VideoGame_Discussion

Age of Wonders 4 - 9/10
Best 4x game I've played in awhile. One of those 'one more turns before bed, and then it's 2 am' games for me.

Nice! I’m interested in this one. Just waiting for a PS5 physical version or for the digital price to go down.

Archer wrote:

Recently came across a Goemon game for the GBA I had never heard of. Goemon New Age Shutsudou!

Played the first couple of stages, it's a fun little platformer. But I don't like young female Ebisu as much as the standout weirdo Ebisumaru from the original series.

Ratchet & Clank {} 8/10
Regretfully I just never got around to finishing the original Ratchet & Clank after starting it for the first time a few months ago. The end boss, combined with all the grinding I'd need to do for bolts each time I'd die (because you have to repurchase any ammo used before you died) was just too much. That was my introduction to the series and I really liked it besides the grinding and stuff that caused me to not finish it.

So I'm giving this PS4 version a try and it's a remake of the original game and like any remake should be, I think it is a better game and improved on most of the issues I had with the original.

First off the controls were improved over the original, not that they were all that terrible in the first place, but they definitely are better now.
In addition to that, the graphics actually impressed me. If this is what PS4 can do, then I'm really looking forward to starting the PS5 Ratchet & Clank next just to see how much better it looks.

Also added this time was a much-needed difficulty setting. The original game lacked that and I can certainly understand why so many YouTubers that played it as kids say they really struggled with the original game because I'm a grown ass man and I struggled too. I would have continued on with it, but again, that grinding is a mood changer. Thankfully there is a lot less grinding in this version and when you die you won't have to repurchase ammo.

I thought I'd get bored of trying to play this so soon after giving up on the original, but the updated graphics and improvements to controls help make me want to continue and I will complete it this time.

As big of a fan of 3D (and 2D) platformers as I am, I really don't know how I slept on this series for so long. I blame Super Mario Sunshine for almost killing my love of 3D platformers for most of the GCN/PS2/Xbox era. I slept on Jak & Daxter too, but I'm hoping to change that this summer and play through the trilogy.

TMNT Cowabunga Collection - 8-10 I loved this, finished so many Turtles games that I never played before and beat a few that I have many times before. It was nice to finally beat Ninja Turtles (Nes) after all these years. The collection also introduced me to my new favorite TMNT game Hyperstone Heist.. not sure why but I loved the hell out of it. I also would not mind a new Tournament Fighters game...

I need to finish Shredders revenge but I am a tad burnt out right now, maybe I will revisit it in a few months.

I started a couple of games in co-op with my friend a couple nights ago. I didn't like 2 out of the 3, but the one I did like was just far too difficult.

Wild Guns Reloaded {} 6/10
This is the one I did enjoy...for the little bit I played of it in single player. I didn't intend to play it solo though, I really only downloaded it for my friend and I to play in co-op, and for that the game is ridiculously hard and was a big factor in the score I gave it. In co-op the developers had the bone-headed idea of having the players share the same pool of lives (of which there are only 3 lives for you to share!) and there are no continues, so once you've used up those limited amount of lives, you are stuck having to start from level 1 again. You can select what difficulty to play on in single player, but not multiplayer. Again, I didn't download this to play in single player, so once my friend and I got frustrated by dying repeatedly, I uninstalled it immediately. Retro gamers will probably really like this one, though.

Haven {} 5/10
We only played this for about 2 hours, then my friend asked if we could just play something else next week (she almost never does that, if we give up on a game it's usually because I'm the one who is not enjoying it). This feels like a VN, sprinkled in with some turn-based RPG battles and then you and the other player going around these big fields collecting crap, and it's easy to get lost because too many of the areas look the same. There's some love story between the two characters that I recall reviews saying was actually decent and the best part of this game, but when the gameplay is as boring as this is I'm fine with not knowing how that story ends.

Enter The Gungeon {} 5/10
Of these 3 games this one was requested by my friend for us to play. It's no secret I despise pretty much the entire roguelike genre of games, and my friend is more of a casual gamer herself, so I don't know what it is about these games that she likes, but I'll try and stick with this one long enough until it gets frustrating enough that she finally accepts it's time to move on to another game.

Pokémon Brilliant Diamond

8/10 so far from me and I’m on the second gym. Taking me straight back to my late early 20’s here.

PizzaTheHutt wrote:

Shame you didn't enjoy Haven. Loved it personally. It's just such a chill adventure game. The RPG mechanics are very standard and unremarkable, but battles are few and far between and I enjoyed that. Loved the traversal and the survival elements as well. It's funny because I don't know anyone who enjoyed it as much as I did. The people I know who have tried it also said it was boring. But yeah, the story and the interaction between the two characters is the main hook. It's honestly some of the most organic writing I've seen in a videogame.

Barro {} 3/10
I was browsing through my Steam library and I have no idea where this came from. I can't recall if it was in a Humble Bundle or if the developers had made it free at one point, but either way I decided to give it a shot and boy is it garbage.

This was clearly something thrown together in Unity with little effort by someone hoping to make a quick buck off achievement whores (apparently they don't only exist on PlayStation and Xbox) and I'll tell ya why: I booted this game up, then let it sit at the title screen for a bit while my Xbox controller was syncing to my PC via Bluetooth and I noticed a random achievement popped up, titled "a". A couple seconds later another popped up, titled "b". Again, this time titled "c". More and more achievements kept popping going through the entire alphabet (twice, capital and lowercase) and then some named after symbols like "/" and ">". I played a couple of races while they continued popping up. Within 15 minutes I noticed they finally stopped and I had unlocked 100 achievements out of 109 in total. It took around another 30 minutes to continue unlocking the ones that didn't automatically pop and you actually have to earn.

As for the game itself, it's garbage like I already said. There's no career mode or anything, just single races. 19 tracks in all, but you only need to race on the first 10 if all you're playing it for is the achievement points. The graphics are crap that would look outdated even on a PS1 and the engine noises/audio is so dull. If I could say one positive thing about the game, it'd be that the controls are alright, I guess. I mean, you're pretty much just pressing down the A button and steering the car, it's not complicated and I never needed to hit the brakes a single time because you're never going fast enough that you would need to brake. I kept the difficulty at whatever it was set to by default and I never lost a race.
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@Heavyd814life admittedly Haven is probably not the type of game I normally would play. It only made it onto my radar because it had co-op (though it feels limited for whoever is player 2). Do the choices you make really have any outcome on the overall story? Just from the couple hours we played I didn't get the impression they mattered very much.

Dead Space Remake (PS5) - 9/10 - DS via back-compat on XSX is rather fantastic, and I played the entire DS trilogy on XSX last year. But even still this is such a wonderful game.

I know a lot of where I need to go and what I need to do but have still enjoyed every minute of this. I just played through RE4 Remake (PS5) before this and honestly this feels very similar. So this feels like where we are in this gen's tech right now. But I find DS more interesting and engaging than RE4 Remake. RE4 was amazing until about 1/2 way through when it turned into a different game.

I don't want to start getting neg'd for RE4vsDS comments but DS is so damn good. The HUD being your character and weapons has never been done better. The 3D audio isn't as good as Callisto Protocol (where I could hear enemies in specific pipes above and around me) but it is nice and the controller rumble is constant and well done. Plot is great. I'm a fan.

I had a nice bit of luck when I found a flea marketer selling Disney Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion for $5. I'd heard it was an underrated gem for the early 3DS, and I was looking out for it, so $5 CIB was a great deal.
[imgt w=1536 h=2048]https://i.imgur.com/twnRAcU.jpg[/imgt]

As it so happens, this is an amalgamation of the semi-recent Disney Epic Mickey series and Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse . So unlike the rest of the Epic Mickey series, this one is a 2D platformer that uses old characters, terminology, and moves. The evil witch Mizrabel has taken over the Castle of Illusion in an alternate world called Wasteland, where forgotten characters and video games wind up. She plans to steal Toon Heart Power from other Disney characters to get back to the Cartoon World and wreak havoc, so Oswald the Lucky Rabbit summons Mickey to thwart her.

The platforming is pretty good. You can bounce off enemies to gain vertical height and make them drop hearts or money. You also have the Magical Paintbrush from Kirby: Canvas Curse to fire paint or thinner projectiles. At certain times, you may be forced to use the Touch Screen to draw or erase objects from the world, whether it's creating a cannon to launch yourself or removing a spiky block. This becomes a minigame of tracing a predetermined shape or efficiently scratching out that shape, respectively, and the better you do on the minigame, the more effective the results. While I do like the concept, it honestly gets pretty repetitive tracing the same outline or deleting the same hazard a dozen times in a world. I also wish Mickey could run faster or dash forward; he's pretty slow on the ground and has a floaty jump.

Throughout the game, you'll run into many classic Disney characters in need of rescue. While GameTZ's audience may be familiar with the likes of Snow White and Pinocchio , Renaissance characters like Ariel and the Beast also appear. The most recent faces here are Rapunzel and Pascal from 2011's Tangled. (I personally think adding Wreck-it Ralph could've been a clever choice--this game released a few weeks after his film, and forgotten video games are established to enter this world, so it would've worked perfectly for everyone.) Either way, the developers clearly did their homework on these characters. They all talk convincingly like their movie counterparts and reference lines any fan will appreciate. The Peddler from Aladdin, for example, notes that I'm "only interested in the exceptionally rare," and offers to sell Mickey magic beans at one point. Mickey turns him down, saying that he knows magic beans all too well--a reference to the Mickey and the Beanstalk segment from 1947's Fun and Fancy Free. Donald none-too-subtly hits on various princesses, which seems to be a facet of his character, and I think started in 1944's The Three Caballeros. It's entertaining seeing Mickey meet and pleasantly chat with all these icons!

Every toon you save gets or joins a room in the Fortress, your home base. They then give you sidequests to do, which upgrade their room when completed and earn you Toon Heart Power. Since you need a certain amount of power to unlock the next world, doing these quests is inevitable. They usually task you with retrieving an item/character from a previous stage or talking to another rescued Toon. While I didn't mind it at first, it's definitely needless padding. Whenever they ask you to find their thing, the thing then appears in an already-beaten level, so it's not like you can pick up their item on the first trip to save time. The best you can do is take on as many sidequests as possible and then collect numerous things in one go. Additionally, upgrading every character's room to the max doesn't do anything whatsoever--not even a buff against the final boss or something. I needed to grind a little money to get that 100% completion, but I'm not sure that was worth it. The final world gives out the most cash per stage, and the stages there are a drag.

Lastly, the music is unremarkable, and Mickey never shuts up in play. He makes sound effects wth every action, which gets grating. Fortunately, the art direction is very high-quality! The sprites, backgrounds, and portraits are shockingly good, which made it all the more enjoyable to play. My total play time was 20 hours, though apparently most people complete it faster.

My rating: 7.5 out of 10.

Nickelodeon Kart Racers 2: Grand Prix {} 5/10
A month or two ago I bought a Humble Bundle of kart racers and I decided this will be the first one I try. I hope the rest in the bundle can only be better than this.
Overall I'm not impressed with it. This is one of the most bland kart racers I've played in a while. It's not that it's a bad game, it just feels like wasted potential of the Nickelodeon license because they didn't even bother getting voice clips of any of the characters, which kills a chunk of the nostalgia factor that I wanted to play this for in the first place. When you hit an opponent with an item you don't hear anything from them that even acknowledges it, just the boring music that plays through each race. As for the controls, the karts handle alright, but the default assigned buttons are not ideal. The gas is assigned to RB and the drifting to LB. I'd personally rather have those assigned to the right and left triggers, so I go into the options menu to change it (it's a very basic options menu btw, you can't even adjust anything like the resolution) and while it does let you make some changes to the controls, you can't assign anything to the left and right trigger buttons specifically.

There are 32 tracks to race on, which is a good amount, however most just aren't well designed or fun to race on. A diehard Nickelodeon fan might be able to guess what track is from which franchise, but some of them still have me stumped. They just don't scream "Nickelodeon" the way that recent Disney kart racer got it right with that IP. The character roster is a decent size with 30 characters in total, but I'm not familiar with some of them, they're from series that started after I outgrew the channel. They should not be charging $40 for this and I'm glad I didn't pay anywhere near that for it.

MotorStorm: Apocalypse {} 8/10
Do you wanna know how I know this game released in 2011 without having needed to look it up? Because the minute you reach the title screen they start assaulting your ears with dubstep music. Gross.

Crappy dubstep soundtrack aside, this is a damn good game. I really wish Sony didn't kill this franchise off. These were good games, and among the nicest looking racing games of that console gen. Obviously they're no match for current gen racing games, but this one still looks good, and I really like the way the environments collapse around you, altering the track layout for the following laps (you can argue Split/Second might have done it better, but I think both games do it well for different reasons).

I have no problem so far with the track designs, though I haven't raced on them all yet. And the vehicles all control well (thankfully haven't been noticing any input lag because I'm streaming this on PS+ Premium instead of playing on the actual PS3). I really am liking this game, but if I could change anything about it, it'd be the soundtrack (I miss when consoles let us use custom soundtracks) and maybe the cutscenes (or how they're written) because some are just really corny. Oh, and also make the difficulty a tad easier. As much as I enjoy some of the MotorStorm games, I have not been able to actually complete one because they always reach a point where the CPU is just too damn good.

I’m up to the final boss, and Dead Island 2 has been a great surprise. I really expected it to be bad given how long it was in development and all the drama with new devs coming in. It’s really quite fun though (especially in co-op) and is giving me more Left 4 Dead vibes than Back 4 Blood did.

Bleed_DukeBlue wrote:

Great game, had a blast with it. I didn't do any co-op my first play through but I wanna go back and play as another character and try.

PizzaTheHutt wrote:

It's been years since I played it but once I started getting familiar with the tracks I had a lot of fun with this back in that era. Learning what jumps between buildings were death pits vs potential shortcuts helped. The first couple times around each track was a bit too much trial and error though.

Layers of Fear {} 9/10
I'll start off with a pet peeve of mine regarding games like this: when I'm playing a horror game, I want to feel like I am constantly in danger. What I don't want to have to do, is stop and read these torn papers/newspaper articles that are scattered around an abandoned house/mansion just to be able to get a little backstory. So many horror games these days are guilty of this, and it just bugs me to the point where I just skip most of them. The only time I want to stop and have to read something is if there's an upcoming puzzle and the solution will be in whatever document thingy I'm reading, otherwise just find a different way to fill me in on backstory at the start of the game. At least this game works it into the story, because you're playing as an alcoholic husband whose marriage is falling apart and you and the wife are not on speaking terms, so you each leave notes to each other and that's basically how you'd communicate.

So that's pretty much my only complaint. The rest of the game is solid, and is one of my favorite horror games since Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The game does a good job of playing mind games with you, kind of like Eternal Darkness did back in the day, but this is way more scary, Eternal Darkness was like a kids game in comparison. There's a good amount of jump scares, but they don't overdo it with them. Keep in mind this is one of those "psychological horror games", so it's more about giving the player a creepy experience, there's no combat in it and you're not fighting back against these ghosts and demons because they only exist in the character's mind.

If I could change one thing, I think I would have chosen to buy this on PlayStation VR instead, as all horror games are just automatically going to be more scary in VR, like, that's been scientifically proven. I've heard it was a bit of a lazy port though.

Gotham Knights (PS5) - 6.5/10 - I finally put some real time into this and although you can find some fun here, it's clumsy, kinda dull, and the inventory stuff is overly complex. Being able to choose from a few characters (each with their own play style) is nice. But once I used Red Hood who had a distance gun weapon, that's all I'm ever going to use.

Crafting new equipment and merging/applying mod gems(?) to things makes you constantly check if you can upgrade something...and usually you can't. Most upgrade unlocks happen in batches as you complete core missions.

Because of how sparse and simple the game is, the "it's only 30fps" argument isn't an issue for me. It plays fine and looks ok. I got this for maybe $20-$25 and it's not terrible at that price, but it definitely doesn't have the fun factor of the Arkham Batman trilogy. For $20 or less this is decent. But I'm also starting to see (like Assassin's Creed) where you get to a point, and then are required to level up (to have a chance) at certain missions to continue the core plot. That blows. And I've seen more than a few side missions to clear buildings of enemies that literally have the same exact floor plan, same exact enemy placement, and same chests in the same locations. At this point when I start one of these I can breeze through the pattern in like 2 minutes now since I've seen it 4-5 times.

The batcycle is a nice ride but it feels SO unbelievable slow it's shocking. Eventually you earn traversal skills (Red Skull can just "magic jump" in the air continually to stay afloat) and although they are ridiculous, it does make the game more fun.

@PizzaTheHutt I presume that's the newest rerelease, if it's out now, correct? I played the original a few years back and the sequel earlier this year and found them both to be decent games, but near completely non-scary. Atmosphere was good in them, better in the first, but once I caught on to the idea that if I turn around the scene might change completely, then that tactic lost it's chance to affect me and the scare fell apart from there.

