VideoGame_Discussion

I enjoyed Days Gone for what it was, but it took way too long to get into. And yeah it really stretched it out way too long and overstayed it’s welcome by like 15-20 hours. Just when I thought things were starting to wrap up it was like nope, we’re just getting started.

Black - "Turn me around!" / 10

I have not played 'Black' since 2006 via a trade on GameTZ, after which I sold the game. I downloaded it on my Series X thanks to Game Pass/EA Play, and decided to randomly give it a go last night because I almost bought a physical copy last week.

Holy crap does it look great! The visual upgrade is phenomenal. Not a full widescreen experience, but the game is sharp on Series X! For the most part the gameplay itself holds up, which is to say it's a fine, mid-2000s FPS, but holy crap is turning/looking slow! Like...geez! And there's no way to adjust it! It makes aiming really hard. I don't remember this being an issue back then, but compared to nowadays, hell, compared to the original 'Halo' I can't believe how slow it is. I found the most accurate way to aim and shoot was to generally look towards an enemy, and then move the character to line up shots. Almost like the gyro with the WiiU Gamepad in 'Splatoon.'

I played through the first two levels, and while it's still entertaining, aiming is such a slog, I don't know if I'll continue.

Still playing Vampire Survivors. I'm out of the loop since this was maybe a thing on Youtube/Twitch for a while, but I can definitely see why it blew up. It's not Diablo at all but it sort of scratches that itch a bit. Nothing is more fun than maxing out and evolving an arsenal of weapons and seeing enormous waves of enemies explode into gold fountains. This game is dirt cheap, so it's well worth a shot.

Star Ocean First Departure 7/10 - Definitely fun, but some major balance and pacing issues, story ended very abruptly and wasn't anywhere near as good as second story.

God of War: Ragnarok
So far it’s a 9/10 for me. The opening prologue of thunderous action sequences reminded me of the opening to movies likes Revenge of the Sith.
Weeeeee!

I just fired up Majoras Mask on 3ds. I thought I had played the intro before on N64. Apparently I have never played MM so this is a completely new experience for me. I mistakenly confused the intro of OOT on N64 with MM. I just finished the intro and I’m pleasantly surprised. The remaster looks great on 3ds. So far I’m really digging it.

Majora’s Mask remains one of my favorite games. Still love the Clock Town music!

Clock Town theme is top tier for sure.

I was going to start a new game. Switch Lite was out of battery.

So what am I currently playing? Nothing

Score: idk/10

I really enjoy the Switch Lite. One of the few things I don't like is that if you don't pay attention to the battery, that's it.

As opposed to the switch which, if docked, will stay charged.

You can't plug in the Lite and still play?

Anxiouz wrote:

Yes, you can. Done it many times with my own.

Snake Pass {} 6/10
I remember hearing a lot of positive impressions about this game when it first released back in 2017. I was in no rush to buy it, but had always kept it on my "I'll check it out eventually" list. That day finally came. And after barely an hour I was ready to uninstall it but ultimately decided to come back and give it a little more time.

The graphics remind me of a Rare game with how colorful they are. Adding to that, the music was done by David Wise who is most known for his work with Rare back when they were actually relevant. So that's two things the game had going for it from the beginning. How a game plays is more important than how it looks or sounds though, and once I started actually playing it these godawful controls had me ready to tap out in no time. I just couldn't deal with them. They have two control options in the pause menu and after changing it to the easy controls I thought it felt a little better, but they still weren't as good as they could've been. I'm glad I stuck with the game a little longer instead of just uninstalling it like I was thinking of doing, but I'm still undecided if I'll actually finish this or not, even though user reviews say it's a short game.

I give the game credit because there isn't much else like it out there, but originality only gets you so far. I feel like there is a decent game in here, but the controls might turn a lot of people off to it.

Just started playing Splatoon 2.

I'm very glad that there is an option to turn off motion controls. I find that when games have motion controls, the camera often self calibrates as you're moving your handheld device, eventually forcing you to either recalibrate or turn your hands very far in order to move where you want; kudos to Nintendo for implementing a feature that you can instantly recalibrate by pressing Y

Double points to Nintendo for giving the option to turn off the motion controls altogether.

The Callisto Protocol 8/10 - This is pretty sweet once the "dodge" mechanic clicks.

Beat God of War III Remastered (PS4 on PS5) in less than a week. In 2022 I'd probably have to give it a 7.5/10. I had played the original on PS3, then the remaster on PS4, and now again on PS5 (since digital is on sale for $10). I enjoyed it quite a bit but it does feel aged. Can't skip cutscenes (or the lengthy end credits), and giving the levels a more critical eye 12 years after it came out...there is a lot that is super clumsy.

Obviously climbing titans is still incredible but the labyrinth stuff and some other bits are pure filler. You battle and gain powers from several gods in likely the same session, and then deal with weird levels of roaming/fetching for hours before the next god. The pacing is intense or unbalanced but never consistent.

It's still outstanding though, no question. It's just amazing how far games have come in 12 years. But for this style of game I'll mention that I play Dante's Inferno on Xbox every year or two (since it got the BC HD and 60fps improvements) and I'd definitely prefer to play DI over this again. It's not a better game but it's so consistent and enjoyable.

I’ve reached chapter 5 in the last of us remastered. I know there’s much love for this game… I’m just not feeling it. It’s well put together and looks amazing but I must be missing something. It feels paint by numbers to me. I’m pretty sure I’ll see it all the way through till the end I’m just not getting that omg best game ever vibe that so many others have expressed.

For what it’s worth, I kinda felt the same way playing The Last of Us Remastered on PS4 a couple of years ago. (I suspect it was more unique when it first came out.). However, then I got into the multiplayer, which is great, and The Last of Us Part II is one of my favorite games of all time (and you need the first game for its big moments to be impactful).

loztdogs wrote:

I’m hoping by the end of LOU I’ll have enjoyed it enough to want to dive into 2.

loztdogs wrote:

Yeah same here. Last of Us 1 is probably an 8/10 for me - it’s pretty good but not like life-changing. TLOU II is a 10/10 for me - gameplay and presentation-wise it’s one of the most polished I’ve played, and the story is great (at least in my opinion).

Just tried the demo for Forspoken and stopped playing after about 10 minutes. I kinda hate it. The controls are unintuitive, the framerate is poop, the combat is all style no substance, the constant chatter during combat is annoying, and the world is completely barren. Not a very good first impression. This is my biggest issue with modern Square. The combat in all their games takes forever to get used to. It's flashy, sure, but there is too much going on and it just isn't particularly responsive or fun. I just don't have the patience to play any more of this, but I'm eager to hear what others who have tried it think.

This is a bummer because I was looking forward to this, but I may just skip it altogether now. Deleting this demo and jumping right back into the post-game stuff for Midnight Suns!

Heavyd814life wrote:

Yeah I deleted it within 30 min myself. I was excited for it a bit until I played it. Kinda lackluster. The parkour idea is kinda neat tho for a Square style JRPG. The combat controls and world were annoying to me so I uninstalled and removed it from my wish list.

Supersonic Tank Cats {} 3/10
No Gravity Games is back to give away another bundle of turds to Switch owners this holiday season.
I'm someone who will play pretty much any kart racer I can get my hands on. I know the majority of them suck ass in comparison to the king of the genre, Mario Kart, but every now and then you might find a hidden gem. But "hidden gem" sure as hell ain't what this game is. It's one of the most bland kart racers I've ever played. Everything from the graphics looking so bad (PS1 quality), track designs being dull and the music and controls not being any better, I'll never understand how do the developers not realize (or care) that it sucks when they're testing it out? I doubt they had the kind of tight deadline a AAA game would. I'd be embarrassed to have my name displayed in the credits to something like this. Gross.

nonamesleft wrote:


Do you only play in handheld? I don't like the gyro controls in handheld mode but I find when playing docked I do much better with the motion controls enabled. In fact, I wish more games on the PlayStation side would support that feature. I use it a lot in Horizon: Forbidden West and then get bummed when I try to use it in other games only to realize it's not supported.

PizzaTheHutt wrote:
Yeah, I mainly play in handheld mode.

I think I mentioned this here, though not in this thread, but I've spent hours and hours creating a relatively exhaustive bucket list. I started with RPGs, because that is what inspired the idea, and I've been playing through them in (quasi) chronological order.

I finished Final Fantasy Legend, aka Makai Toushi SaGa, today. I owned it when it first came out in the US, but I never got far. The draw for me was and is the non-traditional RPG weaponry like guns, grenades, etc. I played through it on the Collection of SaGa: Final Fantasy Legend on the Steam Deck.

There are far more clouds than silver linings. Weapons decay, generally after 50 uses. Equipment doesn't have stats, so you can assume more expensive stuff is better, but there is a lot of trial and error.

You can choose humans, mutants, and monsters for your party. Humans get equipment but have to have their strength, agility, and HP raised by buying and consuming items that have a roll to determine the improvement. Mutants get random abilities as long as you use other abilities in battle. For the end game I was stuck with almost completely useless abilities for my two mutants and wound up having to exclusively use weapons with them. Monsters, which I was advised not to use on a first play through, evolve by eating the meat of defeated enemies.

It is typically important to me to see where a series came from, so I didn't want to skip this one before moving on to later SaGa games. If you don't share this mental defect, I advise skipping it. I can play 8-bit games in other genres without issue, but, outside of Phantasy Star and Final Fantasy, RPGs from that era are rough. Even with those, I would recommend the Sega Ages and Pixel Remaster versions for the quality-of-life improvements.

SaGa is a VERY MIXED bag. Also hit/miss depending on the entry.

Gypsy wrote:

Are there any in particular you would recommend playing or avoiding?

Lotta folks hate on Unlimited Saga

Yoshi wrote:

Romancing SaGa 3 is probably the best one. As Benstylus said Unlimited SaGa is one widely regarded as bad. I liked Frontier 2 a lot more than the first Frontier. Worth starting most to see how they feel for you though.

Back 4 Blood {} 7/10
I swear I've played this before. These devs really like the "4 humans vs hordes of enemies" schtick and don't wanna step out of their comfort zone, is that it?
While I do have fun playing this, there are times where I'm also kinda bored. I feel it's way too much of just doing the same thing over and over again. Beat the level, then repeat it all over again in the next level, but with different scenery.

What I don't get is there are these card things you're supposed to collect or something, and I haven't even gotten to know what their purpose is. The game explains it pretty early on, but I just didn't care enough to listen. I just wanna shoot these undead mofos, there's no need to make things complicated by adding in new gimmicks.

If you get a good group of friends to join you, you'll have more fun. But I feel bad for anyone who might've bought this with the intention of playing through it solo, because this is a terrible game for that. Even still, I'm glad I paid only something like $20 for this, because I'd want to kick my own ass if I had paid the full $60. But the devs are still supporting it with new content, so if you and 3 friends are enjoying yourselves then there should be enough content here to keep you busy. As for my friend and I, I plan to just move on as soon as we see the credits roll, because there are times the game feels like it's really dragging on.

Been playing God of War Ragnarok, I havent beat it yet but so far its around a 9.5 to me. Id give it a 10 but I have some nitpicks.

I just got to Asgard and I have to say, the character designs in this game are amazing. Theze gods look amazing.

Evil West feels like great coop action linear games from the Gears of War days of olde and I’m digging it. 8/10 so far.

TalonJedi87 wrote:

This one's on my radar now, but I'll probably wait for a cheap GameFly sale TBH.

Ya it’s 47 now on sale on PSN. I wanted to wait for 30 or less myself but my buddy talked me into it for the coop.

