VideoGame_Discussion

I havent played those yet but it is similar in The Quarry, the walk faster button barely makes any difference.

Yup

I think Little Hope and Man of Medan were better than the Quarry overall, but i enjoy these games for couch co-op

R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 {} 7/10
I never got to play this back in the day, so when I saw it was added to March's Classic Game Catalog for PS+ Premium I downloaded it right away while I'm still on this racing game kick.

First thing you see right off the bat when loading the game up...this clearly did not get the upscaling love and care treatment that the PSP Ridge Racer game I played a couple weeks ago did. This still looks very much like a PS1 game. The menus are so pixelated that it's almost hard to read what you are selecting.

The overall handling of the game feels a little better than the PSP game did. There is a story mode, I don't play racing games for a story (thanks, but no thanks) so don't ask me what it's about because I just skip through what they're saying to get to the next race. I know I'll not finish this, I've read it gets tedious trying to unlock everything in the game (a couple hundred unlockable cars). I know this reviewed really well back in 1999, but I'm not sure how much time I will be devoting to it in 2023. Still, again, I'm disappointed in the way they didn't help out the graphics the way they did with the previous Ridge Racer 2 I was just playing. But at least gameplay-wise it is still decent considering how old it is.

loztdogs wrote:

I thought I read in the newer 2k games you can't even play some of the modes once the online servers go down. I can't remember if that was only the McCareer stuff or dynasties too? Do you know if that's true?

@sa330206 unfortunately I don’t. I try to stay away from the newer 2k games and stick to the older versions simply cause I just want to play and not be bogged down by all the added nonsense.

It's hard to beat the NBA Street series.

I’m about halfway thru Hi-Fi Rush now. Man this game is like a rhythm hack and slash Devil May Cry only animated in super smoking sexy style. Loving it so far. 8.5/10

Racing Karts {} 3/10
More eShop trash brought to you by Nintendo giving zero fudges and just accepting anything that gets submitted to them.

I don't remember when I got this. It must have either been during a holiday giveaway by some indie publisher, or it was on sale for pennies and I had just enough leftover gold coins to pay for it. Either way, it will be getting deleted as soon as I'm finished typing this post.

This ain't the fun kind of Kart racer, with turtle shells and banana peels. The racing in this game plays just as generic as you would think based on the title. Even the graphics are generic low-polygon looking crap, almost like Virtua Racing on the Sega Genesis (but at least that game was impressive for its time), complete with parts of the environment being drawn in as you race across the whopping 5 tracks the game offers.

And as bad as the graphics are, the handling is worse. The gas button is ZR which is common in racing games, but the drift button is assigned to the R button with no way to configure it to another button unless you change it through the console options menu yourself. It just feels awkward holding the Pro Controller that way but you have to do it because drifting is the only way to fill up your boost meter and without boosting you'll never catch up to the CPU racers, even on the rookie difficulty.

Oh and at the main menu they couldn't even spell "Time Trial" correctly, it's typo'd as "Trail".

Just out of curiosity I tried looking for the game's credits in the option menu so I could see if this was just a one man project (not that I would forgive it for that), but there were none to be found. Nobody wants their name associated with this turd, and I don't blame them. After searching a little more I found out it was indeed a one man project by a developer that has released quite a few bad games in the eShop, almost all of which are just asset flip shovelware made with Unity.

Alright I've got nothing else to say about this, I've already spent more time typing this up than this game was worth.

Atomic Heart 7/10 6/10

I am about 4 hours in. It’s good but weird. Different. Puzzles are weird but clever. Combat is weird but effective. Dialogue is funny but tiresome. I can understand why ppl didn’t like this but it grows on you the more you play I feel. Kinda like Days Gone. I hated Days Gone at first but about 1/3 into the game it clicked and I really started to enjoy it and understand it better. I feel like that’s what is happening here. Thank goodness for game pass tho. Like most big budget games nowadays, I cannot see spending $70 on this. If it wasn’t on game pass I would have waited for a deep, deep sale.

Edit*** dropping my score due to potential game breaking bugs such as random brightness changes and infinite elevator rides causing you to have to hard reboot the app are annoyances I cannot ignore.

Omori

So far it's fun. Looks good, and has a nice soundtrack.

I wanted to play something different in the meantime before the release of the upcoming Zelda game. And this game seemed different, with its art style and the game dealing with themes of depression (I don't know many games that focus on that - seemed unique), so when it was posted for sale here, I went for it.