I finally tried out Immortals: Fenyx Rising (got it as part of a b2g1 sale at gamestop sometime last year)

I am sad that it is as good as it is. I really wanted to hate it. But it's really good. Totally a breath of the Wild ripoff in terms of gameplay so far except I haven't had my weapons break.

So because of that, BETTER THAN ZELDA.

I know that last line is trolling but I really liked Immortals and had far more fun with it than BotW.

Anxiouz wrote:

It's only a little trolling. I think the games are on pretty equal footing gameplay wise. Yes Ubisoft did a Ctrl-C Ctrl-V on a lot of the game mechanics, but they were great in BOTW and are great in Immortals. The obviously fake accents in Immortals are made up for by pretty decent writing.

Only got through the prologue but the lack of breaking weapons is pretty much the only substantial difference so far.

I guess that and you don't have to collect a million ingredients to craft/cook stuff. Which is also a plus for me nowadays after being crafted to death in so many other games recently. It's nice to have a game that is so straightforward for a change.

So yeah. better than BOTW so far.

I hear you. Immortals is great that you can just look out and see a ton of activity and stuff to do everywhere. So it was easy to find (or avoid) things and keep engaged constantly.

Been playing a bit of Pokémon Violet. I’m not sure what to think. I’m only a couple hours in and it feels disjointed. After the intro you’re pretty much left to your own devices. Which, ok, I like the idea of not being hand held. But I’m randomly running into battles where my opponent is an extremely higher level than me and I’m getting my ass handed to me and losing $800 poke bucks or having to forfeit and losing $800 poke bucks. If there’s a way to identify these higher level opponents (pre battle) I haven’t figured it out yet. There’s also noticeable performance issues (as others have mentioned). Like NPC’s looking like there walking through one those strobe lights at rave.

Yeah, I liked the game overall, but the execution of the open-world design was not done well.

Scott wrote:

Because its an Ubisoft game. This game is basically just Assassins Creed with a new overlay. Map barf galore. See that tower? You can climb it! And you have to. Otherwise how else will you unlock the rest of the map barf!

Archer wrote:

There is Tower climbing to unlock the map too? It really is Breath of the Wild 1.5!

benstylus wrote:

You mean Assassins Creed: Breath of the Wild. Copyright Nintendo.

benstylus wrote:

I felt this in my soul. My biggest complaint about the new Zelda games are weapons breaking like toothpicks. And Immortals is on my hit list next to play so good to know it isn’t sucky!

Again all I can comment on so far for Immortals is the prologue. But it was good!

Yeah I remember playing and enjoying the short demo of Immortals which is why I bought it. Been sitting in my queue for a couple of years now and finally going to get to it in another week or so.

The Fenyx formula gets old imo about half way through. Typical Ubisoft game.

The Quarry {} 7/10
It kinda bugs me that I had to "downgrade" to the PS4 version because I wanted to play this online with my friend and she doesn't have a PS5 yet and the devs made it so the PS5 and PS4 versions can't play together. Dumb decision if you ask me. You know what else bugs me? The whole reason my friend and I each bought this game is because we like this genre, and we are fans of The Dark Pictures Anthology co-op games this dev also makes. This too was advertised as a multiplayer game, but it's a freakin' lie. I guess it's multiplayer if you play locally and pass the controller around to the other player(s) in the room, but there's no true online multiplayer like The Dark Picture Anthology games have. By that I mean whoever is host is the one playing, and the guests (there can be up to 7) can help decide what choices to make during the story, but they'll never get to control any of the characters or unlock any trophies for themselves. I equate this to the same as you watching a YouTuber play this game and you type your suggestion in chat for what choice he/she should make and hope that they pick it. Other than that, unless you are the host you have no real control over anything and are stuck watching a 9 hour horror movie. I took off a point for that.

Alright, so besides that, the game isn't that bad. I do feel like the online multiplayer might've been false advertising, but the rest of the game is alright. We're liking the story so far. There's only a couple of chapters left and due to the lack of true multiplayer I don't think my friend and I are in a rush to replay this immediately after we finish, the way we do with the TDPA series.


@Slickriven It was the the original release. I didn't know there was a re-release, but I guess that makes sense why it is listed in my Steam library as "Layers of Fear (2016)". I guess I'll check out what the differences are between the two.

loztdogs wrote:

Looks like it takes about 28 hours if you focus on the story stuff.

If you focus on the ubithon of side quests I can imagine it would get less interesting over time.

Just like BOTW! The similarities never end

I liked Fenyx Rising but never finished it. Didn't get any of the DLC either. Maybe someday...

According to my Xbox profile I played Fenyx for 30 hours. I do remember hitting a point where some of the side activities felt too grind-y, but I spent plenty of time doing optional stuff to upgrade my equipment and I enjoyed that. Once you have lots of arrows and the skill that lets you control them in the air, it helps you chip away at tough enemies from a distance.

benstylus wrote:

The only part of BOTW that was crack to me side-quest wise were those shrines. Couldn’t get enough of them.

Ethan: Meteor Hunter {} 7/10
I had never heard of this game before coming across it in the PS+ Premium selection of Cloud Streaming games. It's a 2D puzzle platformer where you play as a mouse working your way through stages and you have to collect these things that allow you to freeze the world and manipulate certain objects to help you reach a higher platform (just as an example).

Why is the mouse doing this? Well, I couldn't tell you. I didn't bother to read the description in the PS Store if they explained anything, and the game itself had no opening cutscene to fill you in on any kind of story. Yet the game manages to be fun despite not knowing why I'm doing any of this.

It does get pretty frustrating though, and not only the puzzles but the sections of straight-up platforming too (I knew 8 years of playing troll levels in Super Mario Maker would come in handy someday). For that alone I will likely not finish it, but I'm enjoying it until I reach the point where a puzzle stumps me good enough, because this game isn't exactly a high priority, so I'm more likely to quit than to resort to looking up a guide.

Uncharted 3 via the Nathan Drake collection
9/10 so far.
After beating 2 Among Thieves in May, I didn't love that game and gave it a grumpy 6/10 on the Last game you beat thread and really that was dumb. It was a better game than that, just some things got frustrating for me and overall it was a bit too fanciful with over the top moments and bad stealth parts. I'm only a short ways into 3 Drake's Deception and really liked the story and setting and surprise of the opening. The backstory bit was cool and while the game still isn't great with stealth, so far the few levels and areas have been more enjoyable to play.

Star Wars Jedi Survivor (PS5) - 7/10 - This is more of the same, and it's still quite fun, but it's buggy as hell, the graphics are a bit of a mess at times, and it just feels like it lacked focus during development. I honestly don't know what the core plot is and I'm 4 planets in. It's a parade of characters, rumors (side missions), and lots of traveling. Adding fast travel is great but it's only necessary because the maps are larger than they need to be. I'm having fun but this definitely feels rushed out the door, even now with several patches.

Even bumping down to 1440p Performance mode results in regular screen tearing and bouts of poor framerates. I've encountered many times where it appears to be hitting 20fps in both modes. And I get about 2 crashes a night. Disappointing but I'm still having fun.

WWE 2K23 {} 7/10
I hadn't bought one of these games since the 2K16 version and a bit has changed over the years since then. I wish they'd just simplify the gameplay a little bit more.
I hate to compare this to the WWF games on N64, but I'm going to do just that. One of the reasons those games were so popular (and apparently still are, even though I feel they haven't aged too well) is because when a friend or relative would visit, they'd usually want to play even if they didn't give a crap about watching WWF on TV, the games were just that fun, and you could hand them a controller and explain everything they'd need to know to play within a minute. I don't think you'd be able to do that with this game. The matches are a lot more slow paced, just mashing buttons won't get you anywhere (so it's not noob-friendly). It's way more realistic than those N64 games which is both good and bad.

I feel like the Create-A-Wrestler Superstar mode is a little too in-depth for its own good. In WWF No Mercy I could spend about 45-60 minutes creating my own custom wrestler, and that would include his entrance, moveset and alternate attires. Just on my one custom wrestler so far in this game I've spent almost 2 f'n hours creating him, with over 45 minutes of that being spent on his entrance alone (which I'm still not satisfied with due to glitches involving pyro), and spending a lot of time on his moveset but there's no way I'm sitting there to preview every available option. 20 years ago I would have, but not anymore.

Having not played one of these games since 2K16 version, I feel the graphics in 2K23 are a little bit of a letdown, or maybe I just expected a little more from the PS5 version. I felt the PS3 and Xbox 360 WWE games were held back a lot because they kept supporting the Wii and PS2 for longer than they should have instead of just taking full advantage of the next-gen hardware and I don't want a repeat of that with PS5 and XSX, so maybe just cut the PS4 and XB1 versions after this.

I had fun with the showcase mode, however it overall was not as good as I was hoping for. It focuses only on John Cena and he's one of those "love him or hate him" guys for most fans. I personally am somewhere in the middle. I realize there will always be a place for guys like him in the the industry (good physique, charismatic, but somewhat limited in-ring ability) so the women and children have someone to mark out for. It was fun to revisit some of his more famous matches, but I do have some complaints:
- They really botched some of the presentation in this mode. There is no commentary in any of the matches except for the last two, it's all just generic rock music in the rest of the matches.
- At a few points some of the FMV clips are pixelated and gross, almost as if they ripped the clips off of old YouTube videos instead of getting them from WWE directly.
- During the matches some parts turn into a cutscene (a mixture of the in-game character models and FMV clips) to segue you into the next point of the match, but some of the cutscenes felt too long.
- They had to censor way too much stuff in the FMV cutscenes. Referee faces (wtf?), commentary team's faces, faces of the ringside photographers, and also the logos on John Cena's sneakers and wristbands. It looks terrible when you see all of those things on-screen at the same and having to be blurred out.

After that I tried out the MyRise mode which you use a created character to play through an original storyline. It offers two storylines and I've only played through one so far, but I liked it and it offers a few kinda inside references to the "smart" fans. They encourage you to play through it twice to see the different available paths you take depending on choices you've made but I don't know if I'll be doing that.
My original intention was to play through the Showcase mode and then toss this up on Craigslist by WrestleMania weekend to get some of my money back. I eventually decided I'm not doing that. After exploring more of the game's features and what it offers, I'm okay with keeping this in my collection for good. I doubt I'll go back to where I buy these games yearly, but I was pleased with this one after being away from the series for so long.

Slickriven wrote:


As good as the Uncharted games are, I feel like stealth is one area they never quite got right.

Ice Age: Scrat's Nutty Adventure! {} 4/10
Okay, let me explain why the heck I'm even playing this is because I had one of those moments where I loaded up the PS+ Extra/Premium Game Catalog and closed my eyes while pressing the d-pad wildly and I'd play whatever it landed on. Well, it landed on this and I wasn't backing down. I'm committed to finishing this turd.

I have not watched any of the Ice Age films (though I've heard by many they are considered the Citizen Kane of children's CGI films) and so I have no connection with this character or why he is the standout character of the series (at least I assume he is, since he earned his own game), but to put it simply, there is nothing remarkable about this game.

Even by "low budget licensed games aimed at making a quick buck off of clueless parents and their children who don't know any better and will play anything" standards, this is a pretty bad game. First off, the game itself plays like the generic licensed kid games from the GameCube-era, and in fact if I was watching gameplay of this on YouTube and the uploader said it was indeed a GameCube game being upscaled via the Dolphin emulator, I don't think I'd have a difficult time believing that, because nothing about this looks like it belongs on a PlayStation 5 (or PS4 or even PS3 for that matter). In addition to that the camera doesn't always play nice, so that also makes it feel like it fits in that GameCube-era of 3D platformers. They also don't take advantage of the DualSense unique features like the rumble (it is disabled by default in the options menu) or gyro, where there's one section specifically where the character falls off the edge of a cliff and you have to aim him through the center of hoops as he falls and that could have been cooler to do with gyro instead of the analog stick. The character is also silent the entire time except for some grunts when jumping or taking damage, that could've been covered up if the music was at least catchy but most time I don't even notice any BGM playing.

You might think I'm being overly harsh on a game that I'm clearly not in the target demographic for, but someone has gotta look out for these kids, so leave it to ol' uncle PizzaTheHutt.

There are much better licensed games for children to play than this, and I suggest starting them out with one of those South Park RPGs. That'll open their eyes real quick and as a bonus will give them something to talk about with their therapist when they get older.

Polyball {} 6/10
Basically this is a ball rolling game inspired by titles like Marble Madness and Super Monkey Ball while also taking inspiration from games like Sonic The Hedgehog, Super Mario Kart and Trackmania.

I don't find it to be as fun as any of those games though. And graphically it has a kind of minimalist look to it. It's definitely not as colorful as Super Monkey Ball, instead it uses lots of gray and brown (at least in the dozen levels I've played so far).

There is a multiplayer mode, but at this point there is nobody playing online. There's also a message when you select the multiplayer mode saying something like "we know multiplayer is buggy and it's a miracle that it works at all", so that could have something to do with why nobody is playing it.

There's a level editor and you can upload/download custom levels, but I didn't mess around with it very long. You can also race against ghosts of other players, but I didn't bother with that as I'm not interested in speed running these types of games, I more like the challenge of just trying to make it to the ending of each level. While I wouldn't call this a bad game, I don't know how much more I'll play it. I probably wouldn't have played it at all if Sega didn't screw up the Super Monkey Ball series because this game lacks any of that charm...and monkeys.

Pokémon Legends: Arceus

Not sure how I feel about this one yet/10

I mean the the new formula of actually running around in a semi open world and watching your Pokemon battle it out while you run around and survey them etc is kinda cool, but I’m not sure how I feel about ticking off so many damn research boxes in the Pokédex to progress in the game such as catch an X amount of the same Pokémon, battle them an C amount of times, etc. Maybe I’m just too used to and too accustomed to the traditional Pokemon games. I’m only about 2 hours in so far and hoping the more I play it’ll click.

TalonJedi87 wrote:

I feel largely the same way about it. The lack of Pokémon variety doesn't help either. I abandoned the checklists pretty quickly and focused on the missions. Then the game is much more fun. I view the checklists as something people can go back to if they want to play more, but don't want to start a new game.

Wait you can abandon the check lists? I thought you had to do them in order to rank up and progress in the story?

The arceus end game is great.

I just completed Super Mario RPG for the first time earlier today. I enjoyed it. It was fun to see those characters/world in a RPG format. As an RPG, it was pretty short and easy - I just powered through the story and didn't worry about all the items or side quests. In battle controls are a bit awkward, but you get used to it. I only died during main story boss maybe two or three times. The mini games are kind of blah, but you can do them over and over for coins. Would recommend. It is on my available list now too if anybody is interested.

TalonJedi87 wrote:

Some of them are required, yes, but they aren't as extensive as the list that max out a Pokémon's entry information. Most of the required ones are low like 5 or 10, with basic tasks.

TalonJedi87 wrote:
I had a similar thought and didn't continue playing the game (I was a couple hours in).

@DCGX Without giving any spoilers, if I skip all the non mandatory checklists, do I miss out on things in the game that are very worth it? Or is it more like, "do a bunch of tasks, and get a uniquely colored t shirt" type of reward?

nonamesleft wrote:

Well, I obviously didn't do them so I don't know for sure lol but I don't even think it's that. It's mainly completing the Pokedex entries.

DCGX wrote:

Ah I see. Thanks for the info. I’ll see if I can stick with it then. I like the new feel minus the Pokédex check boxes. It’s def a different Pokémon game than traditional ones.

Immortals: Fenyx Rising

8/10

This game is way too good for an Ubi title. It’s like a Greek Zelda BOTW and I am OK with this. It has quirky corny humor too which I mildly enjoy. I’m about halfway through and I am pretty hooked. Oh and PS. No crappy breakable weapons! Haha

Strider 2014 release
8/10
It's generally not very challenging outside of maybe the first attempt against a boss but it's quite a lot of fun overall and not short. I'm at nearly 7 hrs and only around 60% overall completion, though I suspect that all of the collectables might count towards the overall and I've found a decent amount, but suspect there are a good bit left. I've also collected all 4 of the colored slash skills and a good bit of the upgrades, so I would think I'm actually getting nearer to the end vs. what that 60+% indicates.
It's also sort of surprising (to me at least) a Metroidvania, with doors and such you need upgrades to access later, and that causes 2 drawbacks as there's really not any fast traveling and the map could be better with indicating if you've already visited an area behind a formerly blocked, but now accessible, doorway. So you can end up (if you choose to) backtracking to an area you thought you maybe missed but hadn't. It's not terrible and seems like if you explore on your own then enemies won't spawn in as much or at all in some cases in non-active story sections.