Need for Speed: Unbound (PS5) - Maybe a 7 out of 10. There is a lot to like here, but man, the grind is real. I'm used to grinding NFS games but this one feels too slow. The starting car (after the prologue) is terrible and not too fun but you have to use it for far too long.

Although a single race may net you $7k, the buyin will be like $3k so although you think you're going to make a lot you end up with $4k. If you get 1st place. Otherwise you end up with less. And every race adds heat so you may do several races, earn only $6k and then need to head to the garage because your car is to crapty to handle the high heat.

The day heat also carries over to night, and those races make more money so I just stopped doing anything during the day...which is half of the game. And after about half of the races you immediately enter being chased by cops. So that gets old pretty quick.

The progression is based on 4 weeks where you have a week (1 day + 1 night set of events per day) to do things and earn enough money for a tournament qualifier at the end of the week. Beat all 4 qualifiers (1 per week) to get to the final race. The first qualifier was $20k to get in and I barely made that much while also trying to get parts. The second one was $50k and that entire second week I had earned about $70k but couldn't do much with it (certainly not buy a better car, or upgrade my garage for $50k to unlock better parts) so I basically had the same crapty car for half of the game. Where's the fun in that?

I don't see a way to possibly ever be able to afford a $150k car unless you can re-do a week entirely and have things carry over.

Graphics are nice, story is fine, art style is actually good, and it plays nice. There are also some nice cat-and-mouse missions where you have to watch the radar to drive around cops to deliver a car. I enjoyed those bits a lot. It's just the main gameplay loop is starting to no longer be actually fun.

I've been taking a break from RPGs for the last week or so but still rockin' in the best decade, and I've come to solidify an opinion I've held for decades. In terms of third-parties, Konami was head and shoulders above everyone else during the mid-1980s. I've always thought of Konami and Capcom as #1 and #1a, but Capcom really wasn't close until the late 1980s or even 1990s.

Look at some quasi-direct comparisons in terms of sub-genre and release year. Capcom's 1984 1942 is not as good as Konami's 1985 Twinbee, a pleasant surprise I have slept on for way too long, since "cute 'em ups" were never my thing with few exceptions. Capcom's 1985 Section Z barely deserves mention next to Konami's 1985 Gradius, though the idea of the direction-switch button was interesting that far back. Capcom's 1985 Ghost 'n Goblins is similarly obliterated by Konami's 1986 Castlevania. It's conceivable that Konami was able to use what Capcom did to improve their games that are a year later, but now that almost four decades have passed, I am more interested in which ones are worth playing.

Taito and -- to a lesser extent -- Namco are really the only others in the conversation in terms of overall breadth. I haven't gotten to revisit their stuff yet. Companies like Falcom, Tecmo, and Technōs were just getting started, and of course Sega was already a multi-genre powerhouse, but they were a platform holder so excluded from the comparison.

Anxiouz wrote:

Very interesting take. Just finished it up last night. Never felt like a grind at all. In fact, it felt less grindy than most NFS games to me. You get 4 restarts per day and coming in 1st was never too difficult. The progression from week to week felt really nice and the races felt fair. And I love the fact that the heat carries over from day to night. It means you have to be very selective about which races you take on. And you really don't have to do more than 3-4 races a day. With the deliveries you get from Tess and Rydell and the activities around the map, you'll have plenty of money to upgrade your cars. And don't forget that every week you get a chance to win 3 cars, I believe. It's always highlighted on the little progression map. After week 4, I ended up with 10 cars in my garage and over 2 mil in the bank.

It's not a perfect game, but I enjoyed it. The gameplay loop kept me coming back for more and the game doesn't overstay its welcome which is always a plus. The story is meh, but as you mentioned, the graphics and the art style are very nice. I went in with no expectations really and was pleasantly surprised.

Maybe I'll try to be less conservative or just try to progress farther. I did win 2 cars but their stats are terrible and I don't want to waste money on them. My biggest purse so far was I think $18k which is nice but doesn't go very far.

@Heavyd814life Ok, so I won an Evo 9 and after just a couple basic parts it immediately made the game significantly more fun. I escaped a full heat pursuit and am driving better during races. Bummer that this got buried so far into the game (at least for me). I can now see the light at the end of tunnel.

I also only just last night figured out the heat multiplier on the cash you bank so I'll be taking more risks now.

Got through The Lost Legacy (Uncharted) this is my 2nd time beating it and this time did it on the Steam Deck. It's a great game, great story but more climbing and frustrating puzzles than I remember. Length was great for my life right now and the final chapter is easily my favorite (on a train.) I'd love to see Naughty Dog do a sequel for this.

Am finally playing Uncharted Drake's Fortune - 7/10
I'm playing the collection on my but I remembered the opening boat/casket scene and getting into the first temple from a long while back when I tried it on the . I didn't get very far though since I didn't remember the uBoat...
I ended up going 48% through the story on my first session, according to the save file and did right around another 25% tonight.
It's pretty good but darn that upstream jet-ski section was crap. I'm not in love with the controls either, but it's what a 15 year old game now? Without traditional levels or loading screens it's very easy to just keep pushing through it. And really besides two of the jet-ski sections, I've really not had much difficulty with gun fights or even falling to my death. I mean I've died a few times like that, but not enough that I felt annoyed or anything.
Looking forward to wrapping it up and moving into the 2nd title since I've heard it was a big step forward.

Slickriven wrote:

Uncharted 1 was just barely good enough to get me to play Uncharted 2 (the jet ski section is particularly terrible). Glad I did though, because Uncharted 2 is great (a major step up) and Uncharted 4 is one of my favorite games.

Been deep in FF12 recently. Loving it. I get lazy with LP and Gambits but i appreciate the system, gambits are pretty awesome

DrizzDrizzDrizz wrote:

Man, I love FF12! I know it's not everyone's cup of tea and it isn't perfect, but it's honestly one of my all-time fav JRPGs.

EB wrote:

The first jet-ski section was fine, I just blasted through and didn't bother to shoot at the enemies, partly b/c I didn't know how, but it was short and not too bad. The 2nd section was about the same but took a few times for the game to finally tell me what I needed to do to progress, and stop getting killed. But that 3rd, upstream section was where it all became terrible - the controls especially when trying to turn or climb the falls showed up poorly and why am I using the R1 button for acceleration and not R2's linear progression for throttle? I found I really had to take out the enemies to avoid death and no grenade launcher this time but instead a pistol and your ride was affected by the current... Yeah it was crap. But I'm past that and based on the setting am not thinking I'll get another section unless it's headed back to the coast.
Game reminds me a lot of the first 2 Tomb Raider games of the latest reboot trilogy (haven't got to Shadow yet) and I suppose that doesn't surprise me. Obviously TR and Rise are more open world and have crafting/upgrading baked in and are better in some ways, but they came after this game so I'd expect them to be stronger.

The last 2 games I beat were indie games:
Unmetal (Metal Gear parody)
Blazing Chrome (a very good Contra-like game).

Trying to figure out what next game will actually keep my attention. I've started the following recently but none of them have me wanting to play every night and I haven't touched them recently.

DmC: Devil May Cry - Definitive Edition
God of War (2018)
Live A Live
Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy

Games that I'm considering:
Axiom Verge 2 just came out today on PS+ Essentials.
Ghost of Tsushima - Director's Cut
The Witcher III: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition

Mom Hid My Game

It's a puzzle game. You have to find what looks like a DS by interacting with the items in the environment.

For a game that doesn't have all the bells and whistles, this is surprisingly solid. It's funny at times and clever.

Puzzle games like these, I typically play gradually, as opposed to bingeing the levels.

@Sun What were your thoughts on UnMetal? I almost picked it up in the latest Switch sale but held off.

@Slickriven Yeah, the upstream jet ski section was the one I remember really being terrible. I liked the first two TR reboot games better than Uncharted 1 for sure, though like you said they are newer and therefore should be less janky.

EB wrote:

I found it enjoyable. The humor was funny enough and the gameplay was decent (think old school Metal Gear). The game was decently challenging, but rooted in pattern recognition and timing. Difficulty can be adjusted as well. There are some puzzle aspects to the game as well. I picked it up on sale as well and enjoyed it. I would wait for the next sale. Not overly long (an hour a chapter spread over 10 chapters).

EB wrote:

I pushed through the ending of this tonight. I'll add that the Roman Numeral section was a pain and really the gunfights seemed to ramp up in difficulty in the final 15-20%. There was 2 aspects after that Roman Numerals section that I didn't expect and they sort of felt out of place but eh. I'd add that the final time you regain control of Nate and have only a shotgun sucked too as that section was a PITA with that gun - which you keep into the next section too... which also wasn't well suited for it either.
But it felt like a decent conclusion to the game and didn't feel like there was any cliff hangers or suggestions that a sequel was coming - likely b/c there wasn't until Sony got the review and sales figures to decide upon.

After beating, I had found 50% of the collectables and unlocked some concept art - interesting to see so much of Drake's designs had him with 2 pistols yet that wasn't in my game at all. I also unlocked some graphic filters and tweaks and the 'next gen' filter looked pretty good on the opening boat scene.

Days Gone (PS4 on PS5) - 8.5/10 - This starts off really rough and is kinda confusing but after sticking with it, it started to come together. Although really heavy-handed at times, I enjoyed the overall story and there are a few nice surprises along the way. My biggest complaint is that the game is just far too long and the pacing is inconsistent. The story and the map could have been chopped in half to make this a tighter experience. I don't know what my total game time was to beat this but it's gotta be 40-50h+ at least. I can see how not everyone likes this but I really enjoyed it.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (PS5) - 7/10 - Playing this 2 years late without the new-console launch-title rose-colored glasses on...it's alright. Zero surprises other than you not actually playing Ratchet with Clank together. Things I don't like:

- The extra characters play identical and weapons are shared so it doesn't feel special.
- The pull-the-rift-towards you gimmick is no different than just using a grapple or doing a big air dash. Walking between worlds is cool but the standard gameplay traversal mechanic didn't deserve all the attention it got.
- The maps encourage exploration but you get stuck on geometry regularly. Lots of thinking you can jump on top of something but the game doesn't want you to.
- Cutscenes are not great quality and feel rushed. And the story really isn't very interesting.

It's still been fun as a pallet cleanser after spending an eternity in Days Gone though. And I dig the rocket boots.

I'm a couple of hours into Gotham Knights and it kinda sucks. Looks like the critics and gamers were right about this one. It just feels off. Combat is slow and clunky and boring. Traversal as Batgirl doesn't feel good and the batcycle doesn't feel fast and isn't exciting to drive. I booted up Arkham Knight for a quick comparison and it's amazing how Gotham Knights manages to look worse than an 8-year-old game. It's inferior to Arkham Knight in every imaginable way. And honestly, releasing something this meh with a property this valuable is unacceptable. I knew to temper expectations when I saw it was a WB Montreal game, but this is a pretty big step down from their last game Arkham Origins. Also Batgirl's voice actress is kinda awful. To be fair, it could just be the voice direction and not the voice actress herself, but I really only want to play as Batgirl and I may have to mute it so I don't have to listen to her crappy dialogue.

So yeah, this definitely isn't worth the $70 they tried charging for it at launch. It feels directionless and after only 2 hours, I already know it's going to be a slog. I hope I'm wrong, but this certainly hasn't made a great first impression.