It's an RPG. I'm currently trying to locate a lost mixtape for a space pirate captain who won't get out of bed. It will supposedly cheer him up.

Even though the game deals with themes of depression, it doesn't completely focus on that, which is good. There's a nice amount of humor, which is definitely appreciated.

I'm a couple hours in, so can't really give a score yet.

Steam reviews were pretty cool: overwhelmingly positive from 49,000+ ratings. I didn't know the game had such a following.

Thanks @thatfootballguy

Yakuza Kiwami 2 - 7/10
Not near as good as 0 but probably on par with kiwami 1. Kind of dread starting 3 as it will probably be a huge step back so I'm going to start a different game/series next.

@sa330206 It's a pretty big step back. Give it a good while before playing. You probably out to play it on easy, too, since it's just a CPU blockfest.

KartRider: Drift {} 5/10
This is at least better than that last racing game I played on Switch, but that isn't saying much.

It supports cross-platform multiplayer between PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC and mobile, so there are always people to play against, especially because it's free-to-play. Actually because it is free-to-play is why I went in with low expectations, but it ended up not being as bad as I thought, it's just very average. Kart racers are one of my favorite genre of games, so I'll give any of them a fair chance (and I recently bought a Humble Bundle of kart racers, so I might be playing a lot of them over the next few weeks).

Overall it is a very run-of-the-mill kart racer and anything it does has already been done better by the more popular kart racers out there. The game runs smoothly, I haven't noticed any lag and that's with quite a few Korean mobile players in the lobbies (the developer is also Korean, so maybe it has a following there). There are some balancing issues with the items I think, though. In one race I was only in 2nd or 3rd place when I was given this game's equivalent of the blue shell. I can't comment about the microtransactions, I do my best to just ignore them in any game that has them, but it's a safe bet they're used to customize your character and kart and buy better ones. I'm not sure if that puts me at a disadvantage by not spending money since I've been able to get a few finishes in the Top 3. But then again I'm not exactly taking this game seriously anyway, I have only played for a couple of hours, of course I'm going to get beat by the players that have bought/grinded to unlock the better stuff.

Mafia: Definitive Edition (PS4 on PS5) - 7/10 - It was kind of refreshing to have an open-world that was super linear with very little side activities or map filler. I guess that's the core game showing its age, but even with the map being kinda dull and bland, I dug the 1930's vibe, the story was interesting enough, the characters/voices were well done, and the simplicity of the game was a nice change of pace. I think I got through this in a weekend or so which felt rather short, but I enjoyed this enough that I'm going to give Mafia 2 a spin (at some point).

Pretty much exactly the same thoughts when I beat it recently, although I’d give it a 7.5 I guess.

Not sure when I’ll get around to Mafia 2, maybe if/when it comes to ps plus

After reading some reviews I decided I'm going to skip Mafia 2 and instead grab Mafia 3. Both are <$10 digital but #3 looks more up my alley so I'm DLing it now.

Just got to what I think is the final boss in Kena: Bridge of Spirits and the difficulty spike is obnoxious. I need this to be over asap. I'm only about 12 hours in, but it feels like 30 because the entire gameplay loop gets old really fast. It looks like a Pixar movie, plays like a Souls game (for real, I'm playing on Hard and it's a real challenge), and the entire vibe is like the older Zelda games with a little Pikmin mixed in. Sounds solid on the surface, but it's just sooo boring and repetitive and tedious. I wonder if anyone else felt this way. And while the narrative has its moments, the storytelling is far too shallow and fragmented to be enjoyable/memorable. I don't know. It's not terrible - it's a solid 7 - but I definitely had higher expectations.

@Heavyd814life I felt the same way. Bored out of my skull 4 hours in so I just bailed on the game. I've had no desire to play it again.

I liked Kena but yeah those difficulty spikes out of nowhere were pretty ridiculous.

Wasn't a big fan of Kena, I eventually dumped the difficulty just to beat it but it was certainly better than Stray as far as AA titles go.

Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear To The Rescue {} 6/10

I remember playing this on the Nintendo 64 way back when it first released, trying to help one of my younger nephews who couldn't get the hang of 3D platforming. I didn't put a lot of time into it, but I recall thinking it was a pretty decent game and not the usual licensed trash game I was used to getting as a kid in the 8 and 16-bit eras.