The Pathless (PS5) - 6.5/10 - This is pretty chill and enjoyable, and I do like it, but it only rarely gels for me. I like just heading in a direction towards a glowy thing and seeing what i find when I get there. Having to shoot to keep your speed is interesting too, and it feels great when in a zone, but I'm also finding it annoying at times and for such a core mechanic it can feel clumsy all too easily. It can take just one "wait, how did I miss?" to ruin your flow.

I also often get to a staircase-like wall I can't shoot myself up without lots of backtracking so I use the bird to go straight up, land to reset the flaps, and repeat until I'm at the top. It feels like an exploit because it kills all momentum (which goes against the entire premise of the game).

I got this for $20 which feels about right and is a good time for that price. For $40, no way.

Far cry 6 and inscryption added to ps plus, nice, had both on wishlist and hoped this would happen

Inscryption is so geat. Far Cry 6 I just could not get into

started playing Tacoma as it was added to ps plus recently, really interesting,“walking simulator” in space where you basically piece together AR memories to figure out what happened to the crew, about an hour into it

Death Stranding: Director's Cut {} 5/10
I wasn't sure what to expect out of this. Of course I had read what other people thought of it (and it was mostly negative things), but I still wanted to give it a shot and use it as a make up badge in the Game of the Month thread. I won't be getting that badge though, because I don't wish to spend any more time on this than I already have.

On the positive side, I like the 3D audio and it sounded very realistic the first time I heard a thunderstorm starting up (there was an actual thunderstorm happening outside irl too, so that was like hearing it in 4D or something). The soundtrack has also been decent, and I liked the ability to build bridges and ladders and leave them in the world for other players to be able to use. On the not-so-positive side, plain and simple I just find the game to be pretty boring. It's not even a bad game, and I've played and beaten plenty of bad games and posted about them in this thread, but I already know this would feel like a chore if I make myself commit to finishing this, and you know as well as I do that nobody likes chores.

Death Stranding is an acquired taste. I was not a fan of it for like the first 10 hours. Then it clicked. I still wouldn’t personally rank it higher than a 6/10 but I have friends who adore it for whatever reason. More power to them.

I finished Death Stranding, but didn't do any extra stuff. It was interesting, but not great.
It's too bad they are making Death Stranding 2 instead of something else.

I concur. Kojima could be giving us another Zone of the Enders but instead we’re getting Walking Simulator 2.

Walking Simulator 2 with more poison rain and Alan Wake enemies does not sound like a good time.

Oh yeah. I actually came to contribute something lol. Street Fighter 6 for PS5. Pretty dang good. Been doing World Tour mode the most because I don’t want to pay for costumes and colors. The grind is real, but enjoyable. I feel like they might have too many systems in place, and sometimes it feels overwhelming. Drive parries, drive impacts, different levels of super moves based on which button but you can only use 1 power of a super move (ie level 1 Shin Hadoken or whatever it’s called can’t be a level 2 or 3 no matter how many bars you have built up). Lots of returning characters have lots of different moves too, but still feel familiar. Graphics are great and the music is there. Nothing really that I’d listen to outside the game, but nothing offensive either. There’s a cool track that would be straight out of a Final Fight game if it were made today that’s pretty good. The new characters fit the aesthetic of what they’re going for in this game, but they wouldn’t have fit any other Street Fighter game. Capcom has been killing it lately, and I’m here for it. I don’t know if I want to give it a number score, but if you’re into fighting games this is a great one.

I suck at Street Fighter usually but I’m intrigued by the accessibility of SF6. I may pick it up on a sale.

Like a Dragon Ishin is just about what I’d imagine a Yakuza game being set in feudal Japan. 8/10 so far and I’m about 1/4 of the way thru.

They did make the controls a lot more accessible with the modern scheme. I defaulted to the classic because I’ve been playing Street Fighter for 30 years that way. I feel more in control with classic, but modern is also good.

Good to know. I played SF on and off for the past 30 years myself. I think I came close to being halfway decent at SF2 and almost SF4 for a bit but not without my hands needing wheelchairs for recovery first from all those ridiculous and complex combos haha if I get it I’ll def opt in for modern controls and be called a filthy casual and wear that title like a badge of honor. At least then my hands won’t need life support.

That’s fair haha. I’m a filthy casual myself. I don’t play online with others because I don’t need that negativity in my life. If there’s ever a GTZ Tourney involved I’ll do that but beyond friends I’m out haha.

Afterimage - This game is giving Hollow Knight a run for its money for how large the map is. I'd say it's at least an 8/10 game after around 10 hours so far. Some performance issues on Switch, but runs fine for the most part.

Guacamelee! 2 {} 8/10
It has been 7 or 8 years since I first played the original Guacamelee! game and so there are things I don't remember too well about it, but I enjoyed the game overall and got a few laughs out of the humor and the same applies to this game. It's a pretty good example of what a sequel should be: it takes what you liked about the first game and just gives you more of it. More of the same beat-em-up gameplay mixed with 2D platforming and Metroidvania elements (hearing a game described as "Metroidvania" is usually enough to make me skip it, but this one is doing something right) with more of the silly humor from the first game sprinkled on top. I think I'm nearing the end of the game already, I might have it beaten by tonight.

Trek to Yomi
7/10. Like the art style. Camera,reminds me of early Resident Evil. Neat little “pick up and play” game.

Finished SF6 World Tour mode. I’ll grind to get everyone’s second outfits that I can but otherwise it’s done for me. I did like it, but not enough to immediately jump into another play through.

Finished Tacoma the other day, short but compelling experience, recommended

Started Far Cry 6, so far so good but very early

Since the slay the spire topic is closed, just got to A20 with Watcher, that means all my characters have reached A20, i’ve beaten A20 heart run with Ironclad and Silent, haven’t done it yet with Defect, and haven’t tried yet with Watcher
A year ago i was convinced i’d never even sniff A20 or any kind of heart run, so im kinda proud of myself, just two more A20 heart runs to go and I can settle into more casually playing the daily climbs and random runs haha

you should be proud, way better than I'll ever be and I play often

Persona 4: Golden 8/10 so far and I’m almost done with the first palace. It’s a nice predecessor to P5 but so far for me P5 is still top dog.

TalonJedi87 wrote:

It’s funny how everyone’s fav Persona game is always the first one they played.

Pretty much! Haha

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.

Slickriven wrote:

They were specifically included for the 3ds release, pretty sure they aren't in the Wii U version

@benstylus Ah, good to know. I did just beat it. I actually switched to the mellow mode for the latter part of level 6-7 but that wasn't all that helpful as it just gave Yoshi wings to change his jump and float type hang-time and I wasn't a big fan. I finished the level that way, but went back to classic mode right after and beat the final level, which really wasn't too challenging.

Had an itch for some antiques so I played some Konami Antiques MSX collection titles:

Athletic Land () - Not Pitfall/10.
I died on the second screen (the first screen all you need to do is walk to the right). Apparently the protagonist is the opposite or athletic because you can die from jumping into a puddle, tripping over a small rock, or even falling instead jumping of a knee high platform. It is awesomely bad.

Antarctic Adventure () - Cute Penguins/10.
Starts off pretty easy but difficulty really ramps up around stage 7. Simple gameplay - Dodge holes, walruses, catch fish, go fast.

Knightmare () - Quality Shmup/10.
kind of reminiscent of Dino Riki or King's Knight. Other than the super slow scrolling this one was actually pretty good. Fun powerups and weapons, and a decent difficulty curve. And now I know what game the Knight character in the original Parodius is from.

Gradius () - Not Nostalgic for this Version/10.
I like seeing how different ports turn out, and while this one is fairly playable, it's not as good as the NES port. So that one will probably still be my go to.

Also played some other games:

Strider 2 () - Backwards Discs/10.
Amazingly fun game with pixel perfect control. And they printed the wrong art on the discs. And that also weirdly affect the digital version because you have to use "Disc 2" to play it. Disc 1 is the bonus game, a port of the original Strider. (You can reset in game to switch discs).

Pandemonium () - Greg Proops/10.
I miss the days of interesting an experimental 2D/3D games back when they were first figuring this whole polygon thing out. This falls into what people now call 2.5D platformers. Game gets pretty difficult after the first 3 or 4 levels. and the bonus stages are insanely hard. But hey it has Greg Proops so I can't complain too much.

428 Shibuya Scramble - story was interesting but this might be the most confusing game I've ever played. I'm only in the 2nd "hour" and you have 5 different people. Each person's story has 2 or 3 questions and you have to get the scenario right with all of them to move forward. There are so many combinations. Story was intriguing but I am cutting my losses on this one. 2/10.

Baldurs Gate 3 10/10 I am completely consumed and I don't even care. The world may fall away under me and I will still play.

I started up "My Time At Portia" last night. It's definitely up my alley. Similiar to Stardew Valley. There is only one major problem right now. Even though I am on the latest patch, there is a really bad bug. Sometimes you cant scroll through the menus. Literally the up/down just doesn't work. I did some googling and I guess the developer never fixed the bug. The only fix I found is that you have to shut down the game and reopen it. Then after a while the problem will come back again. One user said they had heard the source code is a mess and the developers have moved on.

I guess I will see how often this bug hits. I ran into it last night but it was before I was about to quit. I really like the game but if this happens often I am going to quit now before I get too far in. Anyone else play this game? Did you have big issues with this bug?

Cel Damage 7/10
I recall playing this back in college on the with my roommates and it was decently fun in that setting. So when I got a copy for the GC I figured it should be similar. It plays a bit like Twisted Metal but with a more comical and faster paced feel. There are 3 event types, 1 is all about being the first to 500 damage score, 2nd is racing to clear 20 gates first and last is about being first to collect 4 flags and make it to the goal. Playing solo the game has dropped 6 other characters into each event to beat. I can select from 6 and then for each of the 4 themed zones a 7th joins that I've not yet unlocked, if they even can be.

The game is no cake walk as it's generally very chaotic. The races you can easily go from 6th to 1st or the reverse. The characters do feel unique in how they perform, I've largely used the chick in the pink caddy or the duck in the 30's car for races as they're a bit faster, though can get knocked around easier. For the 500 damage events I've gone more with the red devil looking dude with his 6 wheeled ride as his specific weapon can take out foes fast and completely. Each character has a unique weapon as well as can get well over a dozen random ones. They're all placed around the map and running over them gives you the weapon.

It's fun but can also be dang frustrating mostly in the races where you rarely get much of a lead. They only have 2 gates on the map and you have to go through 1 and then the other continually which causes you to pass your opponents often and they will destroy you. The damage events can allow for larger leads as I've won a few by 75 or more points, I've also lost by just 1 or a good bit. I've only tried one of the flag events as you needed to unlock that from beating 4 events in the other 2 styles first. Each themed zone has 3 arenas that all 3 events occur on. To consider this beat I'll need to win 36 total events and I've only done 1 flag, 8 damage and 9 races. I've also lost many events. I'm generally rather good at racing games so the chaos of those events try my patience some, but they are satisfying to finally beat after many attempts.

Slickriven wrote:

I've only played the demo on Xbox way back when, and haven't played the HD version, but the HD version goes on sale for a couple of bucks every now and then (and it's cross-buy on Playstation). The HD version seems to have reviewed worse than the original release, so I never bother getting it.

@DCGX I went looking for a review of the game last night and noticed they released an HD version. I read part of the review and it sounds like they changed some things as well in the newer release. I'm not too surprised that it reviewed worse more recently as standards and norms in the industry change frequently. It can be fun, in short bursts, but the AI and overall chaotic nature throw away much of your feelings of control or skill. Luck and perseverance are more important.

I played it a decent bit yesterday and have now beat a full 5/6ths of the events, including all gate races, all smack events and half of the flag rush. That final mode has been a bit more frustrating, though I lost several gate races as well. But with only 6 remaining I'll keep pushing to complete it. Choosing the right character is key for each event and arena combination.

Slickriven wrote:

Thanks for the update! I like the idea of a bit of strategy in choosing who to use to complete what events.

EQQO {} 5/10
I must have bought this dirt cheap years ago. The game is a puzzle adventure game that I feel had potential, but they botched the execution. This was first released on PC as a VR game and after checking some reviews on YouTube, I think the general opinion is that's where it should be played.

The main character (named EQQO, pronounced Echo) is blind. You don't play as him, instead you control a cursor that can point to where you want him to go, and interact with the environment. The story is being narrated by the boy's mother. I think games like Ico were a big inspiration to the developers of this game.

Like I said, it had potential but they didn't pull it off, at least not on Switch. The controls are so clunky. You can tell the game was designed for VR and the Switch version is the inferior way to play it. I would think it might play better using the touchscreen in handheld mode, but that isn't how I want to play. It's not a long game, I haven't run into any difficult puzzle yet in the hour I've played, but with the controls being the way they are, I am not sure that I want to play all the way through it.

-=-

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon Classic Edition {} 6/10
I remember all the buzz around this game when it first released a decade ago. I was interested in playing it, but didn't wanna do it until I had played vanilla Far Cry 3 first (which I finally did earlier this year). Now that I'm playing this, I am not enjoying it as much as I did plain old FC3. This is pushing too hard into 80s sci-fi style (though it takes place in 2007, it just feels like a movie from the 80s), and I'm just not liking it as much as I thought I would. Also the humor just isn't sticking with me. Like in the beginning when you have to do the tutorial, the main character is breaking the 4th wall by complaining about how much he hates tutorials while you're playing through it. I guess it was kind of funny in the beginning, but the joke had played itself out by the time the tutorial was over, and this happens with a lot of the other humor as well, the main character has a one-liner for nearly every enemy you kill and not only do they start to get repetitive, they also are often vulgar for the sake of being vulgar. I know this is a short game since it was originally just meant to be a DLC expansion to FC3, but part of me just wants to skip it and move on to Far Cry 4. I'm going to try and stick it out though, but just do the main missions (from what I can tell there are less than 10 I think) and once the credits roll I'll move on immediately to something else.

PizzaTheHutt wrote:

I LOVED Blood Dragon when it released. It was still instantly familiar to Far Cry fans, yet different enough to stand on it's own. But...I also have the Classic edition and I was so excited to play it again, but it just didn't have the same magic to it. I don't know if it's because I had already played through it so nothing was a surprise anymore or if it just doesn't hold up after 10ish years. The controls in particular felt pretty clunky compared to modern shooters/Far Cry. I'm glad that I played it back when it came out though, because I still have those great memories even if I can't relive them with the re-release.

Driving Strikers - 7.5/10

For those that don't know, this is a new, 3D online enabled Dreamcast game in the vein of 'Rocket League' with cross-play with Steam. Yes, that's a lot and quite nice. It's available physically and digitally for about $20 (plus shipping for the physical). Check my Dreamcast Forum for links.

That said, I'm a bit disappointed. I wasn't expecting Rocket League levels of fine tuning, but regardless of the play surface, it feels like little tin cars sliding on ice. Acceleration from the analog stick has a ramp up to top speed and can't be controlled. It's hard to gauge depth, which makes trying to do jump shots/blocking nearly impossible. Also, the ally AI is so bad. I played a match to a 4-4 tie, and my ally had all four goals for the opposing team. I wouldn't be surprised if the ally AI scored more against us than seven other teams combined. Because of this, even on the easiest setting, the League Mode is needlessly hard.

It's not all bad news, though the amount of arenas is small, they are all distinct and nice to look at. The music, too, slaps, though the tracks are too short for even a three minute match. I like the different teams and their names, though there isn't enough detail on the cars, and some different skins for the play ball would be cool.

Obviously this game is meant for and will shine in multiplayer. I haven't had the chance, but I imagine getting together with three other humans/friends would be a blast. I'd like more from this game, though it is only $20 with online play, and that's a great deal for a new, 3D Dreamcast game in 2023.

sa330206 wrote:

I'm really enjoying this game. I have only hit the bug once so it must not be too common. I'm about a month in. It's kind of like stardew but with the focus on crafting/building vs gardening. It seems pretty deep. Definitely recommended!

Saints Row (2022) {} 6/10
No more jetpacks and/or aliens! Woo-hoo!

Unfortunately, that is just one of the few things this reboot got right. Overall it failed to bring the series back to where it needed to be, and that is a damn shame. Long time Saints Row fans deserve better than this, the series has become a shell of its former self. The first three games in the series were some of my favorite open-world games of all time, and sure, you could argue that the third entry is where the series went in a totally different direction, and I'd agree, but I still had a blast playing it. But the last three games in the series (SR IV, Gat Out Of Hell and this reboot) have almost forgotten this series' roots. It's almost enough to where if GTA would just add co-op already, it might be enough to get me to completely leave the Saints Row series in the dust and not look back. I admit I like this one more than SR IV and Gat Out Of Hell, but there are certain missions that are too corny (those LARP'ing missions, ugh) and the overall writing isn't as good as those first three games, both in the humor department and in the way I don't feel any attachment to my fellow gang members.