Callisto Protocol 7/10- Took me a little over 12 hours, playing on Max Security (hardest setting). Honestly, save for one part a decent ways into the game, this was an overall fairly easy game. The way the core combat mechanics of the melee works, you just hold a direction and dodge or block, then strike back with counter/melee combos. You eventually get guns and they work about like you think, so nothing too out of the ordinary there. Had some choppiness in random sections, but runs pretty decently now with a couple of patches under its belt at mostly highest settings at 1440p - ray tracing definitely had to be turned off, but the game is gorgeous for the most part even without it, so not worth the performance hit in my opinion. Overall, I enjoyed it for what it was but Dead Space is still king of this hill. If you need something to play, pick it up in a few months when it goes on sale and maybe by then some story DLC will be out as well since the ending is a dangling carrot.

Dasgessabel wrote:

I've been playing Arcade Paradise on PS5. I've got 20-something of the 35 games, and am really enjoying my time with it. I'd probably give it a solid 7-7/5/10. Some of the "arcade" games are actually really fun, albeit knockoffs of preexisting games that I like

Dasgessabel wrote:

I liked this too, nothing special but not as bad as reviews showed. I just wish I had known to not even bother with the Tactical Pistol. Was absolutely worthless and I just sold all the amm I got.

Heavyd814life wrote:

Yeah without a buddy to play with to ease and soften the blow the game is severely lacking in most areas. What a disappointment.

Happy Game {} 7/10
That title is a ruse, I tell ya. They just wanna trick you with that title because this game ain't happy at all, it's psychotic. And that's what I liked about it.

You start as a little boy just before he goes to sleep and has one heck of a nightmare. I don't know how to describe the actual game beyond that other than it's a point-and-click game with some puzzles that aren't really too difficult to figure out. Actually due to the on-screen cursor controls I would probably recommend playing this on PC instead if you have the option, because the controls are a little clunky at times with analog sticks (I didn't play in handheld mode, so I don't know if it supports the touchscreen or not). It's a short game at barely 2 hours long, but I guess that's better than overstaying its welcome.

Borrowed TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge from the library and played through the first 4 stages with my 4-year old. He’s having a blast. Raph is his favorite.

Sun wrote:
Every once in awhile someone mentions taking video games out from the library. Pretty cool that some libraries offer this.

nonamesleft wrote:

Probably just me! I've played through a number of single-player games this way:

The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes
The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope
Horizon Forbidden West (didn't even install it)
The Last of Us: Part II
Life is Strange: True Colors
The Quarry
Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin
Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury (I only played Bowser's Fury since I beat 3D World on Wii U)
Tactics Ogre Reborn (didn't even get a chance to play it)
Tiny Tina's Wonderland (didn't play it very much)
TMNT: The Cowabunga Collection
TMNT: Shredder's Revenge
Uncharted: The Lost Legacy

I don't check out longer games since I know I won't finish them.

I put Marvel's Midnight Suns, Hogwarts Legacy and God of War: Ragnarok on hold request as well. Maybe I'll finish God of War (2018) by the time it's my turn for Ragnarok.

Sun wrote:
Wow. Some great games on there. And they have Switch games? Your library is

I'm not going to even bother checking my local library to see if they carry games. They almost certainly don't... okay, fine, I'll check, but only because you insisted

Somebody didn't like my R&C Rift Apart 7/10. Would love to hear from folks that would rate this higher in 2023.

Anxiouz wrote:

I didn’t neg you but I loved R&C A Rift Apart. Easy 8-9/10 for me.

Finally finished Yakuza 0. I'd give it a 8.5/10. Great game but got a bit repetitive.

I started Yakuza 1 (remake) the other day. Very similar to 0 except a little more lifeless? Hope I can make it through, it's OK so far.

sa330206 wrote:

I played 0 last year and enjoyed the story, but the gameplay does get repetitive. That’s why I haven’t finished Kiwami yet. It’s good in small spurts and will take a long time to finish as a result. I have all the games on PS4 but it’s gonna take a long time to get thru them all.

@Sun

I checked and, from what I can tell, only books and some movies. No video games. I didn't think they'd have any. Checked on the very slight chance that they would.

Frank wrote:

(Spoilers for Callisto Protocol in the spoiler tag for those who haven't played, don't click it)

Kommie wrote:

Yeah the tactical pistol was given way too late. Should have been the first gun, honestly. The five round burst is fun but overall, a worthless gun because you get the last gun not too long after.

As a normal adult man doing normal adult things, I tried out Teddy Together on 3DS today. It's basically like Nintendogs but with a talking teddy bear.

I got to Level 2 friendship and he went outside to see if he could make friends. Lots of kids around but he lamented there were no other bears so he couldn't make friends.

The dialog choice was between "I'm sure you'll make friends soon" (or something similar) and "Yep! No friends for you!" (That exact wording).

This game is simultaneously charming, a bit creepy, and hilarious at the same time.

@sa330206 Definitely don't try to play the Yakuza series back to back. They will feel insanely repetitive if you don't put some other games in between them. I try to play one per year. Out of the five I've played, I still like 0 the best.

Also beat the Callisto Protocol - 8/10 for me

Visually, one of the most impressive games I’ve seen this generation. It’s not exactly scary but I do like the atmospheric dread and melee heavy combat. I liked it more than most people because I felt like the length was just right for a single player game. Once I upgraded my grip gun, combat became a lot more fun. Not replayable but DLC would intrigue me to jump back in

Stray {} 7/10
I had heard the usual complaints about this game, such as the final game being different than what people were expecting from the initial announcement trailer. I guess you can put me in that category too. What's the deal with all this robot stuff? I just wanted to play as a cat, but they felt the need to complicate things with this super uninteresting story about robots.

I've heard it's a short game, but at one point I didn't even know if I wanted to finish it. There's even a trophy for beating the game in 2 hours, but I spent that much time alone just getting lost in the slums and not being able to find my away around because so much of the area just looked the same. Really, that is pretty early on into the game and it had me wanting to quit. I haven't finished the game yet, but once you get out of the slums/rooftops section the game gets slightly better.

I do want to give some kudos to whoever was responsible for the game's music. The bass sounds so good with the Pulse 3D headset, in the rare times you actually hear any music. As for the rest of the audio, it is just environmental effects and those sound alright too. I feel like there's nothing special about the graphics. The environments look nice at times, but overall I was expecting this to look better than it does. I know it's from a small studio so I guess they can be forgiven, but early on I had to double check and make sure I hadn't downloaded the PlayStation 4 version by mistake.

I think the game is just barely above average, but I'll add a +1 to the score because once in a while I catch my cat staring at the TV when I'm playing this and he doesn't usually do that for too many other games (Animal Crossing is another one he seems to like).

=-=

KeyWe {} 8/10
This is a pretty fun co-op game. You can play it solo, but it's clearly meant for two players, and you're playing as little kiwi birds working in a post office, sorting mail and stuff.
It sounds simple, but things can get pretty hectic in the later levels. This is definitely something where you can enjoy it with a friend that is as much into gaming as you, or a spouse that is more of a casual gamer.

there was nothing really going for Stray other than "cat game" and even then it doesn't save it from below mediocrity.

And yet 'Stray' keeps getting Game of the Year nods...somehow.

I love cats but that game had nothing interesting going on. If it were more in line with a typical puzzle game like Limbo, Another World, Heart of Darkness, or Little Nightmares and removed the force story nonsense it may have been better. The whole robot part/story crap was so bad.

The beginning where you just run and jump on stuff and be a cat was kinda cool, but the game lost me immediately after that.

Kommie wrote:

Been playing a lot of Fantasy Life for 3DS lately.

It reminds me of how much I miss Level 5 in the US market.

Not saying we need more Layton games after 5 and 6 though.

But their creativity when they aren't shackled to a single series/concept is pretty great.

benstylus wrote:

Looks like I got this one at some point but haven't played it yet.

I've had The Last of Us Part 2 on the shelf for awhile now, and just never felt in the mood to start it. But it fit the bill perfectly last night and I'm enjoying the story beats and the quality is as impressive as I was expecting. Naughty Dog really is something special. I do think that they introduce far too many characters too early, and jumping between them works as a narrative for a film but it makes it tough to connect with who I'm supposed to care about. I'm excited to see where this goes though.

PizzaTheHutt wrote:

I'm actually stuck here now. I felt like I mostly did everything in that area before stopping for the night. But then a week or so later when I resumed, I couldn't figure out where to go/what to do. I think I need to get 3 more soda cans for the merchant?, and then there is a clue about rooftops? (but I thought I did that already). But after running around the same area for 10-15 minutes I keep turning this off.

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.

Kommie wrote:

I guess! Never got more than an hour or 2 into that one.

Axiom Verge 1 sucked for me. I also didn’t get passed the first couple of hours. The level design and weapons were just lame.

Axiom Verge just felt awful to play. Never understood the appeal of it.

I just got to Act 2 in Inscryption. Very strange game, but I'm enjoying it so far.

I enjoyed Inscryption. It only gets weirder too :)

Orlandu wrote:

The two things I've heard about the game are:

1. It's weird.
2. Go in blind.

Even with that warning it still caught me off guard a bit.

It's weird, people seem to either love or hate Axiom Verge. There's not much in between. I really loved it overall, but it did have too much backtracking, and there were a couple times when I had absolutely no idea where to go next and just had to re-explore the entire world to find the passage I had missed. I don't care for that kind of stuff, but the rest of the game was good enough that I was able to overlook it. I still need to play Axiom Verge 2.

I always assumed Axion Verge was some highly regarded game. Seems like it came out for just about every system, even the Wii U and vita. Does it have an easy mode (dont judge me)?

@sa330206 I'd say it is highly regarded overall, metacritic scores are mostly in the high 80s (but do vary widely by platform for some reason). There's not an easy mode, just normal and hard. The difficulty mostly comes from keeping track of the huge world and figuring out where to go next. The combat isn't too bad, but I do think it's more challenging than most Metroid games.

Inscryption is friggen awesome. I wanted to go for the platinum, but there's too much RNG for me in the challenge stages. Even then though, I still go back and play it sometimes for fun

Finished up Mafia Definitive Edition. While I was a bit annoyed with the linear path, it did force me to actually finish the story and move on without getting distracted by side stuff. Gameplay was fairly dated but it's a remake from 2002. Story was really good. Overall I'd give it a solid 7, I'd recommend checking it out .

I always wanted to check out the Mafia series. Glad to hear the original holds up decently well.

Mafia 1 remastered is pretty damn good. Mafia 2 on the other hand is a whole different kind of animal.

Currently playing Pocket Card Jockey for the 3DS. It's pretty fun, but I just wish there was more to do. There's only so many races to win and so many horses to unlock. IMO the race selection difficulty should scale a little better with your horses, and you should unlock more races as your horses level up. No idea if they improved any of this in the more recent apple arcade game, I don't do apple ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Pocket Card Jockey was a really interesting concept. I got some bad hands and ended up putting it down for Pokemon Picross, but I'd like to revisit some day.

I beat Inscryption. I think I ended up liking the first chapter the best. I get thematically why each chapter was wildly different, but the third felt a tad too long. Still glad I played it. Weird game, but the stuff outside of the game is way weirder. For those of you who have beaten the game (seriously, don't click these links if you haven't played it):

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/inscryption-endi...
https://docs.google.com/document/u/2/d/e/2PACX-1vT...

AssassinFiver wrote:

I bought and played a good amount of this last fall, and generally agree. Once I had my fill of the main gameplay, I put it down. I'll play from time to time (I like solitaire games), but the forced fails early on for tutorial's sake really annoyed me.

