VideoGame_Discussion

Knights And Bikes {} 7/10

It's a pretty fun co-op action/adventure game with some puzzles thrown in. It kind of gives a Goonies vibe, with two young girls setting off on an adventure with no idea what is in store for them as they form a bond along the way. I only have one main complaint and it's that the screen is shared by both players, so you can't just go and check something on your own without your partner needing to follow you. I like when co-op games give that kind of freedom. Other than that, my friend and I are enjoying this and the game is pretty funny too which I guess is to be expected for a game published by Double Fine.

I started RPGolf Legends. I like RPGs and I know the basic rules of golf so I figured I'd give it a shot. It's a Kemco game so my expectations were low coming in.

So far I've enjoyed it. The golfing is simple and the game seems straightforward. It looks like a 16 bit game with some catchy music so far. Seems like a lot of fetch quests but the golfing makes this game more unique than the other random kemco RPGs. I think there's another golf rpg on switch (golf story?) too but I've never played that one. Unless RPGolf takes a major downward turn , I plan to finish it

Started up Prototype 2 (PS4) and it still holds up pretty well. I can't believe how many game mechanics it has that other games (especially Spider-man) stole from but traversal is a joy and the graphics in this HD-update are not as bad as I expected. It certainly feels like a game from its time, is repetitious, and similar to all of the Unreal engine stuff in the X360/PS3 era...but it's still quite fun and you really do feel like a badass.

It's on sale on PSN for $6 (the first game is on sale for $5) which has definitely been worth it. The 2-game bundle came out a couple years ago for I think $40 which is way too much. But for $5-ish it's been great.

Currently playing Octopath Traveler II on the . This is everything a sequel should be. 4 hours in and I’m loving it so far. I was in the mood for a turn based RPG and it’s definitely scratching that itch. Probably going to put a couple more hours into it tonight.

Humanity {} 6/10
First, this is totally playable on PS4 and PS5 without the VR headsets, but having VR support (both PSVR and PSVR2) is why I wanted to play it to begin with. I did watch my friend play it without VR before I actually played it myself in VR, and I can tell ya VR didn't seem to add a whole lot to the experience other than it just looks slightly cooler, but it's still nice that they gave the option. From the almost three hours I've played so far, this is just a pretty average puzzle game either way you look at it. Think of the old puzzle game Lemmings, but it's in 3D now. I wasn't expecting this from the initial trailer and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't at least a little disappointed in what it turned out to be, and holy hell is the music just bad. As per usual with puzzle games, I had planned to play until I reached a point where I got stumped (even though this game lets you look at puzzle solutions at any time so you don't have to resort to checking YouTube), but it had failed to hold my interest before I had reached that point of being stumped, so I've already uninstalled it.

PizzaTheHutt wrote:

This was really getting praised when it came out. I have the demo, and want to try it in VR, but haven't gotten around it it yet.

Kao The Kangaroo: Round 2 {} 6/10
I remember playing a demo of the first Kao game on Dreamcast. It was a platformer that had a behind-the-character view kind of like Crash Bandicoot. I didn't think there was anything special about it, but that was just what I remember from the demo, I suppose there's a chance the full game might have been decent.
Then in 2003 this game released and went full 3D platformer, lots of similarities to Rayman 2 this time instead of Crash. The game itself is still "nothing special". I've definitely played worse 3D platformers than this, but I've also played much, much better ones. The voice acting is corny as hell, and the game itself is pretty easy overall, you will probably be dying more from the camera than from most enemies (I feel like that's probably the case with most 3D platformers from 20 years ago though). You get unlimited lives and the checkpoints are placed very generously so if you do die, you won't have to replay much to get back to where you were. I pretty much only started this game because I just wanted to play a 3D platformer and I wasn't being picky, but I don't plan to actually finish it and I don't feel I'm missing out on much by not playing it through to the end.