I know this game released with bugs galore, and that was disappointing enough, but they've had a year to iron them out and there are still plenty of them. There is this one annoying glitch where when my friend exits the car, she can't get back in it, so we either have to steal a whole new car, or she will have to sit on the roof of the car while I drive if we're doing a mission that requires us to use a specific vehicle. That glitch happens every damn time we play. The NPC drivers are also among some of the worst I've seen in a game like this, and even the AI police don't seem to give a crap when you go speeding past them or hit a car in their view, they don't seem to care unless you make physical contact with the officer or their car. Multiple times my friend and I have discovered random NPCs floating off the ground stuck in what looks like a swimming animation.

It's cool and all that they are still supporting it with new content and DLC expansions, but they should focus on fixing what they've already given us. Bugs aside, nothing about this game feels like I'm playing a PlayStation 5 game. I mean the graphics don't look that good by PS5 standards, and the load times aren't fast either like I've gotten used to with PS5 games. It does make use of the adaptive triggers but that's about the only thing it does that doesn't make me feel like I'm just playing a PS4 game on my PS5.

The length of the game feels pretty short compared to previous mainline Saints Row games if you just stick to the story missions (I don't count Gat Out Of Hell as mainline, it was originally meant to be more like an expansion to SR IV). And I admit the game isn't totally devoid of fun, and I'm actually considering going for the platinum trophy after my friend and I complete the story. I 100% completed the first three Saints Row games, but just couldn't force myself to do that with SR IV or GOoH, but I don't think I'd feel as miserable doing all the activities in this game as I would in those two. Still though, this isn't the reboot the SR series needed and overall am a little disappointed in it and what the series in general has become over the past 10 years.

That's pretty fair. I didn't think it was a total mess, it just didn't do anything noteworthy. But I personally thought the LARPing stuff was the most memorable part of the game.

Anyone playing Sea of Stars?

I’m about 2 hours in and while it’s been very early, tutorialesque, Final Fantasy Mystic Quest style standard RPG fare, which I assume will get deeper with time, it looks absolutely incredible, the art/style alone is worth playing it. Some great music too

If you like SNES era RPGs, this should feel right at home

I downloaded Sea of Stars this morning after getting my Kickstarter Switch code. Gonna dig into it after I finish up Persona 4 for sure. Heard nothing but good things. I was hoping it would take us back to the FF/Chrono Trigger-esque days of olde.

TalonJedi87 wrote:

It definitely does, Chrono trigger influence especially is strong, at least visually

Not sure if I'm gonna try to beat Blasphemous 2 first or just play it and Sea of Stars at the same time. Been waiting for both for awhile now.

Think I may change it to Blasphemous 2 first myself before starting Sea of Stars only cause B2 is much shorter I read

Blasphemous 2: they got rid of the instant kill spike traps. It's like Hollow Knight where you respawn where you jumped into the pit. Weirded me out honestly as you get a Trophy/Achievement for surviving a spike trap. Guess they took the people crying over it seriously and decided to change it.

Crazy Construction

This one is a fun little block dropper + physics game.

Instead of neatly matching colored blocks or creating unbroken lines to keep your play area as low as possible, you're trying to cram as much random and oddly shaped stuff in to pile it as high as possible, carefully balancing and securing things as best you can so pieces don't fall off the side of the building.

As you progress, through each stage, there begin to be stage hazards such as clouds of electricity that will make your material fall without any control, wind to blow your piece off course and rotate it, etc.

I had initially thought this was an eshop only release but apparently it got a physical release in Germany. So that's the one I bought.

TMNT: Shredder's Revenge - Dimension Shellshock - The two new characters are cool and Survival mode is fun, especially in multiplayer. These aren't really new stages though, so the price seems a little steep. But maybe I'm just used to getting free DLC from indie developers.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider {} 8/10
I know I've said this before, but man it still surprises me just how good last gen games could look. Just like with the Uncharted and Horizon games, I spend a lot of time slowly walking through the jungles just taking in the scenery and once again going overboard with the game's photo mode. I can't wait to see how good a new Tomb Raider will look built from the ground up with current gen hardware. Though it is a PS4 game, I'm playing it on PlayStation 5 which Digital Foundry says is the best way to play, it has a slight performance boost to the resolution and frame-rate that they rank it slightly above playing it on Xbox Series X. The audio is good as well. I don't believe it supports the 3D audio feature, but there was one instance where I was hiding behind a wall with several enemies on the other side of it. I stealth killed one and I guess they noticed he was gone so they started searching around for him, and there was one enemy I didn't even notice was with the others until I could hear his footsteps approaching from behind me with just enough time to stealth kill him too.

Before I started this game I had heard people call it the weakest entry of the reboot trilogy, so that kind of lowered the expectations I had going into it. I finished the game last night and I don't know that I'd agree with that. Is it more of the same as the previous two games? Yeah, a little more emphasis on stealth in the jungle sections, but for the most part it's a lot of the same. But that is not necessarily a bad thing to me. I might feel differently if they were still milking this series to the same degree they were doing from 1996 through the early 2000s though, but rebooting this series was the best thing to ever happen to this franchise and I wouldn't want them to screw with the formula too much. I expect things to be different enough with the rumored upcoming Tomb Raider game though, so we'll see how that turns out.

They certainly upped their game with the puzzles in this one. I will admit the second puzzle in the game had stumped me and I had to resort to looking up the solution on YouTube (it was easy, I totally should've been able to figure it out myself, but what's done is done), but I refused to do that for any other puzzles.
If there is one area I feel the game could've been improved, it would be to remove some of the underwater sections. I just feel like there are a few too many of them, but at least they don't go on for too long.

I never finished that one. Need to get back to it sometime

Fast & Furious: Spy Racers Rise of SH1FT3R {} 4/10
For some stupid reason every once in a while I look through the PS+ Extra game catalog specifically to find something bad to play, and this time I found this.

I've never seen any of the F&F movies, but that doesn't matter, because this appears to be based off of a cartoon or something where you're racing as teenagers. It's not even teenage versions of Vin Diesel or...whoever else is in these movies, these are just made up characters. Maybe that was intentional, because if I was Vin Diesel I wouldn't want my name or likeness attached to this pile of crap.

I don't need to go into too much detail because nobody reading this is going to play this game, but to describe it briefly, it almost feels like it's inspired by the old game Blur. But it's nowhere near as fun and more limited in the items you can use. The game moves pretty slow, no matter what the on-screen speedometer says you're doing, it never feels like you're driving anywhere near that fast. The music is also not good and character voices are annoying because they're so repetitive.
The story mode is just 17 races long and is over in barely 2 hours. The CPU racers offer no challenge unless you put the difficulty to the highest level, but even on the easiest setting no matter how far ahead you are, they will always be able to hit you with their paintball weapon thingy.

edit: I downloaded the PS4 version just to compare the two. It's the exact same game, any upgrade to the graphics the PS5 version has is hardly noticeable.

Life Is Strange: True Colors {} 8/10
I've pretty much enjoyed all of the games in this series, though none have been able to match the story of the first game. I've only played through the first three chapters of this one (will be starting Chapter 4 as soon as I post this), so there's a chance it could change, but so far I'm enjoying this story a lot too.

Graphically the game doesn't look so hot. I mean even though it released in late 2021 it is very much a last gen game, especially the character models and stuff, so when you select to play in high resolution mode and enable ray tracing, the frame-rate should not be dipping below 30fps like it does in some parts (it's not that noticeable most times, but it does happen). Good thing this isn't an action game, so that makes it easier to tolerate, but still disappointing. The audio is better though, both the voice acting and music on the soundtrack is top notch like usual, that's one thing this series gets right.

Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II The Sith Lords on Series X

9/10

Decided to replay some old games I haven’t played in ages. This one aged like fine wine minus the obviously dated graphics. It isn’t better than the first KOTOR game but still is a blast to play. I miss games like this that actually made you pay attention to detail and reading journal entries etc to know where to go and what to do next. It’s a lost art.

Ibought a new PC last year and it came with three months of Xbox GamePass, so I finally redeemed it on Friday and started playing Sea of Stars. I'm about six hours into it and I've been having a blast. It's looking like a 9/10 to me. The battle system is great, animation is beautiful, and, surprisingly, I'm actually into the story and the characters, which is rare for me. I just wish I was playing this on my TV and not on my PC.

Good to hear. I'm interested in playing that eventually. I ended up going with the best of both worlds, and I have my PC hooked up to a 55" OLED.

citizen_zane wrote:

Bleed_DukeBlue wrote:

That sounds pretty sweet!

I got it mostly for work when I was working from home during the pandemic, but it's been great for gaming too. I've been playing Baldur's Gate 3 on it, and it's a blast.

citizen_zane wrote:

Swagman (PS1)

Finally got a copy, and it doesn't go past the "choose a save slot" screen on my slim PS3. (Just brings up the loading icon and it spins forever) Looking online at least one other person has experienced an identical issue so it might just be an emulation issue with that model of the triple.

Popped it in a PS2 and it ran fine. It's not as well designed as Dr. Lunatic which has a similar graphic style, but it also predates Dr. Lunatic by about 3 years.

Gameplaywise, it definitely feels dated but there's something charming about the "bad pre-rendered cg" look for characters and enemies.

Just finished Final Fantasy 16, did every single mission and monster hunt, just need to finish some challenges to truly count it as 100% done.

I absolutely loved it. I thought mostly everything was amazingly done and the characters, music and overall story are very interesting.

Only had 2 nitpicks that keep it from being perfect in my eyes. First, It should've been optimized to have a mode that locks at 60fps, the frame drops hurt the experience and I couldnt handle the 30fps mode which is the one that everyone suggest is used. The other thing is, while I think the gameplay is awesome, I always felt like they couldve added a way to control or call in your other teammates like you can call in you wolf. (Tales of Arise had a great way of doing this, for example).

9.5/10

In Other Waters (Switch) - Interesting, different, mellow, meditative, exploration game. It's hard to give it a rating, but I like it so far. Controls are a bit odd. I'm finding myself using the touchscreen because I'm not sure which button to press in some situations. The story seems well done. I'm motivated to uncover more of what's going on. Mostly, I'm just going around taking samples and finding paths to new areas. Lots of flavor text to read. I was lost for a while, but I'm starting to know the map better now.

Manic Miner

An enhanced portable version of the 8-bit microcomputer classic.

Very difficult single screen per level platformer but also mostly quite fair.

kevolones wrote:

I hope to start this soon. Need to finish Tears of the Kingdom first.

Hungry Shark World {} 6/10
I bought this a while ago when it was on sale for like $2 or $3 probably during shark week. Since it was on sale for that cheap I didn't bother researching it ahead of time, I had just watched Jaws and saw this in the eShop a few hours later and thought it'd be cool to play as a shark and tear crap up. That's mainly what you do in the game, swim around and eating people, fish, other sharks, etc. There's a bunch of objectives for you to do for each shark you unlock, and I doubt I'll complete all of them, but I do plan to revisit this game now and then to make some progress until I get bored of it, because that seems the best way to play this game is in short bursts. Why the game is best played in short bursts is because for over a decade Ubisoft has an entire Hungry Shark series on iOS and Android, this just happens to be the only one that they ported to consoles and thankfully it is free of microtransactions. The mobile version of this game released in 2015 and is still getting new content updates to this day, but this console port released in 2018 and from what I can tell seems to have just been a quick one-and-done with nothing added post-release. Judging by the long-ish load times and occasional sluggish frame-rate, I suspect this might've just been a low effort port that they hoped would attract more players to the mobile games as that's where they'll make the big bucks from. I really was surprised to look up this game on YouTube and there are barely any reviews or anything specifically of the console version, the mobile version is clearly what gets the views.

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.

-
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.

-
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).

-=-

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.
-=-

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.

Aqua Kitty UDX - Addicting out of Frustrating
This was on my Wishlist for a long while, is on sale and I have a little Steam funds (thanks Ren2K), so I bought it and... I wish I hadn't. It's nice looking and was fun for a while as I pushed through the first 5-7 levels, then the 2nd boss level was hard and took 20+ attempts, then the level like 3-4 after that I must have tried 40+ times, but it's so addicting and easy to hit A to retry that I spent 2.5 hours playing it just now... foolish.

Advice, don't buy this, even at the $2.05 or whatever it's on sale for. Yes it's enjoyable for a bit but holy Flark does it get annoyingly challenging pretty quick. I see there's an easy mode so maybe I'll try that b/c I do enjoy the play in general, though constantly having to save the miners gets old since there's SO MUCH going on screen that trying to rush over and kill the abductor craft before it surfaces is a challenge in itself... maybe I should stop trying and maybe only protect 1 or 2 miners if they're close together, but with some of the seeking torpedoes you almost have to run from them b/c trying to dodge them generally means you'll just run into another projectile.

Archangel {} 8/10
I feel like this game could be used as an example to show friends or family who have never played VR just what it is capable of. It's a legit game, not just some lame "VR experience" that you show off once and then get bored of. And this is now the type of game I want more of in VR. It's an on-rails shooter where you are controlling this giant mech, shooting and smashing stuff to smithereens and it's really fun but it's the type of game where I wouldn't even play this if it wasn't in VR.

Kudos to the developers, it's like they knew how to work around any limitations of the hardware and they freakin' nailed it. The game lets you play with two PS Move controllers or a DualShock 4, and in my experience the tracking of the PS Move controllers works great so I didn't even bother using the DS4, PS Move controllers are the definitive way to play this. The graphics also don't suffer from the dreaded "screendoor effect".

I only have a few complaints about the game. Stop me if you've heard this one before, but damn it's pretty short. At roughly a little over three hours in length though, that's longer than most of the other VR games I've been playing lately. Difficulty-wise, I don't know if it's a complaint, but it does get pretty hard. I started out on Normal difficulty, got to the third level (six total from what I've read) and died a few too many times, so I decided to bump the difficulty down a notch to Easy, and to do that meant I had to restart from level one (fyi Easy is still pretty freakin' hard and I still haven't beaten that third level yet). I would have stuck it out on Normal, it's just that I got tired of looking at load screens every time I died and they're 20-ish seconds each which starts to add up, plus all the dialog you have to sit through each time you continue. If you like torturing yourself, the game even offers a permadeath mode where if you die even once you must restart from the beginning. Final complaint, I don't think there is much replay value here. Normally if you enjoy a game enough by the time you've finished it, you could go back and unlock more trophies in it, but this game only has six of them and you won't even get one for taking the time to get good enough at it to beat it on permadeath mode, so you can likely get them all in one playthrough.

TalonJedi87 wrote:
Chrono Trigger 2? 😄

They didn't get the same composer for the music, did they? Because both Chrono games have great soundtracks.

I started playing Forza Horizon 5 I mean Crew Motorfest (PS5) this evening. I'm actually enjoying it quite a bit but, yeah, it's basically FH5 but clumsier. With the 3D headset the car sounds are good and the music selection is leagues better than what was in FH5. The audio in this in generally is pretty good as well as the dual sense controller stuff. I'm having fun. It's just shocking how egregiously this copies the FH formula.

I enjoy reading all of your VR reviews. I remember Archangel. I beat it last year, and it does hold up well even on the old hardware.

PizzaTheHutt wrote:

XIII (PS5) - 6/10 - This is the recent PS5/XSX "remaster" of the recent PS4/X1 remake. I played the X1 remake on XSX and got stuck on a mission and could never get past it. In this updated version (on PS5) I'm breezing through the game. It's not good, but the cell-shaded style looks better and this game does have some charm.

The voice acting is atrocious (shame on both of you David Dachovny and Adam West) and the cutscenes lack anything of interest, plus the voicework just makes it all so lame. But dang if I'm not enjoying playing this simple game after some open-world stuff. It was like $4 of PSN and for that price it's worth it.

But again, it's not good although better than it was. Some odd stuff like you can now carry all the weapons you find (you were limited before)...but guns (and their ammo) resets at certain checkpoints or level breaks. So you may lose weapons at a cutscnee (but gain more ammo for the weapons that carry over) so there's no reason to horde ammo. Strange.

This is an ok ($10 or less) game now if you are fond of the nostalgia or just want a linear shooter.

nonamesleft wrote:

Oh yeah. Some tracks in Sea of Stars were recorded by the OG composer from Chrono Trigger. I think he also did Super Mario RPG too bsck in the day.

Marvel Spider-Man 2 - 8/10 - Visually impressive, fun gameplay but very familiar. I enjoyed it but feel a smaller more focused story would have worked better, they put a lot of content into the last few hours that I think could have been better paced as another game or extended DLC.
Assassin's Creed Mirage - 7/10 - Gameplay was fun, the first game to feel like a real Assassin's Creed game in a while.