DCGX wrote:
Oh yeah. I plan on unlocking everything in the game (trophies, special horses, etc.) but after that I can't really see myself replaying it.

I gave up on Infernax. Got to the first dungeon and to get to the boss after dying is way too far for me to deal with this crap after dying.

Orlandu wrote:

Oh yeah I played some pokemon picross but if I remember correctly there was a lot of in-app purchases? Wasn't really my thing but I might revisit it now that you mention it.

Been meaning to play Inscryption! Watched a playthrough of it but they stopped after they reached the second chapter so I never saw how it ended. Have it on my steam wishlist now and plan on playing it once I've finished the unplayed games in my library. You say each chapter was wildly different: does it retain deck-building at least, or is it a different style of gameplay entirely?

@AssassinFiver Pokemon Picross is one of the very few in-app purchase games that can be played completely offline. As a result of that it's possible to edit your save to max out your in game currency, which makes it way more fun to play. Alternately you can probably also just toggle a cheat for them. The cheat would for sure require custom firmware, but I can't remember if the save edit method does. Here's a tutorial to edit the save: https://gbatemp.net/threads/infinite-picrites-on-p...

As for Inscryption the downtime between card battles, visual style, and how you build/maintain your deck are the major changes between chapters. Each chapter also adds a few wrinkles to the card battling, but the core card combat remains for the entire game. Don't want to say too much for fear of spoiling. It's a reasonably quick game (maybe 10-15 hours depending on how successful you are), so definitely give it a shot if you're interested.

Been playing 8 Doors on my PC. 7/10 I guess
It was on a list of good Metroidvanias to try and Amazon Games (Twitch) gave it away free a while back so I wanted to give it a go. You play as a girl who's town and dad apparently get killed in the opening clip and you head to purgatory to get him back. Game is pretty decent, with nods to Hollow Knight for sure, but others in the genre too. Color pallet is unique, mainly grey/black/white, but with some red.
Controls aren't too bad, but I think this originally came out on the Switch, so when using an X1 controller on my PC it shows that in the key-config/bind settings, but incorrectly flips A/B and X/Y, also a number of onscreen tutorials when you get new things will show a white/blank area for what button assignment will trigger the new feature - not horrible, but feels a little unfinished in that regard.
I'm cheating a little as I've got a complete map open in the background, but I'm trying not to use it a ton, more for backtracking or to verify if there are hidden things I missed. It's cheap, I get it, but I don't really want to wander around too much. Boss fights have been decent but slow. You really need to move close, get it a few hits and react to the next, generally, 1 of 4-6 attacks they'll do. Dodge it and get in a few more hits. After likely about 50%, they've all yelled and triggered phase 2, where so far they've really only more closely chained 2 attacks. Hardest one was this tree creature that would inhabit a 1 of 2 trees that are almost in the background, 1 on the far left and right of the screen, such that you could stand in the middle and not see him on either side. Well he could still hit you with some attacks and would flip btwn the 2, so you had to move too far too often, otherwise he wasn't bad. Didn't like how you could purchase an upgrade to see the health of the bosses, but you had to hit a sort of non-normal attack button and the displayed health would go away after about 5 seconds, sort of lame and not overly useful.
According to stats I'm at 40% after only 2 sessions playing I'd guess 3+ hrs. It's worth finishing, I figure.

The Crew 2 {} 6/10
I dunno, I just wanted a racing game to play, but maybe I should've chosen a different one, not open-world and with minimal story. I just wanna race, is that too much to ask?
I recall playing quite a bit of The Crew when Ubisoft made the PC version free back in 2017 (I think) and I kind of liked it. Turns out this game released in 2018 and seems to still be getting new content added all these years later. They also added planes, boats and motorcycles. That's cool and crap, but I just ain't feeling this. Maybe it is better than I'm giving it credit for, but I feel a racing game isn't the genre where you need to sink a handful of hours into before you know if you like it or not. The opening intro where you fly the plane, drive the boat and then the car was pretty cool though and in the 2 hours I played that was the highlight. I'll be uninstalling it now.

Im playing Witcher 3 again, mostly to do the DLC. Even compared to newer games I still think this is easily the best open world game Ive played.

I want to play the Witcher 3, but I can't shake the feeling that I would have to play 1 and 2 first.

You dont really need to. You could read up on the events of 1 and 2 if you want. Or play, sure, but they havent aged well though.

@Orlandu oh crap dude that's a game changer, thanks for the tip!

@AssassinFiver No prob! With that change it's my favorite Picross game out of all of them.

I started up sleeping dogs definitive on ps4. I played it on Xbox 360 years ago so I figured I'd give the definitive version a shot. So far it's been fine but I don't remember the controls being this clunky (esp. driving).

I think they are a tad clunky. You get used to it after a while, though.

Playing Sonic Frontiers (PS5) and boy is this a mess of a game. Basically just constant collecting, insane pop-in, lots of bugginess, and the older-school levels are just as clumsy as before. Sure it's better than a lot of previous Sonic games but that's not really saying a lot, and this is not nearly as good as people made it out to be. There's some fun to be had but this feels like a AA title.

Eagle Flight {} 6/10
There's not a whole lot to this game. I think this is one of those VR games that tiptoes the line between what is a "VR game" and what is considered a "VR experience". You are playing as an eagle and flying around a post-apocalyptic Paris, fifty years after the demise of humanity. That's it. There are some objectives (things like fly through hoops or shoot down groups of falcons by "squaking" at them) and collectibles to find, but there's not a lot of depth here. There is a multiplayer mode which even includes cross-play between PC VR headsets, but of course there isn't anyone playing it at this point so I haven't gotten to try it and have no idea what kind of stuff you can do with other players. The game can be played by anyone as the controls are really simple: L2 and R2 for slow down/speed up, and you tilt your head to steer the eagle (your instincts might tell you to turn your head, but the game will constantly remind you to only tilt it).

Casual players will probably have more fun just doing the free-fly mode while experienced players will have more fun with the story mode for the 3 hours it lasts, though it's not that the story is all that good, but some of the levels get intense while you're flying fast and trying not to crash (most races are under 3 minutes but you will have to restart from the beginning anytime you crash into something). While it is cool and relaxing flying around a virtual Paris for a bit, there's just not enough to keep you coming back to it and I would have liked if they had done more with the graphics because at times it looks like an early PlayStation 3 game.

I forgot I had gotten 'Eagle Flight' when it was cheap years ago, so I tried it yesterday and got through chapter 2. I love Paris, and while this isn't a terribly accurate version of the city, I like flying around it. Too much flying through rings though, and, being a Ubisoft game, too many collectibles. so 'Eagle Flight' gets a 7/10 for me. There is online multiplayer, which is cool.

I also tried 'Doom VFR' yesterday. I got the physical release cheap years ago. It was updated after launch to use the Aim controller, which is what I used. It works for the most part, but I couldn't find a way to remap button, and the weapons wheel is mapped to R1 which is not easily accessible in the heat of a battle. There's smooth turning, but teleportation only. You can juke in four directions, but this game needs full locomotion. It really drags down the experience. 7/10 for me too.

Finally, I played through 'Batman Arkham VR.' This is definitely more an experience than a game, but it leans into the detective element of Batman. That's cool, but it's easy. The game takes place between 'City' and 'Knight,' but it's obvious what's going on. Anything action related is relegated to a black screen with sound effects, including fighting and driving vehicles. You can look at giant models of many vehicles in the Batcave, including things like the BVS: Dawn of Justice batmobile, but not much else. After "beating" the game, which abruptly ends, Riddler trophies appear in each part of each chapter to find and solve, which open 3D models of many things. It's cool. Another 7/10 from me.

'Doom VFR' is definitely the meatiest, because it's a real game albeit short, but the story mode in 'Eagle Flight' was a nice surprised. 'Batman' is still cool, because you're Batman, but even Batman suffers from the dreaded short VR shins. Most of the time each of these goes on sale for a few dollars, and I'd say each is worth that.

Eagle Flight was one of my favorite PSVR games. I just enjoyed flying around casually collecting things. It felt great zipping between buildings.

Callisto Protocol (PS5) - 8/10 - After a simple google search it looks like I'm 30-40% through, probably a little bit more. It definitely has Dead Space vibes which I love, and I generally really dig everything here, but man does the DS similarity just make me wish for a direction/nav arrow! This is super linear until it's not, and it's confusing when you find interesting things on the side but it's not where you should be going and it's really not clear on how you get back to the main path.

The door says Maintenance but I'm supposed to get to Medical. But Medical is ultimately through Laundry, and then Maintenance. But if you miss some audio cues I don't know how you can get reminders or guides. The audio clips via the menu are meaningless on their own.

So it's not as great as DS but I absolutely love it so far. The 3D audio headset it's fantastic and it makes me giddy when I hear creepies moving through air ducts near me, then over me, then to the side. The 3D audio is So. Damn. Good.

Hogwarts Legacy: Incredible attention to detail makes Hogwarts really fun to explore. The combat can be challenging and should get a little more interesting as the game goes along. The menu system is pretty poor, and the loot system with a 20 item cap is terrible. If you play this definitely do not go crazy exploring in the beginning because the items in the treasure chests are tied to your current level.

Hogwarts... at time feels like a walking tutorial. But I can run around and cast spells and pet cats.

Yeah, it definitely suffers from modern gaming syndrome. Enormous checklist collection without a lot of interesting interaction. I bought it for my girlfriend since she loves Harry Potter. She mostly just enjoys walking around the castle and taking in all the detail and the non-combat quests. She makes me do all of the fighting stuff.

It Takes Two {} 10/10
I will say if you have a decent gaming PC, Xbox or PlayStation, just play this on there instead. The downgrade in the graphics is very noticeable, it looks muddy as hell, I saw some weird little graphical glitches during a few cutscenes, and no way is this game close to hitting 60 fps like the other versions (it's still a consistent 30 though which is good enough for me), and even docked 720p is the best you're gonna get. There seems to be more load times on Switch too. For those reasons alone I say this is the worst version to play.
But, it still gets a 10 from me because it's the worst version of a game that is still incredibly fun regardless of any visual downgrades, it is still one of the best co-op games I've ever played (this will be my 3rd playthrough) and I'm impressed they even have this running on Switch to begin with. Only because I enjoy this game so much did I go back on my "no longer buying multiplatform games on Switch" rule.

I'm playing this with a friend from Japan (she's using the Friend Pass which I'm glad wasn't region restricted) and there is absolutely no lag. Every time I play a platformer (2D or 3D) in online co-op and it runs flawless like this, it just makes me even more pissed that Nintendo screwed up so badly with Super Mario Maker 2's online mode. How are all these other developers getting it right?

My friend and I played for a little over 4 hours so far, it was her first time playing and the only complaint she had was the lack of gyro for controlling the camera and where you're aiming your weapon. She's a big Splatoon fan and just doesn't like using analog sticks for things like that and as a fan of gyro myself I do agree it would've been great to have it, but she only plays on Nintendo consoles and I don't, so I'm used to games not having it.

The Medium {} 6/10
I'm not really feeling this game. I just was browsing the PS+ Extra Game Catalog for anything that resembled a horror game and chose this. I kinda dig the split-screen gimmick, but the game itself is just boring me. I guess I was hoping for a little more action and less...walking around. After barely 2 hours I've uninstalled it. Usually I like to give games more time than that before I dismiss them, but I don't know if this one will get any better, I recall when it first released a lot of people were just talking about how average it was.

