VideoGame_Discussion

Air Conflicts - Secret Wars {} 6/10
I am not sure if I will be playing all the way through this one, I just was in the mood for a game like this and it (barely) managed scratch that itch. I've put around 3 hours into it so far and it's just pretty average. It's an arcade-style flight combat sim game, the story takes place way back in WWI, and you play as this pilot named DeeDee whose voice actor kinda annoys me to the point where I've started skipping the cutscenes (which are just still images anyway), but I still have to hear her during missions. The story is mostly her trying to find out how her father died. I didn't know the guy so I couldn't care less how he died, I just wanna fly around and shoot things and drop bombs on suckas in tanks and I'm at least having a bit of fun doing that, but the minute it stops being fun I will move on to something else.

Graphically I guess it looks alright for a PS3 game. It's not even close to pushing the limits of the hardware, but it's not an ugly game. The game even has the option to play it in 3D if you're one of the few rich and cool people that ever bought a 3DTV when those were still a thing. I am neither rich nor cool, so I couldn't tell you how it looks. There are some frame-rate stutters here and there though, particularly when you're trying to turn the plane.
As for the controls, there are multiple control settings but I just keep mine set to "Arcade" which I think was the default setting, and it handles well, but because of how long ago the game takes place these planes move f'n slow, so don't go into this expecting Ace Combat or something. Also I started out playing on the Rookie difficulty setting and the auto-targeting is a little too helpful, just makes things too easy. You also have the option of setting the controls to simulation, but I'm just keeping mine set to arcade. There even is a setting to play with a PS Move controller but I can't test that out since I'm playing it on PS5 (streaming it via PS+ Premium), so there is no way to be able to use a PS3 camera to recognize the PS Move controller.

Air Conflicts: Vietnam {} 5/10
As a series of budget titles I am pretty surprised that this didn't end up just being a lazy Copy+Paste of the previous Air Conflicts game I was just playing last week. It looks a bit nicer, the jets are more fun to fly than the slow poke planes in the previous game and I think it uses licensed tunes from that era.
Despite all that though, I'm not liking it as much. I was halfway through the previous Air Conflicts game when I decided not to finish it, and I'm about an hour into this one and I already know I'm not going to finish it. It just feels a bit repetitive.

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Devil May Cry V Special Edition {} 8/10

Up until now my only experience with this series was when I played DmC - Devil May Cry a decade ago, and then I played the original Devil May Cry on Switch two or three years ago. DmC was really good, I enjoyed it and the soundtrack was also great, now and then I still listen to a couple of the licensed songs featured in it. I understand that longtime fans of the series disliked it enough to send death threats to the developers, but fudge those guys, that's when you know you take video games way too seriously. Because of those crybabies I don't know if Capcom considers that game canon anymore.
The original DMC on Switch I had to stop playing after 2 or 3 hours, I just wasn't enjoying it at all. I am sure it was fun back in 2001, but it didn't age well by 2021, the reboot was far superior.

I just wanted to get that out of the way, that I'm not a big fan of this series, prior to this I've only played those two games and one was great, but the other was bad enough to kill my interest in wanting to check out DMCs 2, 3 and 4. I don't even know what it was about DMC V that made me want to check it out, other than I'm kinda desperate for big budget PS5 games to play in the PS+ Extra catalog.

If I didn't already know that this was originally a last gen game, I would believe it if you told me this was meant for current gen. It checks pretty much all of the boxes of things I expect from a PS5 game: it looks nice (sometimes it can be tough to tell when a cutscene ends and the gameplay begins), supports ray tracing effects, it supports the fancy shmancy rumble of the DualSense, adaptive triggers, 3D audio, practically blink-and-you-miss-it load times, you know just all that good stuff that should be standard on PS5 by now but for some reason some developers don't put in the effort to make it be.

The story is all mumbo jumbo to me, but I don't typically play these types of games for the story anyway, so I don't care why I'm hacking and slashing these creatures, as long as I have fun doing it. And I am. The dialogue is pretty corny at times though, but I mean it's Capcom, the "Jill sandwich" guys, so...

I'm at the halfway point of the game and I don't know yet how much of a role this guy plays in the overall story, but there's a character you play as that looks like a scrawny emo sissy and his powers are that he can summon a freakin' crow and a panther or something, and they do most of the fighting for him. I do not enjoy playing as him I was really enjoying the game up until he came along. I still am enjoying it, but I think I'd enjoy it more without him and I hope there aren't too many more levels where I have to play as him.

But for the game itself, the graphics are very good, it warns you that enabling ray-tracing may affect the frame-rate, but it happens so infrequently that there's no reason not to enable it. The audio is good as well I'm really liking the soundtrack (not quite as much as DmC's though). I have no issue with the controls, I'm basically just button-mashing my way through it all and the game makes me feel like I am kicking a lotta ass while doing it. Overall the game is fun, but I still don't want to check out DMC 2-4 anytime soon because I doubt they aged well, but I may check out future installments.

PizzaTheHutt wrote:

For me, budget games tend to fall into one of two categories. The developer believes:

- This is the best game we could make within our budget and time constraints.

OR

- It's OK that we phoned it in; nobody expects much from a budget title anyway.

Some of the games from the former viewpoint end up being classics in their own right, while games developed under the latter end up being mocked for generations to come.

benstylus wrote:


I remember late in the PS1's life there was a whole line of budget games for $10. Almost all were garbage and most aimed at children. Gaming mags didn't even bother reviewing majority of them, but one I remember being surprisingly decent was a game based on the original The Italian Job movie, published by Rockstar Games and released in 2002, long after most people thought the console was dead. It's because of that game that I don't immediately write off every budget title as automatically being crap, because like you said some developers are just doing their best with what they were given to work with.

