VideoGame_Discussion

Anxiouz wrote:


Yeah you need to get up to the rooftops to advance (I think it was having to track down 4 books) and then briefly you will return to the slums area again before eventually moving on and not being able to return. Buying the last item from the merchant with 3 cans was optional, because I was only able to find two of the cans before I just gave up and left.

Freedom Wars - 7/10

I decided to start playing through some of my Vita backlog. This requires me to *gasp* open sealed games. First up is 'Freedom Wars.' I'm not much of a 'Monster Hunter' guy, as this is often compared to, and while the game is designed for players to team up and take down larger creatures, that's not all of it so far (hello rescuing civilians...). The premise of being jailed and working off time by running these missions is interested, and detailed, yet still doesn't feel fleshed out. I'm only a few missions in, but most of the non-mission, non-cutscene interactions is just your character and their accessory (android companion) in your cell. Missions take place in essentially arenas, so no interconnected world like 'Monster Hunter' or 'Toukiden.' It makes the world feel really lifeless, but the game does look good. Controls are a bit cumbersome, but I'm getting used to them. My concern is that, since this was so heavily designed to be played with others, and from what I've read online, the end of the game might be impossible if playing solo. There's no difficulty options, and your character doesn't level up per say (just better gear and weapons), so we'll see how far I can get. But this game is still exclusive to Vita. So there's that.

Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX {} 5/10
Despite my first childhood console back in the day being a Sega Master System, I had never played an Alex Kidd game prior to this one. I remember reading about them in issues of Sega Visions but for whatever reason they just never made it onto my lists of games I wanted when I'd visit Toys R Us. If this is how they played, then I don't think I made the wrong decision by excluding them.

I feel like if you have even a little bit of nostalgia for this series in the 80s, you might be able to overlook just how utterly mediocre this game is. By the time I had reached the second or third level I started to question how likely I am to finish this game, and that's a bad sign for any game. I'm at the halfway point now and I think this is about where I'm gonna end it and move on to something else. To make up for the game's frustratingly high difficulty, you are given the option to play with infinity lives, but that didn't do anything to change my opinion of how much not-fun I was having playing this. However I made it as far into the game as I did only because of that option.

In addition to the infinite lives option you also have the option to make the controls feel more responsive and less floaty, but it warns you that doing so removes his sliding ability and will make some parts of the game unreachable. You also have the option to make the collission detection a little better. Both of those are good options to have. It's still a frustrating game, just a little bit easier to tolerate with those options enabled.
The graphics are the one area I will say look nice. And with the tap of the R2 button you can instantly toggle between the modern HD graphics and the retro graphics of the original game. That's a neat touch but too bad there isn't a button you can tap that will make the game fun.

PizzaTheHutt wrote:

Try the power button.

Honestly I never had an issue with the platforming and stuff in the game, just the stupid rock paper scissors crap that you have to either memorize or be lucky with.

I know Jan-ken-pon is huge in Japan to the point where a $10+ million auction deal was notably awarded to Christie's instead of Sotheby's over the results of one play, but in video games it's just not fun at all.

Inscryption - ?/10 - I sorta want to like this, but once I get past boss 1, all the flying enemies and the ones who hide just slaughter me immediately. Annoying.

I have that on my wishlist but hoping it just gets added to ps plus one day so i can try it (like slay the spire)

I finished FF12 (left a lot of side content but not compelled to keep going, though I enjoyed it a lot)and am now playing through Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy - dated (controls are trash) but i really like it, it’s so tense at times

Also doing Spyro Reignited trilogy and Dark Pictures Little Hope co-op, fun games i wouldnt play solo

The Pedestrian {} 8/10
I had this in my eShop wishlist for a bit, so once I saw it was one of the games offered when I upgraded to PS+ Premium it was the first game I chose to download. This is a pretty fun 2D puzzle/platformer.
It looks like it is going to be a short game, but I'm still undecided if I will finish it or not. It's not because I'm not enjoying it, but this is a game that I've already played enough of to know that I wouldn't mind buying it in the future. Plus puzzle games usually take me a while to beat because I gotta be in a certain mood before I even want to start playing them.

This is a pretty unique puzzle game where you are arranging a path for this stick figure dude to be able to reach his goal. You have to connect different segments so you can enter a door in one and exit in another. That's probably a crappy way of describing the game, but I'll just say that it's more fun than I make it sound.

@PizzaTheHutt This feels like deja-vu, 1st Omno, now The Pedestrian. I beat The Predestrian on last year via GP and it was pretty good. It's not too long, but yeah it gets a little stale with puzzles. But they do add in more variety enough so that I wasn't annoyed. A few were a shade challenging, but I don't think I had to resort to Google. Pretty sure I 1k GS'd it as well, as there weren't any Achievements that were too bad, or that I didn't mind replaying a section/puzzle to get if I missed them.

