hear them.

I don’t think I’ve felt this outclassed by a game since The Witness.

Anonymous wrote:

Oh okay, I’ve got a couple of those. I’m not really sure what’s good and what isn’t.

It’s definitely a game I’ve got a long ways to go in before I master. I only just figured out how to pick up items yesterday.  I’ve no idea how to use all the moves/specials properly. I dont even really understand the scissors paper rock match up thing with spirits – like blue is defense and red is attack, but what does that mean exactly?

It’s also so fast and sometimes quite challenging to keep track of your player and who’s on screen.  Especially on stages with environmental hazards, which are most of them.

If you have any general or specific tips I’d love to hear them.

I don’t think I’ve felt this outclassed by a game since The Witness.

Did you watch the little tutorial video with Mario and Bowser? That’ll explain how to do most stuff.

Smash can get quite confusing, especially in battles with a lot of fighters. You just have to get used to it, really. I think it’s overlooked by a lot of players because they’ve been with it since the N64 one, where that was less of an issue and they’ve just adapted along with it. You could try doing smash battles against easy CPU players (or a Figure Player, which will adapt to your fighting style, if you have an amiibo) on the battlefield or flat configurations (press x on the stage select screen to cycle between those) to get the hang of combat before having to deal with stage hazards etc.

The rock-paper-scissors on the spirits is just by the stats they increase, but to be honest, I never noticed a huge difference with that beyond raw power levels. It’s the support spirits that make the most obvious difference.

Yakuza 3 Remastered

This was a lot easier than I remember.  Then again, then it was the first game in the series I had played.  This time?  After all seven entries? Yeah, I know how to play this now.

For anyone playing the series in sequential order, this is going to be a kick to the head after the advances and refinements of Zero, Kiwami 1 and Kiwami 2.  Those are the series in its most advanced form, this is the series as it once was, about a decade ago!   Does that make it a bad game? No, it’s simply comparatively weaker due to the passing of time.  Is it still fun? Oh yes.  One of the features that vanished from Yakuza 5 onwards was the fight intros and the post-fight apology and compensation.  They’re in here and it’s so fun having some cocky bastard waltz up, shit-talk the human tank that is Kiryu, fight kicks off, you take them to the cleaners.  Then there’s what options you have in the fights: Hit, dodge, grab, punch, kick, throw, weaponry, objects, special moves – it’s varied enough that the fights never really get old.

One weakness of the fight system is it is very reliant on enemy blocking as a form of difficulty – on any setting higher than easier, they will have practically infinite block and you’ll rarely knock them over.  It isn’t that good a mix because the fight system isn’t that good.  On one optional boss I resorted to whipping out an extendable staff, whacked him a load of times – he wasn’t even blocking but a personal force field effect stopped 90% of the hits, it was that blatant.  Over time, you’ll greater offensive ability that allows you to break through the blocks of most non-boss enemies.

The real heart of the series is in its stories.  Now these are not the most enlightened tales.  Women? Forget about it.  More varied ethnicity? A measure of.  But for the most part? This is a story of manly blokes engaged in manly business settled by the manly method of bare-knuckle fighting with shirts off.  What makes it all work, in all its ludicrous, melodramatic glory is the sheer conviction that it spins its tale with.  This is serious business and you’re gonna believe it.  One thing I noticed this time around was the character significance after playing the three preceding games.  Before it was: That guy died? Ok, now? That guy died!? Shit. They’ve also re-translated the material and I’m sure there’s a load of lines that were never in the original, some that render it very much 18+ only!

Along the way there are a load of substories ranging from the sweet to the insane, with a smattering of optional bosses – who, should you choose to duff them up, will render the story bosses quite a bit easier.

One of the best achievements and this never really changes across the series – it’s not about the size of your game world but what you’ve got in it and this series has always been about quality over quantity.  It’s not the biggest world, it has a load of minigames, if you want them, but it uses its limited space very, very effectively.

In story terms, is it essential? Oh yes, this picks up threads from Kiwami 1 and 2 very effectively.  After this the series shifted to multiple characters and more ambitious story-telling because it had nowhere else to go.  It had to go bigger.  It’s a smart remaster that makes a decade plus old game look and play as good it can in 2020, without it being a full-on remake.  It has its flaws due to being an older game but allowance can be made for that.

Definitely don’t play it out of order, now all seven games are available there’s no excuse and huge benefits to playing it properly, but definitely play it.

 

I play the old Tomb Raider 3 and sometimes when I finish a level, I look at the walkthrough.  After reading I realize I missed everything but I still finished the level. Who cares? Its only a game…

Al-x wrote:

Its only a game…

Get da fuck out of here!

Time to return to No Man’s Sky as they’ve done a major space update – story missions, living ships added:

https://www.nomanssky.com/living-ship-update/

I should probably jump into NMS at some point soon…  it looks like the game is finally a good version of what it should’ve been, and some more. Good for them.

This latest update was around 11GB, for free.

So yeah, the base game is cheap but the amount of stuff added since launch is huge.

Crap, I think I might’ve waited too long and now it might be too huge of a game… =/

Terrible, isn’t it? ;)

Although, on this one, with 18 quadrillion systems, it was always too big a game right from the start!

[Jon]

Yeah it’s the kind of game that seems to daunting for me, these days… I prefer more simple stuff… but eh… I dunno, I guess I’ll wait for the summer sale and decide then… it’s on sale right now, so I was thinking about it, but I’ll go with Shadow Tactics instead…

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by Jon.

I’d sat NMS is as simple or complicated as you want to make it – if you like you can go to do a complex base, with intricate power supply, or you do something more simple.  The size aspect is deceptive too – since it’s procedurally generated, you’ll spot the graphic sets it uses and combines.  The game’s biggest selling point remains flying from space station to planet, and and explore or fly over it, if you like it, build a base.  Later, you get a freighter – the best ones of which look very sweet.  And the main plot I’ve played is surprisingly rock hard SF.

Meanwhile, I had forgotten just how goddamn awful the Saejima section of Yakuza 4 was.

Both Akinyama and Saejima have limited movesets, but the former’s is just so much more fun as you batter the hell out of enemies with a succession of kicks. In contrast Saejima is slow, his moves feel more limited and the game pulls some very cheap moves on top of that. Like, placing you in a long battle sequence, with next to no healing items, a fighter with whom you are unfamiliar and a difficult boss.

Kiryu should not be an easier fight than Saito but is. How did I do Saito? The King Cheese method of charging him, and then, once he’s down, charge as he is getting up to knock him back down again. Repeat as frequently as possible otherwise you will be whacked with his 10-hit unblockable combo. Yes, it is shit. But coming as it does, right at the start of a new chapter, with next to no items and upgrades, it stands out badly.

After that it has a very short chapter that is basically the other boss fight mentioned in the spoiler and then there’s a quite good chapter in Kamurocho, but then it drops instant fail stealth sections before the final boss battles. In both the way to win is more or less the very monotonous King Cheese method described. It just isn’t good.

Tanimura is better, once you have got his minuscule health bar increased and some upgrades added.

However, the brutal reality is none of these three is anywhere near Kazzy, who I haven’t yet got to play as.

Like it’s predecessor, boss enemies tend to be one-trick ponies, they just have super-block, that’s pretty much it. Although, one area where both games improved on compared to their original incarnations is the chase sequences. Used to be you had to keep hitting R2, now it’s just hold which makes them quite a bit more fun. In this one you can also pick up and throw objects, which adds an extra element, along with QTE fights that sort of work.

I finally beat Final Fantasy Tactics Advance tonight!

Well, ok, no, I’m lying. Rather, I got to the final mission – which is three battle you can’t save between – got absolutely muellered on the final bit, decided I had no interest in grinding for however long to survive it, so just watched the game’s ending on YouTube and called it a day. It’s a nice game, but too long and I want to move onto something else already.

Got to the finale of Yakuza 4, which means I finished off Tanimura’s story and have been playing Kazzy.  There was just one flaw at the start of Kazzy’s section….