PizzaTheHutt wrote:

I played that one but I remember the load times often being longer than the actual levels...

Golf Club Wasteland Nostalgia {} 5/10

When I bought this game last year it was called Golf Club Wasteland, but it has since been renamed to Golf Club Nostalgia in the eShop (though the display name and icon on the console home screen weren't updated to reflect the name change for some reason).

I'm not a fan of the sport of golf (or any sport really), but I don't mind when games are built around it to tell a bigger story or something. Switch is home to two of my favorite golf games, Golf Story and What The Golf?, and neither are aimed at hardcore golf fans. I don't think this game is aimed at those fans either, though this is a more serious game than the other two. It's basically a social commentary about the world and rich corporations, and the story is narrated through the radio that is broadcasting while you play. I'll be honest, the story isn't that interesting to me, it's something to do with Earth being almost destroyed, so the rich people move to Mars and come back down to Earth once in a while to play golf on what's left of the decaying planet. The golf portion of the game is really basic, and if the game wasn't so short (I am 5 holes away from the end, I think I've played maybe 2 hours) I would have abandoned the game by now.

Man, Disney illusion island is really boring.

loztdogs wrote:

It looks nice and it controls well, but it just feels so empty.

I really wish they had gone the Rayman Origins/Legends route and created a bunch of focused, tightly designed stages instead of a large open metroidvania style world with practically nothing in it.

Platforming with no combat can work, but it requires great level design, or at the very least a lot of variety. Illusion Island has neither.

Makes me sad because I really wanted to like it.

Mouse Trap {} 3/10
Alright, hear me out. This was on sale in the eShop for $4 a couple weeks ago. I never got to play this board game as a kid, but I thought it looked fun in the commercials. I don't think any of my friends owned it either, and when going to Toys R Us as a kid and having the opportunity to choose between a new video game and a board game, I sure as crap wasn't choosing a board game, that's how I became the coolest kid on the block. As soon as I saw it supported online play I texted my friend and asked if she wanted to play a couple rounds and she bought it too (turns out she did play it once or twice as a kid). It feels like each game is over before you know it and I was left thinking "that's it?" I think we played through two full matches in a little less than 20 minutes. Unlike some other video game adaptations of board games, I don't think this one transitioned very well.

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Chex Quest HD {} 5/10
Another game I never played as a kid and thus have no nostalgia for, but it's on sale for 50 cents so I decided to check it out. This is not a 1:1 remake of the original though, they tried to modernize it a bit. It's not very good, but I also wouldn't say it is awful. I've spent more than 50 cents on games that I ended up enjoying less than this.Seems like it'll be a short game since there's only 5 levels. I haven't beaten it yet and not sure if I will honestly due to slightly confusing level design and there are no checkpoints in levels so if you die you have to restart. This remake was built from the ground up on Unreal Engine 4 and that might explain why it feels so sluggish like a lot of other UE4 games on Switch, so you'll definitely want to adjust the sensitivity of the analog sticks.
I guess this made for a cool freebie in the mid-90s, but it's nothing special if you're playing it for the first time all these years later with no nostalgic memories of it, it's more of a "you had to be there" type of thing. Also, I'm surprised this got a T rating instead of E. The "violence" that ESRB claims is very minimal and there's obviously no blood.

Arizona Sunshine {} 7/10
For the first couple of hours I was convinced this just might be my favorite shooter on PSVR so far, or at least tied with DOOM VFR (not counting on-rails shooters like Until Dawn: Rush Of Blood, I mean shooters with full locomotion movement). But I will stop myself from singing this game's praises too much, because once those first couple of hours pass you'll realize just how janky this game really is.

I started playing with PS Move controllers and they took a little getting used to, but when you give it enough time they start to feel like the right way to play, but my current setup is not ideal for that, so I played with DualShock 4 in the next session and I'll probably continue using it for the remainder of my playthrough. I do think it felt pretty cool with the Move controllers and having to reload guns using both hands and it gives you the option to hold two guns at once vs just one on DS4, but besides that there was nothing wrong with using the DS4.

I wish the graphics were a little better. I know this released pretty early in the PSVR's life, but damn it kind of looks like a PlayStation 3 game at times. Also in the dark environments you can barely see anything. The audio is alright, but one thing I don't like is you can often hear zombies, but when you look around the room will be empty and the zombies are outside or in the next room, but you hear them as if they are right up in your face. The main character (who I don't recall is ever given a name) will spout comments as you play and he doesn't annoy me or anything, so that's a positive. Though he refers to all zombies as "Fred" and I don't get the joke there. The controls as already mentioned are fine. I think it supports the PS Aim controller, but I don't have one to know how it works, but if you have the option, try it with PS Move controllers first as the game tells you from the beginning that those controls are what it was designed for.

Overall it's merely a decent game that could have been a really good game, but is held back by some jankyness. For example in one area I was surrounded by zombies and as I was backing away from them as I was shooting, I ended up walking through the environment and I only realized that's what happened because suddenly the zombies stopped running after me because they couldn't see me. Later in the game I reached a room where I could hear zombies were nearby, turns out ther were outside but I couldn't get close enough to open the door because their arms were glitching through it. And one more example is this point I've reached in the game just a couple of levels from the end, the screen has gone black multiple times and the only way to continue is by exiting the game and reloading. If that happens a few more times I will probably just give up and play something else. I am still enjoying the game, hence the 7 score, but there are times when those glitches show up where it kinda feels closer to a 5 or 6. There's online multiplayer co-op horde mode but I don't know if I will try that or not, or if anyone is even still playing it. That's one thing about VR games, unless it's a really popular one, they don't stay active online very long because they're already releasing to a limited audience.

