VideoGame_Discussion

Ty The Tasmanian Tiger HD

6/10

I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older or what but those old-school platform games like Banjo Kazooie just aren’t having enough charm to me in my mid 30s anymore. Mostly because I find it highly frustrating to spend hours in a map, trying to find every single little thing when the map design isn’t that great to begin with. Nor is the camera. I’m not sure if I’ll be sticking with this one until the end because I read there are certain requirements you must hit in order to progress further in the story like collect 80% of every collectible in each before you can unlock the boss and I’m not sure I’m about that life anymore.

Alan Wake 2 - 9.75/10 - Excellent game, great story, great graphics, fun gameplay, creepy atmospheric horror like the first game. I highly recommend playing previous Remedy games before starting this one.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown - 9/10 - Initially I was not a fan of the character movements but once it gets going it all clicks and it works great. Excellent platforming, great level design, just lacked in worthwhile unlocks at times and had a few sections that were unnecessarily difficult.

I started to play Sundered this week. Love the visuals/art style but so far the gameplay hasnt clicked. Ill give it another, but so far I dont find it fun

Smalland: Survive the Wild - This game is pretty fun. Its a casual open world survival game. But it has a story. It reminds me a lot of Outward, but without the magic and has mounts you can tame. I say that because of the combat and having to craft armor for the right season (summer/winter), not just a certain area of the map. It does have the normal survival stuff of having to eat, collect resources and build things. But its all very casual compared to most other games like that. I guess its a lot like Grounded. I've never tried that. I might check it out since its on GP. I thought that game was something different. Smalland has also been in early access on steam for over a year, but officially released the other day. Its also on xbox and ps5. Anyway, this game is really good. If you like these kind of games or played and liked palword or outward you will probably like this one too.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage - 7.5/10

This feels like old school Ass. Creed and I’m digging it. The focus on going almost all stealth at times and its setting remind me of the very first game with Altair 17 years ago. The game map isn’t as big as the previous more recent entries which is nice and there is more of a focus on just story missions with a sprinkle of side contracts here and there which take mere minutes to complete so it doesn’t stray from the story. My only complaints so far are the graphics not being as good as I would have expected, some wonky feeling timing on the controls and believe it or not the load times when you’re fast traveling for some reason take longer than I anticipated. I’m playing it on the PS5 and fast traveling takes about 10-12 seconds, even if the fast travel point is relatively close which feels long to me in an age when load times are almost non-existent anymore. I guess when they priced this game out at $50 their budget excluded graphical fidelity, an HDR option and quick load times. But other than that I’m having a good old fashioned AC sneaky stealth time.

Archer wrote:

I was hoping it would be on switch to play with the younguns. Probably very demanding.

TalonJedi87 wrote:

Have you played Valhalla? I haven't yet. I know Mirage is a prequel, and some say Mirage can be played first while others say more is gotten out of Mirage if Valhalla was played first.

Valhalla is the only AC game I haven’t played and most likely won’t ever play it because of its length. Any game that’s 200 hours long terrifies me. Especially an AC game that’s full of tick boxes and redundant gameplay. 200 hours of that sounds like a chore.

Gotcha. I haven't played 'Odyssey' or 'Valhalla' yet. I have both for PS4, but want to play them on PS5 (which I don't have yet) because they run better. But with 'Mirage' on sale, I'm tempted to get it, because I miss old school AC so much.

Feeb wrote:

Actually seems odd this isn't on Switch. This would be the perfect Switch game. Its not very graphic intensive, so I don't think it would be taxing for the switch. And even on PS5 its modular loading, if you run too fast you come across bugs who are loading in or just standing around and their ai wont kick in until you get close. So I think it would be fine on switch.

SYNTHETIK: Legion Rising - so far I like this, but it seems like I'll be playing it on and off a lot as it's pretty hard

DCGX wrote:

Oh yeah then I’d definitely pull the trigger on Mirage. It’s the closest experience you’ll get to the AC1-3 days. A very concise story with only a fraction of things to do compared to modern day AC games.