The Narrator is a DICK: Longer, Harder, and Uncut {} 5/10
I'm trying my best to make it through this game, but it's unlikely I'll do it. It's kind of a one trick pony. The gimmick is that you are playing through this pretty difficult 2D platformer and all the while you are playing the narrator is insulting you in this snarky British accent that makes you want to punch him in his stupid face (you never actually see his face, I only assume that it's stupid). He has 151 different insults he'll shout at you after you die and I know this because after I died for the 151st time it unlocked an achievement for hearing them all.

If it was possible to remake these levels 1:1 in Super Mario Maker, I am fairly confident that I'd probably breeze right through the game. But at least for me, a lot of the challenge in this game is due to the floaty controls and sometimes questionable hit detection with environmental hazards like spikes. It reminds me of mid-2000s flash games.
The New Super Mario Bros. series has pretty much perfected the controls of modern 2D platformers and should be the industry standard. If you're an indie dev making a 2D platformer, you should be trying to mimic those physics closely. I've spent over an hour raging on certain troll levels in Super Mario Maker, but I don't know if I want to do it for a lesser game like this, I just don't know if it's going to feel as rewarding when I finally reach the end. Anyway, I know I'm not that far from the end, but I've lost 333 lives at this point and stopped playing while I decide if this is something I want to continue or not.

Tried out Sonic Frontiers on PS5 today.

It's all right. Not amazing, but not terrible.

I just don't really know what it wants to be. There are the speedy 3d stages you have come to expect from Sonic, then there is the open world areas where you wander around and try to complete various objectives like defeating monsters, solving some (fairly trivial) puzzles, getting from A to B in a certain time limit... and then there's a skill tree to upgrade your moves, and you can collect some blobby things to upgrade your attack power and defense (no idea what defense does, even after upgrading it still seems like I lose all my rings from getting hit.

Overall it was an underwhelming hour or so of playing. Which is actually slightly better than where I thought it would be.

Sonic Frontiers is trash. I said it. That’s its issue. It doesn’t know wtf it is so it tries to be everything in one with horrid mechanics and controls. I sold it within a week.

Yakuza Like a Dragon

This game is so ridiculous on so many levels but I am beginning to love its whackiness dearly. I’d go 8.5/10 so far and I’m 4 chapters in with chances to increase to a 9/10 if it keeps up the momentum. Using a hobo’s pigeons to maul ppl to death is becoming my new favorite past time.

The Darkness {} 7/10
This game randomly popped up in my mind recently and it made me want to replay it (haven't played it since it first released 16 years ago) so I figured I'd go load up Steam and buy it on there...and couldn't find it because it never even got released on PC. Thankfully I found this on PS+ Premium streaming section because I really didn't want to have to dig out my PS3 or Xbox 360 and then buy the game.

Unfortunately this game released in mid-2007, which was still pretty early in the PlayStation 3's life. Games back then didn't even have trophies, but more importantly, by that point some third-party developers were still struggling to figure out the tricky PS3 hardware. This is one of those games that suffered because of that (I remember BioShock did too, another 2K game that released around this same time). The frame-rate drops at times are pretty noticeable, and beyond that there are a few non-hardware related issues with the game that I must've forgotten it having in 2007, like enemies feeling like bullet sponges sometimes. And I know the game takes place in New York City, but as someone who lived all of my life in NY (not in the city, but not that far from it either) up until last October, I could probably count on one hand the number of people I've met that unironically speak with the stereotypical "New Yawk" accent that some of the characters in this game use. The rest of the voice acting is done well though, as is the soundtrack.

Even with the flaws, I'm trying to stick to it and just deal with it because I really like the vibe of this game. As a first-person shooter it was never that great, but they got mostly everything else right that it made it easier to tolerate the game's faults. But if there are any games left from the PS360-era that deserve a remaster and haven't gotten one yet, it'd be this game (haven't played the sequel yet, but might as well remaster it too). I was debating on giving this a 6 or 7 by today's standards (for reference my original score of this on Xbox 360 was an 8 back when it first released), because there is a good game in here, I guess it was just easier to find it in 2007. Like I said it could really benefit from a remaster.