Evil West. This game is way better than it should be. 8/10

God of War: Ragnarok. It’s gotta be a 10/10 right? I think it’s damn close if it’s not a 10. Some of the puzzles and running around got annoying, but they more than made up for it literally everywhere else.

Grime - I want to like this more but something is missing. Or there are just too many mechanics or something... Not really sure what exactly I'm not liking here.

Ratchet & Clank: A Rift Apart: - Super boring. Never played a game in the series, so I didn't expect quite so much dull cover shooting at the start. Seems more aimed at kids, so that's my problem.

DBZ: Kakarot: I am utterly baffled by the controls. Stuff outside of combat feels like filler.

Still chugging along on GrindStone. Not sure if it's fun, but it sure is addictive.

Life Is Strange: Before The Storm {} 7/10
I dunno man. It has been so long since I've played the original Life Is Strange, I don't remember a whole lot of it (I recorded a chunk of my playthrough of it and plan to watch it at some point as a refresher) but I remember the story being one of the best of these types of games. It was really well written. I'm not getting that from this game though. What I also don't remember about the previous game is the controls being this clunky. Yuck. Or maybe they were and the story was just so good it was easy to overlook something like that, but that ain't the case this time. I'm about to enter Episode 3, so if something major happens maybe I'll come back to edit this score, but as of now it is good, but not great.

Not sure it fully belongs here but just went through Radiohead’s Kid A Mnesia Exhibition on PS5

Holy crap what a journey. Some of the rooms/songs especially were seriously incredible, transcendent even. There’s definitely a lot of stuff I missed but I did try to explore as much as possible, gave it about an hour and a half maybe.
Absolutely use headphones for this, or a really good surround sound system, trust me
I’m surprised they didnt make a VR version AFAIK, seems perfect for it
There’s no gameplay except walking around but you can influence what’s happening a bit, at times. The atmosphere is really something

@theJaw i think you’d dig this, I remember you being a fan of radiohead

Signalis - Honestly have no idea what this game is about but I like it. Just beat the first boss. It's like a top-down Resident Evil-style game, I guess. 6 item inventory limit. Enemies can get back up/respawn after being killed unless you shove a flare-up their butt-hole.

Just beat Yakuza Kiwami. I gave 0 a 8.5 so I'll give this one a 7. It was good but so much more empty than 0. It was definitely a step back from 0. Had most of the same minigames but just had overall less going on. I think I'll take the advice posted here and start a different game before jumping into Yakuza Kiwami 2.

Yeah makes sense since 0 came out later, they had time to refine it. Kiwami 1/2 are just remakes of the PS2 originals. I think 0 came out after Yakuza…5 maybe?

I have all the Yakuza games via PS plus but have only beaten Kiwami and Kiwami 2 for now. Definitely not a series to play back to back games, easy burnout that way.

I started playing Judgment and its kinda cool that I already know the city/map so well as it’s the same one as the Yakuza games. It’s basically a Yakuza game, but just different enough to not be

sa330206 wrote:

The problem with Kiwami is that it was a remake, vs. 0 they got to build from scratch. So Kiwami had to stick to the framework of the original title.

Has anyone played Where the Heart Leads?

I started it the other day and it’s really something, I find myself wanting to jump back into the world and even when I’m not playing I think about some of the choices I made, it’s an engrossing game.
There’s no voice acting, it’s mostly just reading a lot of text and walking around and interacting with human-shaped shiny blobs and doing tasks, but it still somehow feels so “alive”. I feel like I actually live in that town

It’s definitely not for everyone but I would say if it -seems- up your alley conceptually, it probably will be

0 is the most massive Yakuza game so if you are wanting them all to be that packed you will be disappointed. Personally after 5 and 0 I was happy that 6 was shorter. I think it's going to be rough for you when you get to 3/4/5. 3 especially could of used an actual remake at this point. My favorite part of 5 is some peoples least favorite so ymmv on that one lol.

I'm pretty excited for Ishin. First "new" game I will have played since Elden Ring. I need to play Lost Judgment but if I start it I know I won't finish the current game I'm playing. Maybe I should just drop it, idk, not been feeling games lately.

God of War: Ragnarok

What an amazing game and story. These guys prove again that you can do a lengthy single player game without going for the Ubisoft openworld style. Gameplay, music, sound, characters, boss fights, the story and how it is presented....it is all amazing. It ends so freaking cool and satisfying too! Im playing endgame stuff now and Im impressed theyre still telling you stuff through dialogue when you revisit areas. Very neat.

Personally, this is a 10/10 in my book. But to be fair to other practically perfect games Ill just lower it a bit, only because there were 2 things that would distract me from time to time; some scenes had lip sync issues and also that some NPCs animated rather poorly or robotic sometimes. I notice some of the stuff wasnt motion captured and the difference was distracting.