Crysis 2 Remastered - 7.5/10
I am about 3/4 thru this one and while more COD than Far Cry from the previous installment, it sure looks pretty and polished enough and sounds pretty robust on a surround system. It's a little more linear than the previous game and that may be an issue for some, but I think it's just fine. And with all the flooded open world games nowadays, sometimes all that's needed is a straight path to victory in a focused shooter, even one that's dated as this with it's almost fresh coat of paint. Some technical issues I've encountered though such as action prompts appearing out of context as well as some frame drops here and there and inconsistencies within the audio mixing, sometimes the sound effect are too loud, while the dialogue and music is too soft. I'm also not a fan of a return to a silent protagonist here after having the main character Nomad speak in the previous game, but I think in Crysis 3 they have the main protagonist speak again, which I'm looking forward to.

@PizzaTheHutt yeah The Medium was not very good. I played it right before it was set to leave GP on the XSX and if not for that 'play this now or never' vibe I likely would've given up too. But it wasn't super long and I didn't bother exploring much and just pushed through it. It was also very easy except for a few dumb instant kill things later on. It's another of those could've been great but just wasn't titles.

Finished up Sleeping Dogs Definitive Edition. It had some glitches but it was good. Biggest glitch was people randomly falling from the sky on a few occasions. I'd give it a 7 out of 10. The only mission that really pissed me off is where you had to beat 30 straight enemies all wielding poison knives. Definitely worth playing if you like GTA style games, especially if you never played the original version on 360 or ps3.

sa330206 wrote:

Glitch or throwback to that XM commercial from 20 years ago?

https://youtu.be/a877EIVk4MQ

I really enjoyed 'Sleeping Dogs.' There's just that one damn achievement for getting ranks or whatever in missions that I just can't get because of the stupid scoring system.

Sleeping Dogs was awesome! Can't believe it has been 10 years already.

Like a Dragon! Ishin - 8/10

I was pretty excited for this to get a North American release after a decade. For the most part, it's standard 'Yakuza' brawling fare, in a wild west influenced Japanese setting. There are four styles: Gunman, Swordfighter, Brawler and Dancer. The latter is a mix of the first two, and it's slick to move around a battle with, but I've started to heavily lean into swordfighter. It helps differentiate the gameplay here from past 'Yakuza' games. The city is unique, though not the easiest to traverse, and there's still plenty of side activities to do.

This is also the first 'Yakuza/Like a Dragon' game to not use one of the Dragon Engines. It uses Unreal. The devs say the switch was because Unreal is better at outdoor daytime lighting, and sure, maybe, but I miss the Dragon Engine. Everything looks very close to what the Dragon Engine can produce, but slightly smoother. However, there are some graphical quirks, like textures still loading in when changing scenes or areas. There's a weird, heavy gradient shadowing in some low-light cutscenes that can be distracting. Menus also have a second or two pause when opening the main menu or navigating within it. Nothing game breaking, but these also weren't present when the series was using the Dragon Engine.

One off-putting thing is that, while this has no direct connection to the larger 'Yakuza' story, the same character models are used. It can be off-putting, but I read a review somewhere that suggested looking at this like a play, with the actors playing different roles, and that is a good way to look at it. I'm really enjoying this entry so far. There's just enough to have it feel familiar yet different from past games. I just wish the preorder steelbook had a more inventive design (and title on the spine).

Horizon: Forbidden West - Finally started this up and I'm enjoying it quite a bit. But...it certainly starts off really slow, Aloy is one of the most dull protagonists I can remember in a long time, and I've had quite a few clumsy gameplay moments.

Forgotten City is really good, free on ps plus extra/premium now, highly recommend it. Apparently a former Skyrim mod
Similar to Deathloop in a way (and tons others I’m sure but I played Deathloop recently), you loop and repeat same day while piecing together the mystery of the world
Some very light combat. If you strive to talk to every NPC and try to exhaust all conversational options, you’ll enjoy this, it really rewards that approach

It has 4 main endings, you can easily see them all even without replaying the game as long as you save strategically and often

Wanted to post in the Slay the Spire thread but it’s closed

I finallyyyyyy did my A20 Heart run with Silent, after months and months of mostly failure (a couple close calls but overall I was mostly dying in Act 2 or 3), and ruining my win/loss stats completely, finally did it

Now ill go back to Defect fot the first time in like half a year or so

DrizzDrizzDrizz wrote:

Nice! I just re-opened the thread

Vampire Survivors - 10/10

I can't imagine a better way to spend $5. This game is epic.

Far Cry 3 Classic Edition {} 7/10
This is a game I've had on my "to play...someday" list for years. At some point Ubisoft gave it away for free on PC but I just never got around to playing it on there (PC gaming is never a priority). But I saw this in the Ubisoft+ catalog on PS+ Extra/Premium and decided I'll finally give it a shot.

One thing about the Far Cry series that you gotta give them credit for is that the graphics are so good (except for that one awful port on the Wii in 2006, there was nothing good about that game). I've never played Far Cry 3 on Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, but I did watch a comparison video before I began playing this and apparently the 360/PS3 game ran at 720p and barely could reach a steady 30fps a lot of the time. This updated "Classic Edition" for PS4 and Xbox One though is pretty much a direct port of the game PC players had already gotten in 2012.
Still, there are parts where things get funky, such as grass sticking up through the floorboard of a vehicle as I'm about to get in it. There are also times where I've shot an enemy or animal and then turned my attention somewhere else, then I go back to grab loot from the enemy or skin fromt he animal and their corpse had vanished (once in a while that would happen with vehicles too if I walked too far away).

As far as audio, that's good too. The music, the ambiance, sounds of the wildlife, it's all top notch.

The game does feature item/supply crafting, which I will never hesitate to hate on when games include this crap, but this is one of the games that at least does it right, and by "right" I mean it is just a few simple button presses and you don't have to hunt down a special table to craft stuff at.

As per usual with Ubisoft games, it's a big open world and perhaps bigger than it needed to be just to fit all these damn collectibles in. I am not bothering with that nonsense, I'm doing my best to just get through the story mode.

Overall I think this is a far better game than the first two. And though I feel like I've had my fill of open world games, I do like exploring in this one. It's pretty cool seeing the wildlife interact with each other. One cool moment happened where I was running from a group of enemies shooting at me, I hear one of them start screaming and I turned around to see it's because he was being attacked by a freaking tiger. It wasn't a scripted moment or anything, it just happened. I also like how every situation can be approached in stealth or run and gun style.

Ink & Paper: DoodleCut {} 6/10
I saw this while browsing the eShop and the hand-drawn art style caught my attention. It turns out it's like a Qix clone, which is a game I have a bit of nostalgia for because it was the first GameBoy game I owned, and for a while it was the only GameBoy game I owned, so I played it a lot as a kid. But times have changed and I didn't wanna pay $5 for this because you can download mobile games for free that have more depth to them than a Qix wannabe would. But the devs released the game with a 90% off sale, so at 49¢ it seemed much more reasonable.

Not much to say about this game. It's a Qix clone and I got what I expected out of it. It's certainly less fun now than it was when I was a kid. which I often find to be the case when I revisit many games I liked from the 80s and 90s and is the main reason I try to avoid letting nostalgia play a role in my purchases. But still, I feel I got my 49¢ of enjoyment out of it at least. You can't even buy a pack of gum for that price anymore.

Oh, and the music. I don't like it. It's kinda catchy though.

Sonic Frontiers is el terible. Who thought this was a good idea? 4/10

Paranormasight - This was developed by Square Enix and is reminding me a little of the Zero Escape games. It uses a similar flow chart and has some puzzle solving, though the game mostly involves reading. Had me stumped for awhile early where you actually have to mess with the settings menu to deal with one of the other "curse-bearers". The Storyteller also messes with you early on when he asks for your name. Really interesting so far.

A Plague Tale: Requiem - 8/10
I'm on chapter 4 now and it's pretty much more of the same from the first installment, which is fine to me. If it ain't broke, don't fix it! The graphics looks great too on the Series X and I'm not sure why some folks are complaining about the framerate on consoles because it looks smooth enough for me, but that may be because I am playing on an OLED with V.R.R. enabled. I hear without it, there's a lot of stutter and dips.

Split/Second {} 8/10
I remember renting this on Xbox 360 back when it first released, and I enjoyed it. Revisiting it now, I think I might be enjoying it even more. I'm really surprised the online servers are still up, though I only got matched with one other person and I couldn't race because it tells me I need to download some additional content in the PS Store, which I don't think is possible on PS5.

But I'm still enjoying the single player stuff. And whoever owns this IP cares enough about leaving the online servers up and keeping the game on PS+ Premium, but why can't they just give us a sequel? It wouldn't even need a big budget, just give us more of this. It was such a cool idea that I'm surprised some indie dev hasn't taken it and put their own spin on it.

PizzaTheHutt wrote:

I think it was published by Disney

Yeah it's Disney, which answers the question of why there's no sequel. Online always annoyed me, because your rank went up and down by your position finishing a race, and it was always much harder to raise your rank than take a hit with it. I think the only achievement I need in 'Split/Second' is getting the top rank (a 20 I believe), and I would get close, then finish, like third, and my rank would go down a few. It was frustrating. Plus, there's virtually no way to catch up if you're too far back.

DCGX wrote:

Blue shells are bad though.

benstylus wrote:

Sure, but with 'Split/Second,' if everyone is on the same skill level, it's the environmental triggers that are meant to shift advantage, but if you're too far back for one reason or another, those (and most shortcuts) won't make a difference. Basically, if you screw up or get screwed at the beginning of a race, there's no hope to being competitive.

I replayed through S/S last year and absolutely loved it and felt it held up extremely well. Really great game.

Ridge Racer 2 {} 8/10

I've always had mixed feelings on the Ridge Racer series overall. I've not played all of them and only consider myself a casual fan of the series, but of the ones I have played, some of the entries are good (OG Ridge Racer, Ridge Racer 3D), some are just average (Ridge Racer 64/RRDS) and some were pretty damn bad (Ridge Racer Unbounded).

This one definitely goes in the Good category.
Sometimes I'm just in the mood to play a good old fashioned arcade-style racer, unlocking better cars as I progress, and without having to worry about tinkering around under the hood to upgrade parts of my current car. The Ridge Racer games usually allow me to do just that, no upgrading nonsense, just pure racing. And the racing in this one is fun.

The game handles well too. I don't know how it controlled on the PSP but I never was a fan of that little nub anyway.

They did a decent job touching up the graphics on PS4/PS5. One issue I have though is the UI just takes up too much of the screen. Your only options are to deal with it, or turn it off completely with the select button. I would've liked a middle ground where I can at least see what place I'm in and how much nitro I have stored up, and turn off the rest.

NBA 2k15 remote play via Chiaki.

Coming off of NBA2K13…15 feels bad. My biggest complaint is I’ve noticed the comp nerfs my team when ever I play top rated teams like Lebron James’ cavaliers. All of a sudden no one can make a free throw or lay up. Lots of loose balls in 15 and shooting sucks. I think ima shelf this after this season. 6/10.

loztdogs wrote:

Steam Deck Chiaki or Windows app?

@Kommie I’ve used Steam Deck Chiaki but I happen to be playing on my Switch with the Hori split pads.

loztdogs wrote:

Do you get random white flashes or graphical glitches? No matter what settings I try, there's always some flash/green artifact or glitch.

Kommie wrote:

Never experienced that on either platform.

loztdogs wrote:

So I assume you never messed with any of the settings then? just installed it and played with no tinkering?