F.I.S.T. 8.5/10

This one's been on my radar for a while, and after EPIC made it a freebie a handful of months back, I was eager to jump into it. I didn't get around to it until recently but it's been fun. It looks great, runs well and outside of the goofy way of parrying and a bit too often the voice-overs not working, it's been great to play.
I've got 3-4 sessions in and several hours and I'm only just shy of 40%. It's a pretty good and well fleshed out metroidvania.

I played the demo on steam and thought it was pretty fun. I like the art style they went with.

DrizzDrizzDrizz wrote:
Congrats! Yeah, I think you mentioned awhile back about how A20 seemed so far away. Great job!

Which character was the most difficult to beat A19 with?

Which was the most fun?

A Story About My Uncle {} 7/10
What we have here is a straight up first-person platforming game, kinda like Mirror's Edge, but with less emphasis on parkour on rooftops and more sci-fi in caves and stuff.
It starts with you, the father, telling your daughter a bedtime story, a story about your uncle. As a child you did many activities with him, and when he'd go off on a journey of his own he'd send you post cards about where he is and what he's been doing. That is until one day where he just vanishes without a word, and a couple of weeks pass and there are no post cards. So you go down into his workshop and find a child-size suit identical to the one he made for himself, which allows him to jump super high and use this grappling hook thingy to get around. You then set out on your own adventure looking for him and along the way you come across this village full of frog people. I don't think the story gets much deeper than that, or at least it hasn't in the 2 hours I've played.

Like Mirror's Edge, this is the type of game that is a bit on the short side and you could easily finish it in one sitting. There are six levels plus an epilogue, and Steam says I've played for 2 hours, I'm currently on level four. I wasn't able to beat this in one sitting because admittedly it took me a little while to get used to the physics of grappling everywhere and sometimes I'd just get frustrated and close the game. I think Mirrors Edge is the better game, but this is really a pretty chill game itself and I'm kinda surprised it hadn't been ported to consoles, it could've made a decent PSN/XBLA title back then. In what I've played so far, it's all just been platforming (and a bit of exploring if you're into hunting down collectibles) and no enemies to fight with or anything like that.

Trek to Yomi 6.5/10

Parts of this are decent, but some things I don't like too much. Likely doesn't help that I'm also playing another 2D game with similar controls but that's a lot more action focused and easier and just more fun overall (F.I.S.T.).
Trek to Yomi is all in black/white and feels at times like an old film from that era. You want to explore as much as you can to find things in the fixed camera 3D sections, but it's not easy to spot places to go thanks to that design choice. Then in fights you get locked to a 2D plane and some sections the camera placement is annoyingly far away. A few sections the fights have been tougher and I've been frustrated at a few, most recently 1 in the 6th stage has been kicking my butt. I'd like to finish this, but I've failed at this 1 section like 15+ times already and my patience is wearing thin and I fear I'm a combination of not patient nor potentially skilled enough to possibly get past it.

nonamesleft wrote:

I think Defect was my hardest in terms of getting past A18 (but it was the first character I got to A18 with), took me the most tries I think. i don’t think I’ve done a basic A20 run successfully with Defect yet unlike the others but I’m trying to go for Heart A20 at same time

they’re all fun but maybe Ironclad with a strong exhaust and strength/block scaling setup felt the most “powerful”.

But hard to choose, I think they found a really nice balance where every character has a unique aspect but it doesn’t feel TOO different

PizzaTheHutt wrote:

I love both Darkness games. The 2nd one has somewhat cell-shaded graphics that make it feel less aged visually, but I recall very little of the story. Even though I like to play through them both every couple years. Character models and level-design are super simple but I just plain enjoy the creature voice, attacks, and novelty of having guns and tentacles.

Hyper Void {} 7/10
Still slowly making my way through my PSVR library before I will allow myself to purchase a PSVR2. This is the oldest PSVR game in my account, though I had no memory of buying it. It turns out the PS3 version was once given free to PS+ subscribers, and in return owning the PS3 version would also get you the PS4 version, and from there the devs added in PSVR support for free around a year post-launch. I had no idea about that until PS5 finally got an update to let you filter VR games in your game library and I wondered why this was there.