Duke Nukem 1 Remastered on Evercade

This game is WAY easier in wide-screen than the original boxed in version. I like the new additions like the background music. It feels a little off running that smoothly though. I turned the jerkiness back on for effect

TalonJedi87 wrote:
They got Yasunori Mitsuda for Sea of Stars?! I'm excited. I really enjoyed his work. I might have to just push my backlog away for Sea of Stars.

You're right about Mario RPG containing music from a composer who worked on Chrono Trigger. Mario RPG actually had more than one composer. Nobuo Uematsu and Yoko Shimomura.

Chrono Trigger was mostly composed by Yasunori Mitsuda, but several tracks were composed by Nobuo Uematsu.

I’d move it up the queue for sure. It’s so addictive. I play whenever I have free time. Sea of Stars is pretty much what I want if Chrono Trigger were made in 2023. Including unlockable gear items that let you progress like in Zelda games. Just got the grappling hook. Games are just better with grappling hooks.

TalonJedi87 wrote:
:) A friend of mine said something about grappling hooks just being awesome. I think it was in reference to Halo Infinite.

Sea of Stars was great as long as you don’t expect anything new - i guess elements of the battle system are technically speaking unique, maybe, or maybe I just haven’t played enough JRPGs, but other than that, it’s a beautifully, beautifully crafted love letter to something from our past that we think fondly of

Dying Light 2- 7/10

It’s what I expected it to be. Far Cry with zombies. Too many damn check boxes in the open world. I’m just sticking to the main story though and it has a pretty solid story and is brutal combat wise. The parkour feels fluent for the most part too. Reminds me of Mirror’s Edge a bit. It plays a lot more smoother than the first game which had a ton of bugs and performance issues from what I recall.

DrizzDrizzDrizz wrote:

That's a very good way to sum it up, at least for me.

Sorry in advance for the long post, I''m going through more PSVR games so I've spent the past few days playing some racing games.

Gran Turismo SPORT {} 6/10
I'm not too big on racing sims, so I don't really care for the Gran Turismos and Forzas, Need For Speed and Mario Kart are more my style. So that's why 6 years after getting this game bundled with my PSVR headset I've only just now finally opened it, and that's because I've heard they are shutting the servers down next month and a bunch of the game won't be playable anymore.

Well then, imagine my surprise when I come to find out that only a small (and I mean small) portion of this game is even playable in VR. There is a showroom mode where you can look at 3D models of the cars, a basic race mode where you can race against a whopping ONE CPU driver (there's no option to race against others online, or even race locally with someone using the TV), and a Time Trial mode where from what I can tell the best times list is separate from when you do Time Trial mode in non-VR. Like, what made them think this was the ideal game to bundle with the headset then? That was a stupid decision and in my opinion was just a waste of a bundle, and if I knew that then I would have just left it unopened because that's the sole reason I had any interest in playing it at all. My disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined. Nah but seriously, it was a waste of time to even open this because the real meat of the game is the non-VR modes, and I'm already currently playing a non-VR racing game (Need For Speed Heat) and I'm enjoying that one more, so I won't be investing much more time into this one. From what I have played though, if you are into the Gran Turismo series that 6/10 doesn't apply to you, I don't see why you wouldn't enjoy this one as much as the other games in the series. But as someone who expected more from this game's VR integration, it's pretty disappointing. I hope they did it right in Gran Turismo 7.

The soundtrack also is nothing special. I like racing games, but I don't consider myself a "car guy", so having a good soundtrack is kinda important to me because I want to hear more than just the sounds of brakes squeaking and engines roaring.

=-=
WipEout Omega Collection {} 8/10
Like Gran Turismo above, this game is playable without VR too, but I don't want to play it that way because unlike Gran Turismo this game offers the entire game playable in VR. And now that I've played this in VR, there is no going back to the flat mode.

With how fast everything moves in this game you would think it would be easy to get motion sickness. And while I'm sure some people still will get motion sickness regardless, they did a pretty good job in this game of trying to avoid that by making it more comfortable for VR players. They have certain comfort settings enabled for each track in the game and you can't disable them until you've played each track once with them on. There were also several times where i was ready to wrap it up and stop playing, but kept getting sucked back in with the feeling of "just one more race", something I wasn't feeling in Gran Turismo.

Surprisingly the online servers are still active, but there's just not many people playing. I did find 6 or 7 people playing when I searched on the EU servers, but they were much better at the game than I am, so I only stuck around for a couple of races.
This is a series I've never been good at, but still enjoyed the few entries I've played. I hope they're working on something new for PSVR2.

=-=
TrackMania Turbo {} 7/10
Again, like the two games above this has a VR mode and flat mode. I don't care much about the flat mode, but I did play some of it just to compare what's available in VR and what isn't. It's a fun experience in VR, but there's not enough to it. You basically get a time trial mode with 40 tracks to race on, which might sound like a lot, but they're fairly easy and basic tracks that last anywhere from 15-45 seconds each and took no time at all to get the gold star ranking on all of them (granted gold star isn't the highest ranking in this game, but it's good enough for me). This series is popular more for the user-created tracks, but you can't play those in VR. In fact the VR mode in general just feels like an afterthought (and it probably was, I think the patch that added the VR mode came months after the game released), but I still appreciate that they even added it. I was surprised that for a 2016 release there were still 5 or 6 lobbies online with people playing and like with WipEout I was the only American player.

The graphics are alright and everything runs smooth and that's the important part (especially in VR, you'd get a migraine otherwise). You can't manually select a dashboard view like I prefer for VR games, but the game will automatically switch to one when needed, like when driving through a tunnel or up a wall for example. I have my VR legs, but when driving up walls and stuff it almost knocked me for a loop when I was playing standing up, so I had to sit down to continue and it was much better, but still can feel a little funky once in a while. One track in particular that has you going upside down had me feeling like I was on a legit roller coaster, I thought I was gonna have to close my eyes until it ended but then I wouldn't be able to see where I'm steering. It got me way more than WipEout did, which surprised me. Just as a little experiment I think it would be funny (and cruel) to use this game to pop the cherry of a friend or relative that hasn't played VR before.

I saw TrackMania was listed under VR for the sale, and was considering it, but it doesn't sound like it's worth it just for VR. I still have to get around to WipEout. I've had it for years.

Wipeout Omega on PSVR1 was one of my favorites. Somehow I was way better at it in VR.

DCGX wrote:


If you have PS+ Extra it's available in the Ubisoft section of games. I assume it was given away to regular tier PS+ subscribers years ago and that's how it got in my game library. WipEout probably was given to PS+ subscribers too and for some reason you can't even purchase it digitally anymore.

PizzaTheHutt wrote:

I only have the Essential tier, and I'm letting that run out. If Trackmania was a PS+ title, I never redeemed it. I have WipEout physicall and from PS+. That's weird it isn't available digitally anymore. Were there any licenses?

DCGX wrote:

A lot of the music for sure was licensed

The Crew Motorfest (PS5) - 7/10 - After more time with this it's ok but not great. The narrative leads you to do Playlists which is a set of races scattered of some theme all over the map (Japanese iconic cars, drift cars, muscle cars, offroad, etc.). But it always give you specific cars to use during each race so just doing the playlists it has been leading me to has netted me like $1M with no need to buy any cars yet. But I also don't know how I can buy them.

AI - is all over the place. When you use nitrous they don't all immediately go as fast as you like in NFS. You can boost past the pack if you save it up and find a good straight. But then they boost in odd ways to catch you and I seem to get rammed in the back far too often.

Also, since the playlists have you all over the map I'm now just immediately switching to the plane mode and flying to where I need to be instead of driving since it's quicker. That's really cool to do but it makes me avoid the optional tasks and things I suspect it wanted me to see (and be distracted by) on the way.

Audio - is really good. Controller vibrates with variety and it's speaker does some nice car sounds, plus the music tracks are WAY better than FH5.

It's a good game but nothing great. For $30 on sale it's decent.

benstylus wrote:

There ya go then.

Paranormal Activity: The Lost Soul {} 7/10
Pretty sure I bought this on sale at Best Buy all the way back in 2018, back when GCU was a thing (RIP). I think it was pretty cheap rather than it being something I was just itching to play, so that's why it took so long to open it.

Two things I want to mention. First, I like that as soon as you begin the game you won't see a single damn loading screen. Second, the game claims to have "randomized jump scares", so if you play through it more than once you won't always know what to expect. I actually found the second playthrough to be less scary though, like there were fewer jump scares this time or something. However I feel like some of the jump scares were spoiled by the auto=save icon that appears on-screen now and then. Once you see it, you know something is about to happen.

I'm playing on PS5 which gives it the visual benefits of a PS4 Pro, and the graphics are pretty good. But the character models in particular look not-so-good. And you'll find letters throughout the house, but the text is like a blurry mess until you hold the paper at just the right distance and angle.

The 3D audio is pretty good too. Like, hearing certain sound effects and whispering voices, this just would not have sounded nearly as good if I was using the TV speakers. And it made the jump scares that much better.

As for the controls, I played through this game once with the PS Move controllers, and then started a new playthrough for around 20 minutes using the DualShock 4 before ultimately restarting the game and going back to using the PS Move. Overall the PS Move controllers were just okay and I did run into some issues. For example, one section of the game, maybe around the halfway mark, you have to do some satanic ritual thing and place coins on a table forming like a pentagram shape. Well...I dropped a coin on the floor and it was way more difficult than it should've been trying to pick it back up, because when I'd bend down to reach for it the PlayStation Camera would lose track of the PS Move controller. I had to keep recalibrating again and again with the Start button until I lucked out and somehow tricked the camera into thinking I was crouching and was able to reach the coin. I had to do this two other times with items that I needed to pick up off the floor (in both playthroughs). Also, at times I'd still get the movement buttons mixed up (which turn left and right, or move forward and backwards). I dunno man, I'll be getting PSVR2 in a few weeks and one of the biggest things I'm looking forward to is hopefully the death of that "click turning" nonsense.

For the game's length, my first playthrough was almost precisely 2½ hours and that includes probably 10-15 minutes wasted in the beginning not knowing what to do or where to go (that would happen a couple other times throughout the playthrough as well). My second playthrough was an hour shorter, and that included probably 25 minutes of me being lost and not remembering where to find one important item from my previous playthrough. I'm not even going to complain about the length, I'm just going to finally accept that the majority of VR games will never be the length of AAA games (excluding the ones that are AAA games like RE8, RE4, GT7 etc.). That's just the way it is. But what I will complain about is the game's ending. I don't know how many endings there are, but the one I got sucked. And I got the same ending in both playthroughs even though I chose a different path for each of them.

TL;DR It's not the greatest VR horror game, but it slightly exceeded my somewhat low expectations. However I've never watched any of the Paranormal Activity movies and this game didn't really convince me that I should. Also, at some point this game had gotten patched so that you can play it without VR now, but just like RE 7 and RE 8 I'll never play it that way.

Holy crap, I just noticed this thread turned 20 years old today. It has to be the longest running thread on the site.

I think it's only competition was the last game you beat thread, and that one is from 2005.

I also checked the Amazon commission thread in site feedback and it's a comparative baby having been started in 2010

Powerwash Simulator - Downloaded this on a whim because it's the PS+ monthly game and thought "Meh, something to keep my hands busy while I watch sports or listen to music". Turns out, I must be the target audience for a game like this. It's so addicting and satisfying that I can't put it down. My girlfriend thinks I've lost my mind

Need For Speed: Heat {} 8/10

So far this has turned out a bit better than I was expecting. Usually I crap on NFS story modes, but this one might be the only one I didn't outright dislike since NFS: The Run, which was over a decade ago.
I did have mixed feelings about the way the game's events are seperated between day and night time, but after enough time I've grown to like it. I kinda wish in the beginning I had spent more time playing at night to earn reputation faster instead of playing during the day to earn money. The game also just looks a bit nicer at night too.

Another thing about the NFS games I usually crap on is the soundtrack. This game has a few bangers though, but I wish there were more of them. I don't see a way to disable certain songs in the options menu, or even how to skip a song once it starts playing. But there's a few songs I like and that help make the races feel more intense when their bass is pounding in the headphones, especially with the binaural option enabled. I can't think of any other game I've played that supports the 3D audio feature that had featured licensed music and made it sound better. But again, ideally I wish I could disable every other song besides those few that I feel add to the experience. The few songs I do like only seem to play at night.

I remember when I first got my PlayStation 4, one of the first games I bought was Need For Speed: Rivals. In-between races and making progress in the campaign, I enjoyed just driving around the map listening to the other players chit chat, some maybe not even realizing their mic was on. Despite this game having cross-platform multiplayer so PlayStation, Xbox and PC users are driving around the map together, I've never heard a peep from anyone. Also all the activity seems to take place on one portion of the map. I barely ever see anyone driving on the western side.

Overall I feel this actually might be the best Need For Speed of last-gen (not counting the Hot Pursuit Remaster). There's lots to do as far as events to participate in, and plenty of collectibles to find if you care enough for that (I'm getting a bit tired of the whole crashing through billboards gimmick though, it's time to come up with something new).

Superhot VR {} 7/10

Never before has one game made me feel like such a badass...even though I totally suck at it. I feel like this is one of those games that VR was made for, that's how good it is (and that's weird to say because it originally released as a non-VR game). The game is a blast, I like the whole "time only moves when you move" gimmick, but honestly I just don't see myself completing this one. The controls work well majority of the time, but it's just those once in a while moments where they don't (particularly with items that you can only throw) that is the problem. They just don't throw where I want them to. Shooting where you want to is also tricky at times, but at least guns have more than one bullet, so you don't only get one chance with them. I feel like I might need to revisit this game at a later time, or if it gets brought to PSVR2, but until then I'm going to move on to something else.

Inscryption 8/10

A relative of mine has been recommending this game to me for a long time. The other month I took a look in the eShop. It was on sale (11.99). Had some leftover eShop credit anyway, so I bought it.

It's fun. It's card based, and similar in style to Slay the Spire. It has borderline horror vibes, but it isn't horror.

There's some light humor too.

So far it's pretty good.

PizzaTheHutt wrote:

I really enjoyed this one. Checking Xbox I put in 39h in that version (none of it multiplayer). I recently started it up on PS5 and had some fun but it felt far too familiar given how much time I put into it last time.


Crew Motorfest stands out to me for this reason. With the 3d headset the audio really elevates the experience. You can't skip specific songs but you can change stations. It's not as good of a game as NFS Heat but the music selection is far better than I've heard in games recently.

Super Amazeballs {} 7/10

image
Everyone remembers these things as kids. But now it's in VR, and by default that just makes it cooler, because everything is cooler in VR. I'm only half joking. It actually is a pretty fun game...while it lasts. The problem is it's just short and with little replay value. There are only 25 levels and I'm already at level 19 with less than 90 minutes of playtime. And there are only 6 trophies, 5 of which I had unlocked in less than a half hour (the final one is for completing all levels).

The graphics...are not what you'd play a game like this for, but they still are pretty lackluster. You'll spend the whole time focused on the maze in front of you and navigating the marble to the goal anyway, so you probably won't even notice the one single static image displayed in the background that's the same across every stage,

For the audio, the game's listing in the PlayStation Store mentions a "deep soundtrack created by Honsoneous". I don't know who Honsoneous is, but I didn't care for the music very much and after around 5 levels or so I had turned the music off completely and just listened to the sound of the marble traveling through the maze.

The controls are pretty good. Any failures where the marble would fall off the track, I never felt like it was the fault of the controls or the camera losing track of the PS Move ball thingies. The marble physics are good too.

Overall I wish there was just a little more to the game. Maybe a user-created maze maker mode or something, and they can be shared online. That could be kinda cool, though I don't know how big of an audience a game like this would attract anyway. Despite the short length, I will say that the developers at least did it right by only charging you $5 for it. I've played plenty of VR games that were as short as this but still cost 5x or 6x more. I can at least say I feel like I got my $5 worth out of it, because there just ain't a whole lot you can do with only $5 these days.

Anxiouz wrote:


I think it was a nice improvement over the previous one (Payback, I think). I also didn't play any of it in multiplayer other than driving around the map while connected online. There were a few peeps that would crash into me and then speed away when I was first starting out, I guess their way of bullying me for being the noob or something, but other than that it felt like everyone was just doing their own thing and not really interacting with one another.

I have NFS Unbound to play next, but I've heard it's not as good as Heat was, so it's not a high priority at the moment.

PizzaTheHutt wrote:

Damn my 9yr old is obsessed with these sorts of things. He has a perplexis ball coming for Christmas. If I could get him to use VR he'd be all over that.

Arca's Path {} 5/10

The best way to describe this game is it's so far the closest thing to a Super Monkey Ball in VR that we've gotten yet. Unfortunately it is just nowhere near as fun and it lacks any of the charm of Super Monkey Ball.