9.8/10

The Legend of Tianding 7/10
Game has some redeeming qualities like the art style, movement and fighting in general, but it's hard to get sucked into the story with so many characters and places with names I don't know how to read/pronounce. There's also a few too many fetch quests and reading so much dialog isn't all that great. The 3rd boss was very frustrating to me, especially with how some of her attacks used the exact same colors and would thus mask one another.

Ratchet & Clank {} 8/10
Alright, hear me out before you think I'm being a little too lenient with that score. It's because maybe I am. This is my introduction to the Ratchet & Clank series. Do I think this is an 8 out of 10 compared to 3D platformers of 2023? Heck no, it feels a little too dated for that. But for a 3D platformer from 20 years ago, this holds up surprisingly well.

I know this was originally a PlayStation 2 game, but I'm playing the HD Remaster released for PlayStation 3, and I'm doing it via streaming on the PlayStation 5 through the Classic Catalog in PS+ Premium. I only mention that part because I'm impressed by how little input lag there is in the controls, it feels like how I would expect it to if I was playing it on a legitimate PS3 console. But my complaints with the controls have nothing to do with input lag anyway (because that wouldn't be the game's fault), but rather just how sluggish the platforming can feel at times and also when aiming your weapons. Hopefully those are fixed in the later games which I will get around to playing eventually (I plan on going through the whole series, or at least whatever is available to me with PS+ Premium).

I don't know if the HD Remaster did anything besides touching up the graphics, but I can say the camera isn't as problematic as most 3D platformers of the early 2000s (I'm looking at you Super Mario Sunshine, which released only a few months before this with a camera so bad that it's still the only 3D Mario title that I am just unable to force myself to complete), so that was a big relief.

Level design is pretty good and there are lots of weapons to unlock. I haven't finished the game yet but so far each weapon comes in handy throughout the game instead of early weapons being useless later on. I can see parts where Knack might have used this game as inspiration, but Knack as a whole was just poorly executed in comparison to this.

The graphics, keeping in mind this is a decade old Remaster of a two decade old game, look pretty decent and in addition to that, the voice acting and humor are pretty good. The music though, seems pretty forgettable. That's one area that most of the Mario games just can't be beaten in.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, kudos to the developers for adding some actual challenge to the game, something sorely lacking in most Mario games. It's not overly difficult and there are plenty of checkpoints for when you die, but I feel the challenge is just enough to keep skilled players happy and not too frustrating for casuals. There are a couple of hoverboard racing segments that kinda pissed me off, but thankfully they are just a small part of the game and one of them is optional (but not doing it will make the other one harder because you win an upgrade from the optional one).

Kirby and the Forgotten Land: I just finished up the second world and it's starting to feel pretty repetitive. I don't like how stage objectives are hidden until you complete the stage. You can get lucky and clear them all the first round, but there are some obscure ones. Fighting bosses multiple times kind of dulls the experience, too. I wish I knew the magic number of waddle dees to collect so I could just move on with incomplete stages. Checking every inch of every screen kind of messes up the flow of the game. The big mouth copy abilities are pretty fun, but there hasn't really been a stand-out stage yet.

The Looker: A spoof of The Witness. Short, funny, and a perfect cherry on top final puzzle. Completely free, so no harm in giving it a go if it looks fun to you.

Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin: Immediately off-putting protagonist. Shelved. Kind of wondering why I even bought it.

Might try out Chained Echos or Tunic next.

Hmm. I havent tried Sakuna yet and I have it somewhere collecting dust.

It very well could get better, but it starts with you controlling a spoiled brat kid (not my opinion, a deliberate story setup). The voice actor really leans into that fact. I turned off voices completely but it still is one of those games that's really chatty without saying anything useful. The combat feels a little off. Hard to explain why but it feels delayed. I've fallen off of several ledges just from mistiming basic jump inputs. Didn't even make it to the farming part because I didn't like any of the rest of the game. Probably an overly harsh assessment for less than an hour played, but I still have other games that I haven't even opened yet.

Tunic is surprisingly not fun. I was really looking forward to this one, too. A lot of paths in the early game rely on the camera to obscure hidden paths. Combine that with a largely monochrome palette and it's hard for me to even see where I need to go. Combat is awful (though you can essentially opt out of it by toggling an in-game option for invincibility) and a little out of place in an exploration game. A lot of cumbersome dead-ends make back-tracking a little tedious. Running is attached to the roll mechanic (hold roll button to roll then run), so it takes a little while to regain momentum. I stopped playing after I hit the first big tuning fork thing. Oh well.

I've read some many polarizing opinions on Tunic recently. Is it still on Gamepass?