Valhalla is daunting. Overwhelming is also a good word. There is SO MUCH to do it makes me not want to play it. Odyssey was straddling that line, but I finished it. I can’t bring myself to play more Valhalla.

I played Vampire Survivors for the first time the other day. It’s fantastic.

I'm still waiting for Mirage to have a significant sale. I have a hard time paying more than $25 for Ubisoft games now days. They don't really put a lot of effort into their games anymore. Its all just lazy copy paste of past games with minor story changes.

BucketofJustice wrote:


Dude what you just said was precisely how I felt. I struggled so much to get thru Odyssey and I love Greeky mythos. Origins I thought was meaty enough even while bloated but then Odyssey pushed that bar way over the line of bloated to sheer overwhelming standards then Valhalla said f it I’m just gonna be AC WoW.

Archer wrote:

@Bleed_DukeBlue was kind enough to sell me his copy of Mirage on here for the great price of $25, which too is all I’m willing to pay for most Ubi games nowadays.

I loved Origins, but other games took precedent over Odyssey and Valhalla when they came out (I got the gold steelbook editions of each, cheap, eventually).

I think I might just get Mirage. I'm ok with $35 for the Deluxe Edition.

Lies of P - solid
I'm not normally a soulsborne player and I'm FAR from good at this game, but I'm getting better and enjoying it. It looks great and after playing with the controls and dying a bunch I'm taking on the 2nd main boss.
I've learned to farm materials by fighting the same areas some and I want to look into a guide to get pointers on when I should use resources to upgrade my weapons. I'm hesitant to waste them too early, but feel like I'm maybe a touch weaker due to not doing almost any resource based upgrading.
The electrical weapon I've got has been pretty decent at taking down the normal foes and surprisingly was the weapon I used to kill the first human, so I've stuck with it. But I feel like digging into more info online could help me understand if my tactics are good or misguided, and when to push into upgrades.
I do find it strange that there's really no music during exploration.
I'm like 6 hours in and not very far but really only 1 section had annoyed me, but that was after I changed the controls around and was still adjusting to that. So slow and steady will likely be my path forward.

DCGX wrote:

Actually, there was still a seller on Amazon that had a new Launch Edition for $30. I didn't even know there was a launch edition. It comes with three lithographs and a physical map.

Spider-man 2 - 8/10 / ps portal

Terrific game. Tons going on in this iteration of spider-man. Probably the best looking Spider-Man game to date. Loved the web wings addition although (for me) I found my self using web wings 90% of the time so very little web swinging through the city which kind of pulls you out of the spider-man experience at least imo. Same ol same ol fighting mechanics, has always felt like button mashing to me. Story delivery is awesome as always, like a comic book come to life; not a huge fan of the alternate origins if you will. I only focused on main missions but will go back and do some side quests just to web wing through the city some more. Very enjoyable experience.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart {} 9/10

Alright, I'm gonna sidetrack for a bit right here. So just for old times sake I decided to watch Toy Story on Disney+ and it was my first time watching it in probably over 20 years, but now for the first time I got to see it in 4K, HDR, all that jazz.
But what does that have do with this game? Well it's just that after the movie ended I decided to start this game up for the first time and oh my goodness does this game look good. Like, really good. It made me remember back in 1995, the big question among us gaming nerds at the school lunch table was "will video games ever reach the same level of Toy Story graphics?" And I wish I could go back in time as current me to let those little punks know that video games will have not only matched Toy Story "graphics" in our lifetime, my boys we have f'n surpassed it.

This isn't exactly the first game to make me feel that way, but when I first started playing I just was so impressed, especially after just having sat through Toy Story, that's what brought out the comparison. I really like that we have reached the point where all cutscenes can be done with in-game graphics now and it's so seamless that you can't always tell the difference when a cutscene ends and the gameplay begins again because there's no load screen or fade to black when the cutscene is over. I want that to be the standard from now on. The hardware is clearly capable of it, but yet so few developers put in the freaking effort.