The first thing that comes to mind when thinking of how to describe this game is it's kind of like Tempest in VR...or without VR, since that was added in later and it's playable without it, but my experience is exclusively playing it in VR. It gets pretty challenging and everything is hectic. I highly doubt I will actually finish this game. I'm enjoying it, but I really have low patience for these types of games, so I'm enjoying it up until I reach the point where the difficulty spike will chase me away. It looks pretty cool in VR, though I think not as cool as Thumper (not exactly the same genre, but still...).

Manticore - Galaxy on Fire {} 8/10
I explicitly remember buying this game in the eShop just a bit over two years ago because I had felt the sudden urge to play one of these space shooter type games, and I recall this being on sale for $5 or less and so I checked some YouTube reviews saying it's a pretty decent game, so I got it. And then it took me until last week to actually play it, so I guess that initial urge wasn't as strong as I had thought. Sometimes I make no sense.

The missions seem a bit on the short side, and that is likely to do with this being a port of a mobile game and the developers probably thought this would feel at home on Switch where you can play in short bursts in handheld mode, at least that's what I assume they were thinking because they never ported it to the other consoles.

The graphics are pretty nice by Switch standards (it's one of the few Switch games with a photo mode), even in handheld mode it looks good and everything runs smooth. The controls and audio are also fine, though I do wish there were gyro controls (for some reason you can tilt the controller and the menu backgrounds will move, but during actual gameplay there is no gyro support). If I had just two minor complaints it would be that 1. I wish the load times could've been a little shorter, and 2. after completing a mission, you fly around the level looking for intel fragments and ship upgrade parts, I think this is totally optional but I've been doing them and some are really well hidden, last night I spent almost an hour looking for one.
While this won't replace the Star Fox series for many (or at least the 2½ actual good games in the series), I feel like fans of the series might want to check this out because other than that Ubisoft game from a few years ago, this might be the closest to a SF game you can get on Switch.

I haven't been playing the following, but I've been watching gameplay of Ghost of Tsushima, and I'm enjoying it.

I stuck with Cyberpunk and ended up finishing it over the weekend. I'll give it a solid 7/10. It had ups and downs, but I only hit one major bug. I hit an issue where it keeps saying "you cant save right now", the only fix is to go back to the apartment and sleep. I was on the last patch for Xbox One X so I am surprised they never fixed that bug. My biggest gripe is the pacing. I like the action, I hated that in some missions I would watch dialogue, then it would load, more dialogue, then another loading screen. The slow pace and many loading screens really took me out of the game. Otherwise it would have received a higher score.

I still can't get over my (then) 8yr old overriding my Ghost of Tshushima save when I was probably an hour away from completing it 100%. I can't restart it on that platform (even though my profile is password protected now.) I hope to relive it on PC whenever it gets released. But what a masterpiece of a game.

sinnie wrote:

If that happened to me, I would never play it again!

I started up SIMULACRA on PS4 last night. I think it was originally a phone game. At first it was pretty boring and I almost quit but I stuck with it and played about an hour and a half. I think it's going to be pretty short so I plan to finish it. The story is interesting so I hope the ending is decent. Basically you find a phone of a girl and are trying to figure out what happened to her. It's pretty much just texting back and forth with people and solving some puzzles.

kevolones wrote:

Honestly since then I have had a hard time getting into anything and finishing it. (And have played absolutely nothing on consoles.)

About 20+ years ago I lost not one but two Final Fantasy 8 saves of 20+ hrs (mostly grinding for -aga spells early on taking advantage of temporary Seifer in party and having him level up while keeping rest dead) because my little brother deleted them somehow. Painful af but i had the energy to do it again

Then no similar issues for about 20 years until my friends son wrote over my Oddworld soulstorm file and wiped out 15+ hours, wven after I warned him not to.
Took all my strength to redo it eventually lol

Medievil (PS4 remake) - I don't have anything nice to say. From the drifty camera, poor hit detection, meh animations, uninteresting levels and enemies, controls that don't feel great, and simple lack of fun = 2/10

Anxiouz wrote:

Have you gone back and played the original to compare the two?

I don't recall the first one being amazing but any interest I had in a nostalgia trip is now gone.