The Last of Us Part 1 (PS5) - 9/10 - There is no reason for this to have been remade a 2nd time. But it's pretty fantastic. My TLOU experience:

* PS3 TLOU - I played about 1/2 way through but stopped because I wasn't enjoying it.

* PS4 TLOU Remastered - Powered my way through it, beat it, and the DLC. I felt like I was using exploits though (lots of just plowing ahead and just using spiked baseball bats and shivs).

* PS4 TLOU 2 - Felt bloated, unfocussed, padded, and overly convoluted. But was really good and it's bones were solid (gameplay and base story premise).

* HBO TLOU - Felt it was ok but honestly didn't remember many of the story beats. So it felt like every couple episodes it would just do a side story and then kill that person off, not advancing the story at all. Weird pacing.

* PS5 TLOU Part 1 Remake - Makes me totally respect the HBO show more. They really did a good job now that I'm seeing the story I had forgotten. This game is really well written and quite an experience. It's pretty wonderful. But I think you can enjoy it just the same via the PS4 Remastered version.

And now hearing the TLOU Part 2 is getting the remake treatment...yeah it's going to be awesome but playing the PS4 game on my PS5 made that already feel current. If they charge $70 for Part 2 Remake < 3 years from when it came out...come on man.

So I wrote a review of Buriki-One for the Neo Geo Hyper 64. Rather than post a gigantic wall of text and screens here, I posted it to my ghost town user forum. Its the kind of thing I would have submitted as a GameTZ Review proper if that were still a thing, so please have a look.

Zombie Army 4: Dead War - 6.5/10

Another PS+ game I downloaded, and, 'tis the season. This game was clearly designed with 4 player co-op in mind even though it can be played solo. I wish the other characters, they're distinct like 'Left 4 Dead,' would be CPU controlled. It's easy to get surrounded and have your life nearly immediately drained. The game is also a bit janky. I think this is the first game I've ever changed the aiming controls to move slower. It's so quick on default that it's hard to aim. I don't know. It's fun, and an interesting throwback to games we got more commonly during the 360/PS3 era, but it's also evident the budget was lower and fine-tuning had to be sacrificed. If I had three other people to play with, or jumped online, I can see the fun here.

Dead Space remake 8.5/10

It’s awesome so far. I’m on chapter 2. Performance mode is so fluid and it’s just as creepy as when I first played it back in the day. I also appreciate them having Isaac talk now. I thought I would mind it but it’s done tastefully as it was in part 2. I hope they remake part 2 next. That one was also very good.

Assassins Creed: Valhalla: bloated/10.

Started this last Sunday. Got a few hours in. Barely touched the tip of the surface. Seems fun but kinda weird too, and basically feels like Witchers Creed mixed with Happy Leif Erickson day.

TalonJedi87 wrote:

Oh wow I had no idea Isaac was voiced in the remake. I'm guessing they changed up the dialogue and his interactions with other characters to accommodate him being voiced this time around. Not sure when I'll get around to playing it, but I'm even more excited now just to see how different it all is.

Oh yeah it’s completely different as Isaac is talking back and interacting with crew members more on the regular now via comms that he hasn’t in the past. Almost feels like a brand new game in that sense.

The remake is so good. It's a really nice addition of him talking since the back and forth conversations are way more engaging than NPCs just talking at you (and responding to your silence). Everyone monologuing was far less interesting and easy to just ignore.

Unpacking {} 6/10
What a really monotonous game this is. I kinda liked the concept, and it is fun to play at times, but boring at other times.

This is based on a developer's real life experience after she had moved in with her boyfriend and felt overwhelmed having to unpack a bunch of boxes without knowing what was in them. In the past decade I've moved 3 times and probably will again next year. I've always numbered the boxes and wrote down what I put in them. It's not rocket surgery. But that's not how this broad's mind operates, and if it was then we wouldn't have this game.

You're unpacking boxes and then putting the items away. It can be fun to play and relax to, but while It's a short game at roughly 4 hours long, I still feel like it should have been a little shorter. I started to wish there was a little more variety in the items to unpack, because again, while the game is short, every level has largely the same crap because apparently she doesn't like throwing things away. After what feels like the umpteenth time of unpacking a box of tampons and having to put them in the cabinet under the bathroom sink, or her childhood stuffed animals, or the countless books you will be stuffing on the bookshelf (why doesn't she invest in a Kindle the next time she moves?) it will start to feel like you're doing more of an irl chore instead of playing a video game (not too unlike that PowerWash Simulator game). Also when you unpack the items, you can pretty much place them anywhere and facing any direction, the game doesn't judge you for how good of a job you do at decorating the rooms, it's literally just unpacking the boxes and putting the items where they should be.

I'm close to finishing the game now and once I do I can't see myself ever wanting to play this again. But where we're at now with too many indie devs playing it safe and farting out so many Metroidvanias, rouguelikes, [insert activity here] Simulator 2023, or 2D Zelda clones, kudos to these devs for trying something new, I guess.

PizzaTheHutt wrote:

Well, it's not just about unpacking boxes. It's about adapting/fitting your life, represented by the items in the boxes, to new things, situations and environments. I agree, there isn't much to it, and it's definitely best played to relax with.