Saito.  Fuckin’ Saito. Fucking unkillable motherfucker Saito.  Still, it’ll be different with Kazzy, right?  It’ll make for all the frustration of the earlier fight with Saejima, right? Wrong.  He is still the cheating, 10-hit-unblockable-combo phasing shitbag he was earlier.  It’s very notable how easily Kazzy goes through everyone else, but is limited against a fucking phasing superhuman. So yeah, chapter 1 is a real up and down affair – up when fighting everyone else, down when you have to deal Saito.  It also undercuts the sense of accomplishment of getting to Kazzy, only to find even he can’t steam-roll Saito, which would have been far more satisfying.

After that, it recovers pretty quick, although if I was tell you this game has 17 chapters, split into four four-part stories – sounds big, right? Well,it’s not because a good few of those “chapters” are: Start cutscene, boss fight, end cutscene.  All in all, I’d rate its predecessor for doing better at making its chapters feel more substantive. It’s not a sin limited to this series either, but it is one I don’t like.

Playing as Kazzy is pretty fun – the gangs substory is very fun to do, as you hand numerous smack-talking morons their arse.  It’s also quite handy for powering him up.  And that pays off in the big battle at Kamurcho Hills that concludes the story.

Also, playing it in quick succession after Yakuza 3 really helps the story, as does having played the earlier trilogy of Zero-Kiwami-1-Kiwami-2.    I did not expect to find Hamazaki’s redemption story to be as effective as it was.  Similarly, character names and families referred to make far more sense with a full playthrough of the earlier games – something not possible when I played it on PS3.

I’m well into the Endgame in Iceborne.

It really does reinvigorate the satisfying grind of the base game.  You could easily spend just as much time with the expansion as you could with the basegame.

I’ve got myself to a pretty comfortable build now with over 1000 attack and close to 1000 defence.  Its not the “META” build (Most Effective Tactics Available) that apparently i should be grinding for in the endgame, but I like it even with its setbacks (m0stly defence setbacks). I’ll probably hang my hat on it now – theres still grinding i could do to change some augments on my weapon and upgrade my mantles and charms, but im just not super enthused.  I’ll probably check out the new Rajang and Brachydios variants when they come out next month but im not expecting to do a whole lot more game.

I’ve also been playing some Soul Calibur 6.  Look, I don’t love it.  Having not played a Soul Calibur game but lots of fighting games i find it fine, and relatively easy to pick up but hard to master.  With that said it really feels like a last gen game and the story modes can be a huge slog at time (especially Libra of Souls – which is sort of a half rpg/half fighting game and feels detailed but undercooked, and can be really frustrating in times).  Having played Mortal Kombat 11 recently, this compares very poorly against that in pretty much all areas, and it’s interesting to see the review scores are at a relative parity nonetheless.

I’ll probably dovetail out of this and Smash bros, and maybe a little Monster Hunter, until Nioh 2 releases mid next month.  I expect to fully sink my teeth into that (baring absolutely crushing reviews).

Dave – ive been meaning to ask.  How are you going with Jedi?

Not bad thanks. I’ve not had much time to play it since I last posted about it but I had a free evening last week and had a good two-hour blast on it and did all of the Kashyyyk level in one session. (The first visit, anyway – I guess I might be back at some point.)

This brings me to one of my gripes with the game, and I think it’s something you mentioned before Christmas too Tim – the backtracking to previous planets once new areas are unlocked isn’t handled as well as it could be. I don’t mind the concept in theory, but having to trudge back through sections you’ve already completed to get to the new stuff is a chore.

It could easily have been overcome with a fast-travel mechanism or multiple landing platforms for each planet, and I’m a bit baffled as to why they didn’t do this.

I spent the final twenty minutes of my last session going back to a previous level and getting lost in the labyrinthine level design while I tried to navigate my way to the new section. The map wasn’t much help. It would have been nice to be able to just jump to the new stuff. Having to redo all the old areas kind of kills the excitement of venturing somewhere new.

Anonymous wrote:

I’ve also been playing some Soul Calibur 6.  Look, I don’t love it.  Having not played a Soul Calibur game but lots of fighting games i find it fine, and relatively easy to pick up but hard to master.  With that said it really feels like a last gen game and the story modes can be a huge slog at time (especially Libra of Souls – which is sort of a half rpg/half fighting game and feels detailed but undercooked, and can be really frustrating in times).  Having played Mortal Kombat 11 recently, this compares very poorly against that in pretty much all areas, and it’s interesting to see the review scores are at a relative parity nonetheless.

I’m a fan of both franchises but they do play very differently. Soul Calibur’s single-player modes have always been a bit of a slog.

I haven’t played either of these new iterations yet, but I found the story modes of the last couple of MK games to be a much more elegant way of doing that kind of thing.

The story mode in MK11 is probably the best ive ever played in a fighting game. Its better then the already good Injustice stuff which is clearly where Netherrealm learned how to do story mode (and arguably invent it).

Street Fighter V also had a pretty fun story mode which knitted together the bullshit cannon of the franchise. (MK did it better though).

Soul Calibur is way more earnest and clearly doesnt have the budget to do much more than anime drawings and text screens.

Yakuza 4

In story terms, this is a smart addition to the series, giving it an overall structure that Zero would later take advantage of.  In gameplay terms it’s more mixed due to some ideas not really working out and unevenness in the game.  Overall? It’s still a success, just not quite what it could be.

For all that a lot of people dislike him, I quite enjoyed playing Tanimura.  This time around Akiyama comes across as more sleazy, in part due to the hostess aspects, which is something that I can’t really get my head around – clearly, lots of players like playing at dressing up women as it was a wanted returning bit of content.  The same applies to Yakuza 3 too.   The weakest of the new characters is Saejima due to a limited moveset, a couple of quite nasty difficulty spikes and a couple of instant fail stealth sections.  On their own, these are bad, together they make quite the destructive cocktail.

The other weakness is in the combat.  It says R1 locks on but it isn’t really the case and the AI will abuse it every chance it gets, which is many.  It would be more accurate to say R1 locks your alignment which is fine until the enemy changes it and you can rarely respond quickly enough to it.  Most of the time, this is a minor point but in boss fights it gets amplified to the game’s detriment.  Talking of, the final boss fights work out mostly OK but there are some weaknesses there Kido’s un-interruptable health recharge is cheap crap, Daigo relies entirely on unblockable moves and being able to walk through hits, but the worst offender is the last one.  You take on the police chief, but he has 8 other guys with him, which makes for chaos – as you rarely have enough time to take out or even hit one enemy before another hits you.  Worse is it interrupts frequently with cutscenes, which breaks the rhythm you need to get into on games like this.  Add in the AI use and abuse of dodge while your main adversary just runs and shoots from a distance – it’s not good.   But, like every other game in the series, the story keeps you playing regardless of the gameplay crap pulled.

There is a good graphics upgrade from its predecessor, especially on the heat moves, but be under no illusion, this is an old game spruced up with an HD makeover.  It isn’t going to match the later games.

Overall, it works.  The story remains its best card, but it has a whole lot of good gameplay that evens out for its excesses.  And you can even have some fun with Saejima, just not as much as the others.

Bought the Doom 2016 soundtrack on double LP as a wee treat for myself. It comes on bloody red vinyl because of course it does!

I love this! I listen to it fairly frequently on Spotify (usually when I’m out running) but though decent stereo it really gives it some extra “oomph”!

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Dave

Ive been getting along with Soul Calibur VI

It does the really annoying thing that lots of fighting games do which is include a bunch of characters to fight against in the arcade and single player modes, but then lock the playable versions behind DLC.

You would think maybe these characters were included in those modes in subsequent updates after the DLC was released, but no, they were there in the base game – at least Tila, Cassandra, Hilde and Amy were.  Basically, this is annoying because it really does indicate the developers had made these characters and could have included them in the base game but cut them out just to add them to DLC.

With 2 season passes priced pretty much at half what the normal game was priced at, really dedicated fans who wanted to have all the characters were looking at forking out $200AUD, but this is just to play with characters that were already developed on the games release.  It’s just greedy really, particularly when there isn’t a whole lot of development time or resources needed to create one of these characters when youre already developing the base game (and theyve already been developed for it anyway)

DLC like that for The Witcher or Monster Hunter is hugely different because theres all these new assets you need to create and ill happily pay for it if its good, but I think im drawing a line on additional characters that have clearly been excluded content rather than developed post-release.