Diablo IV

On act 1 now and absolutely loving it. Forgot how good Diablo games were. Been a while. The sense of wanderlust and doing just 1 more dungeon crawl is immense. Plus I’m digging the quality of life improvements with being able to fast travel by way of opening the map and selecting activated waypoints now. I forgot if you could do that in Diablo 3 but remember in Diablo 2 you had to physically reach a waypoint to initiate fast travel unless you were teleporting back to the main hub area. Anyways I’m only a baby level 10 Druid now but I’m in if for the long haul. 9/10

Beat Far Cry 6 recently - if you like Far Cry you’ll like this too. Some subtle changes to the very familiar mechanics, I enjoyed the whole backpack/loadout thing (i resisted at first but then realized it’s better to have a couple different loadouts for stealth, explosive chaos, scavenging and roaming etc) and the story was decent. The stranger things DLC was pretty fun too, intense at times

Started Vampyr and after a few hours decided that I won’t continue, it’s not bad by any means but it felt like a high chance of wasting too much time on it. Spent too much time going back and forth in conversations just to uncover some random minute detail which is needed to unlock more conversation. And the combat system didn’t feel great, mostly fine but just slightly off
Also it seemed like the game tries to warn you to avoid killing civilians while constantly tempting you with cool bonuses for bloodlust lol so I was undecided how to even play

Started Horizon Forbidden West, about 15 hours in. If you liked the 1st you will almost certainly enjoy this too. Looks incredible, and while very familiar open world/checklist quest concept, it’s done very well

Oh and I beat Alan Wake remastered and the DLCs last week. Great game, not as polished as Control and gameplay eventually gets predictable (while still challenging at times) as no new enemy types or weapons appear, but really satisfying and for me the ideal length of a campaign (6 chapters of about 60-90 mins each, and each chapter is basically a fresh start in terms of items/weapons)
It’s got a creepy vibe but no jump scares or anything, feels more like an action game than survival horror

I just started Far Cry 6 on PS5 last night (having only played about halfway through FC5 previously). I'm really digging it. It feels a little too familiar though...the locale, conquering locations to change them from red to blue, and enemies roaming around all just reminds me of Just Cause.

The alligator is a hilarious mechanic, the graphics are pretty good and it's been playing smoothly, but I don't know if it's going to keep my interest for the 20 hours or whatever. We'll see.

Lego DC Super Villains - I don't know/10

Was ready to play, took out my Switch. Out of battery. Charger not nearby *Sigh* Pretty big letdown.

Blue Estate: The Game {} 7/10
This is a comedic on-rails light-gun shooter. It originally released on Xbox One, then PlayStation 4, and then finally Steam back in 2015 (though a couple of years ago the PS4 version was delisted for some reason, possibly related to having a different publisher than the other versions which are still available). Due to it being a light-gun shooter I kinda wish they would port this to Switch, but it doesn't look like they have any plans to do so. The PS4 version did support gyro aiming, but as mentioned you cannot buy it on there anymore. Xbox One version supports Kinect, I don't know anyone who willingly bought one of those after Microsoft stopped packing it in with consoles, but I'm a little curious how it plays. I stupidly started this game with the Xbox One controller but learned my lesson and went to using the mouse for the rest of my playthrough, and it almost felt too damn easy in comparison. There is lightgun support on PC, but I'm not buying one for just one game and prior to seeing it in the options menu I didn't even know they made lightguns for the PC.

This is based on some comic book that I couldn't tell you anything about and I don't really care about the backstory since I don't intend to read the comic, so I'm treatig this as a standalone story. I do like comedy in games, and I do like arcade-style lightgun shooters and that's why I chose to play this and I feel that the game delivers, at least for the few dollars I paid for it. I got a few laughs out of it (some of the jokes are misses though, like one level with an illegal dog fighting shtick, while you're blasting you're way through the level there are several spots where you are interrupted by a dog trying to hump your leg, which was only funny the first time it happened, and it goes on for like 3 levels). While I don't think anyone will be talking about this game 30 years from now like some other classic lightgun shooters like Virtua Cop, House of the Dead or Duck Hunt, it's still pretty good for the few hours it lasts (7 levels, each lasting a little under 25 minutes).