DCGX wrote:

I've given up on this game already. I was on the second chapter where you need to retrieve a couple of cogs for a machine, and then protect the machine while it does its thing, got overrun and died. Not bad on its own, but the only checkpoint was the beginning of the chapter, and this game isn't fun enough solo to force me to do that all over again. With friends, sure.

Friday The 13th The Game {} 7/10
I'm like 6 years behind the times I guess, but I finally decided to play this for the first time today, long after it had peaked in popularity on YouTube and Twitch. I only played a couple of rounds, but it was fun. I have more fun playing as Jason than trying to survive as those jabronis, but I'm enjoying it either way. I'm sure it's more fun with friends but I don't know anyone still playing this. I'm not sure if it was just because I'm playing it on an actual Friday that happens to be on the 13th, but there's a decent amount of people still playing online. I'm not sure that this is something I would keep coming back to, but I can see keeping this installed and playing a few rounds here and there. Too bad the game won't be around much longer though.

Just beat Dead Space . Great game. Never played the original.

Now gonna played Armored Core VI.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered {} 8/10
I remember liking this game when I played it in 2009 on Xbox 360, and I'm still liking it now. There are some things they really should have fixed up in this remaster though to make it even better. The first should have been adding gyro aiming to the Switch version. It just feels like it was made for that. Second would be to fix the lip sync issues with the characters when they're speaking in the cutscenes. In fact, it seems like the cutscenes in general had the bare minimum of fixing up because they don't look as good as the actual game.

My initial impression of playing the original release was that the voice acting was done really well by all involved...except for Bill Murray, who sounded like he was bored and only reprising his role as a favor to his friends. I still kind of feel that way, he does sound bored in most cutscenes but it's not prevalent throughout the whole game like I remembered it being.

While the game itself is still fun, it kinda does feels like only a little effort was put into this remaster. I mean, they didn't even include the multiplayer mode. They said it was something they were working on because they had to recompile it because the original code was a mess since it was outsourced to a different team and that they would patch it in after launch, but then about two years after this released they quietly announced that they gave up on doing that, so single player is all you will get. At least it's still a good game even in single player and you can often find it on sale for under $10. I just felt like playing a game like this but wasn't in the mood to replay Luigi's Mansion 3 and this was perfect for that.

Infamous: Second Son (PS4 on PS5) - 7/10 - I remember this fondly, but mostly for the DLC which lets you play as the electric girl. But I thought I'd give this another try and found out I had the Platinum trophy (so I guess I really did enjoy it). It's been fun to revisit but for a nearly 10 year old game it plays pretty well (minus the stickiness of climbing/grabbing) and seems to have an unlocked framerate option now that works well.

One big negative is the visual contrast so heavily emphasizes neon that there are loads of things that are totally dark and you can't see. It's really tough to spot enemies below you or those not near signs and things.

The open world is pretty tame by 2023 standards and there are a fair amount of things to do, but not too many and enough to make it feel reasonable for going out of your way. It's a very good game but shows its age a bit for sure.

Suika Game / Watermelon Game / スイカゲーム {} 7/10

I noticed a bunch of Japanese friends on my friend list were playing this lately, so I asked about it and apparently this was a 2021 release in Japan, I guess it went largely unnoticed until recently when it became one of the hottest trending games over there. It finally released in the US yesterday at only $3 so I picked it up to see what all the fuss was about. The first time I played it, I didn't like it at all. Then later that afternoon I gave it another try and I disliked it less. Then the next time I realized it ain't so bad.
They put minimal effort into releasing it here, because they didn't translate anything, the game is only playable in Japanese (luckily it's 90% katakana which is super easy, but the game doesn't rely on text anyway, you'll figure it out). It's a simple concept really, you combine smaller fruit to make bigger fruit and try not to let them reach the top of the playing field. It sounds like a Flash game from 20 years ago, but it's really that simple. I expect there to be a hundred clones of this infesting the Android and iOS stores if they're not already. I can see myself getting really bored of this game if I didn't have those friends to compare high scores with and work at trying to beat them, and that's pretty much the only thing that keeps me coming back to it (you can't compare scores within the game though, we message each other whenever we get a new PB). It's a fun time killer, but I'm enjoying Super Mario Bros. Wonder too much to invest much more time into this at the moment, so this will just be a game I play before bed.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder {} 9/10

I don't dislike the New Super Mario Bros. series as much as some seem to, but I'm so glad we got this instead of another NSMB game because those all feel and look the same, and this was like a breath of fresh air in comparison. I feel like one thing the NSMB games did is damn near perfect the controls of 2D platformers, and since I play so much Super Mario Maker (which uses those same physics) I could tell right away that the jump and run physics and stuff in this game are certainly a little different. Not worse, just different. It took all of 10 minutes to adapt to though, so no problem.

The graphics are pretty good, and again, breath of fresh air after all of the recycled assets the NSMB games shared between them for years.

The music, I don't know, still waiting for it to grow on me. Then again, I've never really been big into video game music anyway besides some of the classics like the OG SMB and Zelda games. The talking flowers, I can see them annoying some people, but so far it's been easy to ignore them. I barely hear them speak most of the time and I don't even read what they say. Mario and Luigi's new voices don't really bother me either.

There are a couple of complaints though, first is the badges. They kind of made a big deal about these badges and there are 24 in total, so far I've unlocked 19 of them, but there's only one that I used through 99% of my playthrough. The others I only used in the bonus levels where you are forced to use them. Overall these badges were not as important as Nintendo wanted us to think they were going to be.