The game is played entirely with the HMD and the ball thingy will roll in the direction you're looking/tilting you head. The only time you will need to use a controller is if you need to pause the game, or to push down on the TouchPad to be able to freely look around and observe the environment without having the ball follow where you're looking. This method of control actually works pretty well and is probably the best thing about the game and will make it easily accessible for anyone.
It's everything else about the game that is pretty lame, and that goes for the graphics, soundtrack and the story. The story is told through still images and I don't know what they're trying to tell nor do I feel that a game like this would even have a story worth following. The graphics and music are both dull. The music I just didn't like at all, and the graphics just have very little variety with most levels looking the same as the one before it.

I haven't finished this yet, but I've put an hour into it so far and I don't expect it to take much more than another hour or so before I'll be seeing the credits roll because there are only 25 levels and they've so far not offered any bit of challenge yet. I'll finish it up after dinner, but unless there are some significant changes in the second half of the game I don't expect my opinion will have changed at all.

Shady Part of Me {} 8/10

I bought this a few years ago after seeing the trailer and it's pretty much exactly what I expected to get from it, and what I wanted from it. A 2.5D puzzle/platformer that acts like a single player co-op game. What I mean by that is you are playing as two girls, one human and the other a shadowy-like figure, and you switch between them to help each other get through the levels. For example the human girl doesn't like light, so as the shadow girl you might have to pull some levers that will adjust some things to create shaded areas so she can get through. All while you are playing a story is unfolding and being written out in the background and occasionally narrated. If at any point you die you hold the ZR button to rewind and go right back where you were. Now don't get me wrong, the game itself, the concept is not exactly unique and it has been done before, it's just that with the current state of the indie game scene today with 50 roguelikes and "[insert mundane activity here] Simulator 2023" releasing every week, this still manages to feel like a freaking breath of fresh air despite not being original itself.

I have not beaten the game yet, I'm almost 3 hours into it and I don't even think I'm halfway done yet, so that as well feels like an improvement over a lot of other indie games of this style lately. After 2 hours of playing most of them I'd probably be looking at the end credits by now. From what I have played so far I really don't have much to complain about. As far as the graphics, I really dig the artstyle, and the controls and audio are just fine. The puzzles as well are good. Some have stumped me for a bit but it never reached the point where I was ready to give up and look at a walkthrough.

That game sounds similar to Tandem: A Tale of Shadows.

BloodPuppetX wrote:


Pretty sure this was recently given free on Epic Games Store. I'm gonna have to play that next then.

Started up Bug Fables on PS4. Definitely a rip off of paper mario, but it's good so far!

Shadow of the Tomb Raider - 7/10 - The weakest of the trilogy but it still had some fun tombs, pretty good gameplay, and nice graphics.

I'm posting three times so it's not just one big wall of text in a single post, but I've been playing these over the past week.

Firewall Zero Hour {} 6/10
This kind of reminded me of "Unit 13" I think it was called, which was an early third-person shooter on the PS Vita by the SOCOM developers, except this is first-person. I don't actually remember a whole lot about that game other than it was a decent shooter on a handheld (something we didn't really get too many of prior to Switch) and that it wasn't just trying to be a Call of Duty or Halo wannabe, and neither is this game. I admit though that I didn't play this game for very long.

The game supports the PS Aim controller and DualShock 4, but I was limited to DualShock 4. This is also primarily an online multiplayer co-op shooter, and I'm just not as into those these days (especially when my only option is to play with randoms because nobody else I know is into VR enough to buy it themselves) compared to say 10 years ago where I would've been all over something like this, so that's why I didn't play very much of it and what I did play was mostly the offline mode where I had to protect a laptop against bots that were coming from all sides trying to get to it and steal the data off of it. I mostly just played that for around an hour until I got bored of it. I did have some tracking issues during one round where all of a sudden my in-game hand holding the gun would only point sideways, but the issue seemed to eventually fix itself after 5 minutes or so and there were no problems after that.

Considering that the game has over 13K reviews in the PlayStation Store and 65% have rated it 5 stars (I only mention this because the rating feature was only just added a couple months ago and that you can only rate games you own, so less chances of dogy gamers review bombing something), I think it is safe to say that if you are into online shooters then your experience with this will be way different than mine because there's clearly a good game in here. I was pretty surprised that the servers are not only still online, but there are people still playing it and I was able to join a match that had 5 other players (there was no list of lobbies to see exactly how many were still playing though, it just put me in a random lobby). But as it is a 5 year old game I just don't see the point at trying to invest the time into the online portion now because as a new player I'll just get stomped by the veterans. But this developer is closing down and I think Sony made a mistake by not buying them out, because they clearly had a hit on their hands with this game. But then again, I think I'd be more surprised if Sony did buy them out because it might show they actually care about their own VR product instead of just releasing it and leaving it up to everyone else to support it.

VirZOOM Arcade {} 4/10

Unfortunately I did not get to experience this game the intended way, hence the low score.
This is basically a fitness game, and how they intend for you to play it is with this $400 exercise bicycle controller. You can totally play it with just a regular DualShock 4 like I did though, but then the problem becomes there is no exercise involved anymore, and the game on its own is just not very fun, so why even play it with no benefit of getting exercise? Think of it like the equivalent of trying to play Ring Fit Adventure with a Pro Controller (which isn't possible, but I mean if it was it would feel pretty pointless).

The game is basically a collection of mini-games that are designed to be simple like old arcade titles. One has you riding horseback, one has you on a bicycle riding tour, one has you in a kayak going around a pond, one has you in a tank, one has you on a flying unicorn, one has you flying a helicopter and one has you in a race car. All of those are controlled by you peddling the bicycle...or just holding the R2 button to accelerate and tilting your upper body to the left or right to steer. I will say that it is cool that this game exists in the first place if you play it the intended way. But none of these mini-games are fun for more than 10 minutes when you play with just the basic DualShock 4, and in that case there are far better stand-alone racing, flying, tank combat, etc. PSVR games already, further making it pointless to play this for anything other than fitness.

Witching Tower VR {} 8/10
What we've got right here is a first-person puzzle/adventure game. As is the case with so many PSVR games in my library, I don't even remember buying this one, so I'm assuming it was on sale pretty cheap at one point.

The game takes place in the 1400s, and you start out chained up in a dungeon, in a cage across from you in a floating skull who is yapping away about something. A crow flies down with a key that you use to free yourself from the chains, then you you let that skull out of the cage he was in and he follows you around for the rest of the game, and he's actually quite annoying sometimes because you often forget he's there and if you turn around while holding your sword, you're often gonna accidentally hit him and he won't shut up abou it. Once you get out of that dungeon you've gotta climb the wall across a big gap to really start your adventure (which was kinda cool, and there are ladders to climb too later on but each of those sections last under a minute) and then you're given a torch which you'll use to fight enemies which are just zombie dogs and bats in the beginning (later you'll get a bow with infinity arrows and a sword). The combat isn't deep at all. Regardless if you're using the torch or the sword, it takes very little skill to kill anything and is as simple as back in the day when games would make you waggle the Wii Remote. I tried not to use the bow and arrow unless it was needed, bucause I couldn't aim it well.

The graphics are quite good by PSVR standards. I can't speak as to what kind of budget went into this game, but releasing at only $20 and barely 3 hours long I think it's safe to say this isn't exactly a AAA game, but visually I would rank it pretty high as one the better looking PSVR titles I've played (there are two AAA PSVR games that I haven't played, Skyrim and Borderlands 2, and I would like to see how this game compares to them). The audio though, that's where the developers kind of dropped the ball. First off when you kill a dog or bat enemy, you'll still hear them. Example, I bop the dog on the nose with my sword a couple times, that mf is still making growling noises after his corpse has faded away. More than once I was tricked into thinking it was the sound of another dog coming after me, but there weren't any to be found. The audio also is not 3D like most other VR games I've played. When those bats are swarming at you, you won't be able to actually tell from which direction they're coming from. You just gotta keep looking around and waggling your arm wildly. The enemies do have HP, but most only take 3 or 4 swings with the sword to kill. And them having HP is the closest thing to any RPG stuff you will find here.

Next I want to touch on the controls. I did have some tracking issues around 15 minutes into the game. There was this little cage thing with bombs in it and to get them out I needed to bend the bars. I couldn't reach down far enough without the PS Camera losing track of the PS Move controllers, and there is no crouch button in the game. I was hesitant to mess with the camera setup because for the past few months I've been going through my PSVR library, I have not had many tracking issues with most games, but I reluctantly moved the camera to my desk instead of keeping it on the TV. So far it has been working, but it felt like my character was a midget (there are various crates and barrels throughout the tower and I'm barely taller than them now). I did put the camera back on top of the TV when I continued earlier today for the second session and I had no issues this time.

That tracking issue brings me to the puzzles. So just before I reached that part at the 15 minute mark where I struggled with the tracking, that's the first real puzzle of the game. After I moved the position of the camera I then decided to restart my game from scratch and when I got back to that first puzzle the solution was not the same was it was the first time. It was a basic "push the buttons in the correct order" type of puzzle and this time the order was different. Assuming that happens to other puzzles throughout the game too, I think that is pretty damn cool and it encourages repeat playthroughs for puzzle fans. The rest of the puzzles, one or two ended up stumping me a bit, and instead of giving little hints at what to do, you can press the Triangle button on the right PS Move controller and the game will practically spell out the solution for you. That part is not as cool. Late in the game you unlock the ability to posess enemy skeletons and control them, basically using them to pull levers or step on switches to open doors for you and I liked that mechanic and wish it didn't come so late into the game. Another puzzle had you crush up a crystal and mix it into some potion thing. It was pretty cool but just like each of the climbing sections it only lasts briefly.

Overall there is some room for improvement here (especially the combat), but outside of the tracking issue I experienced in the beginning and the audio not being as good as it could be, I am glad that I played this and it wound up being one of PSVR's hidden gems once I got over a couple of rough patches.

Lies of P - 9.5/10

A souls-like with a coherent story that’s not just told through environmental notes and an absolutely perfect parry mechanic?! Color me surprised.

Even though its game design is linear, I found that to be to its advantage. Elden ring being the exception, I find myself fatigued by open world games. Lies of P has a deliberate path/loop through all its levels where you find shortcuts, fight a tough miniboss, get introduced to new enemies, and then of course the final save point before the big level ending baddie. I am not good at soulsborne games, and I absolutely suck at parrying. Lies of P parry animation is so instant and the timing window so telegraphed, by the end of the game I became a perfect parry god. For context: I couldn’t get past the first boss in Sekiro that’s on a horse, and I only beat Elden ring because of dodge roll invincibility frames.

It’s absolutely needed to tackle the final 3 bosses of the game, which for me were the only ones that took over 20 tries to beat. The enemies and bosses are well designed, feel like fair fights, and reward aggression/taking advantage of telegraphed attacks that are parriable. Most of them took me 5 tries or less to beat until the late game. Absolutely loved the Pinocchio meets Bloodborne aesthetic, and the story is actually damn good and heartfelt, with a teaser hinting at a sequel with a certain lead character that I didn’t see coming (but am very excited about). The weapon variety is amazing as are the enemy designs, everyone will find a different weapon that carries them through and fits their play style.

Grateful that this was added to gamepass, took me nearly 60 hours on my first playthrough, mainly because I grinded a lot if a boss gave me trouble. It’s absolutely worth getting, even if you’re not a fan of the genre. Take it from someone who was apprehensive to play it because I suck at these games but got hooked within the first 30 minutes.

Posted in FF thread. Thought maybe others would be interested in this:

Finally finished and platinum FFXVI

This one is a mixed bag. The story starts very slow and the pacing is a mess for quite awhile. When it does pick up- it’s a typical WTF is going on modern FF convoluted mess of existential philosophy and overlong dialogue that I mostly just wanted to skip through. It’s not helped at all by the fact that combat takes 3/4 of the game to really come together- and you don’t even have all skills or ability to mix and match any skill to your set until you “master” them with skill points- so you may never be able to do this on 1 playthrough.

The game is saved by the second playthrough- unfortunately it is a long game and rushing through / skipping cut scenes it still clocks in at about 30 hrs or so. The second playthrough ups the difficulty, opens up the inventory and crafting system and gives you access to all all skills and the ability to match any skill with any base eikon once it’s mastered. Leveling never feels like it really matters. Sometimes enemies are 10-15 levels ahead and still feel trivial. This game went from a 6/10 to an 8/10 for me after a second playthrough.

It’s unfortunate that they decided to lock the full experience behind a full playthrough- most likely won’t see it.

Another mistake imo is using the easy mode items they give you at the start. One of them automatically performs all dodges and pet skills, one of them allows you to just press 1 button to perform any move chosen by the CPU etc. these completely trivialize all but 1 or 2 end game encounters. The combat system is quite good and pretty fun once you learn it well. I’m thinking lots of folks used these and really dumbed it down made it boring.

Technically this game is one of the few that seems truly “next gen” this year. The visuals and seeing it in action are jaw dropping. The music is standard setting, the use of the dual sense is genius as you learn what each shake is queuing you up for. Seriously the battle music on certain bosses will give you chills.

The boss battles overstay their welcome frequently. I know this may be unpopular but damn- some of them require 30-45 minutes of play time to finish.

It’s a good game but does not feel at all like a mainline FF entry for me. It would have been a great spinoff or new IP. I can truly say I enjoyed FF XV better as a FF game. Lots of old standby enemies, spells, items, weapons- just are not here.

A great tech demo for the ps5.

I’m about 20 hours into Persona 5 Tactica and there is far too much dialogue for a tactics game. It’s fine in regular Persona where you have the overworld to break things up and add an additional layer to the overall experience, but here it’s about 70% yapping and 30% actual gameplay. The gameplay is fun when the game actually lets me do it. It’s nowhere near as nuanced as the best games in the tactical RPG genre, but it adds some P5 flavor to things and I’m enjoying it even if it is admittedly a little clunky. Playing it on Hard and it feels more like Normal, but I don’t mind it as much. Also I want to note that the whole fusion of Persona thing is kinda shoehorned in to this and doesn’t really impact the gameplay much.

Overall it’s okay but it’s a game I’d only really recommend if you are itching for something Persona related. Something like Triangle Strategy puts it to shame as a tactical RPG and Persona 5 Strikers is a much better spinoff and doesn’t feel quite as forced/contrived as this one does. Moreover, the story is super boring. It starts off quite nicely, but I’m definitely not enjoying it as much anymore. Maybe it’ll pick back up. The one standout thing about this game is Erina. She’s legitimately awesome and fits into the P5 crew perfectly. Right now the game feels like a bit of a slog and I’m probably going to start skipping through a bunch of dialogue so I can get to the gameplay.

I’ve been playing Resident Evil Village in VR for the first time and trying to get to the scene in the basement (IYKYK) to show my family when they arrive tomorrow. It’s really quite impressive. Hands down the best VR experience I’ve ever had so far.

Started Sea of Stars the other night through Game Pass. It’s touching on a lot of nostalgia feels and it’s new at the same time. I’ve died a few times though, since I’m not great at RPG’s, but it hasn’t killed the vibe for me.

I’m on the final act of Sea of Stars now myself and yes its a very good game with a ton of member berries moments. I wish we had more games like this that’s fresh yet familiar.

Heavyd814life wrote:

I was going to play this when I got back home after the holidays. I might hold off now.

Just finished Callisto Protocol. Got this for free thru PS+ and have to say it wasnt as bad as I expected. I can understand how people who paid full price were let down though.

It looks and sounds pretty good and the story wasnt bad. Id say this game is more similar to Hellblade than it is to Deadspace. You just walk through linear stages and fight monsters using your sword.

7/10 since it was free

I agree on Callisto Protocol. Not a bad game, nice to get it for free on PS+. It's not as good as Dead Space, but it's worth playing.

Same. I enjoyed my time with Callisto Protocol when not comparing it to Dead Space but yeah it’s still worth a play.

Archer wrote:

Yeah man I’m at the end now and they just chose to pad out the length of the game with pointless battles and recycled boss fights from earlier in the game. I guess they are trying to make it feel like a “final dungeon”? Who knows. I do enjoy the combat though for what it’s worth. I’m 40 hours in now and I definitely would have bailed by now if I didn’t like the combat. It feels more like a puzzle game than a tactics game sometimes because there are missions that you have to complete in a certain number of turns and you kinda have to figure out the best/most efficient route. I like it, but I don’t know how others will feel about that. It’s definitely a weird game. Especially since it feels like they cheaped out on the visuals and the overall style may not be for everyone. I was playing on Hard but then bumped it up to Merciless and it’s still too easy. I also think the story is incredibly generic, forgettable, shallow, boring etc but YMMV since it’s subjective. It’s just so poorly written, imo.

If you’ve already got it it’s worth trying out to see if it clicks. I definitely don’t regret playing it.