 

Yeah, fighting games seem to be particularly bad for this. I’ve had similar irritations with the recent MK and SF games.

It’s no different from a lot of games that cut off content from the game to sell it as a DLC… times we live in…

If it makes you feel better, most times in FGs they legit don’t have time to finish all the chars, so they release some after, via DLC or whatnot… but sometimes they do the dirty crap.

I meant to write about this a few days back, but I forgot (some personal stuff has really knocked me for a loop this week). This past Saturday, I went to a retro event at a local church, run by the Retro Computer Museum. The RCM proper is based in Leicester but, for some reason, they’ve been doing this event in Gloucester for a few years now, bringing an array of their spare machines and setting them up for people to have a go on.

It was an interesting selection of machines: a Binatone Pong, Atari 2600, Amstrad GX4000, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Playstation, Playstation 2, a gaming PC, Xbox, NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube, ZX Spectrum, Master System, Mega Drive, Dreamcast, Atari Jaguar, a large custom arcade set-up running MAME and a Scalextric track too. It presented a really good view of the computer games market from the early 80s to mid-00s and it was good to see a lot of kids there having a go on things (although the young kid playing GTA3 on the Xbox whose father’s only input was to tell him off for being slightly too loud when getting excited about punching things was a tad concerning).

I certainly enjoyed the opportunity to play Duck Hunt on the original NES and a CRT (a special Commodore one) for the first time since the early 90s. That said, the curation of the event was a bit spotty. Most of the machines had been set up with expanded storage containing hundreds of ROMs, (an Everdrive in the SNES for example), which my personal dislike for ROM hoards aside, makes sense to a degree. There were two problems with this though. The first is on a practical level. The SNES Everdrive was filled with practically every game made for the system, but they were almost all US versions, which wouldn’t load up on the unmodded PAL SNES. I spent about ten minutes with it just trying to find a game that would load and ended up just putting Super Mario World back on. Even if they had worked though, there’s a sort of paralysis of choice that comes from that many options (the Netflix effect, I think it’s been called) where you have so much open to you it’s impossible to pick one thing and stick to it long enough to get invested in it. There’s also no quality control. The 2600 similarly had a complete selection of games to pick from. I’m not entirely familiar with the system, so I just dumbfoundedly paged through all the options and random selected something that turned out to be a cola branded Space Invaders clone. Academically interesting maybe, but not that fun.

They’d have done better, imo, to just have a limited and curated selection of games for each system, which to be fair, they did for a few of them. The Master System had only Sonic The Hedgehog, Terminator and something else. The NES was set up with just the double-pack cart of Duck Hunt and Super Mario Bros, which seemed really popular. On the other hand, the Atari Jaguar had Doom and Wolfenstein 3D sitting on the side while the entirely awful Tempest 2000 was plugged in and, bizarrely, the guy from the RCM was telling people not to change the cartridge on it because it’d wear out the contacts, which raises the question of why they’d brought it and multiple games (I was pleased to see various kids not get this message and liberally switch things up). The PS1 was set up with a bizarrely poor array of games too: Final Fantasy IX (I mean, that’s fine, but hardly pick up and play), V-Rally, Fighting Force, some Phantom Menace roaming beat ’em up and an Army Men game. Hardly putting the system’s best foot forward.

They also could have done with some little laminates with instructions for certain games. I went to use the Spectrum, which was running some platformer thing and there didn’t appear to be a key set to move the character left. I reset the machine to load something else and had no idea how to get it past the boot-up screen, so just quietly walked away.

Anyway, despite all that, it was a fairly fun afternoon (helped by the people from the church having pick & mix sweets available!) and I’m keen to go to the RCM proper sometime. One of their guys was telling us about it and they’ve got three industrial units knocked together, containing their main home computer and console collection, an array of arcade machines and some of those big VR machines that were always on TV in the early 90s, so it sounds like it’d be worth the trip.

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DavidM, Dave

Sounds amazing Martin!

As for me, I’ve finished the Libra of Souls campaign (which is quite hard mind you) excepting for the epilogue stuff which contains a bunch of Legendary level fighters which I’ll likely have a crack at but I’m not going to pour too much energy into beating (BTW I never finished Street Fighter Vs story mode, having hit a hurdle at the final boss M Bison).

The gameplay I think is fine.  It’s a little different to punch kicky fighters and I keep reaching for a dodge or roll button because the weapon-based gameplay feels akin to a third person action rpg at times, but the movement is limited to that 2d/3d style populised by Mortal Kombat, with certain exceptions made to ducking and jumping.  I sort of have a half-handle on one fighting style (out of 20), the others of which I plan to introduce myself to in the second story mode (Soul Chronicle).

I’ve given the arcade mode a crack a number of times too but I like the progression based stuff. I’m a sucker for ticking boxes and getting trophies.

Is it good? It’s probably great if you’re a fan.  It’s fine if you’re not and MK, SF and Tekken are all far more accessible.  Stringing together complicated combos is beyond me and I think this game leans more into that than in either MK or SF (but not Tekken) in terms of excluding new players from the cool parts. It also lends itself, a fair bit, to glitching AI by repeating moves which was really a last-gen AI thing.  I can’t tell you the number of times i glitched fights in Libra of Souls by repeating moves.  What im saying here is that the AI doesn’t replicate a human very well, which means you can trick it very easily on lower difficulties and on much higher difficulties it seemingly knows what youre doing and seems immensely unfair.

Martin, playing this has enlivened in me a new appreciation for Smash Bros, because that game really encourages skill to overcome adversity, rather than cheese methods.

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Martin Smith

Somewhere in the ether of the Internet there will be lurking my posts on the PS3 playthrough I did of Yakuza 5.  Not a lot has changed about a decade later with the game remastered for Ps4.

When and to what degree should a successful game series change?  That is what this iteration of the series brings into question because the Taxi game for Kiryu? It is fucking awful.  If you are not having to avoid suicidal pedestrians, while having a conversation with the most picky passengers possible while having to carefully press the R2 trigger, to move forward at the right spreed, while, with your same thumb/hand you have o the L3 stick, you are to use the D-Pad to indicate direction you are turning and only go on green, despite the time limit clock obscuring your view of those traffic lights…. To be honest, it’s more fun to just fuck the taxi missions up and humiliate your bastard passengers.  You still get points and XP so screw ’em.

But while its experimenting with driving is a total disaster the core gameplay is superb.  It makes moves available from the start that you had to earn much later in previous games.  For instance, some guy grabs you head-on and you have the heat gauge active? Piledrive his head into the ground!  Then there’s new heat moves like there’s these bollards see? So grab a guy, place his arse above one of them and then tell him to say goodbye to his nuts, as you ram him into the top of the bollard!  The fighting is a blast and the pre-fight smack talk and post-fight apology is present too, just in new form.

Of the three remasters, this is the hardest to see the improvements on because it looked so good way back when.

 

🤟🤟🤟

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Dave

I watched that with a big smile on my face.

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Bruce

[Ben]

I am now through the godawful abomination that was the hunting section of Yakuza 5.

On my first PS3 playthrough, I did more of that terrible section but this time? Did not give a shit. Oh, there’s a hunter trapped on the mountain? Shouldn’t have gone up, should he? Fuck him.  There’s a demon bear on the loose? Fuck that too.  There’s some other shit to be done? What part of ‘like I give a shit’ do you yokels not get?

To give them some credit though, this is where my memory of having fun playing Saejima comes from, not its predecessor, because in this one? They power him up big time right from the start – you can boot people in the face with a size 15 boot.  You can throw someone onto the ground so hard they bounce four feet and – once you have the heat move unlocked, bounce them high in the air, clothesline them on the way back down and, just to make them extra dead, slam them headfirst into the ground!  And then there is the classic that never goes out of fashion – smashing the crap out of goons with a motorbike! Yes, you read that right.