Now I could keep rambling on about the graphics, how nice the lighting effects are, how steady the frame-rate is even when in 4K with ray-tracing enabled, and how much time I spent in the game's photo mode taking screenshots, but I'll shut up about that now and talk about some other things, starting with the 3D audio. It sounds good, and there's a setting specifically for the Pulse 3D headphones in the options menu and that's always a plus. The bass from the music sounds good, as does bass from explosions. Also the character voices all sound good, and I have no complaints regarding the voice acting, I haven't been annoyed by any of the characters (there's usually at least one character in these types of games that get kind of annoying).

The controls as well, really good usage of the haptic feedback and adaptive triggers (it's a first-party game so I'd expect nothing less). For the haptic feedback, just neat little touches like for example there is a nightclub section early on and once you enter the room the controller vibrates to the beat of the music, like you're feeling the bass. For the adaptive triggers, when firing your weapon, the harder you press the faster you'll shoot.
The rest of the game controls great, except for this one part when you're flying on a pterodactyl, I found those flying sections to not control well. But when you're on the ground everything is fine.

So my history with the Ratchet & Clank series is brief. The first game released all the way back in 2002, but I just never got around to playing it. I kind of blame Super Mario Sunshine for temporarily making me completely uninterested in 3D platformers for a while around that time due to its horrid camera and I thought because Nintendo was unable to produce a 3D platformer with a decent camera, that must mean nobody else is able to get it right either.
I can admit now that I was wrong to think that, because I finally played the first R&C last January, 20 years after its release. I enjoyed it a lot, though there were some questionable design choices in it, but most importantly the camera wasn't an issue, they did what Nintendon't (at least by 2002 standards). I followed it up a few months later by playing the PS4 reboot of it, which pretty much fixed the few problems I had with the original release. I actually would like to check out some of the other games in the series, but I worry they'll feel too outdated after playing this one.

So besides this game, those are the only two in the series I've played. I'm enjoying this even more than I did those other two. I like the Rift mechanic even though I don't feel it is used as much as it should be, and the swapping between characters when needed to make progress (that part is something I don't always like when other games do it) and thankfully all weapon upgrades carry over between them. I wouldn't mind one bit if they did something more with that new lombax character and made the next game co-op or something

Vampire Survivors for Xbox Series X. Fantastic game. Solid 9/10.

Resident Evil 4 {2} 10/10

No regrets on waiting to play this until I was able to do so in VR, just like I did with RE7 and RE8. I feel like that was the right choice. Sorry if this is coming off as mumbo jumbo, I've just been writing down various thoughts as I've been playing through it (currently at Chapter 12).

So to start off with a somewhat negative, the graphics are good, there are some damn good lighting effects, but to be honest I did expect slightly better visuals from my first AAA PSVR2 game. The fire effects and explosions just don't look that great.

The audio is great though. The explosions sound good (much better than they look), voice acting is fine by me, I've heard fans of the series crap on Ada's new voice actor but I didn't have a problem with her at all. The sound effects in general are good, multiple times I've heard an enemy nearby and knew right where the sound was coming from which allowed me to sneak up on them (more on that later).

Controls for the most part are quite good. Actually in the beginning I outright didn't like them, but really I just needed to get used to them.
It took me a little while to adjust to the fact that I need to hold the shotgun with two hands, and give it that little "pump" after firing each shot, for example. Or that I have to manually reach down into the pouch thingy with my left hand to grab ammo to reload the gun in my right hand. Once I got used to it all, I really liked the controls. I feel like this is now the definitive way to play RE4, it finally took the crown from the Wii version. The game overall makes good use of the haptic feedback too.

Having said that though, there was one puzzle in particular where you have to rotate these hexagonal things. I have nothing good to say about that part, because the controls were uncooperative and I had almost rage-quit for the night. There were a couple of other parts too where when you turn your hand to rotate an object, Leon's in-game hand doesn't exactly turn the way it should be. Those parts don't happen often though.