RIGS: Mechanized Combat League {} 6/10
That score of 6 isn't exactly fair because I feel like I've only gotten to experience half of the game. This feels like it'd be perfect to play online with friends (assuming you have any that have a PSVR headset of their own) or even with randoms online, but the online servers were shut down last year, so your only option is to play against the CPU now, and I just played for about an hour and got my ass absolutely destroyed by them. They're just too good and I stopped playing because it just wasn't fun to keep losing. I feel like the tutorial didn't prepare me for any of what was about to happen once I started playing for real. Maybe I'll revisit at some point in the future and try to practice and get better at it, but for now I'm done with it.
-=-

Bound {} 7/10
Like RIGS, this must have been another PS+ freebie at some point, because I have no idea how it got in my VR library.

It's a 3D platformer (also is playable without VR, but if playing in VR I recommend switching up the camera style immediately, because I couldn't get used to whatever one they had set as default) and I admit is pretty unique and kinda one of those artsy-fartsy type of games, almost like Journey or The Unfinished Swan (is it just me, or did Sony only care about these types of games in the PS3 era and once PS4 and PS5 sales left Xbox in the dust they don't seem to care about these types of games as much anymore?)

The game is not long at all. If you just breeze through it like I did, you can expect to reach the end credits in a little bit less than 2 hours. By doing that I didn't unlock any trophies, but if you're a trophy hunter you definitely will spend more than 2 hours on this because it will require multiple playthroughs. The story seems to be about a girl (now an adult, and pregnant) that grew up in a broken family and the dad left and I feel like if that's something you use for a story, do more with it than they did.

.

AEW Fight Forever for PS5. Got it for $20 because I had Best Buy reward certificates. I wish I had bought something else. The gameplay is fun but janky and the controls are mostly fine but not as responsive as I think they should be. The art style is hideous and there’s just a lot of stuff missing from a wrestling game in 2023. I’m sure that someone will say it’s the first AEW game and I should cut it some slack, but fudge that because it’s not Yukes’ first wrestling game and they should’ve done better. This should be on Game Pass/10.

Yoshi's Woolly World 7/10
The game is endearing for the most part, it's also not overly challenging until the final world or 2 and then I guess it's less of a challenge ramp and more of a precision and frustration ramp up. I've went largely with playing only a handful of levels at a time as initially I was getting a touch bored after 3-4 and later my patience started to wear thin as some sections were just flarking annoying to progress through. I did resist the urge to change to casual mode but I also learned to not give a rip about trying to collect everything b/c well that was a chore with hidden crap and certain jumps you could miss, as well as the yarn ball shooting mechanic that I didn't love.
I now sit with just 2 levels before the end credits but I haven't even come remotely close to unlocking the 9th level in any of the 6 worlds. Doing so requires 40 flowers, of which there are 5/level from 8 so you'd need them all and my best world for flower collection is maybe 75%. I also have only unlocked 2 to 4 Yoshi skins, from also finding all 5 bundles of yarn per level, from any world. There's 2 other challenges per level to collect all 20 stamps which are concealed behind random gems you collect and to finish with a full 20/20 health and you have to find and collect clouds that give you up to 5 each and only start with 10. So far I went back and redid 1-1 and got that full star rating for doing all 4 challenges, but I have zero interest in doing that for more levels - too much crap is just hidden or some sections are just annoying.
Glad I stuck with it and I am looking forward to finishing it.

I 100%Ed woolly world on 3DS. The yoshi and poochy videos unlocking over time kept me coming back

benstylus wrote:

Either I'm missing those, or they don't appear in the Wii-U version, or I need to specifically find/watch them b/c I'm not aware of such videos. The gems I've earned lets me redeem them for badges that have unlocked as I've beat levels, but I generally haven't used any since I don't know what might be useful in a new level. They've offered me a free one from time to time and I've then guessed and taken one, but that's all I've seen. I do know that unlocking the stamps has caused some blurb about how I've collected X and could check them out somewhere, but I've not bothered.