My main complaint is the same as usual: too friggin' easy. You can say "But Pizza, they want everyone of all ages and skill levels to enjoy this game", and that's fine, that's how they've been doing things since the Wii era. But those young kids or moms and dads that don't play many games, they can just use any of the Yoshi characters, the rest of the game doesn't have to be easy mode for all of us.

I'm going for 100% like I do with pretty much every Mario title and feel like I gotta be at least 85%-ish done at this point and there hasn't been as much of a challenge as I'd hoped. I don't mean just overall difficulty of making it to the goal either, I mean finding the collectibles has been really easy too. No guides needed. And that's not me bragging as if I'm some elite player or something, because there are tons of Super Expert levels in Super Mario Maker that I won't even attempt to play because I know they're well above my skill level. I'm not expecting that level of difficulty out of this, but these are the same guys that gave us a bastardized Super Mario Bros. 2 because they thought we couldn't handle The Lost Levels, but now it feels as if they just tone it down for everyone across the board.

I do like the concept of the ghosts of random players being visible while you play and they can revive you if you die, and I've been careful about where I place my standees so hopefully they are helpful to other players too. I'm really hoping for that bonus world to kick my ass, I've been saving that for last. But even without it, despite being easy I would be lying if I said it wasn't fun to play, and that's the important thing.
With those complaints out of the way, as it stands this is my favorite mainline 2D Mario and very likely my GotY.

Inertial Drift - 6.5/10

One of the last Games with Gold titles, and the opposite of 'Need for Speed: Carbon - Own the City;' no drifts to all drifts.

This game starts out so promising, but slams the brakes about halfway through. The gimmick is to use the right stick to drift, then make minor adjustments to turning with the left stick. It works well, but halfway through the story lines, with the switch to the heavier cars, the game changes the fundamentals of how to drift.

For smaller and lighter cars, you push the right stick in the direction you're turning to initiate a drift, and the brake makes the car turn sharper if need be. Light cars are, obviously, more nimble, so they don't need to initiate a drift very early and switching side to side is easy. Heavier cars work differently. Drifts need to be initiating way, way too early, making tight back and forth on some courses ridiculously stiff. But now, the brake straightens the car out instead of making it turn tighter. I think letting up or double tapping the accelerator makes a car turn tighter, but I'm not entirely sure. If it sounds suspect I don't know, that's because the game never teaches it. The tutorial only covers the first, light car and the controls don't explain nuances. A Google search brings up a Steam thread from three years ago with a few people trying to explain how heavier cars work, but there's no consensus really. I found a lone tutorial on YouTube, complete with real-time button inputs in one of the corners, but the guy doesn't actually give a tutorial or explain how the heavier cars control. I know it's possible for people to get, but I don't know why it isn't anywhere in the game. Just a description, a paragraph, or dialogue between the characters in the story of how the controls change to maneuver heavier cars would've been enough. With some practice I'd probably get it too. Instead, it straight up ruined the game for me.

Not that there isn't much else. The aesthetics are cool and the graphics are sharp. There isn't much music, maybe a track or two for the five course areas. It's lazy and nice tune, but not quite fitting. There's a series of event types: Time Attack, Ghost Battle, Duel, Race, Style, Endurance and Precision. Time Attack and Ghost Battle are essentially the same. Ditto for Duel and Race, because there's never more than one opponent on the track at least in the story. Style is drift for points and Endurance is seeing how far you can go with checkpoints. I never bothered with Precision. Essentially, with the exception of Style, each event boils down to a race against the clock in one way or the other. Even in Duel and Race the cars phase through each other. What's left is the same type of event, over and over on the same few tracks with the same lull of music, alone on a track. The story lines are nothing to write home about either. There's no voice work and everyone is incredibly positive. Like, suspiciously too positive. There's no drama or anything. Even in Duels your opponent is giving reassuring quips via on-screen text no matter where they are in relation to you.

Aside from the story there are challenges, which are ok. They mostly unlock new colors for the cars. There's also leaderboards, so you can see how hardcore fans of this game are. For me, after the string of racing games I've just gone through lately, it's been my least favorite, and I have no desire to return to it.

Some quickies:


Darkest Dungeon - 8/10

I'm not far into this. So far, I love the look and the setup. There is a lot going on in this game. A lot. The game goes over some stuff from jump, but the small things, like attacks and spells, you just have to test out. If would be nice to know what is weak/strong/immune earlier on instead of trial and error. My biggest issue, though, is that this game wasn't optimized to use such a small screen. The text is very tiny on the Vita. Not hard to make out, nor does it impede gameplay, but I have 20/20 vision and I'm having to physically get real close to the screen while in the HUB or during combat to be able to read everything. This game was also definitely made with mouse use in mind. I don't like any game that maps back/negate to the triangle button due to muscle memory (NFS: C-OtC on PSP did this too). Other than that, I'll be chipping away at a playthrough even after the Halloween season.


Puyo Puyo Fever - 7.5/10

I've never been a big Puyo Puyo guy. I'm not the best at it and I just find other puzzle games more engaging. The big twist on gameplay for this iteration is when a player is doing well enough, they enter the "fever" state, which clears their board and presents a series of puzzles (place a thing in a very specific spot and it'll chain to clear the rest of the board), which has been done in challenge and puzzle modes in drop puzzle games for a long time, but with a short time limit here. It's a neat addition that can turn the tide of a match if someone is quick enough. The reason I randomly played this game, though, is not related to the gameplay at all.