The controls on the speedboat could use some work too. You hold R2 to accelerate and that's pretty much it. Just putting light pressure on the button won't do anything, so you're either parked or going full speed, not much room for in-between.

I do think it is kinda wack that your save file is tied between VR or flat, meaning you can't play in VR until the VR2 Sense controllers' batteries die and then continue in flat mode. That isn't much of a problem for me though since I don't intend on ever playing it flat anyway, but still it kinda sucks and I don't recall it being an issue in Resident Evil 7 on the last-gen PSVR.

One cool thing I want to point out is that I've been using my knife a lot, and in addition I've been using it to stealth kill zombies from behind. First off, I almost never use the knife in Resident Evil games. You get so many cool guns to defend yourself with, who has time for a knife? But stealth kills make it worth upgrading your knife in this one. I would never play stealthily in the flat games because they've never really encouraged you to play that way in RE before, but in VR it's really fun to sneak up on a zombie and stab them in the neck. And yes, I know they're technically not called zombies in this game, but I'll never not call them that. And the mini-boss knife fight later in the game, VR just makes that so much more fun (same for the minecart section, which I was looking forward to but it ended up being shorter than I remember.)

Another thing to say is that...the game just isn't very scary, even in VR. Now you may say "no duh" to that, because this was where the series sorta shifted away from its survival/horror roots and became more action, but it feels abundantly clear now. It's like a night and day difference between playing Resident Evil 7 in VR and Resident Evil 4 in VR. In Resident Evil 7 there were lots of scares, and the whole atmosphere was creepy. In Resident Evil 4, well I'm at Chapter 12 so far and the first moment of the game that scared me was a short scripted sequence in Chapter 5 or 6 (I think) where I was walking on a wooden platform and fell through it with no warning. There have been a couple moments later on too where I was surrounded by enemies and one snuck up on me from behind and I wasn't expecting that. I don't mean to imply there are no scares at all, but it's not like RE7. But later on you realize the game gets way more intense than RE7 did.

The game also isn't very "VR AF", (the slang term the VR kiddos use these days for VR games that really immerse you in the experience). You can't just pick up random items on tables scattered throughout the game, doors and drawers are opened by pressing the X button instead of you actually using your hands to open them, and cutscenes are all 2D. Since it's a hybrid flat/VR game, I'll give it a pass on not being able to pick up random objects, but hybrid or not I don't like 2D cutscenes in my VR games, that just comes off as lazy IMO.

One more little nitpick that I don't really even need to mention because it affects so many other VR games too, is that when walking it really feels more like your character is just gliding across the floor. I feel like not many VR games get that part right, but it's not a deal breaker or anything.

Despite some of my minor complaints, I'm really enjoying the game. It's not perfect (no game is, just because it gets scored a 10 doesn't mean it's without flaws), but they've managed to make an already great game even better. I do not want this game to end.

Slickriven wrote:

I feel the same way, just got this recently on PS5. It has been enjoyable and certainly met my expectations for an indie title. It’s a nice chill exploration game with minimal combat but it’s also pretty clumsy.

The “map” is really just a way to select which zone you fast travel to, and the way you check side mission progress by hovering over a certain section of the map and it shows in a little side tab is vague and easy to overlook. The NPC doesn't even have to be in that area. Weird.

And having to go to the robot companion dude to ask if you got all collectibles in that area or not sure seems like it should have been something just listed on the map as "# out of 4". And the only way to see all of your outfits is to go to the change outfit option...by asking him.

The game tries to overcome some of those flaws by throwing a story at you but none of it makes any sense and it only gets worse as it goes on.

The most frustrating thing for me has been the slo-mo button that then lets you grapple. It's awfully inconsistent. You can sometimes grapple from a mile away but during bosses you can't always use it? Only on certain nodes and not all of them? And sometimes you can use it multiple times in a row and it doesn't need to recharge. Very bad UX for such a key aspect of the game.