Been playing Dishonored 2. I really love this series. Still pretty early, finished chapter 3, but i’m fully engrossed

Kommie wrote:

Yup, fired it up out of the box. No tinkering.

loztdogs wrote:

They just keep getting worse every year after. 16 was decent if I remember correctly. But 17-22 is garbage. With each year becoming worse than the year before. I skipped this years because why bother at this point.

I bought NBA 2K22 after not playing it since 2K16 and I didn’t see the need to continue forward. It maybe played a little better, but they’re all basically the same and the micro transaction crap was just too much.

I've recently been looking at EA Basketball games on the Sega Genesis.

The nostalgia for Lakers vs Celtics and the NBA Playoffs is real

I hate all the new career nonsense in the newer games.

Recore Why am I suffering through this /10

Game's always sort of been on my radar since it was one of the very few exclusives from early on and then it came to GP so I've had it installed on my large external drive on my system for like 2+ years. Well M$ has a challenge to earn an Achievement for Women's month from some games with leading ladies and Recore was one, so on a whim I finally started it and sort of got sucked in b/c there are redeeming elements but it's also largely crap. First holy cow it is blown OUT with the colors/brightness/HDR. I started it on my OLED and XSX and took the brightness to as low as the game would allow and it was still so bright when you're out in the sands. But later on there's a dungeon in the dark and it was hard to see b/c of how dark it was. It's like they turned the HDR up to 11 or 14. Add in that it plays with colors a lot - the foes are largely in the 3 primary colors and you want to match that to deal more damage and visually this game actually gave me a headache in my last session.

I moved to playing on a smaller Hisense set where my X1X lives b/c the XSX wasn't popping achievements and that seems to be an 'issue' with the game. It's maybe worse with HDR on there, but that could be the TV, but I also just did a section that looks like 80's Tron and where you need to do some rubbish platforming and killing of enemies where the instant pull mechanic was in use a lot and that did some very bright screen flashes and it was very frustrating, so I'm sure that's where my headache came from... Then to top it off after wanting to tear my hear out I finally reached the end and went to the interface thingy and... instead of it being the multi-use thing, it teleported me to the beginning of the area... and I didn't unlock the fast travel point after that section, so I need to repeat it. If I didn't have a headache I think I would've smashed something - flarking HORRIBLE design choice - why the flying F would I want to go back to the beginning without it granting me the ability to return to where I suspect most folks will at least have some frustration in completing. So Stupid!

Game has some other issues like the camera, the lock-on being nearly useless (it switches very easily to a different enemy) and just too much going on at times, plus some other minor bugs. The version I'm playing has the DLC included that gives you another companion bot that's a mini tank you ride like a quad - it helps with traversing the large open sections of the map, which is nice, but then there are some chase activities you need to do to progress in the DLC's story and it does NOT control all that well for them.

I really should take a break from this especially since I now need to redo the last section that was frustrating trash. I oddly have a desire to beat this so I think I'll finish it, but it's not very good and I don't know why I'm punishing myself. I do like the story some and the lore.

I liked Recore but can understand why it’d feel like a chore. It just reminded me of having Mega Man elements with switching different weapons for enemy weaknesses. I can understand why it’s redundancy didn’t net it a sequel though.

@TalonJedi87 there's some good stuff in the game for sure - it's kept me playing and most of it I've enjoyed. But the annoying crap doesn't go away and especially in the tower 'climb', floor 2 can Suck it (not looking forward to having to replay that - and then a few more). 3D platforming when you're way up in the air (or there's just no ground below) and needing to advance like 50 feet and land on a 3' square platform in wide-open space with all sorts of obstacles wasn't great - especially when some of the designs felt pure BS or there was bad collision detection. Also the camera got too close to you at times in those sections. I liked that they added the orange circle under your feet so you could somewhat tell where you'd land, but the camera liked to be more behind you and not angled down enough to even show that circle. Also using the spider-bot to try to attach to those rails and the camera not showing that either was annoying.
I guess 75% of my gripes are around the camera and lock-on's weaknesses. Other 25% might be the blown out HDR or mixing, I like that it's not Gears of Grey but the sand areas are way to bright and the dungeons are darker but then the fights can deliver too much light and flashes.

I generally liked Recore but honestly don't remember it much at this point. And after putting it down for a few weeks when I came back I had no idea what to do. So I would say stick with it until you beat it or just drop it entirely.

But what I remember most was trying to get this one collectible. It was a sequence of traversing between tall platforms sticking out of sand. There was only way to do it, if you failed it was a long way back to the one place you can climb up to start the sequence, and each platform was barely half a pixel close enough to the max distance you could actually make. So it required perfection. This is literally the only thing I think of when thinking about this game besides diff colored enemies.

KeyWe (PS5) - 7/10 - I've been playing this with my son and it's a lot of fun. There are some collision detection issues from time to time, but in small doses this has been a great couch co-op game. Certainly not as maddening as Overcooked! It does require a lot of teamwork and it's been neat to see how his little brain problem solves and how he gives instructions.

Ive started playing The Quarry. Im enjoying it, but visually it is very distracting. Very weird animations, people look odd, lots of visual artifacts and 30fps. Really wish this had the performance vs fidelity options.

kevolones wrote:

Been playing that as well with my gf
I agree, performance mode woulda been helpful
The controls kinda sluggish
But mainly it feels like, even though there are clearly a ton of outcomes/paths, it rarely feels like you’re making key choices (either it doesnt change what happens regardless of what you select, just how someone feels about it, or you inadvertently “choose” something without realizing that’s what you indirectly chose, feels kinda cheap and random)
Ive also been dealing with ps5 turning off randomly while we play it, seems to happen after about 60-90 minutes

Hmm. I havent played for sessions that long so I havent had that happen. Ive never had my PS5 turn off on its own yet. Hopefully its a bug and not an overheating issue.

Yeah I noticed a reddit thread where a lot of people reported similar - the strange thing is, this was happening occasionally early on but I didn’t realize it (it never turned off while I was playing, but i noticed i wouldnt be able to turn it back on sometimes unless i unplugged from electricity first), then for a while never had any issues, then recently resurfaced. Some are saying updates have caused it to start/stop. Latest update didn’t change anything sadly

I dont think it’s overheating just because it doesn’t feel hot and because I took plates off recently multiple times to clean everything, get rid of dust etc. of course it’s possible I need to do an even deeper clean
Another thing that I tried was changing outlets and plugging it directly into wall, but no change. Of course it’s possible it’s just not getting enough power from either of those two outlets I tried, somehow
It only affects PS5 games not PS4, and possibly not even all PS5 games

In any case, it’s frustrating, but I recently tried just closing the game after an hour before it had a chance to turn off, and then restarting, and got another hour out of it (didn’t test it to the limit). Annoying but potential workaround I guess

I’ll probably end up buying another ps5 anyway for psvr2, hopefully won’t have issues with that one lol

Spider-man: Miles Morales (PS5) - 8/10 - Had this on the shelf for ages but finally dug into it this weekend and beat it tonight. This is really, really well done and a lot of fun but I had a mixed experience.

I had a lot of bugs like the skill challenges not showing on the map or even being able to replay the first ones (even though I had those skills) plus some missions just wouldn't start. I would see the icon and hit triangle but it never activated. Rebooting helped with starting missions but the skill challenges only finally showed up like halfway through the game completely at random. I had tried to access them every night and it never worked...then it did (it reacted like I hadn't done the first ones yet, so it was like starting these fresh). *shrug*

My biggest issue is that having played Spider-man (and all of it's DLC) extensively on PS4, this gives off A+ DLC vibes so it feels too expensive as a stand-alone game...but is too well done and large for DLC. It's basically the same general Spiderman game (same map, similar collectibles, same suit collecting, skill progression) and doesn't feel like a sequel. It's just feels like "more" and although wonderful, or dare I say amazing, this had absolutely zero surprises. But it's better than Spider-man so if you haven't played either, this would be my recommendation. And I'm happy with my experience.

Recore continues to haunt me, thankfully I didn't have to replay the 2nd floor of the tower that I greatly disliked in my prior session and I was able to move into the next cluster of a level. Floor 3 was better with the platforming but each floor has 4 platforming sections wrapped around 3 arenas where you fight waves of enemies and the 3rd arena of floor 3 crushed me. I think it took me over a dozen attempts. You want/need to auto-extract cores from enemies to restore your health as there are a ton of projects flying around but also some phases of the fight you're in radiation and slowly taking damage over time. Well I filled up my inventory likely 2+ full times with extracted cores that I had to just discard, that's how flarking annoying/challenging this fight was for me.
It was 5 phases and often I failed to reach the 4th phase let alone the 5th, some times eating it on the 2nd phase, gah. After much cursing I did beat it and then took a break from that tower. All that frustration let me level up enough to do another dungeon in the DLC, so I went there next. Well the boss there was total crap, it was a large dog plus some flying things that blasted you from around the central platform that you needed to stay on because if you fell off that, the lower area was toxic and could kill you within a few seconds. But double jumping to get back on wasn't a given as the damage you took could cause Jules (your character) to recoil with pain and it was about at the limit of your vertical capacity. Then the dang dog kept coming at you and slammed into you and could stun lock you for at least 2 hits, taking a good 40% of your health with each hit. It also was often there at the ledge to bash you right back off again. There's also that lovely radiation again, so the dungeon that I hoped would be not too bad, took me a good 7 attempts, chocked full of more frustration and cursing too.
The game is just not very good, I now fully wish I wouldn't have tried it but with only a small amount left I want to finish it and I won't likely do anything more in the DLC, as it sucks but I also need to increase around 6 levels just to enter into the next dungeon. I partly went there after the tower to level up some as I figured I must be underpowered, but man my patience with this game is just about gone.

Star Wars: Racer Revenge {} 6/10
I've never seen a Star Wars movie, nor do I plan on it, but once in a while I like checking out games based on the series which is why I originally bought Star Wars Episode 1 Racer on Nintendo64 many years ago. I haven't played it in years, but I remember I had some fun times with that game, especially in split-screen multiplayer. That won't be an option this time, but I didn't care as long as the single player stuff is fun. I was expecting a decent game out of this because the developers (different studio than the original game) had made some other fun racing games during the PS2 era, but this ain't really one of them.

Again, it has been years since I've played the original game and it's entirely possible that if I were to play it now it wouldn't be nearly as fun as I remember it being, but I did watch a couple of reviews on YouTube as a sort of refresher before I started playing this one. The feeling I'm left with from this game is that it isn't a very good sequel. The graphics are hardly much of an improvement over the original, the track designs are nothing special, the overall audio is worse (engine sounds and annoying announcer) and overall if it were stripped of the Star Wars license this would look like just a generic F-Zero or WipeOut wannabe.

Evil West (PS5) - 7/10 - Nothing amazing but it's a very solid AA title. The one thing that absolutely drives me crazy though is that it encourages exploration through super straight-forward level design. And you often reach shiny points in the level to "action" (jumping over a fence, swinging from a rope, etc.) but sometimes you can't go back. So you can hit an area with paths in 3 directions, but if you choose one that doesn't let you backtrack, you miss out on the others. Super dumb way of getting people to replay levels when it's usually just for a small amount of upgrade currency.

Always wondered what’s an AA title vs AAA like is there a defined threshold of sorts or more a feeling
(Serious question)

budget, quality

I really enjoyed Evil West. Great linear action coop game. Something we don’t see too many of nowadays.

Kommie wrote:

Is there a defined border between AA and AAA for both of those (budget wise at least…quality is more subjective)

not really. Like, Kena Bridge of Spirits is AA but has the quality of AAA. Stray is AA and is AA quality.