This entry was released in 2004 on practically everything at the time, and was SEGA's final first-party published game for the Dreamcast. I've had it for nearly that long. But until yesterday, when watching a random video game trivia video on YouTube, I had no idea the whole Dreamcast version can be played in English inherently. It's in the options menu to change either the text or spoken words, or both, to English with complete English voice acting in the cutscenes. I had no idea. That, and there's a slew of backgrounds that can be applied to the Dreamcast's menu. Not the game's main menu, but the Dreamcast system's home menu. Crazy. I'm actually a little embarrassed given how much of a DC fan I am and how much I know about the DC and its games otherwise.


Super Mario Bros. Wonder - Fudge-if-I-know/10

Walmart shipped my copy (and card pack) on release day, and it was supposed to have been delivered this past Monday. That morning it left the HUB in Perrysburg (fudgein' Ohio), and nothing since. I have a lot of work coming up, so I was hoping to go through this with my fiancé before that, but probably not now.

Side-note: I had a separate package to be delivered today by DHL, but I guess the guy wanted to go home, because he marked it as unable to deliver and I've been here all day.

I think I might start 'Days Gone' tonight.

Mortal Blitz {} 8/10
Since Sega and Namco don't want to grab the easy money by making VR ports of Virtua Cop, House of the Dead or Time Crisis, it's up to the little guys to fill that void, and Mortal Blitz makes a darn good attempt at trying to fill it...it just needed to be longer. Now, usually I'd say it's better for a game to end early and leave you wanting more than for it to drag on and leave you wishing it would just end already. But on the default difficulty this game ends too soon (I recorded my playthrough and the unedited video is roughly 55 minutes) and just when you're getting into it, the next thing you know you're at the main menu with a message telling you that you've just completed Episode 1 and to stay tuned because they're planning on adding more missions in future updates. Those f'n missions/updates never came! Sadly it isn't even the first PlayStation VR game I've completed that said there was more content coming in the future and then the developers failed to deliver on it. While you waited for those updates that never came, they tell you to replay the game on a harder difficulty. That's something I rarely enjoy doing no matter how much fun I had in the initial playthrough. I'm the type where once the credits roll, so do I, onto the next game. That's another complaint I have actually. There are no end credits when you complete the last mission, you are just booted back to the main menu. There wasn't even a final boss fight, it's all just so anticlimatic.

I deducted a point from the score because of the short length and abrupt ending, and I know the three games I mentioned above are each the same length as this, but times have changed man, 1 hour games were fine in arcades but not so much now. If it wasn't for that, this could be the best arcade/light-gun/on-rails shooter on PSVR. You'll have enemies coming at you from all angles and needing to duck behind cover, it gets pretty hectic at times and the tracking is some of the best in any PSVR shooter I've played and I didn't have to re-calibrate at all during my playthrough which is pretty damn rare in my experience, I have to do that multiple times in other VR games. I played using the PS Move controllers and that is definitely how I recommend this to be played. The length is my biggest complaint with this game, but if you can overlook that you will find this to be a really solid albeit brief game that I'm surprised doesn't really seem to get talked about a whole lot among the PSVR community from what I've seen.

Blasphemous 2

9/10

They somehow made this one even better than the original with a new variety of weapons that also double as ways to open up new paths of progression, an even more stunning artistic style of graphics and traversal that feels smoother than the original. It’s still just a crushingly difficult but there’s some new nuances like from older Souls games like summoning NPC’s to help with some fights etc. I’m about 1/3 thru the story and loving it.

DCGX wrote:

The unintuitive interface and lack of explanation on the Vita is really starting to get to me. The button mapping isn't great, and the rear touchpad but no front touchpad support is frustrating. I can't figure out how to add characters to my party (yes, I already recruited them from the stagecoach). I can't find an answer online either. I thought, if I embarked maybe the game would ask me to finalize my party, but it doesn't. So I embarked without a full party, and any disadvantage in this game can be a huge disadvantage. And because of how the game saves, even exiting to the home screen or turning off the system at the start of the battle means loading the save puts me right back at the beginning of the battle. Don't even get me started on the high rate of enemy dodging which rendered my first few turns useless.

There's difficulty from challenge, and then there's hamstringing the player for dumb reasons, and considering this is my second embarking, it definitely feels like that latter. I think I have this on PC as well, without the DLC, so I might try that version, but I purchased the European complete-on-cart version for the Vita and wanted to play it there.

I'm 3 episodes into Life is Strange 2 and it's easily a 9/10 so far. It isn't perfect. In fact, episode 2 is a little annoying because it doesn't feel like your choices really matter. It feels like you're set on a predetermined course and fighting against it does nothing. Episodes 1 and 3 are much better, though. Especially episode 3. Things feel more organic. There is a lot of player agency and you really do have an effect on how a ton of smaller and bigger plot points play out. Episode 3 is exceptional if you're into these sorts of games. Very slow paced, but the interactions you have with the other characters are fantastic. Ramps up nicely and the end of the episode is just...wow! I just wanted to type something up quickly to say this is definitely worth playing if you're into these sorts of games. No clue why I skipped it, but I really dig Sean as a main character. His brother Daniel is an annoying little crap, but that's kinda the point and I'm coming to terms with it. I think the dynamic between Clementine and AJ in the final season of The Walking Dead, for example, is much better representation of the older sibling/younger sibling dynamic and I think this game relies far too heavily on Daniel being a spoiled little brat to advance the main plot points. But maybe I'm alone in thinking this. The music is also fantastic! Maybe not quite on par with the godtier soundtrack of the original, but it's pretty damn good! Yeah, just really glad I gave this a shot. I think someone here had a few positive things to say about it which convinced me to pick it up and add it to my backlog. Here's hoping episodes 4 and 5 are just as good.