Unfortunately, after the prologue it falters with a talk-to-random-people-to-progress mission, but at least there’s no fucking Saito in this game.  In fact, if anything, I quite like Deputy Warden Kosuka.  The game recovers after that with a big brawl that’s a lot of fun and then it goes wonky.  By rights, a snowmobile ought to be epic except the controls are fudgy, your view is compromised and it just never really realises its ambitions.  One thing I noticed this time around – the punch-up with Yama-roshi, a demon, bullet-immune, immortal bear, felt easier, as if it had been tweaked.

Talking of changes, forgot to say how Kazzy’s chapters went.  The second half of Kazzy’s section has the long battles that are the series’ highlight, these are epic affairs where you tear through numerous enemies, using whatever weaponry you want.  But the big difference this time around is I had the Bounding Throw technique worked out! Before I never cracked it but this time? It amps up an already insane fighting system when, after punching a guy in the face three times, followed by a heavy blow you then grab and throw the guy into his colleagues!  It gives you a crazy level of initiative and control in the fights while looking so damn flash.  Which meant the final big brawl was a sustained run of glorious utter chaos!

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by Ben.

Red Dead 2 feels like its barreling towards to a very final finale. Question: Is the world still available post storyline? A simple, spoiler free yes/no is all I’m looking. I’ve a shit tonne of stuff left I still want to do but don’t want to start a new fame to do it.

So, having enjoyed inflicting graphical brutality upon numerous deserving adversaries, I finish Saejima’s chapter in Yakuza 5, start the next and it is….

Dance battles!

And not just any dance battles, no – these are to brain melting J-pop horrors.

Bruce wrote:

Red Dead 2 feels like its barreling towards to a very final finale. Question: Is the world still available post storyline? A simple, spoiler free yes/no is all I’m looking. I’ve a shit tonne of stuff left I still want to do but don’t want to start a new fame to do it.

Yes.

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Bruce

Final Fantasy VII Remake Demo

You didn’t know this was available? Now you do – came out 2 March.  My first playthrough on Easy:

Pros:

• Looks amazing
• Excellent subs
• Excellent world and character design

Flaws:

• Could do with a minimap display of enemy locations
• Don’t like R3 / L3 buttons generally – dislike using them for lock-on
• Barratt felt oddly ineffective
• Using O for dodge when just about every other game has used X is hard to adjust to.

Will give the Classic and Normal modes a go over the next few days.

Overall? I think the combat might well be what they were aiming for with both FFXIII and FFXV, but here it feels better, smarter. Don’t yet have the hang of either character switching or commands. Still think it’ll be worth paying £45 for.

[Ben]

Final Fantasy Remake Demo – Part 2

Second playthrough: Normal and “Classic”

OK. This was better than expected – there is a clear, distinct difference between the two levels – you will see this to be particularly to be so with not only the boss fight but also the Sweeper and Shock Trooper adversaries.

The one concern for me is that, on Normal, some of the boss fights may be a bit too fast and involved for me. I can see what they’re going for but it isn’t that good a combination for me. But that’s also due to some rather unique factors as well. There were times when there was a bit too much going on, at a speed I couldn’t really process in time – the electro-field requires two dodge moves to successfully evade and I rarely could factor in the second move in time. On Easy this is a reduced hit so easier to manage. Although, I may not be giving myself due credit, as I’ve now watched a couple of vids where people have ‘fessed up to finding that boss fight a lot harder than expected. I went through a lot of potions and a couple of ethers but I did get to take the bastard out.

The reason “Classic” is in inverted commas is that it simply isn’t really Classic-style FF7. That involves items, attack, defence, magic, abilities and that is not what it is here. In “Classic” mode all you choose is the items and magic and abilities while your controlled character auto-attacks, moves and defends. Short of enabling greater accessability for children I cannot see any other use for it. Now this may well hack off people who really did not want a hack ‘n’ slash FF7. There’s two responses to that:

• One, it isn’t hack ‘n’ slash. Oh sure you could try and play it that way, just as you could try button-mashing but in either case? The game will hand you your arse – especially on normal, try that on the harder enemies and they will RYNO you. (Rip You a New One)
• Two, you have Final Fantasy 7 for a perfectly excellent turn-based system. FF7R is not FF7 and expecting it to be so is just dumb. It is a remake, it is not the game from 20 plus years ago.

So yeah, “Classic” I don’t see much use for, Normal I am 50-50 on, but then there is Easy so they have catered well for varying levels of ability.

And while the audio-visual front is superb, the writing is damn good too:

Barratt: Can’t you hear the planet screaming?
Cloud: Get some pills.

And then there’s Jessie’s lusting over Cloud… Which Wedge and Biggs have to put up with. There’s some very neat details in the writing here.

Having gone through it on Normal, I no longer think it needs a minimap because it doesn’t actually do what FFXV did, which is through 10-15 enemies at you in a total chaos. The enemies are more limited in number but way up in offensive and defensive capability. I’m still not a fan of R3 lock-on and if they enable the ability to swap the O and X buttons around, that would take it up another few notches. But these are small points, easily managed in the game as it is, if the demo is entirely accurate.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by Ben.

I hit a wall in Unirally (almost literally in that I kept screwing up on a course that had a  vertical climb I kept forgetting about) and given I’ve not been finding myself overly desperate to play it lately, I’ve moved on.

And ended up revisiting Breath of the Wild. It’s weird going back to it three years after I finished it (well, mostly; there are 7 shrines and some side quests not done). I’ve been spurred to play it again by watching Luke off Outside Xtra live stream Master Mode, reminding me of just how great the game is. Part of me wants to start over actually, but given my last playthrough lasted several months and I’ve got about two dozen unplayed games, I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’ll hold out for the sequel maybe.

I had to hook up my Wii U to play that, which has been sitting in a bag under my bed for two years now. It’s kinda weird going back to an old console that has built in storage, seeing what you bothered to keep on there. The Gamepad felt really strange to hold, after being used to the Switch now, but I still think it’s more ergonomic and comfortable.

The console had accrued loads of updates for games, so I went through doing all those, just so it’d stop notifying me. One was for Shovel Knight, which I played back in 2014 or 15, I think. It’s now had a massive (free) update to the Treasure Trove edition, which adds three new story modes, a challenge mode and some kind of multiplayer thing (looked vaguely Smash Bros esque from my quick look at it). It’s a huge change to the game and  warrants a proper revisit at some point.

Back to Yakuza 5 and I finished the combo of Akiyama and Haruka and then was lumbered with Shinada.

Is he that bad a character? Not really but the story is built around baseball, which I don’t care about, and his best abilities ae around weapon, but in the main story missions the game too often contrives to deny him those.  Did you know if you drop a baseball bat it shatters on impact?  They do here.  Despite this, once you get him powered up he works well enough.

After Shinada’s tale you get back to Kiryu.  Here I tried the upgrade fight with the Komakis.  It was shit years ago on the PS3 original and here? It’s still shit.  The problem is it combines the worst aspects of the combat into one terrible combination:

• Camera fuckery? Check.
• Unblockable combos? Check.
• Super-speed and dodging? Check.
• Blocked from using heat moves? Check.
• Infinite, unbreakable block? Check.
• No way to win except by cheese methods? Check.

Which it then makes worse by having the fight be against two such enemies, which the fight system simply isn’t designed for.  Normal speed multiple enemies? You can spread out and then deal with, doesn’t work here.  One big boss with minions? Again, can be strategised, but this one? No.  What happens is you try and attack one target, who has super block and while you do that, the other one hits you.  Try to go after the other instead? Same result.  Sure, spamming the Dragon Rage option a Kiryu and quaffing heat recovery items like there’s no tomorrow works but it feels…. dishonourable, even though your enemies have none!

Did do it but I’m sufficiently deterred from trying it for the others.  Plus a Lv20 character will be able to annihilate everyone they fight anyway.

The rest of it? Pretty damn cool. Fighting other enemies only emphasises just how nerfed your own ability and how amped up your enemies were in that fight.  The online advice for it? “Use a shotgun” – yes, seriously.

I played Ff7 remake, Ben. Its pretty good and I like the way theyve incorporated the commands into the hack slash stuff. It feels like youll really need to strategize to the same extent as the original (I remember pouring hours into working out the right materia builds to beat enemies like Emerald Weapon).