AA for me is something from a smaller studio that with a little more budget/time could have really had something amazing. But what they put out is great, and usually comes out at a cheaper price.

Evil West is good but there are small things like the homestead hub where it's fairly large and you return there after each mission, but there is almost nothing to do. Feels like some aspect of the game got cut there, like some narrative stuff/talking to NPCs or maybe even side missions. And then later in the game they just toss more enemies at you but there are no surprises.

Stray is a fun little romp and gives me what I expect being a cat would feel like. Kinda a weird plot though but I’ll roll with it. 7.5/10 so far and I’m a little more than half way thru.

I gave Sonic Frontiers (PS5) a whirl again tonight. I'm at the 3rd world, or island, or whatever. I can't really tell as the collectibles are fudging ridiculous.

I know this is Sega and it had a healthy budget, but I consider this a disappointing AAA game...that represents a AA game perfectly. It has the bones of a solid experience but doesn't hit the mark on a lot of aspects, is clumsy, but can be plenty of fun if you find it yourself. The amount of collectibles is laughable, as are the deaths because you didn't make the only-one-way-of-doing-this-route and fail is through the roof.

The old-school levels are great if you hit everything perfectly but still have the awkward thing like continuing to hold right while traversing a 180' ramp to the left. They still haven't solved making this feel right if you don't have full speed and lose momentum. And when it shifts to 3D it's usually far too easy to fall to a death because the camera is looking more back than forward. Super easy problem to solve, but terribly implemented at times.

Sonic Frontiers was terrible for me. Sold it after getting to world 2. Bad Sega. Bad.

I enjoyed 'Sonic Frontiers,' but I also enjoy the environmental puzzles for collectibles in the 'Assassin's Creed' games too, so 'Frontiers' struck a cord for me. If only the pop-in wasn't present in the current-gen consoles.

Monster of the Deep: Final Fantasy XV {} 5/10
I had bought this years ago, I think it released in late 2017 right around the time I got my PSVR.
A VR fishing game, with PS Move support, I thought that right there would make this fun, I didn't care one bit about the Final Fantasy license being attached to it (and from what I've played it didn't really need that license). Unfortunately the PS Move controls just suck. I can't get the damn camera to track my cast motion properly which is the most important part of a VR fishing game (navigating the menus is just as bad). I changed to the DualShock4 controller and am having the same problem. I checked some reviews and it isn't just me. If you can cast and get the thingy to land where you wanted it to on the first attempt, you got lucky. You likely won't be doing it again.

The graphics are decent, there is a pretty detailed character creator. But the game is guilty of a pet peeve that will always annoy me in the VR games that do it: why go through the hassle of making this big immersive world for the player to feel like they're inside it, but then when a cutscene plays it's in freakin' 2D? Stop doing that VR devs, it's gross. Audio is alright...I guess. The characters seem to have the same voice actors as they did from the real FFXV, but this one broad with big boobs and low cut shorts and a thick southern accent, she's gotta gtfo. I never want to hear her speak again.

Anyway, due to frustrations with the controls, it's highly likely that I will not be finishing this game. So much potential was wasted with this.

Little Hope from the Dark Pictures series is eerie and very atmospheric but the acting is stiff at times as are those controls when you get to control a character. And the walk faster button is just as useless as it was in Man of Medan. I am about halfway thru the story. 7/10

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.

Does Cyberpunk ever pick up and get good? I've waited forever to start it but figured since there hasn't been a patch in a while it might be nearly finalized. I've been playing about 2 hours and so far it's just OK. I want to give it a fair chance but it's definitely not catching my interest to this point.

sa330206 wrote:

No it doesn't. It stays the same mediocre level through the entire game.

Cyberpunk was such a disappointment to me when I played it at launch. Technical issues aside it was just blah and Keanu got annoying towards the end. I heard the new patches made it better but I expected more from the story and gameplay. Especially after all the hype it received initially.

That sucks about Cyberpunk. I'm still early on but a few annoying things..

The world is huge and looks like it has potential but just seems boring to me. I dont know why but it's not pulled me in at all.
The car driving is straight up terrible.
I found it hard to shake a wanted level of even 1 star. I didn't get killed or anything but it was just annoying. This might be a user error.

I think I'll give it a few more hours and if it doesn't grow on me, I'm pulling the plug. I'd rather go back and replay a game I've already beat like the Witcher 3 than painfully play Cyberpunk.

Did you play the Witcher 3 DLC? Blood and Wine was fantastic.

sa330206 wrote:

I actually thought the couple of hours I played were fun. I just have a hard time getting back to it with all the great games I have in queue. Ive been trying to avoid open world games lately and I usually dont enjoy FPS games. This game has both.

I love the Witcher 3 and I downloaded the PS5 version and started playing the 1rst DLC. Love it. I wish I had more time to get into it.

I'm in middle of Mario Tennis Open

It's been awhile since I've played a Mario sports game, and I have very little experience with tennis (I think I've only gone to play actual real tennis only once) so I decided to try this one out.

I'm impressed by the precision of the racket. You can easily hit the ball. I thought it'd be easier to miss it. You still can miss, but it feels on target. Feels well put together.

It's cool how the characters each have custom rackets. Adds a cool touch.

I tried several characters so far: Bowser, Boo, and Donkey Kong. And now that I think about it, how is Boo actually holding the racket? Does he envelop the racket handle with his paw-like hand?

There's a feature where if you're in a specific spot that's highlighted in the ground as the ball comes to you, you can hit the ball back with an extra effect. I keep missing those. Was only able to activate flower power, which sent the ball back on fire at a super speed.

There's also minigames. There's one that I tried earlier, where you hit a tennis ball against the wall, the picture on the wall being a moving from left to right super Mario Bros stage. As you hit the ball, you scroll towards the end of the stage on the screen. But what I don't understand is that there's a timer, just like in the Mario games. I got timed out. How do I get to the end of the stage? You can't hit the ball faster. Didn't seem intuitive to me.

Minigames aside, you can also pick up your DS and move it around to move the character as you're on the court, something like that. Motion controls in a way. But I didn't try swinging the actual DS. That's an accident waiting to happen. So I'm figuring you can't actually swing your DS to swing the racket. It's not like a wiimote where there's a strap. I doubt Nintendo implemented a tennis racket DS feature. They probably foresaw thrown DS consoles to be a potential problem.

Life is Strange 2 {} 8/10
This started off with a bang, unlike the previous Life is Strange game (Before the Storm), whose story didn't start to get good until about halfway through the game.

I've only got two Chapters left to play through. I don't know that this story will end up having quite the same impact that the first game did, but the writing is good, the voice acting is good, and as usual with this series, the soundtrack is pretty good too (kudos to whoever is in charge of deciding what songs get used and where, because the song at the end of Chapter 3 fit very well).

-
Dotboy {} 4/10
Known as Pixboy in the US eShop, I bought this when I had a couple leftover Yen in my wallet and didn't want it to go to waste, so I bought the first cheap game I saw and, well, that is pretty much the same as letting them go to waste, I guess. I mean, I already had a feeling I wasn't going to like this, but of the games in that price range this one looked to be the least crappy (but not by much).

It's a 2D platformer that looks and feels like it came from the late-80s/early-90s (has color filters to make it look like you're playing a GameBoy game) and that's a good thing or a bad thing, depending how you feel about that. For me, I grew up playing 80s and 90s games and am so glad games have only gotten better since then. I often don't enjoy revisiting those games and usually don't enjoy when new games try to imitate those games. I've died more times than I should have in this game due to either the jump button not registering when I've pressed it, or the wonky hit boxes on spikes for example. It looks like there are 40 levels in this game, but I'm getting ready to tap out after only 10.

Bayonetta 3 - 7/10

I played all 3 Bayonetta games this year. While each one incrementally improved over the previous one, I found them somewhat repetitive. Not sure if my tastes how just outgrown button mashing action games (I feel the same way about DmC: Devil May Cry which I'm also currently playing). The game does feel good, and the presentation is over the top, but the levels seemed like an afterthought and a big tunnel to get you from point A to point B. The various change in gameplay was refreshing though and interesting.

Really enjoyed playing as Viola though.

Sun wrote:

I feel the same way when I play these type of games. I only do 1 or 2 missions per play session because I get tired of the formula quickly. I still buy and play them though.

Sun wrote:
How'd you enjoy the first one, being that it was the first in the series and fresh.

Omori

One of the things I really appreciate about this game has nothing to do with the game itself. You know how sometimes when you load up certain games, it takes a long time to start, as you have to see each dev/studio name? And you can't always rush past that. But here you can just press A and skip through them. It's great. Extra point(s) for that.

RE4R is a damn fine remake. 9/10 so far and I’m halfway thru

nonamesleft wrote:

It was okay. Maybe because I played a port of it 13 years after it came out? I own a copy on PS3 and I own the double-pack on Wii U but never played them. First one looked rough on the Switch.

Sun wrote:
I haven't played any of them. I'm intrigued by the upcoming one that's in the works. I think it's about the main character growing up? Something like that.

nonamesleft wrote:

The prequel is already out...Cereza and the Lost Demon, but the gameplay is different.

As my 50th game clear this year, I beat Rhythm Thief & the Emperor's Treasure .
[imgt w=1536 h=2048]https://i.imgur.com/5Q82FOR.jpg[/imgt]

It's a great rhythm game by SEGA. The stylish Parisian art thief Phantom R and his dog Fondue must solve an growing mystery surrounding his father's disappearance, a possibly-resurrected Napoleon Bonaparte with an evil army, a mysterious symbol appearing on various magical treasures, and more, all while dodging the authorities and supporting a new friend. The story and characters are fairly memorable, even if some moments are a little stupid or pointless in the long run. As for gameplay, you spend a lot of time in visual novel-mode, tapping the Touch Screen to find collectibles, recording sound effects for use around the overworld, and solving minor sound-themed puzzles. When you're not doing that, you get to play rhythm minigames that usually advance the story. They use various inputs, like button controls, swiping with the stylus, and even gyro controls. The tunes are catchy, but I'll have to listen to them again to really memorize them. It's satisfying knocking out Napoleon's knights with single palm strikes, quickly sneaking around museums at night, and kicking a soccer ball to pummel a bratty child detective.

All that stuff is good, and the game is really cool because of it. But I do have some critiques. A fair number of the minigames are just annoying. The difficulty curve is pretty forgiving until about Chapter 7, when this go off the rails. Before you know it, the game expects you to divide your attention between two sides of the screen with little time to breathe or quickly flip between six different inputs. (The poodle minigames especially are abysmal.) You can spend coins to use items to enhance your performance, which I strongly encourage in the later chapters. The most obnoxious part is the grading system. You hit the right notes to fill the groove bar from E to A, and any mistake drops it down at least one grade. So you can still get an A if all your mistakes happen early on, but a late mistake is basically a guaranteed B. I can handle that, but the real kicker is the high score system. You can earn an A and still have a low score, but you can also get a D or C and have a high score, depending on when you messed up. The game prioritizes your score over your grade, so a worse letter grade can overwrite your better one. Did I mention some level content is locked behind getting all As? So if you're not careful, you can play yourself into a corner, getting an extremely high score but making just one or two mistakes at the end to net yourself a B. Now you have to outperform your amazing score to replace it. I had to reset the game without saving in order to feasibly get an A on a few difficult minigames, which isn't how this system should work. Your score and overall grade should be saved separately so average players can prioritize getting As to unlock that final bonus chapter, while dedicated players can keep trying to top their scores without fear that the bonus chapter unlock could be affected.