The Touryst {} 7/10
A short game at barely 5 or 6 hours for the average player (I take my time in most games, so HowLongToBeat.com is almost never accurate for me personally, this game took me closer to 8 hours), I beat it in three or four sessions and it was pretty damn fun. It's basically an adventure/puzzle/platformer game. Some of the puzzles remind me of the kind that might be in Zelda dungeons, but there are no enemies to fight, you just gotta figure out the solutions to get out of whatever room you're in. It's not all just puzzles, though. There are platforming sections (that honestly sometimes are made more difficult because of the perspective makes it hard to judge how far you should jump) and little side quests for you to do, and they can be fun. One involves some dude that says he'll pay you if you can beat his high scores on the arcade machines, and you can go in and actually play them, including one that is pretty much a SNES F-Zero clone. I like the graphical style, it has almost a chibi-Minecraft style to it, but unfortunately suffers from something I didn't like about Yoshi's Wooly World and Link's Awakening remake on Switch in that things in the distance have a kind of blurry look to them all.

Overall I enjoyed this and recommend it. I paid $20 for this on release day in 2019 and waited forever to finally play it, but I think I got my money's worth, but I wouldn't argue with someone thinking it'd be better to wait for a sale because of the short-ish length (it's always better to wait for sales regardless, and I need to learn that).

Moving Out 2 {} 8/10
Just like the first game, this is pure chaos and I like it. This time it has added online play and even cross-platform multiplayer (the first game was local only).

If you liked the first game, this is pretty much more of the same, but turned up a notch. If you haven't played it before but have played something like Overcooked, this is in the same vein as that. 2-4 players working together while dealing with a tight time limit and trying not to mess things up. You're working together, but also trying to work quickly to beat the clock. I feel like this could rival Mario Party in the way that you're having lots of fun when things are going well, but then it reaches "destroyer of friendships" territory when you or your partner(s) botches something that ends up screwing over the rest of the team and you wanna smack 'em upside the head.

Alien Rage {} 4/10
I played for less than a hour before I gave up and deleted this. I don't remember hearing of this game before, but it's about a decade old and I was looking for a PS3 game to play in the PS+ Premium catalog and just decided to give this one a try. I wish I hadn't even wasted my time.
It is a fairly generic sci-fi first-person shooter running on Unreal Engine...that looks and feels like almost every single other sci-fi first-person shooter from the 7th gen era of consoles. Seriously, back when I was using GameFly, from around 2008 - 2014 before I deleted my account there, I was on a quest to rent and play every first-person/third-person shooter on Xbox 360 (a quest that I eventually had to abandon). There were just so many that all looked and played the same that when I think of them now they almost all just blend together in my mind and I couldn't tell you which memory is from which game anymore. Now I can add Alien Rage into that mix. Besides being generic, the game is also kinda ridiculously hard, even on the easiest setting (which instead of naming that setting Easy, they named it Challenging and they weren't wrong).

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Surgeon Simulator: Experience Reality {} 4/10
This did not turn out to be what I was hoping for. It's so low effort and there's just too many tracking issues which at times make the experience more frustrating than fun.

You start out sitting at a receptionist desk. You can interact with a few of the things on the desk, but in front of you is the patient list, so I accepted the first one, a guy named Bob that needed a heart transplant. From there I was just thrown into the operating room with no explanation about how to do anything. Within 20 minutes I had just quit out of frustration. I watched a video on YouTube to see what exactly I was expected to do and then returned to the game today.

Even once you figure out what to do, it's still not very fun. The first surgery you perform is a heart transplant and you gotta do it quickly before the patient bleeds to death or just dies from something else. You start by selecting from various tools and you have to remove the guy's rib cage. My tool of choice was a hammer which I used to smash the ribs to pieces and then pull out his lungs to get to his heart, take it out, put the new one in (which I couldn't find where it was kept the first time I played) and then put the new heart in and...that's it. You don't put all the other organs back in place and stitch him up, you just drop the new heart in and call it a day. I got a C rating the first time I completed the heart transplant, and I thought that was pretty low since it was only the first level, so I decided to go for a better score and...I failed 6 or 7 more times before I was able to successfully finish the surgery again, it's like I didn't know what I did correctly the first time even though I was trying to repeat all the same steps. And when I did finally beat it again, I had a worse score. This game just ended up being a disappointment.

Gran Turismo 7 (PS5) - 7/10 - I'm late to the party but holy hell does this start off like ass. You can "play" it after just a short install (15GB while the rest of the 117GB continues) but that only lets you "play" a couple audio tracks while the other 100GB downloads. What a fake out, no actual racing.

When you can start it's just a short odd race that has no actual meaning and is in a clumsy car giving a bad impression. Then a 5min unskippable credits cutscenes intro movie. Neat video but man, I just want to race.

Buying the first car: the stats aren't always in the same place when comparing cars so looking for weight, HP, or torque quickly while switching between them doesn't always line up. What?

Now that I've raced a bit I'm impressed by the car details. But not the graphics. I'm doing Quality mode and everything is so sterile (typical for the series) and honestly just ok. Nothing has blown me away yet and Forza taking an extra 2-3 years shows that was the right move. I'll try the high-framerate next but although it might feel better it's going to look like more of a PS4 game (at best).