Im a little bit anxious as to how and whwn theyre going to tell the next parts of the story because Midgar is hardly the most interesting. It also feels less RPGy and more actiony.

If theyre planninf a staged release of all parts over the next 5 years or so I cant say im too excited by that.

Was wondering when you’d get to that Tim.

I think it might be the case Midgar will be far more than it was.

Like you, I’d like a clearer timetable as to the rest of it, announcing that within days of release would be smart. Should be no more than two to three games in total I think, would homage the three acts FF7 had too. SE will want to avoid a ‘is it ever coming out’ FFXV-style situation.

If building the new engine and game systems took the bulk of development time, then the next eps shouldn’t take as long. Hopefullyi

Yeah. I was thinking about that earlier and reviewing the original games plot.

If the plan is to end the dirst game after they leave Midgar and keep it to three games then theyll probably kove alot of the flashback stuff that happens after midgar in the original to this first installment.

Otherwise theres boatloads of story left and probably too much to tell in just two further games, if theyre adapting all key areas to this scale

The Last Of Us is coming to television as an HBO series:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/last-us-series-works-at-hbo-chernobyl-creator-1282707

By the guy the team that did Chernobyl no less, probably the best TV showing since The Wire.

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Dave

I had forgotten how weak the finale of Yakuza 5 was.

It starts off suitably epic with the heroic quartet laying out goon after goon, but then starts to stumble.  One of the recurring weaknesses in the game’s boss fights is it has this clash between story and gameplay.  The story wants to take out each boss in a suitably cinematic fashion but the gameplay allows you to take the boss health to zero, but the boss keeps fighting with zero health, until the conditions for that cinematic conclusion.  It makes for an unsatisfying combination, especially when you’ve duffed up an enemy all the way to zero and they are still moving around.  Worse is when the hammer-the-button-QTE one of these invokes is possible to fail, with having to go all the way back to the level start as penalty.  The single press QTEs are OK, but the hammer ones require a stupid amount of button presses.

The last two fights are particularly blatant in their construction.  Both have enemies with lots of health.  Both give those enemies infinite, unbreakable block and unblockable combos – the Kanai fight being the prime offender, with goons and most of the heat moves practically disabled, it feels cheap in the worst way.  The fight with Aizawa is little more than some punching followed by triggering the QTE takedown, doing it, doing the next one and repeat.  You never really get into the rhythm the game needs because you are getting interrupted by QTE sequences.  The result is it’s a strangely drained of spectacle fight.

One thing I never did in the PS3 version is pull off Climax Heat moves, likely because of the very small window given for each, but if you do? Say goodbye to two entire life bars of a boss!  Each was very satisfying and was incentive to re-fill the gauge.

And then there is the J-pop of Haruka’s concert.  Ye gods, this is acid to the brain and ears – it is vile.  The whole Haruka story comes across as dodgy as hell, especially with the Park character.  The game bends over backwards to sell her as this hard-but-fair female Simon Cowell figure, but what I saw was a manipulative piece-of-shit. Few game characters I have been so happy to see die as Park.  For all that overwrought and melodramatic is what the series does, it really hit overload on the whole dreams theme.  Still, along the way it had some good characters, Watase is particularly fun.

Still, even though it ends with more whimper than bang, it is still a good game and, if you happen to like the minigame set for each character, there’s a whole lot to do and the twist-atop-twist-atop-twist story keeps you playing.  It’s similar to its predecessor in that it never quite realises its ambitions.

As to the Yakuza Remastered Collection – look, it’s three games for around £11-12 a pop, Y3 is a good 25-30 hours, Y4 is the same and I racked up 40+ hours on Y5, that’s 80-90 hours worth of gameplay – content is plentiful.  It will be pretty similar, if you dislike the fight system in one you will be unlikely to like it in the others.  Some of the substories are truly bizarre, some are very fun.

One thing I didn’t pick up first time around, only noticed it by playing all three in quick sucesssion is what happens in Kamurcho Hills. In the first game it’s a derelict lot used by the homeless, in the next construction has started and displaced the homeless, that continues in three, in four there are homeless outside of the development area, but in five, at the end, they’re all gone from the newly built mall complex.  It’s a level of change that’s rare in video games.

Similarly, the character arcs are more noticeable Daigo’s desire to redeem himself in Y5 after his actions in Y4, Kiryu’s isolating himself after the threats made in that same game, never mind the demolition of the orphanage that happened in Y3.  The only reason a shitbag like Aoyama is able to do what he does is partly due to Kashawagi’s death in Y3.  There’s some quite neat cross-game architecture here.

For anyone wanting to get the whole story, it’s an essential piece of the series.

Although, one point the new translation certainly amps up is the sleaze factor.  Don’t recall the PS3 versions being anywhere close to some of what went down in the new presentation.  Still, that’s no reason not to buy, just be aware it earns its age rating.

Now granted, I was not that much of a fan of the whole power system Hello Games inflicted on No Man’s Sky.

Overly complicated, a lack of clear indications as to how it worked and no real need for it – it’s supposed to be future tech but requires a manually built power grid? It was pretty damn frustrating. Even with it solved on my main bases I’d prefer it wasn’t there.

But compared to the mess that is the Living Ships quest, it doesn’t come close….

There’s a lot I like about the game but this quest…. It is unforgiveably awful. If you were going to do something cool, like say adding living ships, you would want your player base to be able to easily access them, right? Wrong.

• First, you have to buy a Void Egg – there is no indication in the game that you should do this.
• Second, do a random number of warp jumps to activate it – again, going by in-game info alone there is no way to know this.
• Three, warp to indicated system then follow cryptic clues to target planet.
• Four, on target planet, manually find the exact right coordinates on a massive fucking planet. Yeah, this was the part where I went with the ‘fuck this for a lark’ option and abandoned it.

Turns out, even if you go through the whole tedious coordinates crap – which you cannot see in third-person view, only in cockpit or scanner – you then get something to craft, you do that and then, you have to wait 20 hours for it to grow. So you have to wait a day and then…. This whole cycle repeats for another four times! Oh and it turns out there’s only the one type of ship and, if you have your set of six ships, you have to give one up – screw that, I’m not handing over a fully tooled up S-class or exotic even for this.

I really wanted to do this, but the quest structure is awful and I just can’t be bothered, especially when I need to get back to Dragon Quest XI.

Ive beenb playing a little more Smash Bros.

I dont exactly love it, and I think thats largely to do with not having any familiarity with the earlier games. But its okay.

Im about 6 hours into the Adventure mode and I have more of a handle on the mechanics now. I had to turn the difficulty down from normal to easy though because I was finding some fights just too frustrating. Im having a cruisier time with it now but still running into road blocks. Some fighters just seem to stun lock you and im not sure why.

Anyway this will probably get a rest when Nioh 2 comes out, and then theres a string of good new games for a while so im not sure when ill finish this one.

So, Dragon Quest XI is kind of addictive, isn’t it?

In the last few days I’ve duffed up Jarvis in the Crytic Crypt, headed to Gallipolis to save a fop from his own folly, legged it to Gondolia and found that that bastard “Sir” Jasper is a real nasty piece of work, got a ship and, oh wait, new character….

Darlings you won’t believe this guy. Calls himself Sylvando of all things, what a name. And the outfits, an assault on the eyes worn by a total poser….

Have to admit to really disliking him initially, due to that horse race you have next to feck all chance of winning but, over time, with him in the party. Yeah, he’s fun – also gets all the best lines.

The battle system has really opened up too, with the real danger being that I forget about the sheer array of options open to the party – for instance remember to combine Rabblerouser with a poison attack and that enemy, likely a boss, is getting whacked. But there’s a load of others,. have forgotten about Magic Barrier and Sword Stance.

Crafting is still a bit hit-and-miss, especially if you’re trying to do something new – it’s a bit too random to know what will happen on the next bash move. Still, despite that have done a number of pieces and reworkings, got a good +3 items out of it. Also, forging easy stuff makes for a good income stream.

Finally, the design – both on the world and your enemies – remains very inspired. The world looks fantastic and all the enemies you go up against have a great sense of personality.