Currently playing through Immortals of Aveum. I know this game did not sell well at all and led to half the developer studio getting laid off but the game is actually not bad at all. I'm probably 8ish hours in and I'm having a good amount of fun with it so far

BJB wrote:

I think that was the "problem" with this game. With all the amazing games that came out in 2023, something that was just "good" never had much of a chance. When it hits EA whatever/Game Pass, I'd like to give it a go.

Playing Star Ocean: Second Story R. Not too far in (6-7 ish hours) but gosh darn I am in love

theyrhere wrote:

One of the greats!

Finished ys x nordics ps5 Japanese import. If you like Ys you’ll love this. I can honestly say it’s my favorite ys title at least out of the recent releases. The combat is refined to a more strategic fast paced / arcadey sekiro style. There are poise gauges and timed attacks / parries that knock it off and allow for damage multipliers. Lots easier to pull off than many games.

The boat stuff is extremely reminiscent of ACIV- it starts very slowly due to boat not having upgrades but once you get it up and running you zip around pretty fast- lots of fast travel too.

Music is excellent as usual per NIS / falcom stuff. Graphics are typical anime Ys stuff and I like it.

There are redundant and useless weapons and gear- tons of it. As usual.

The story is pretty good. I can understand quite a bit of spoken Japanese and some text- but Google translate / iPhone app makes it easy to get a more solid idea of anything I’m stumped on. It’s easy enough to play and understand once I got the systems down that I’m one trophy away from the platinum with very little outside help.

Super excited for this to be localized to do it again hopefully next year. Definitely grab this if you’re into the series and imports aren’t a turn off.

9/10

Feeb wrote:

No tower defense segments in this one then?

benstylus wrote:

There are about 10 base assault type scenarios that replace the tower defense and Grimwald nox of 8 and 9. They are almost all optional, you have to drive into them to start them so not linear or story related. You basically have to destroy 3-4 towers with your boat in multiple rounds to disable the shields around the island base- then you go inside and assault it 3-6 rounds of just small groups of enemies. The longest one takes about 10 minutes (entire scene boat battle and assault) Once you’re leveled most of the boat and assault rounds take you 2-4 minutes. Not something that feels like a chore as in the previous games. And the rewards are pretty crazy- very easy to S rank them.

This reminds me of another gripe- the boat controls switch axis if you head toward the player versus away- that’s a mess- I’m pretty sure there is an option to turn it off as there are tons of options and gameplay assist / accessibility toggles.

It feels like a half baked shmup and is pretty fun once you get geared and OP. Just crushing boats and bases.

Thanks. Putting this one on my watchist

Feeb wrote:

Nice. I love Ys games! Itll probably be a couple of years until we get it here though. Maybe late 2024 at best. I still have to play 8 so its all good.

Bluey PS4/PS5:
As far as kids games go I really liked it. It's short and probably should have been a cheaper game but its a pretty hot license right now so I suppose that's why. Graphically it feels like your playing the cartoon it's done like 4 TV episodes but it is a little buggy, nothing that really effects anything though. I do wish I would have got it on Switch though just because the of the Joy cons and the size of them would fit better in my 2 year old's hands. She loved watching me play it though and asks for me to play it again. I would highly recomend this game if you want an easy 4 player co-op game to play with your kid. The mini games are REALLY simple also but I think if you have some young ones that's a definite plus.

Dead Island 2

8.5/10

Easily the best FPS zombie game I’ve played in a years. Puts the likes of the Dying Light series to shame really. And I had such low expectations for it with all the delays and developer changes.

TMNT via Cowabunga Collection

7/10

Ya know this game really isn’t bad if you cheat (rewind + save states) plus the music is pretty good and catchy too. I’m finally gonna get revenge on childhood as I just made it past area 4B now. It even has a built in digital Nintendo Power strategy guide section in the collection.

I have like 3 more games to beat on that collection. I have the NES game, the third Game Boy game and that trash Genesis version of Tournament Fighters.

Nice. I wanted to start the collection with the hardest first the work my way backwards. Not sure if I’ll play that crappy version of Tournament Fighters tho.

That’s fair. I started with what I wanted to play. I’m finding it hard to play through the games now though haha

I'm about 7 hours into Signalis on the PS5 and i'm at a loss for words. You talk about a homage to those early survival horror games and I don't think any other game has done it better. And it does it without being derivative. It's very much its own game, but some of the callbacks legitimately give me chills. I just got to a "piano room" where Moonlight Sonata is playing and it takes me right back to the OG Resident Evil and REmake. I have to stop playing now because I have to head out for a couple of hours, but I'm jumping back in as soon as I get back home. I started playing it a while ago and bailed after less than 30 mins because it just wasn't clicking and I think @kommie had really positive things to say about it so I decided I'd give it another shot at some point. So glad I did. Honestly can't recommend this enough if you're a fan of survival horror games.

Heavyd814life wrote:

It's great.

Gollum (PS5) is only $5 at Gamefly (with free shipping) so I said why not. It's not as bad as it was made out to be, but yes it's terrible. If it released at $20 and presented itself as an indie or AA title I think it would still be a disappointment but at least be more reasonable. Full price lol.

The biggest issue is that it had this incredible IP to work with and did absolutely nothing with it. It's not even about Gollum's growth as a character, it's just him, cookie-cutter orcs as the only real enemy (but some wear helmets! ), and occasionally you see other characters in cutscenes. The graphics are poor but I haven't experienced any bugs. Just some clumsy "there is only 1 perfect way to get through this" situations.

Anxiouz wrote:

I haven't played this, and I don't doubt what you said, but I wonder, specifically when it comes to characters and even locales, how much the developer was allowed to use. With the way the Tolkien estate chops up and licenses out the property, they might've been limited in what they could use and/or reference. I really wish someone else was in charge of licensing the IP. The Tolkien estate just comes off as extremely greedy bastards.

Put almost 10 hrs into The Last Case of Benedict Fox and I'd give it a solid 8/10 I suppose.
Graphically it looks amazing for the art style it's going for, you're mainly in Limbo of the twisted mind/memories of 2 individuals and the backgrounds of those 2 places are just really great, lots of details and plenty of vibrant colors, though purple/magenta is a key color in the game. Controls are pretty good, at least moving around, combat isn't the best, BUT you don't fight too much and after a little bit you get used to it. I played mostly on my XSX, but went to the PC (playing via GPU) b/c there was this one door that I could NOT figure out how to open. The game is a bit of a puzzle-metroidvania with skills you unlock overtime allowing you access to more areas and this door I had the right skill to open it and had opened several others like it, but it was elevated and I couldn't get the controls right to interface with it to open it. I even got stuck a few times trying to jump and interface with it. So on PC I used the KB controls and it still took me a little while b/c they just didn't make sense, so there's some issues there.

After I got the door figured out I played a good 2 hrs more on the PC b/c it has that feeling of 'just one more' secret or story element then I'll stop (and go back to my XSX), but I had switched to a Xbox controller by then, so it was pretty similar anyhow. I've used a guide a tiny bit b/c of a few things like that door and there's some other 'dark' sections that I was confused on how to use another tool to navigate/survive in - so the controls or at least the instructions on how to do some things could be improved. The game has a lot of overlapping quests to complete and it really does not hold your hand. A few times I was looking at the map thinking, man what/where do I go next. That guide helped a little there.

Most of the puzzles and such are pretty good and I just did I rather cool looping bit that got a tiny bit stale, but the dialog btwn the main character and another person during this was really good. Plus the voice acting is top notch, one of the better voice acted games I've played, maybe since Guardians of the Galaxy. I will say that I started this in the summer and played like 1 session for maybe 45 mins and it didn't 'hook' me. But I wanted to give it another go and since doing that I've been hooked and played several sessions and am looking forward to seeing out the story.

TLDR - solid game, excellent art design and execution, solid writing and top notch voice acting, controls and/or explaining some skills could use some help, but overall it's been a good game that does take a good hour+ to get into.

The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR { 2} 8/10

I specifically wanted this to be the first game I play on my shiny new PSVR2 and I think that was the right call. I was a big fan of the original game on the previous PSVR and this game is pretty much an improvement in every way you can think of.

I played through half of the game and then restarted from the beginning. Then reached the halfway point again making different choices along the way this time...and then restarted from the beginning again. That is how much I just did not want this game to end. On my third restart is when I finally decided to play it through fully. I actually would have liked to have played through it in one sitting, but that is not going to be possible because of how the game uses the rumble features in the controller, the battery life won't last until the end unless I disable the rumble, but I'm not doing that because it makes good use of it. You don't just feel rumble when you fire a bullet like in every other game, there are some points where it is used to build up tension right before crap is about to go down. More developers need to realize that rumble can be useful for things like that and not just when something explodes.

Since I obviously just got my PSVR2 I cannot speak to the state the game was in when it released last March. Unfortunately Supermassive Games seems to be in the habit of rushing their games out more and more these past few years and just fixing them up in post-launch patches in what is basically the equivalent of flipping off day one buyers, and that seems to be the case with this game, too. I am satisfied with the game as it is now, but from my understanding not a lot of people were left satisfied at launch.

The graphics are one area people complained about at launch. I don't know how much they've been improved via patches since then, but I thought they were just fine (but then again maybe I'm just easily impressed since the only other VR I can compare it to being the original PSVR where games often looked low-res on the base model console). The 3D audio was good (the options menu has a setting for Pulse headset users instead of just giving it a generic "headphones" label) and the controls are good too, absolutely no re-callibrating needed unlike was the case with the original game. Also like the original game, this is a spin-off game of a series you don't really need to have played to be able to enjoy this.

A couple of months ago they added a horde mode as free DLC. It's typical horde mode stuff, but the coaster section moves at like 2x or 3x faster than it does in the story, and that's cool. I kinda get easily burned out on horde mode stuff though, so after about an hour I'm kinda done with it. However for the game itself, just like its predecessor Rush Of Blood, I intend to revisit this for a playthrough every couple of years, and definitely will use it to show off VR to family visiting.

-=-
Cactus Cowboy - Plants At War { 2} 3/10
Not only is this the worst VR game I've played, but it's a contender for one of the worst games I've played...period. It's a first-person shooter acting as a parody of WWII. I couldn't beat the first level, that's just how bad it is, and even the tutorial was a bit painful to get through. The characters are all voiced by AI bots, and it's sometimes difficult to listen to them because they mispronounce words so often. There's one NPC that tells you "this game was developed by one person and is free, so leave a nice review in the store!" and I'm just thinking...heck no. A bad game is a bad game regardless of if just one person made it or a hundred people worked on it together, and just because you didn't charge money for it doesn't mean you get a free pass and your game can't suck. It's like the dude had a funny idea and thought he should build a game around it, but with the finished product he failed miserably.

The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails- PS4

Just finished the platinum. This one is interesting- at first glance it’s a simple, janky psp port of a ho hum action RPG / platformer. After you get into it it’s a pretty deep, fast paced twitch / skill based top tier old school good time. The music is good, the story is typical overblown JRPG fare- the controls are tight and reminiscent of some of the great 16 bit era titles.

The levels are short and each has 3 gems and a treasure to find- along with a specific goal like only use a sword, don’t heal or kill 50 enemies before completing. It feels like a bunch of arcade levels put together to make a 50 hour epic. There are minimal Zelda, metroid, mega man influences in the form of earning a new move to reach new places, revisiting areas and getting a new spell that hurts a boss more. Speaking of bosses- there are lots of them. Each one has multiple phases and may require you to use one of your weapons / skills a’la the aforementioned standard setting opuses.

This one felt really satisfying to platinum. It really shines when you complete all the extra content- the credits roll then there is “after story” that continues the story and finishing it actually counts as “beating the game” trophy. Then there is NG+. It adds a whole new set of side quests and levels- eventually allowing you to use your points earned from achievements ( same as trophies) to buy upgrades such as new level cap, faster speed, new levels, infinite skills. Beating this mode is really the end.

Great fun. Recommend if it sounds even remotely interesting to you.

I only dabbled with the original release as it was Japan only- so I don’t know what’s new here- but this package would easily be a top 5 psp title.

9/10

LEGO 2K Drive {} 7/10

These graphics are nice and really make me want to see what the next Mario Kart title will look like in 4K. And I really dig the whole Car/ATV/Boat transitions, reminds me a bit of Sonic & All-stars Racing Transformed.

I dunno what it is exactly that is preventing it, but I really wanted to like this game a lot more than I am. I can admit this is actually one of the better recent kart racers out there, and I don't mean to imply that I'm not enjoying it at all, because I am, but I just intend to do the bare minimum to complete the story mode before I move on to a different game once the credits roll. If this were a Mario Kart game with an actual story mode you know I'd 100% that dog, but with this one I just don't feel like committing to it that way. In fact I haven't even done anything to upgrade my vehicles. I'm around 3 or 4 races from the end of the story and still using whatever they started me out with, without having made any changes other than paint job because I think they make you do that at one point. Once the story mode ends I might play a few rounds of online multiplayer before deleting it, which feels weird for me to say because that's where these games are most fun and I should be spending the most time playing.

TMNT Radical Rescue via COWABUNGA Collection

4/10

This one is just weird and poorly constructed I feel. I’m not gonna finish it because it’s basically a maze set up and you have to search rooms for keys and keycards to free turtles which have special abilities to allow you to search more rooms and unlock the maze further. However even when I unlocked all the turtles I still got stuck and frustrated so I moved onto TMNT Arcade game which is nostalgia city for me.

Narita Boy (PS5) - I don't usually post reviews of games I'm playing but I think I got this game on sale for like $1.99 and it is so awesome. It's a super solid metroidvania that isn't too challenging, but gets most of its difficulty from puzzling. It is important to read dialogue and keep a pen and paper handy to track wild symbols and codes to advance through the correct specific doors. HLTB has this game at around 8 hours to beat/complete so I'm about halfway through and I am really enjoying my time with this so far.

I loved Narita Boy too. Such a random but fun game. Narita…BOIIIIIIIII!!!

Songs For A Hero - Definitive Edition {} 7/10

Having not played the original version of this, I don't know what makes this the definitive version. But it's a 2D action/platformer where you select a hero in the beginning and set off to rescue a princess (what else are heroes good for?) all the while a narrator is singing along on your ass kicking journey. The songs are pretty funny at times. The problem is though that when I'm concentrating during a part with a lot of action or a boss fight, I can't easily pay attention to what he's even singing.

The game overall is pretty easy as far as the platforming goes. The most challenging parts for me were the boss fights, in particular trying to figure out when you're able to attack them. Some of the boss fights have multiple phases and if you die you will restart from phase one, which especially sucks because you also have to sit through all the dialog leading up to the fight and some of it was only funny the first time.

Aliens: Dark Descent 8/10

RTS lite, gets pretty difficult. It captures the atmosphere of Aliens almost as well as Alien: Isolation does Alien. This is amazing considering the perspective. I only started playing it post patches back at the end of December and I only had a bug 1 time when an alien corpse stuck in the ceiling.

Leveling up and customizing the marines was pretty fun and all of the classes seem well done. There are 5 in all. I would love to see a sequel with even more evolved gameplay.

Ven VR Adventure {2} 6/10

Astro Bot this ain't! But I still got some enjoyment from it, it just took a little longer than I'd have liked before it happened. I know Astro Bot: Rescue Mission was truly a gem, and it's really not fair to compare every other VR 3D platformer to it because they just won't be able to hold their own against it. I'm talkin' first-round KO, flawless victory, Astro Bot is the VR king of the genre. But just for comparison sake, let's say I put Astro Bot on the same tier as Mario and I don't mean just the games, but as characters, Astro Bot and Mario can appeal to players of all ages, universally liked by all. In comparison, Ven is one of the many failed 3D mascot platformer characters from the Xbox era. I'm talking Vexx, Blinx The Cat, Tak, Kao The Kangaroo, etc. I'm not just talking about the quality of those games, but the main characters themselves. When was the last time you've thought about any of them? I'll answer for you - you haven't thought about them because they all suck and are completely forgettable, and so is Ven. You will have forgotten about him once you've finished the game and moved on to something else, because there is nothing charming about him and he leaves no lasting impression, has stupid and repetitive one-liners every time you die (which will be a lot, and not always your fault). It's like they really expected you to die many times. They start you out with 20 lives which itself is already more than most games would start you with, and by the time I was halfway through the game I had over 120 lives. It's a pretty short game, you shouldn't need anywhere close to that many.