GT7 feels like I'm wanting to like it because I love cars more than me liking it because it's fun and well done.

Fe {} 7/10

This is what happens when you buy a game without actually doing any research ahead of time just because other people were saying how much they liked it. I bought this several years ago and what I thought I was getting from this game was a 2D puzzle-platformer with little-to-no dialog and no fighting enemies, like Limbo or Little Nightmares. What I ended up getting is a 3D platformer-adventure game where you are going through this fantasy world singing to various creatures. I can't be mad at that though, because while it's not what I thought it was going to be, it's a somewhat decent game.

The game's graphics are nothing that'll blow you away, it almost kinda looks like a good looking indie title from the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era, which is surprising then that it seems to struggle to keep a consistent frame-rate (at least on Switch, I can't speak for the other versions).
The controls are fine. You can adjust the pitch of your singing by tilting the Joy-Con or Pro Controller, which is kinda neat and a feature probably unique to the Switch version (though PS4 would be capable of it, I don't think enough devs know that). If you're not a fan of using gyro in any way they also give the option to assign it to the right analog stick. I never struggled with dealing with the camera and that's always a plus. However, control of the character itself sometimes feels a little clunky and I've missed jumps from treetop to treetop that I should not have, causing me to plummet down and have to climb my way back to where I was...only to sometimes miss the same jump and have to repeat everything again. The game is supposed to be around 5 or 6 hours but it's definitely taking me longer than that. Not even 100% sure I will end up finishing it yet, too many more jump fails might make me give up.
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Ghost of Tsushima {} 9/10
There is so much I like about this game, so pardon me while I ramble on.

- I like how the wind guides where you need to go, so that's less time spent needing to look at the map (which surprisingly isn't tied to the TouchPad).

- I like the graphics and how good the environments look. For that reason, just like the Horizon games, I prefer to travel on foot or horseback rather than fast traveling. There are times where the game looks amazing (I spend a lot of time sin photo mode in games like this), but then there are other times where the game looks kinda iffy even by last-gen standards. But again, when it looks good, it looks really good and in 4K keeps a relatively consistent 60fps most times. The environments especially look good, but the character models are what I feel are maybe not as good as they could've been. There is one minor issue I have that overall doesn't affect anything, but it just kinda bugs me, and it's how the day/night transition, and any changes in the weather, happen pretty abruptly. Again, it doesn't affect anything about my enjoyment of the game and most times you won't even notice it.
I give the edge to Horizon: Forbidden West in the graphics department (and I'm only comparing them because I still think HFW is the best looking game I've played on PS5 yet, and like GoT it was also initially built around PS4 specs in mind, so I feel like it's a fair comparison).

- 3D audio is pretty damn nice. I'm using the Japanese voice-over but I don't know how smart that is with my ADHD ass, if I look away from the screen for one second how do I know I didn't just miss a key line of dialogue in the subtitles? To be honest I'm 99% sure I would be enjoying this game just as much had I used the English voice-over.

- The controls are nice. I admit that early on I was just button-mashing my way through most of the combat, but now that I've unlocked more stances for different enemy types, I put a little more effort into stabbing them to death. BUT I can't help but feel a little disappointed at the lack of option to use gyro tilting for aiming the bow. I know I am not the only person who likes that feature dammit! You can do it in Horizon: Forbidden West but not here. I know the two games have different developers, but I wish Sony would send the memo across all their studios like "hey, our controller is perfectly capable of this feature and has been since the PS3 era, but barely any of you guys are using it and some of our players really wish you would take the hint and start using it more", y'know? The funny part is if you look in the options menu and select controls, they have options for people who play while holding the controller sideways or upside-down (I guess due to disabilities or something). It seems when designing the controls they had everyone in mind except for the people who like gyro. Oh well, I'll live.

- I'm unsure if they want you to use stealth or not. The first time the game walked me through an assassination kill, I had to sneak up behind the guy and stab him. Then a flashback cutscene played where the main character's uncle told him to never do that, it's something cowards do. Well the game gives plenty of opportunities to get stealth kills, so when I can take them, I do. I might be a coward but at least I ain't the one dead. I'm at the start of Act III now and I really liked the stealth sections towards the end of Act II.

- A big thing I like about this game is you can save anywhere you want and when you continue you'll be in that exact same place, meaning no hunting for specific places on the map where you can save your game. When I'm ready to stop playing for the night I usually go to where the next objective marker is and save right before I reach it so then the next time I play I'm already right there. This is such a time saver and I want more open-world games to have it.

- I've encountered the odd glitch here and there, but nothing even close to ruining the experience. One guy seemed stuck on a rock and couldn't get off of it, but that just made it easier to kill him. Another was an enemy had somehow gotten stuck/attached to the side of his horse and they were both in a bush so I could barely see them until I happened to walk by close enough.

Overall I am digging this game a lot. I decided pretty early on that I wasn't going for 100% though because I had just finished 100%'ing Saints Row before I started this and I thought I might end up being too open-worlded out. This is absolutely a far better game than Saints Row though, so maybe I would've done it had I not played Saints Row first.

Chrono Trigger 2 (DBA: Sea of Stars)

9/10

Everything about this game makes me smile. It also makes me sad as this is the closest thing we’ll get to another Chrono Trigger game.

TalonJedi87 wrote:

I'm loving Sea of Stars as well. I'm about two-thirds of the way through it. I enjoy the art, music, battle system, and even the characters and dialog.

Yeah it’s pretty fantastical. The battle music too gets in ya head.