Yeah, I gave had my eye on it.

Theres a lot of good games coming put imminently sonI doubt ill get around to it soon.

Nioh 2 im super excited for (tomorrow!l. Im meant to be being social this weekend but i somehow doubt that will happen…

Just saw that The Last Of Us composer Gustavo Santaolalla is on board for the HBO tv series too. Great news – his music is a big part of the mood of the game.

Meanwhile, back in Dragon Quest XI, I’ve done a fair bit more and the story’s progressed quite a bit, with the trip to Dundasil and the full party gathered.

Wasn’t a fan of the martial arts tournament, the whole Pep Powers attack, you never had a chance to guard against because the power-ups were crazily coordinated, as in absolutely perfectly – if it happened that way in-game it’d make life easier. The arachnid boss was also a cheating bastard, one time he got to do four attacks in a row – it didn’t help him in the end, he still died, but that one was quite close. The other change has been the appearance of bigger enemies and these are quite impressive, both the Trolls and Green Dragons were suitably imposing. Getting quite fond of using Erik’s sigil abilities, also Sword Stance was very useful in the tournament.

In story terms there was an unexpected but very effective emotional edge to all the revelations in Dundasil. The game also didn’t do the obvious move of throwing in a load of boss battles or other events to ‘involve’ the player. Instead, it had total confidence in the story being enough, if the cutscenes were good enough – they were.

Nioh 2: Day 1.

At least 2 hours spend on the introductory mission (largely running through encounters) only to face a nigh-impossible boss. Summoning help proved fruitful as an overlevelled fellow player (some kind of long haired ninja guy) who jumped in and made quick work of the horse-faced asshole.

The title sequence rolls.  This isn’t how it’s played though is it?

Hours in and the answer is yes and no.  My memory kicks in – this is as much of a loot-grind as it is a souls game.  It’s also so rich with mechanics – counters, blocks, magic, stealth, stances, weapons, stat boosts – it’s definitely the type of game that clicks over tens of hours of time. Not immediately.

The previous game was, I think, the hardest game I’ve played.  This is largely due to to the wealth of mechanics and options in combat, in addition to the loot grind – DMC style demonic power-ups, RPG skill trees, 9 or 10 different weapons wach with Fighter-game style movesets to unlock, buffs and debuffs – and the sequel builds on this more.  It is intimidating. It almost requires a university education to understand.

But it’s an action game, albeit one you can’t play casually. Each mission has me clutching at straws wondering how ill get throuh (usually with online help) only to come back later to grind for more loot and breeze through it, now understanding the enemies and layout (and, critically, the bosses moves) more intimately.

I will be playing this for some time.  It’s more of the same of the first one, excepting theres another 3 levels of mechanics to understand.  It is not as polished, perfected and mechanically elegant as a from soft game.  This more random and unpredictable with its frustration, like a diablo-clone, but usually when you die it is genuinely because you just werent paying attention to the lessons it was teaching you.

The reviews on this a sky-high.  It largely feels like more of the original but just better (excepting my one gripe, which is how theyve integrated the guardian spirits into the yokai forms, which largely limits the presences of the charming guardians altogether)

 

 

 

Ok, this looks like a lot of fun:

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Bruce

Looks really good.

I’ll probably be buying this day 1.

It’ll be a shorter game then Nioh 2 so I might jump between the two.

It’s a cracking year for AAA game releases. FF7 remake releases on April 10.  Last of Us 2 is May 29. Ghosts of Tsushima is June 26 and then both Avengers and Cyberpunk are September.

I’m also interested in the Resident Evil 3 remake and Control DLC but given the release date of things, I can probably afford to wait on those ones.

Anonymous wrote:

Last of Us 2 is May 29.

Day off work already booked. Genuinely.

Anonymous wrote:

Ghosts of Tsushima is June 26

Looking forward to this one too, but might wait until it drops in price slightly. I’ll also probably be far from finishing TLoU2 at that point.

It does feel like this console generation is going out with a bang. Even if it never did get its own GTA game, which I still find odd.

I’d love to pre-order Doom Eternal… but given their absurd regional prices: FUCK THEM!

It’s gonna be interesting to see how much this one gets pirated. Bethesda is crazy.

Anonymous wrote:

Nioh 2: Day 1.

I love the Day 1 bit, was expecting you to be entirely occupied getting your arse kicked by it.

Anonymous wrote:

FF7 remake releases on April 10. Ghosts of Tsushima is June 26

Can’t say I’m on the TLoU train, though it’s a given it’ll be technically and psychologically brilliant.  Ghost is the big surprise one that could go either way.

Likely to start FF7, although I’m currently hooked on DQ11 and I still have God of War to get to.  First world problems….

Dave wrote:

Day off work already booked. Genuinely.

You know that day will be you waiting for the super-GB day 1 patch to download so you can then play the game, right?

Ben wrote:

You know that day will be you waiting for the super-GB day 1 patch to download so you can then play the game, right?

Ha, true.

I’ll get up early and let the PS4 do that while I’m having breakfast.

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Ben

Dave wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Ghosts of Tsushima is June 26

Looking forward to this one too, but might wait until it drops in price slightly. I’ll also probably be far from finishing TLoU2 at that point.

It does feel like this console generation is going out with a bang. Even if it never did get its own GTA game, which I still find odd.

It got RDR2 which is prerry close.

Ben wrote:

Nioh 2: Day 1.

I love the Day 1 bit, was expecting you to be entirely occupied getting your arse kicked by it.

Trust me I am

The first one is a game I did not master. Although I finished it up through the final DLC the last few levels were absurdly npunishing.

This one is reportedly easier but I cant say im feeling that. Theres a new parry mechanic gor demons called burst counter which i havent got a handle on, and I was never great at switching stances, ki pulses, blocking and combos. I really play it like a souls game – circling the enemy and waiting for an opening – but im still getting caught by attacks a lot and im probably goimg to have to learn the other mechanics at some stage.

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Ben

We had a bit of a watershed moment in our house today with one of my kids deciding to spend their own money on videogames for the first time.

My son has (finally) grown a bit tired of Minecraft and so decided to spend some of his birthday money on the Crash Bandicoot trilogy remastered collection for the PS4.

I’d never actually played these games before (they came out during a period when I wasn’t that in touch with the games scene) – unless you count that bit in Uncharted 4 – but I knew them by reputation, and they seem quite fun, especially for someone who’s a fan of old-fashioned straightforward games like me.

And my son has had a great time getting to grips with them today. “The best twenty pounds I ever spent,” apparently. So hopefully he’ll get a lot of value out of these, and I’ll get to catch up on a missed classic.

Dave wrote:

And my son has had a great time getting to grips with them today. “The best twenty pounds I ever spent,” apparently. So hopefully he’ll get a lot of value out of these, and I’ll get to catch up on a missed classic.

The kid will probably do fine.  You? It will probably hand you your arse. ;)

Meanwhile….

One thing that I noticed with this generation is the change of old concepts when rendered by new tech.  The world of ruin as a concept is not new, FF6 used it as have other JRPGs, but when that concept is depicted with current generation graphical capability?  It goes up several level in just how scary it is.  FFXV‘s was the first to really demonstrate this to me – at first you are making your way across a blighted landscape, evading high, high-level adversaries and then you get a lift.  And from that vehicle you get to see the rest of the damned world, numerous Red Giants, with flaming swords, prowling the darkness…  It was pretty damn bleak and stayed that way as you head to Insomnia.  But, compared to Dragon Quest XI?  It was lighter!

This game? Has the world blasted, ominous permanent purple skies consign any talk of day and night out the window, you see numerous refugees and then it tops it all off with …. a kid looking for safety, heads into a blasted church, only to find it full of corpses which freaks the kid out completely!  That…. is fucking dark.

The game then throws another couple of curveballs: First, the hero being talked of turns out to be Hendrik of all people.  Oh yeah, this is going to be good – turns out Hendrik is not instantly trying to kill you.  King Carnelian also turns up, having been possessed by Mordegan for a couple of decades no less.  It then does this big battle sequence, culminating in a bit fight with a headless horseman boss.  I had spent a bit of time before ending Act I on re-setting my abilities so as to unlock Gigaslash – this sequence made that so wirth it.  That ability was insane: In the boss fight it took one minion out at the start and then the other three on its second use.  It also targets all enemies – so hugely effective and it looks so epic when you use it.