Revisiting it all these years later though and looking at it differently, I can see the faults more easily now. I don't like having to deal with the camera. You control the camera with the L2 and R2 buttons instead of the right analog stick. The DualShock had released 2 years prior to this game, but I guess it took a while for developers to figure out what to do with the extra analog stick because it's not used in this game at all. Also, the audio during the FMV scenes is really too loud (a problem I wouldn't have noticed on the N64 version since the FMV would have been replaced by still images). Finding collectable items can also sometimes be a pain because this suffers from a problem pretty much all 3D platformers of this era had, where you can't see the items (or enemies, power-ups, etc.) from a far distance until you get close enough to them, so you pretty much have to inspect every area of the level if you are going to hunt them all down. Enemies you've defeated will also respawn if you walk far enough away.

The rest of the game itself still seems decent, I guess. I mean, it doesn't hold a candle to 3D platformers released these days, but then again I don't think any 3D platformers from 32/64-bit era can. Overall it feels a bit on the easy side (and surprisingly they removed all cheat codes even though they didn't add in Trophy support), and if the camera wasn't an issue I probably could've breezed through this over a couple of days, but since the camera controls annoy me as well as a few other things like Buzz's repetitive one-liners, I just played through one or two levels per day and for that it's fine since every level pretty much has the same objectives anyway, the only thing that changes is the scenery.

-=-
Tray Racers! {} 3/10
I'm always hunting through the eShop for trash to play (it usually doesn't take long because there's certainly no shortage of crap in there), and this just released and happened to be free. Somehow I still feel ripped off.
Basically you are racing through sand dunes in a "post-apocalyptic world". The tracks are randomly generated which might explain why none of them felt well designed. Before you can officially race you are forced to do several minutes of practice runs with the other players you are matched up with. The game supports up to 16 players, but I never found a lobby that had more than 5 in it. Maybe the ridiculously long load times turned most players off, I know it did for me. One loading screen was so long I thought the game had crashed. Anyway, it'll be a strong contender for worst game of the year.

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion - 10/10 This is amazing stuff. Didn't know this would be so good. It's like Zelda, but good.

Kommie wrote:

I saw this on GP the other day and downloaded it. Haven't tried it yet.

Maybe I should have checked GamePass before buying it on Steam, oh well!

Yes Turnip Boy was a blast and pretty short. Highly recommend playing, especially if you've got it via GP.

The Artful Escape {} 8/10
I had no idea what to expect from this, but I'm glad I gave it a chance. It's a 2D platformer with an emphasis on music and a story about a dude who learned to play guitar like his famous Uncle but feels those are some big shoes to fill and everyone expects him to live up to that. He ends up getting abducted by some alien dude and that's when the crazy journey begins. The voice acting is good, so is the music, and the graphics are really good and cartoon-ish kind of like Rayman Legends. It's a short game though, I feel like I'm maybe 4 hours into it and the thing on the console home screen says I'm about 81% through it already (a feature I wish more PS5 games used).

Octodad: Dadliest Catch - You're an Octopus and your family doesn't know. And there's a chef who knows and wants to kill and eat your. Controls are very, very janky.

Been playing Omori. At about the 5 hour mark. Got to a point in the game where there didn't give any other option other than for the main character to stab himself. Next thing you know, you continue with a different character's story arc. What a shame. I was doing a lot in the other arc. Had a lot of more places to explore. I really hope this isn't one of those games where there's a ton of things to do but each playthrough is different depending on how you go about it.

Yoshi’s Story is a little weird. The only objective is eating enough fruit to get to the next stage. 6/10 so far and I’m about 5 levels in.

I just beat Sekiro for the first time, owned it since launch. Once it clicks, it really fudging clicks. 10/10. Way different from Elden Ring, but honestly I'd say probably just as good.

Started playing Mafia 3 (PS4) and am really enjoying the story. It surprisingly feels a lot like Mafia (empty city, sluggish controls, straight-forward main missions) but everything is much improved. What is absolutely killer though is the soundtrack. Hearing songs by the likes of Creedence Clearwater Revival absolutely nails the vibe.

Anxiouz wrote:

The soundtrack and the story/world in Mafia 3 are awesome. I didn’t care much for the open world or mission design, though. Felt like a paint-by-numbers open world game for the most part. I played it at launch and it was also buggy as hell. But glad you’re enjoying it!

Anxiouz wrote:
I'll have to give the soundtrack a listen. I need some new tunes.

TalonJedi87 wrote:

Yeah, it's a weird step back IMO following Yoshi's Island which was awesome.

Kommie wrote:

This game is pretty funny.

Archer wrote:

...