Tapping everything on the screen to find important--and missable--trinkets is a tad irritating when you just want to get a move on. The art style is one part nice and another part cheap. It looks like a lower-budget Prof. Layton game, which is nice until you see Marie's character portrait, as it in particular looks amateurish. The voice acting is adequate but can be flat at times, and there are countless moments where the actor says something completely different from the subtitle--as an example, every time Napoleon says "hare" in the subtitles, his VA says "rabbit," perhaps because they didn't think Americans knew what hares were. Sometimes entire sentences will be changed, shortened, or restructured, which is distracting and just looks sloppy.

Overall, I give it an 8/10. Not amazing, but compelling and stylish enough to play all 18 hours of it and nab every A rank. I recommend buying it on the 3DS eShop while it's still $20, because if you don't, tracking down a rare cartridge will run you a fortune! ...Huh? The eShop's closed? Good luck, then!

Sun wrote:
Wait, what? It is? Had no idea. I thought it was in the works. Will look into it.

@SupremeSarna

A pic of the console's screen. :) Nice. It looks kind of Professor Laytonish. I wonder if similar artists were involved.

That ending that you wrote about the eShop, for a second I was wondering if Nintendo had extended it and kept it open, until I kept reading... 😅

I was disappointed SEGA didn't do an eShop closing sale. They like putting their games on sale. Luckily, I bought 'Rhythm Thief' during the last SEGA 3DS sale when it was $7. I haven't played it yet.

Just finished both Strikey Sisters and Wizorb on .

Both are good Arkanoid-like games with some minor RPG elements. Wizorb looks like Zelda. Both were dirt cheap on the eShop when on sale...a couple bucks each. Short games.

Turtles in Time : This is part of the Cowabunga collection and the Turtles arcade game used to be my favorite.. well this supplanted it. I love the fluid movement and animations... Now maybe thats different then the original, never played but the Arcade game plays alot like how I remember. Anyway I love it. 8/10.

Returnal {} 6/10
Don't take my score serious if this is a genre you actually enjoy. I'm personally not into roguelike stuff, but decided to check this out because I'm paying for PS+ Premium but I feel like there are so few big budget PS5 games offered on it, everything seems to be PS4. I wanted to play a game actually built for the PS5 and there just doesn't seem to be a lot to pick from, but this is one of them. Even if it's a genre I don't personally care for, I figured I would give it a chance.

It looks nice, it makes good use of the DualSense's rumble features, and sounds really good (3D audio support, woo-hoo!). Those are the positive things I can say about it. But as far as the gameplay, after 45 minutes of playing I was really tired of the "Groundhog Day" crap. It tells you before you even start playing that the game is meant to be challenging and that you will die a lot and have to restart. Zombi U is the only game I can think of that did this and I actually enjoyed it. There is approximately 0.001% chance my opinion will change and I will actually finish this.

I am very impartial on Rogue likes but Returnal did it well, the game plays in 2 parts, biomes 1-3 and once you beat that, it's 4-6 so you're not truly beating it all in one run. There is some extra stuff after/act 3 but you could quit there.

It's a great game..... if you like the genre. a big if.

PizzaTheHutt wrote:

I feel you here. Most rogue likes with the exception of maybe Children of Morta and Hades are not my thang either so I scored this about the same and sold my copy after I couldn’t get passed like the 2nd boss. I need games with save points and not shortcuts to get back to another area while having to fight thru a slew of enemies once again.

I enjoy some roguelikes but only for 1 playthru in most cases. I can only think of Hades rn which I dropped after I escaped the 2nd time. And honestly It wasnt worth a 2nd playthru for me.

I think Rogue Legacy 2 is the only roguelike I ever finished.

Dead Cells is my #1 rogue-like. Hades is #2. Granted I haven’t played many of them. Children of Morta and Rogue Legacy are on my backlog. Returnal is what I will probably play for the next week until Tears of the Kingdom comes out. Need to free up storage space for FFXVI.

Disney Speedstorm {} 7/10
I played this via the 2 hour free trial offered on the PS+ Premium tier and I might actually end up buying this if I catch it on sale. I had low expectations going into this because it's by Gameloft, who is most known for their mobile games and the Asphalt series of racing games (some of the Asphalt games are alright, but look and feel so low budget in comparison to other racing games like Need For Speed because they are built for mobile first and foremost). Now that I've played it, I will say God bless Gameloft for giving the world a decent Disney kart racer after that utterly mediocre one Rare released on Nintendo64 back in the day.

So first off, the graphics are pretty good. The tracks are pretty well designed (I especially like one that is in black and white, like the Steamboat Willie era). The music is alright too. In the Mario Kart series I don't particularly care for the soundtracks that much but some of the music in this game hits me in the nostalgia bone. And most importantly the controls are solid. I feel too many kart racers don't control as well as most of us veteran Mario Kart players are used to, but this one gets it.

The tracks are designed around Disney movie franchises, rather than just the characters racing across the US (how boring) like Rare's N64 game I mentioned above.
There's a lot of playable characters in here (with more promised in the future) to unlock and upgrade, and get this, each one has their own special power-up to use during races, a feature a lot of Mario Kart fans have been wanting back in that series for years.

Don't get me wrong, this is far from a "Mario Kart killer" and I am not claiming it to be one, but it is a nice breath of fresh air, you just have to accept the fact you will be grinding a bit if you don't want to pay microtransactions (it's Gameloft after all). I swear kart racers are one genre where actual good ones don't come around too often. There's probably a dozen bad ones for every good one that gets released, thanks to indie devs stinking the genre up.

Metroid Prime Remastered 9/10

Love what they did with the controls. Looks and feels crisp and refreshing.

Circling back on Cyberpunk. It took about 5 hours, and I almost quit multiple times, but it finally picked up a bit. I've actually got into some action and it kind of has a Fallout feel. Up until this point it was basically a super long tutorial with very little action. Now I'm fighting guys left and right, picking up items, etc.

Using 3rd person driving made a big difference too, however the driving overall is still pretty sloppy.

I think I'm going to stick with it now. I don't see myself trying to 100% or anything but I'm having some fun now so maybe I'll do the main story.

A Juggler's Tale {} 7/10
You're playing as this girl that's really a puppet who craves freedom, and it's a 2D platformer with some basic puzzle solving thrown in. Very basic, but occasionally I wound up getting stumped because I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to interact with, for example a stone on the ground that was barely noticeable.

As you are playing through the levels (Acts, because it's like a puppet show y'know) there's some dude narrating the whole story as you're going. There aren't many ways to "die" in this game, instead the narrator will save you by pulling on your strings and place you back in a safe place...and he will also throw subtle insults your way when he has to do that. It was overall a pretty easy game and I was able to complete it in a little under the 2 hour mark. As soon as the credits rolled I checked and Steam said I had played for 117 minutes, and that's gotta include at least 10 minutes where I had the game paused. I recommend playing this if you liked the Unravel games or Little Nightmares.

While everyone is playing TotK, I just finished Skyward Sword for the first time. I liked the graphics and there's some excellent base lore for the series. One of my favorite iterations of the Zelda character too. The main negative is the controls. I played it with the adapted scheme and sometimes I felt like I was going to destroy the stick to do the sword swings. Maybe I should have tried the motion controls.

Also, while I liked flying and exploring the sky, I feel like it's a bit empty and underdeveloped. Most of the game happens on the ground level, and you only go up to retrieve something or get a clue. I was expecting more story interactions with the loftwing, but it really is forgotten after the few first hours.

I enjoyed it, but I can see why some people have issues with the game.

I also got BotW, so I'll finally be able to play it. But I think I'll finish Astral Chain first.

Watched my son play Zelda TotK a bit this weekend. One session was about an hour and in that time I saw only 2 enemies, he died of cold about 10 times, he died from falling about 10 times, he scrolled through like 40 things in his inventory constantly, and otherwise basically just ran around empty spaces.

This seems like it's even more of the find-your-own-fun kind of thing I didn't care for in BotW. So I know I'm in the minority of not liking this style of game. But I'm enjoying the edited clips people are making of cool things.

I am not a fan of the new style Zelda either. But I agree we're in the minority there!

I finished Dead Island 2 (main story) yesterday. I got side quests to go back and finish and am loving all the legendary weapons. The card system could be better, I find it a bit confusing and annoying but it is different I guess. I really enjoyed the game.

I dont particularly love BotW either.

I can see that its a great game, I just prefer the old style. BOTW is the only Zelda game I havent completed.

Dungeons were my favorite part of Zelda games, so a game without fully realized dungeons (BotW) was a bit of a miss for me. I don't think I'll play TotK at all since it looks like Zelda Nuts & Bolts. I wish they would go back to designing smaller, more thoughtful worlds and dungeons, but it's hard to argue against the success of the recent games.

Neo Drift Out (Neo Geo MVS) :

Got the 1CC tonight. A timeless classic of the isometric racer genre. I wanted very badly to clear the game with the Subaru Impreza as I drive a WRX myself, but the Toyota Celica has a higher top speed and is the difference maker in the final stage, where you really can’t afford a single mistake in the Subie. Neo Drift Out’s six stages take place all over the world, from an asphalt track in Italy to a muddy romp in Africa and on to snowy Scandinavia. All of this is beautifully drawn, and a keen eye will notice some weird signs along the road like chocolate chip cookies captioned by an ambiguous question: “What?”. One aspect of this game that is seriously underrated is its absolute banger of a soundtrack. I highly recommend the stage 4 Oceania theme and the stage 6 Great Britain theme, but from the attract mode BGM to the ending credits it’s all great stuff. This game is the final entry of a brief three-game series by Visco, and while it isn’t nearly as pretty as Drift Out ‘94: The Hard Order, it’s controls are markedly better and Neo Drift Out is the best by a wide margin. Likely thanks to the three playable licensed cars, Neo Drift Out has never seen release on any platform but Neo Geo MVS and CD, as well as a years-later AES release by PixelHeart. Well worth a download if you’ve never played it yourself, and a 9.0 GOLD

I love BotW , but it's definitely a very different type of Zelda game. In my ideal world, they would find a better way to mesh the old and the new. But as it currently is, I do miss the old style Zelda games. I wish we could still get some like that too. Actually, I'd be perfectly content if they would keep making 2D Zelda games in addition to BotW/TotK/etc. I prefer the 2D Zelda games over the 3D ones anyway, so that would give me my classic Zelda fix.

Dangerous Golf {} 7/10
So this game released in 2016 but reminds me of one of those "zany, extreme" type of games that would have released 15 years prior on the PlayStation 2.

It's nothing to do with golf other than you control a golf ball in a room where you try to cause as much destruction as possible. That's literally all there is to it.
I enjoyed the hour or two I spent with this game before calling it quits, but my score would have gone down a bit if I had sunk anymore time into this. I can see it would start to get really repetitive and boring sooner rather than later.

Scott wrote:

I agree. I enjoy both new and old. A Link Between Worlds was awesome with it's unique mechanic. I do enjoy TotK and just exploring aimlessly. I mean, I did put in 170 hours into BotW, but that was before I had kids. I did stay up late last night for about 4 hours playing. Part of that devoted to duplicating Diamonds lol.

Loop Hero - Interesting idea for a game. I've been playing it but not making much progress. Well, I've killed the Lich a few times. I'm not sure how to play better.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart - good, much like previous games which I had enjoyed. I may get the plat for this one (seems doable). I'm skipping every cinematic, it's great.

Been playing Lake
I partly love it and partly feel like the butt of a joke i’m not in on

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