So, yeah, quite the hand that it dealt.  Hugely fucked-up but very well executed.

Well, there are different types of “world in ruins”… some are quite beautiful, some are super scary and bleak… Metro 2033 is definetly one of my faves, but it’s a bleak one. Very bleak one.

The reviews for Doom Eternal are out today and seem to be very positive. I was thinking of holding off for a price drop but with my birthday coming up next month I might just ask for it straight away instead.

I don’t trust the reviews… the game’s too overhyped at this point… u_u

I was thinking specifically of JRPGs, where the world of ruins is a very satanic hellhole, engineered by a satanic shitbag.

Other world end games, like Metro and Fallout, tend to belong to the post-apocalyptic strand – shit happened, but there was no singular intelligence making it happen.

This is coronavirus related but funny:

• Italy – the school’s are closed, the kids are off, you’re not supposed to go out so what happens? All the kids log into Fortnite, Italy’s internet breaks!
• UK – The combination of CoD: Warzone and RDR2 update saw a significant spike in web traffic, so much so that BT put out a statement on it!

After ploughing 120+ hours into Red Dead 2 I think I’m done with it. Was going to try finishing off the collectables but my hearts not in it given theres nothing else left to do. What a game though! After a lukewarm start to it I really got into it as I got going. I didn’t expect the plot twist 2/3 of the way through but the post-game played out exactly as I thought it would.

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Martin Smith

Great timing Bruce!

Theres a new game coming out on Friday which i think is right up your alley

THIS MADNESS!

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Bruce, Dave

I recently played 3 Arkham games in a row and looked at Final Fantasy as I’ve bought all the ones available on PC over the years. I completed FF* the other day and then looked online to see what people think is the best. I was surprised a lot opted for FFXII as I had it years ago on the PS2 and found it a bit bland and gave up.

I remembered playing it again that it has some pretty steep difficulty leaps and I gave up because I got stuck in a desert getting wiped out and no place to grind up levels. Anyway this time I cheated a little and found a trick online that quickly takes you up around 15 levels at the start, I can see now why it is highly rated. The story has a much more nuanced Game of Thrones type setup than most FF games with a certain level of ambiguity around the characters. The world is well set up and has a very balanced mix of progressing the story and wandering off exploring and completing hunt sidequests. I’m really enjoying it at the second attempt.

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Ben

PS2 or the remaster Gar? As there’s quite the difference between the two.

It’s the Zodiak version which I’m pretty sure is the remaster. On PC, I lost my PS2 many years ago and actually have no idea where it went. I may have lent it to my nephew and never got it back.

It is. The big addition is the job system, it was in the original but a Japan-only version.

That could be part of why I’m finding it more enjoyable this time if they have made tweaks like that.

Anonymous wrote:

Great timing Bruce!

Theres a new game coming out on Friday which i think is right up your alley

THIS MADNESS!

Ha! I had a sneaking suspicion that was what you’d be linking. The wife is looking forward to Animal Crossing so I was aware of the overlapping release dates.

I’m a bit worried about the release of Doom Eternal. I got an email saying amazon had dispatched it and realised that I’d got it sent to my work. Which is a school. Which is going to be put on lockdown on Friday. Locked up. With nobody at all allowed in. For four months. With my game inside.

If there was ever a case for “buy digital” then this is it.

Im buying it.

My window to play videogames has expended which i swear is totally unrelated to workimg from home.

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Ben, Bruce

My birthday isn’t until mid-April – it’s going to be a long couple of weeks waiting for new-nu-Doom.

Try not to make me too jealous in the meantime.

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Bruce

[Bruce]

I can’t remember if I shared this here but I bought another video game vinyl soundtrack.

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Streets of Rage 2 soundtrack by Yuzo Koshiro on double LP from @datadiscs. Instant flashbacks from the second I put this on. . Marbled vinyl. Two prints included. Heavy nostalgia. . #vinylwanker #records #vinyl #vinylcollection #vinylcommunity #vinylrecord #streetsofrage #gamer #gaming #game #videogame #videogames #videogaming #retrogaming #streetsofrage2 #classicvideogames #streetsofrage2soundtrack #vintagevideogames #videogamesoundtrack #marbledvinyl #sega #datadiscs #yuzokoshiro #beatemup #videogamemusic #artprint #90svideogames #nostalgia #segamegadrive #doublelp

A post shared by Bruce (@judgemaths) on Mar 4, 2020 at 1:22pm PST

It’s an absolute fucking belter!!!

• This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by Bruce.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by Bruce.

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Ben, Dave

That’s awesome.

Does it have the intro music? That track is seared into my brain forever as a result of my misspent youth.

Yep, very first track on side A of the first of the two LPs. It’s amazing how a piece of music you haven’t heard in decades can take you back to a specific place and time.

2 users thanked author for this post.

Ben, Dave

Yeah, I find videogame music very evocative in that way. It helps that the SoRII soundtrack is so distinctive and unique.

I think the boss music would get my heart racing even now.

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Ben

Oh man don’t remind me about SOR… I’ve been sooo disappointed with what I’ve seen from the new one… BUUUUT the good news is that at the very least the soundtrack should be killer… they got a great round up of musicians working on it…

I’m just bummed about some of the gameplay decisions they’ve taken =(

Doom Eternal looks technically brilliant, but I’m starting to think there might be a bit too much going on for me to really pull it off:

• Flamethrower / grenade launcher use / cooldown – bottom right of screen
• Health / Armour -bottom left
• Ammo indicator – on the gun itself?
• All weapons have two mods and alternate fire modes
• You can double jump and dash
• While keeping track of enemies in a very fast fully 3D dynamic environment
• Weapon switching while engaged in full movement is encouraged

Dunno, maybe they’ll have been clever on the difficulty settings, have heard some interesting info on that point but for right now?  That’s an awful lot to juggle.

 

Well apparently it’s not doom anymore, it’s an FPS chess game or some bullshit like that… xD

The more I see from D:E’s gameplay, the less interested I’m in… it’s like they designed the whole thing to be played EXACTLY as THEY want you to play it… which is constant movement & weapon switching every second… as an old dude, this is completely unappealing too…

It seems that they realized that D2016 had a lot of issues, so they addressed them, which is normally a good thing, but I’m not sure they addressed them the right way.

Jon wrote:

The more I see from D:E’s gameplay, the less interested I’m in… it’s like they designed the whole thing to be played EXACTLY as THEY want you to play it… which is constant movement & weapon switching every second… as an old dude, this is completely unappealing too…

As an old dude too, isn’t this just like the original Doom?

Dave wrote:

Jon wrote:

The more I see from D:E’s gameplay, the less interested I’m in… it’s like they designed the whole thing to be played EXACTLY as THEY want you to play it… which is constant movement & weapon switching every second… as an old dude, this is completely unappealing too…

As an old dude too, isn’t this just like the original Doom?

Not really no… You can play the OG Dooms (and even Doom 3 was MUCH closer to the OGs, despite what people might say) however you like, there are even “pacifist” runs. In terms of weapon switching, you’ll want to switch weapons to make things easier, but you can very much finish all the game with the shotgun if you so choose. In reality, the OGs have an ammo problem in tougher difficulties, which is where you’re gonna want to use your weapons more smartly, and sure, there are some weapons that are just better against some ennemies (chainsaw for pinky for exemple), but it’s nowhere near the mechanics they’re using in Eternal.

In 2016 you could also pretty much go with your prefered weapon and plow through the game without needing to switch like a maniac, but I think that was also an issue, because at some point you get some upgrades that make some weapons too good to no use. It seems that they’re fully aware of that, but chose to make it so you now need to really use specific weapons for specific things to try to make it more dynamic, instead of going back to the drawing board to solve those issues.