Tunic is still on GP and it's fantastic. It's totally committed to being like the NES Zelda - where you don't know squat and need to explore. I mean the 'manual' is given out as random pages at a time, if you can find them and it's in a language you can't even read, so it 100% doesn't hold your hand and is about exploring. I will concede that the first few hours could be frustrating/difficult b/c you see so many things you want to get to, but don't have the gear, so it's like a Metroidvania in some aspects. But the atmosphere, lore, music, sound, look and old school Zelda feelings it gave me made it easily my GotY pick - of the 80 games I beat last year, not just the games that actually came out in '22 since I didn't play too many '22 releases.

Very small download, too, so virtually no commitment to try the game out.

Maybe I'll try it out next if I don't decide to replay Signalis

I liked Tunic, but didn't love it. I appreciate it, but it wasn't as fun as I had hoped.

Tunic was good but it didn't hold my attention and I eventually dropped it. If you like this type of game it's wonderful. If you're indifferent it doesn't do enough to keep you hooked imo.

Kena: Bridge of Spirits (PS5) - A generous 7/10 - A solid AA game and absolutely gorgeous (at times it's really one of the prettiest games I've ever played) but it's so simple and a little clumsy that I don't think I'll be playing it again. The graphics and character models are all fun and I really like the style. The gameplay loop is ok but linear...this would be great for kids. The final boss was brutal though (huge difficulty spike) which kinda soured the overall experience a bit.

I bailed out of Kena after a couple of hours. Cute characters but just not at all fun to play.

I've gotten past the first major continent in Kirby and the Forgotten World. Once I stopped worrying about fully clearing a stage it became a lot more fun. Did anyone else have trouble fine-tuning their aim on ranged attacks? I'm not sure if my controller is way too sensitive or if I just suck. Feels like even the slightest tilt alters the aim almost 45 degrees.

Gotham Knights is a 6.5 and that’s me being generous. I’m about halfway thru the main story and if it had a lock on, counter system a 60fps mode and more interesting and engaging combat and less sluggish traversal I’d give it a lot higher because some of the puzzles detective work and story itself has potential. The drop in drop out coop is fun tho and eases the burden and takes away the focus on its many shortcomings.

DCGX wrote:


Yup, I'm done with this game. I'm even dropping it another point. I'm on mission 5.3, which is just over halfway through the game. So far, the whole game as been the same two mission objective types on the same three brown arenas. The story has a couple threads to pull, but revelations are so few and far between it's not enough to keep going. Eventually a quick travel option can be unlocked, which helps the monotony of going back and forth from the same few areas, which are again brown, and that helps, but it still feels like a trudge.

There's a lot of systems, that are mostly explained, but things like facilities and resource management is buried with menus. There's so many menus! And I'm not even sure I'm doing things right. The big problem is with weapons where, unless you're selecting a weapon you already have, crafting or upgrading weapons does not compare to what you have equip. What's worse, is you can't upgrade or improve weapons you have equip because everything takes real time to finish.

The biggest problem is that, up until this point, the game has been a breeze, but mission 5.3 has such a difficulty spike it borders on masochistic. The mission is to eliminate all enemies, but they keep spawning until the large bipedal is toppled. At any one point, there are ten or so regular soldiers with rockets and sticky grenades barraging you. If they get taken out, they respawn endlessly not far away. It's nearly impossible to focus on the larger bipedal because your character literally gets juggled by the rockets and grenades. Pretty quick, my whole team is taken out and it's me against an army with no hope.

People talked about how towards the end of the game is really hard solo, but I didn't expect it halfway through. I wasn't really enjoying the game to begin with (I think it's pretty boring and a poor 'Monster Hunter'-like), so hitting this wall so hard, so fast makes me want to drop it cold. And I very, very rarely quit a game before the credits roll. Ugh.

I've been playing Mafia Definitive Edition. So far it's pretty meh. The story is interesting and the city is very nice looking, just very hollow/emotionless. Probably because this is a remaster of an old game. I find the shooting mechanics to be pretty dull as well. If it weren't for the story I would have quit by now.

I know I played through one of the mafia games. It was decent enough for me to finish it, I think. Playboy magz being the collectibles is brilliant though

Axion Verge 2

Im disappointed as I usually love Metroidvania games. The weapons are boring, the powerups are mostly boring as well, the story was uninteresting to me and thus I didnt care to read all the lore inside collectibles. "Bosses" are extremely boring too.

But the worst part is the excessive backtracking and getting lost on where to go next. I know the original Metroid was like that but nowadays I dont like wasting my time and this game wasted my gaming hours for quite a bit. I almost deleted it from my PS5 but decided to just use a guide to plow through it. The ending was bad so It wasnt really worth it. Its so bad I dont feel like ever going back to finish the 1rst one.

4/10

Sounds like it's as bad as the original Axiom Verge.