This sounds all negative but i've enjoyed it and am 3/4 through it. Got it for $16 and that price feels fair.

Cyberpunk 2077 - boring/10

I’m about 4 hours in and I don’t really want to play any more. I hate abandoning games tho, especially when I was as eager as I was to finally play this game. It’s just not vibing with me.

Does it get better? Do I need to sink more hours into it? Maybe I’ll shelf it and come back or maybe I’ll trade it for something better.

nah, it sucks

bill wrote:

Thanks Bill. That’s a shame cause it looks great… oh well moving on then.

It sucks, yes.

loztdogs wrote:

That's exactly how I felt. Granted I was playing it near launch on a PS4 Pro, but nothing about the characters or story was interesting to me.

Helldivers 2- disappointment/10. On paper, I should have really liked this. I love co-op online shooters with progression systems, and I played several matches for a couple of hours, but it’s just not very fun. The servers were a pain, and getting into a game took awhile. Once I was in, it was annoying how easily you run out of ammo on higher difficulty levels while engaging with a bunch of enemy robots. Every time you want a new weapon or more resources, you have to pull down a drop-down menu and press a series of buttons like “up down left up right up down” to send supplies down and then wait for the supplies to land. It’s not a huge deal, but it’s just an unnecessary interruption you have to deal with over and over again. The gunplay is OK, the graphics are great in cutscenes but muddy in-game. I was looking forward to this one, and it was just kinda meh. On the plus side, it’s sold out everywhere, so I was able to sell it for $50 on Mercari and more or less got paid to play this.

Star Wars Jedi Survivor -

A grappling hook of a good time/10

Seriously I think people in the writers room at the developer just sat in a round table and said oh boy how can we really make this game any better than the first? And one guy was like guys guys gals gals… Grappling hook.

The grappling hook was always great in Zelda games.

Oh yeah, Zelda pioneered the grappling hook. Good times man.

Played Robotron 64 for the first time today. Got to level 194 and finally got game over.

It's a fun game bug some of those later levels are surely impossible to do on one life.

loztdogs wrote:

Never got too far in that game. I finished the 1rst main mission and met with the Asian dude at the dinner. Havent gotten back to it since

Moved on to Diablo IV / Portal

Much more promising/10

I'm 2 hours into Persona 3 Reload and I don't think I like it. At all. I've played other remakes of games I love and never had an issue with changes, but this one just isn't clicking. I'm trying to keep an open mind though and I definitely need to stop comparing every little thing to the original, but everything just feels...off. The soundtrack just doesn't sound right and the voice acting, while not bad, just doesn't sound right either. I don't like Yukari's voice actress at all. And I don't mind Mitsuru's new voice actress, but Tara Platt, who voiced the OG Mitsuru, has a really unique voice and I keep expecting to hear her and then I don't and it's kinda jarring. Still very early on, though. Fingers crossed that it grows on me because the original is probably my fav JRPG of all time.

Oh wow. That’s a shame. Was hoping it would rub off some P5 attributes in the gameplay and soundtrack. That’s a bummer though.

I haven’t revisited p3 since ps portable. I definitely recognize the music but it does seem like it has been made more “complicated” or something. Maybe it’s just the fidelity of the newer sound- but it’s off for sure. Sort of like listening to NIN with headphones- you miss more than you hear when it’s not as clear- and that can be good or bad.

Heavyd814life wrote:

This is exactly how I felt for the first few hours, maybe like 5 or more hours. But then I tried to play the OG and Portable version, and it made me appreciate the updates. I got over the voices, but never got over the music.

I will also add, that I found a lot of the voice changes to end up being better. Like a lot of the non SEES members. Yuko (sports team manager) being the most outstanding change in voice acting. The non SEES members ended up being way better because of the full voice acting. And lot of the VA nailed the characters. But for SEES, it did take me a long time to get over Yukari (shes too nice and not sarcastic/mean enough). Mitsuru sounds pretty close to me after a bit.