So Dead Island 2 finally came out and I'm having a freaking blast with it. There is some lag though but they're patching stuff to fix it. It's still a ton of fun though and the characters are great!

sinnie wrote:

It's really good. The quality of life improvements are incredible. I love the original and Riptide, but they definitely show their age nowadays. DI2 is just a pleasure to play, well worth it!

Chicory: A Colorful Tale {} 6/10

I played this in co-op with a friend (remotely via SharePlay because the co-op is local only) and honestly if we weren't playing it co-op and I was just playing it single player, I probably would have bailed on this after the first hour or two. At times it just wasn't holding my attention much.

We finished the game last night, but since we were only able to play it once a week, I feel like I've forgotten half of the story already because I'm playing other games to fill in the gaps during the rest of the week. I will say though, if you're a parent and looking through the eShop, PlayStation Store, Steam etc., looking for a co-op game to play with your kid and you come across this game because it has cartoony graphics and looks like a kid's game, there are times where the story goes kind of "dark" and before a cutscene it will warn you when a character is going to "self-hate" or touch on sensitive snowflake topics like mental health, or say angry things to your character and they will give you the option to skip the cutscenes but overall I didn't find them to be too bad.

I feel it's important to note that the co-op mode is just "girlfriend mode", like Super Mario Galaxy where the second player doesn't actually have their own character to play as, they just use a paint brush to help the main character and paint in the environments. For the most part they're really not doing much and they're just riding your coattails, but you let them think they're being a great help and you couldn't do it without them. They can really come in handy during boss fights though, because multitasking by controlling your character with the left analog stick and your paint brush with the right analog stick simultaneously can be overwhelming sometimes, but it's fine during the rest of the game because there are so few enemies you need to worry about.

Star Wars: Republic Commando {} 6/10
I had wanted to play this back in the day on the original Xbox but I never got around to it, it just wasn't a priority. As one of Nintendo's recent free trials I figured I'll finally check it out and, well, it feels very much like a 2005 first-person shooter alright. I don't mean that in a bad way, but it does feel a little rough around the edges.

For the most part this is basically a straight up port of the original Xbox game, but stripped of the multiplayer modes (both online and split-screen options are absent in this version), making it single player only now. It wasn't given the full remaster (or better yet, remake) treatment it could've used to better compete with more modern shooters of today. I don't know that anything was added to this to make it better besides a minor touch up to the graphics, but I'm disappointed at the lack of gyro controls. Without gyro aiming, I feel like Joy-Cons are among the worst controllers for this genre of game. I think we are (thankfully) at the point where most devs putting their first-person shooters on Switch know that Nintendo fans like our gyro aiming, so I think more fps games support it than not and so I always get disappointed when a developer puts their game on Switch and didn't include the option, but at least that is one way to know which developers listen to the players and which ones don't. Anyway, beyond that, the game's performance is a bit lackluster. There are plenty of times when playing that I notice the frame-rate dropping. I know Switch is outdated, but it shouldn't be struggling to run a game from 2005 unless the developers are just lazy.

So far from what I've played (around 3 or 4 hours), it's not that difficult of a game. You have CPU teammates you can boss around and tell them where to go, clear out a room or whatever (it's not as deep as Rainbow 6, think more along the lines of "baby's first tactical shooter"). You don't really have to worry about them dying because they just fall down until you revive them (and health refill stations are pretty common to find). The player also can be revived by them, so the only way to actually see a Game Over screen is if the whole team gets wiped out at once, which I have yet to see happen.

I kind of regret that I will not be able to finish this before the remainder of the free trial period is over, because I am enjoying it, but not quite enough that I want to buy it due to how poorly optimized it is on Switch and as I said it is missing the multiplayer mode from the original release, so once I've beaten this there is little chance I'd return to play it again. For what it's worth, after watching some comparison videos on YouTube, the PS4 version is also missing the multiplayer mode but at least it runs at a consistent 60fps (unfortunately I don't think I want to buy it on PS4 either because I'd have to start over completely).

@PizzaTheHutt I beat SW:RC co-op back on the with my then college roommate and recently beat it again on the - which is really just the same game tweaked some to run via Xbox's back compat program. Nostalgia surely played a little role for me, but yes it's an old game that's mediocre now and wasn't amazing back then either.
The difficulty did ramp up in 2 noteworthy places, the 1 being right near the end, so missing out might not be so bad for you. Knowing it is 18 years old, it wasn't horrible, but your 6/10 score unlikely would've gone up, IMO, had you played it on a different system.