So I dunno, I guess we’ll have to see… but yeah they definetly want you to play a certain way and they even say so out loud, which I think is a pretty dumb design philosophy in general, and in the end, they might end up with certain similar problems anyways. What I’m trying to say is that D:E seems more like a bandage to 2016’s issues rather than a proper solution…

Yeah ID software made a Doom game, not half life.

Just like netherealm studips makes Mortal Kombat games, not Tekken.

If you dont like this type of shooter then there are others to choose from.

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Dave

Anonymous wrote:

Yeah ID software made a Doom game, not half life.

What’s Half life got to do with anything? Yes, ID made a Doom game… the question was wether it’s different or not from the older games. Yes it is (whether you think that’s good or bad).

Jon wrote:

In 2016 you could also pretty much go with your prefered weapon and plow through the game without needing to switch like a maniac, but I think that was also an issue, because at some point you get some upgrades that make some weapons too good to no use. It seems that they’re fully aware of that, but chose to make it so you now need to really use specific weapons for specific things to try to make it more dynamic, instead of going back to the drawing board to solve those issues.

Doom has always had that ethos though.

There was a good interview with Romero a little while back where he talked about how the original game was specifically designed to not make existing weapons obsolete each time you got a new one; how each one was still the best tool for the job in certain situations.

I’ll see if I can dig it out.

Here it is.

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2019/nov/12/doom-creator-john-romero-shooter-games-id-software

Modern shooters are too close to fantasy role-playing games in how they shower you with new weapons from battle to battle, Romero suggests. This abundance of loot – which reflects how blockbuster games generally have become Netflix-style services, defined by an unrelenting roll-out of “content” – means you spend as much time comparing guns in menus as savouring their capabilities. It encourages you to think of each gun as essentially disposable, like an obsolete make of smartphone. “The more weapons you throw in there, the more you’re playing an inventory game.”

Romero contrasts this to the sparing design of the original Doom, which launched in 1993 with a grand total of eight guns. “For Doom, it was really important that every time you got a new weapon, it never made any previous weapons useless. That was a critical design characteristic. We’re going to add a new thing that can’t negate anything that came before. So how do you get the chaingun and not cancel out the pistol? It’s to do with how much ammo it eats, and how inaccurate it is over distance – the pistol eats less ammo and is extremely accurate at a distance.”

Yeah, no one uses the pistol though, unless you’re out of ammo. Also, the chaingun IS extremely accurate too, I don’t know what he’s talking about, tbh… xD

The real issue in the OG Dooms is the ammo… you use the less powerful weapons because you keep the rockets and the plasma ammo for harder situations/bigger ennemies, otherwise you’d run around shooting rockets everywhere. In Doom2, once you get the supershotgun, everything becomes pretty obsolete, too.

So let me rectify, it’s not that you don’t switch weapons, you do, but whereas you have only 9 weapons (counting the fist) in the OGs, in Doom Eternal you’ll have effectively:

Machine gun (I think they flat out removed the pistol and replaced it with the machine gun), shotgun, supershotgun, plasma rifle, chaingun, rocket launcher, the new ballista thingie that replaces the plasma canon in 2016, the BFG and the Doom64 weapon. Then you also have mounted grenades, a fire launcher, a special super punch, the chainsaw and the argent sword thingie. So that’s 14, BUT around 7 of those weapons have 2 extra modes, so we’re talking at least 28 options to kill an ennemy… That’s considerably more.

And as it’s been widely shown in the trailers, for exemple, the 3 shotgun modes are REALLY useful for specific situations, which means you’ll end up not only switching between weapons, but between modes as well. So that’s 28 options you’ll need to keep track of at all times (when you actually have a full arsenal of course).

Now, the issue they had in Doom 2016, was mostly the upgrade section, which basically made most weapons obsolete, since once you had the right upgrades (and played semi-decently) you could basically spam the plasma canon and one shot most everything from a distance, for exemple, making even the BFG sort of obsolete, and since you had an upgrade to have infinite ammo… yeah =/

But I’m sure they’ll avoid that in this game by avoiding those problematic upgrades. Anyways, the point being, form what they’ve shown and explained, it seems as if they’ve designed the ennemies to force you to switch to certain weapons/modes in order to deal with them… I guess you could be stubborn and bruteforce your way through, but since they also ramped up the difficulty, I don’t see people being able to do that unless you’re a god at shooters.

Now, again, is it good or bad? I guess it depends on each person… I’m not particularly fond of that sort of game design, but I’m sure a lot of people will love it…

Oh and to go back to what Romero said, I think it’s safe to say that the new ones have become very RPG-y, I mean, the amount of weapon options and upgrades there are… yeah, it’s totally RPG, so that “ethos” was out of the window since 2016, if we’re being honest.

I don’t know, as someone who gets very turned-off by excessive customisation and endless options in modern games, I felt as though Doom 2016 was relatively simple, streamlined and clean.

Dave wrote:

I don’t know, as someone who gets very turned-off by excessive customisation and endless options in modern games, I felt as though Doom 2016 was relatively simple, streamlined and clean.

Yes because of the upgrades… did you really use the pistol or the shotgun once you got some of the better upgrades? Because I spent most of my playtime sniping demons with the zoom upgrade (and the headshot damage bonuses) for the rifle. I didn’t really use the rocket launcher or the plasma gun either and eventually just used the chaingun mode that was savage as fuck (I think it was the “turret mode”) once I got the infinite ammo and no cool-down upgrades… and then the plasma canon’s “siege mode” (I think?), the one that allows a charge, once I got the mobility upgrade… I never really switched modes for the weapons while playing.

So yeah, meaning I basically ended up using mostly 3 options (+the chainsaw to deal with annoying critters too)… and the odd BFG here and there cause I was lazy (not necessary with the plasma cannon). But I don’t think the upgrades will be quite as powerful in Eternal, so that’s not gonna be possible anyways.

But hey, I’ll let you guys tell me what you think of it… since I’m probably not getting this game for a couple of years at least… u_u

Having grown up.eith FPS and RPGs as my genres of choice, I feel pretty confident saying that Doom as a franchise (including 2016) is very very distinct from other FPS –
from Wolfenstein (yes I know they both originated with Romero) to Half life to Metro to Call of Duty.

How so? I mean, why do you think the Doom franchise is so distinct, in what regards?

Behind The Scenes Stories Of Huge Video Games

My kids have been watching one of their favourite youtubers play that game where the goose has to piss everyone off. Has anyone played it? Is it any good?

It looks like a lot of fun but also something that could be pretty short-lived, and £16 on the PSN seems a little steep.

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Bruce

Dave wrote:

My kids have been watching one of their favourite youtubers play that game where the goose has to piss everyone off. Has anyone played it? Is it any good?

It looks like a lot of fun but also something that could be pretty short-lived, and £16 on the PSN seems a little steep.

I saw a Piewdiepie playthrough, honestly I didn’t feel like I wanted to play it… It’s cute and all, but yeah it looks short. It might be a nice game for kids though, but yeah maybe it’s a bit steep… spring sales should be around the corner though.

I was all set to spend the evening finishing off the Spider-Man DLC today, booted it up, got into it and… done in about 20 minutes. Hmm.

Decent DLC pack, over all. Pretty tough in places – I wouldn’t want to do it on the highest difficulty level – but it was fun and the story was solid.

No idea what to play next now though. Or what to do with the rest of my evening.

Dave wrote:

My kids have been watching one of their favourite youtubers play that game where the goose has to piss everyone off. Has anyone played it? Is it any good?

It looks like a lot of fun but also something that could be pretty short-lived, and £16 on the PSN seems a little steep.

I bought it at full price. Thoroughly enjoyed it but it’s probably not worth the cost. I was hoping it would be a bit more “Goat Simulator-y” in terms of just being about creating open world chaos but it’s more like an old school point-and-click adventure game whose puzzles have multiple solutions.

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Dave

I played the first couple of levels of Doom Eternal last night.

It’s fast (the default movement speed is “sprint like fuck”).

It’s difficult (I died a couple of times on the first level on “Hurt Me Plenty”).

It’s delightfully retro (health bottles from Doom and Doom 2 make an appearance).

It’s fun (oh god, it’s so much fun).

It is unequivocal Doom.

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Ben, Dave