Honestly it really could've used more time in the oven. This feels like it might've been rushed out to try and get it out before Christmas. There's just too much jank (including a really annoying bug halfway through level 4 that until it is patched will require you to stand and then crouch at a specific part during a brief cutscene to be able to pass it, even though the game tells you from the start that it is best played while sitting) and I don't know if this is how it was on PC VR or if these are new issues just on PSVR2, but I suspect the jank was there all along after checking out a few older reviews. Another comparison to Astro Bot is that by the end of World 1 I already knew that I was going to go for that Platinum Trophy and to 100% it, that's how much I was enjoying it from the start. With this game, even though it's short (3 Worlds with 4 levels each), I really can't decide if I want to be bothered doing that or not. I mean first off there is no Platinum Trophy here to begin with, and one of the trophy requirements is to beat each level in time trial mode with no checkpoints, and that sounds like more trouble than it's worth because like I said you're gonna die a lot and it won't always be your fault. What I mean by "not always your fault", there are certain enemies that fart out poison gas and if they start the animation for it as you jump on them, you and the enemy will basically be killing each other simultaneously and it happens too often.

Just so it doesn't sound like I'm crapping on the game and it has no good features, I will mention a couple of parts of the game in particular that stood out to me (and I still have 2 levels left to beat, maybe there's a chance one of them rocks my socks off or something). One was a boss fight with a giant snake creature where you had to throw bombs at it. I just liked that whole mechanic, the boss fight itself won't rank up there among the best I've experienced in a game or anything. And the other was a mini-boss that basically makes you play a round of Beat Saber. Those have so far been two of my favorite parts of the game, and they are also the only sections in the game to justify the use of the VR2 Sense controllers because they couldn't be done with the regular DualSense. Another thing I like is also what I liked about Astro Bot: Rescue Mission and it's that these levels take place all around you, so a swivel chair is certainly recommended so you won't lose track of Ven. The game isn't all bad, and I'd even consider buying a sequel if the devs built upon this game and learned from what worked and what didn't work in this one (and also make it at least double the length).

SimCity

Where did the last three hours go out of ten.

Sometimes you just need a game where you can chill and this is definitely it.

Why am I so terrible at Resident Evil 3 (2020)?I want to love the game but it hates me
I’m really struggling to stick to my “evade and run whenever possible, conserve resources” plan
Great game though lol

Man I loved the RE3 remake despite popular opinion. I had beaten all runs on all difficulties but nightmare. I think the key is doing the challenges to unlock perks like unlimited ammo etc. Then it’s weeeeeee!!!

Solar Ash 7/10

I think I saw a review for this a while back and saw it was from the Hyper Light Drifter crew and was interested... not that I've really played HLD yet. Anyhow Solar Ash landed on GP so I wanted to give it a go and after maybe 3 hours... it's alright. It's a bit of a cross btwn Tony Hawk (the fast movement - you can 'skate' on pretty much any surface and grind on rails) and something akin to Shadow of the Colossus as you fight these huge beasts. It's colorful and the story seems interesting. In general you explore these sizable spaces needing to take out a few anomalies before gaining access to fight the big boss thing. You glide around on these anomalies (and the bosses) and need to hit some linked nodes or nerves of the creatures before destroying them. The bosses have 3 phases of increasing difficulty and I ended up reducing the overall difficult to easy, as that gives you more time to hit all the nodes. On the very first boss I could not get to them all fast enough, even on phase 1, got quickly annoyed and just wanted to enjoy the game. Even on easy, some of the bosses, thanks to trailing camera, could still take a handful of attempts. If you recall how in Shadow of the Colossus it could be frustrating if you didn't hit the 'hold on' button quick enough to prevent getting shaken off, it's sort of worse here b/c you need to skate and move fast on these guys, only some are moving around quickly. You generally want to stay on their hard shells to move fast plus the skating can get a touch floaty, then they'll sometimes flip over on a whim. The 3rd phase, their previously black body that you could touch before, but would slow you down, is now red and will insta-kill you.

The world and overall gameplay is pretty decent, but the bosses can be a little annoying to complete fast enough and not mistakenly fall off or touch their red body. The camera can screw you over and you fall a long way down to the area's basin and need to trek all the way back up. So for sure there's some annoyances, but I do like it enough to keep going. I've cleared the first 2 areas and am ready to fight the third's boss so I think I'm nearing 50%, but not sure. There's also some side things to do, like finding logs from your prior compatriots, who came to this void, or other characters whom are trapped in there with you. I don't mind exploring some but I've yet to find all of the things in any of the 3 areas I've visited so far - I'm not sure then if I'll bother going for them before finishing this.

benstylus wrote:

While I've never played Sim City, that's how I used to feel about Populous. I remember buying at on sale at the mall for $19.99 back when I was a freshman in high school. I had never heard of it, but I had a little money burning a hole in my pocket and it was one of the cheapest games I could find at the time and the box art looked very interesting to me. I would just get into this relaxing zone whenver I played it. Good times. Perhaps I should revist it.

Sim city snes was awesome. Simplified almost arcade version of a deeper sim. I loved it as a 13 year old.

Max: The Curse of Brotherhood {} 7/10

This is a sequel to a game I played all the way back in the year 2010 BC (before Covid) on WiiWare called Max and the Magic Marker, where you'd play as Max in a 2D platformer and use a magic marker to draw in the environment things like bridges or ladders to help Max on his advanture. I liked the game and was kind of impressed they were able to do what they did within Nintendo's really constrictive 40MB limitation on WiiWare (Nintendo really had no idea wtf they were doing in those days and I'm glad whoever was in charge of that department was replaced). In this game you pretty much do the same thing, with the story of Max coming home from school and being annoyed by his little brother, so he casts a spell that would make his brother disappear...and it works, so now you have to rescue him before your parents find out.

This originally released a decade ago on Xbox One and Xbox 360. I feel it would have made a better fit for the Wii U with the GamePad, but I can understand why they avoided that system like the plague (and why everyone else did, too). But luckily Switch has a touchscreen too, and this was ported to it 4 years later. I played in handheld mode just because I thought it'd be better for the drawing mechanic, but the controls just didn't feel that great regardless if I used the touchscreen or the analog stick, so back to playing on the TV I went. The controls in general needed some touching up, not just the drawing parts. First off, unlike the previous game, you don't get to draw objects all willy-nilly to help Max. Instead, this time your marker allows you to "draw" branches, vines and raise parts of the earth to help you get around (there might be more but I'm at Champter 4 so far and those are what I'm able to do). You can only draw those things when you find a glowing spot in the environment telling you so. Take that whole marker gimmick out and what you're left with is a pretty standard 2D platformer with some pretty basic puzzles, but I'm still enjoying it. The graphics look nice, and the audio isn't bad, with Max making comments on your journey along the way while not getting annoying or repetitive. It's just the controls could've used a little touching up, like Max not always grabbing on to a vine rope when you know you were holding up.

PizzaTheHutt wrote:

The Wii only had 512 mb internal memory. If they didn't have some sort of hard cap, then people would have whined about running out of space too fast.

Yes they could have just given it a hard drive like the PS3 and 360 but that would have added to the cost, and that $250 price point was one reason people went for Wii in such huge numbers (compared to double that for the base PS3 or 360+hard drive)

Pixel Ripped 1995 {2} 8/10

A sequel to Pixel Ripped 1989 on the original PSVR, and I really like this whole "game within a game" vibe this series goes for. This has several games within it that play like mid-90s games some of us grew up with, like LttP, Super Metroid, Castlevania, Road Rash just to name a few.

At one point you're so engrossed in the game while having your mom giving you crap for playing too much, so you've gotta find ways to distract her (like putting the controller down to grab your nerf gun to shoot a jar of cookies off the counter) to shut her up so you can get back to playing.

Another section has her lecturing you that it's bedtime, but you're a little rebel and adapt to the "I'll sleep when I'm dead" mentality, so you keep on playing and she'll periodically wake up and come check on you, that's when you gotta quickly put the controller down and grab the remote to shut the TV off until she goes back to sleep and when she does you turn the TV back on and continue playing. There's another part where you're playing on the kiosk at a game rental store and it was pretty cool just listening to the other kids chit=chat around you.
The game is pretty fun and the graphics are good, no issues with the controls at all. They've released a newer one based in 1978 and I think that one is published by Atari so they can use the actual names of the consoles and IPs, I'm definitely going to check that one out because I liked the previous two.

benstylus wrote:


I don't know if HDD was even necessary as much as just giving users the ability to save directly to SD card. I don't think they even got that part right with the Wii U either.

Hogwarts Legacy

9/10

I’m not into Harry Potter like I am with other fantasy genres like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, but man this game is amazing. Truly captures the feel of the world of witchcraft and wizardry tenfold and it’s just so immersive. I’m having a blast exploring and solving puzzles. The combat is air tight and precise. Flying on a broom or mount for traversal in the overworld is visceral and plain old fun. It’s also making me want to rewatch the Harry Potter flicks too and I just might.

Astalon: Tears of the Earth Nostalgia at its finest/10

Snagged this from someone on here who got it in the recent Humble Bundle and man did I score a deal - price was great but the game has been a true gem. Feels like a modern twist on the old Dragon Warrior (it does use a more Metroid like side view and map, but the one character is a dead ringer for the blue DW hero IMO) or similar NES titles with its 8-bit look, its wonderful chip-tune soundtrack and the overall the feel of the game. I've got 6 hours in and have the map at just 37% so I think I've got a good ways left to go and that's exactly what I would want, more of this game, especially after getting some unlocked powers for the 3 characters.
I do have a minor gripe, that when you die, you return to the beginning of the dungeon and then have/want to trek back to where you were, there is an elevator and some other mechanics that open up as you progress and access/activate them, but a few times that gameplay loop can feel a little bit annoying. There is an incentive to killing all the foes in the rooms you progress through on this trek, as they drop orbs that act as a currency to buy all manner of upgrades after you die. There are very few options to heal, so simply avoiding as much damage as possible is a good tactic.
But in my 6 hours so far, that slog was only felt maybe twice and not for too long as eventually I was finding more elevator access rooms to allow for greater fast travel as well as getting upgrades to help with progression and such.

Spider-man 2 (PS5) - 9/10 - Everything feels so familiar and they really didn't push the gameplay envelope, but...the story is great and throws a lot of cool bits in, gameplay is polished, and it's just a damn solid game throughout.

Many of the map filler items are redundant like the previous 2 games but the level-up trees have more value so grinding a bit is worthwhile. And it introduces story elements into them much better to make it seem more interesting (if only just a little bit).

I'm on-track to 100% with only a couple missions left from what I can tell from the story, but this is one of those games that it simply worth the price of admission. If you haven't played a PS5 ever, this is definitely a killer app like GOW.

Main complaint is that with multiple characters with multiple types of attacks it's tough for me to remember which Spidey powers I have when switching between characters. If I don't make their suits super obvious I can't tell who I am until I try to do moves.

Slickriven wrote:
How's the music?

nonamesleft wrote:

I think it's really good, some tracks are better than others though. I think you can listen to it here, at least snips:
https://mattkap.bandcamp.com/album/astalon-tears-o...

Slickriven wrote:
Thanks for the link. Will have to give it a listen. I'm constantly on the lookout for new potentially good video game music.

Prince of Persia the Lost Crown

I just finished the last boss and I’m cleaning up trophies. One of my biggest pet peeves- bugged trophies. This one really feels like a kick in the nuts because some of the items you need take so much work through frustrating platforming to get- only to find there’s bugged stuff. Ouch.

The game feels and looks like a low budget indie title. Graphics ehh cartoon and music is mid. There are some very clever puzzles and use of time / split personality etc. There are far more super frustrating controller tossing moments though. The bosses are ok, they look like Sifu bosses, just low quality cartoons. They are all quite frustrating as well on harder difficulties. The boss fights, like the ridiculously long instant death around every corner action segments- require near perfection for a lengthy battle to win. Often you just get the wind knocked right out of you by losing in the 2nd / 3rd phase of a boss- and have to dig deep to hit retry and not just walk away. Lots of the game induces this feeling of pure frustration and disappointment. It’s very often a total bummer.

One of the sequences was a small room with a series of rolling spike logs that came from every angle. No crap I worked on this for at least a full day before I finally completed it- only to be rewarded with lilac cosmetic pants. Are you Fukun serious? These pants don’t even look lilac?! I’d absolutely go pantless before earning these again. It was no joke over 2 full minutes necessitating perfection- and each slip was instant death and restart. It felt like the world championship of action games.

If this sounds compatible with your health and you enjoy a challenge- give it a go. But if you get to that room - just don’t. You’ll know it when you see it.

7/10. And I feel like that’s kind of generous. I’m not sure why this one has been so hyped. It’s a ho hum butt-hole Metroidvania of the souls lite variety. Dime a dozen these days.

Shakedown: Hawaii {} 7/10
Retro City Rampage originally came to be after some dude was trying to port Grand Theft Auto III to the NES just for craps and giggles way back in 2002. He eventually turned it into its own game and in 2012 Retro City Rampage released. It still was very much like playing GTA III in 8-bit. I originally played it on PlayStation 3 and didn't like it. I gave it another try on PS Vita and still didn't like it. Then a couple of years go by and I decided to give the game one final chance, this time on 3DS, and for some reason this time the game just clicked and I ended up really enjoying it.

Shakedown: Hawaii is the sequel to RCR (at least I think it is, I hardly remember the RCR story or if it is related to this one), this time taking place in Hawaii and upgraded to a more 16-bit aesthetic.

You play as some out of touch, rich old fart that has been coasting by on past success and come to find out that you're not so rich anymore. So you set out trying to take over businesses around the island. Gameplay-wise it still feels like RCR: you steal cars, shoot people, get chased by police, etc. But now there is more of a Monopoly vibe as well because you have to micro-manage all these properties that you're buying.

One of the things I liked about Retro City Rampage was the humor. It was a pretty funny game with lots of pop culture references. This game as well has lots of humor (minus the pop culture references) but thus far I haven't really laughed at any of it.

Overall there are a lot more things to do in this game compared to RCR. Of course the taking over various properties around the island and the micromanagement of them all, plus you are changing between three characters throughout the story, and the missions in general offer more variety than RCR did with lots of mini-games and the game overall is nearly double the length. But for some reason, I just feel like I can't wait for the game to end. I'm not going to give up on it as I'm a little over halfway through the story mode, but I feel like it might be going on a couple hours longer than it needed to.
-=-

Epic Roller Coasters {2} 5/10

First off I didn't pay for any of the DLC, so I only messed with what was available in the base game which is free to download. There's not much to do unless you pay for the extra coasters, thus the low score.
This is mostly a "VR Experience", which there aren't really a lot of on PSVR2 compared to the last-gen PSVR. Those are always good for showing off to family and friends that visit, and they want to see what this VR stuff is about even if they're not gamers. This is good for that, but not much else.

There's only a few coasters you get in the free version, and unlike real roller coasters once you've rode these virtual ones you probably won't do it again (typical for most VR Experiences). Two of the free ones were pretty cool though, one was an underwater theme and the other was with a T-Rex chasing you. Oddly the game's thumbnail and title screen has Sponge Bob characters, but none of the free content in the base game has anything to do with Sponge Bob, so that's kind of misleading.
In addition to just riding the coasters, there's also a race mode and shooting mode. The shooting mode has you riding the roller coaster while shooting at targets. It's not really fun though and I can't think of one damn good reason to play that mode when Switchback VR already exists and does it better.

PlataGO! Super Platform Game Maker {} 3/10

I bought this years ago on both Steam and eShop, never actually played it on Steam but today finally booted it up on Switch. This is such junk. It clearly was trying to capitalize on the success of Super Mario Maker, which as a big fan of SMM is why I bought this (it released 2 weeks before SMM2), but it's just not enjoyable. The lack of in-depth tutorial for making your own levels really hurts the game, and the graphics and controls just look and feel so outdated. If you're big into retro gaming in the 8-bit era then you may not mind that, but I kinda do because 2D platformers have evolved so much since those days. I mean, there's a reason Nintendo opted for Super Mario Maker to use the NSMB controls/physics instead of the 8 and 16-bit games.

There looks to be a decent tool for making levels if you take the time to learn how to use it, but even with Super Mario Maker I am always more interested in playing the levels of other players than making my own, but even that isn't so easy to do in here with how awkward it is to navigate the menus.
Graphically it uses an 8-bit aesthetic, though you can apply a filter on your custom levels that make it look like a GameBoy game, SNES game, or even a red Virtual Boy-like game (there are others too but I didn't mess with it very long). Steam version lets you import sprites from other games if you wish, but looking through the game's community hub on Steam it seams to be dead, no recent posts. And when searching in-game for levels to play and sort by date, I couldn't find any from later than 2020, and I also had the game crash on me while trying to find levels to play.
-=-

Star Wars: Squadrons {} 8/10
This is fully playable in flat mode on your boring old TV, but I felt there was no reason not to exclusively play it in VR like I do every other hybrid VR/flat game.
The presentation in this game is pretty damn good. It's the kind of big budget game the original PSVR needed more of (or VR in general needs more of). So I'm glad that EA even went ahead and supported it, because I wouldn't be playing this at all otherwise.

This is the first OG PSVR game I've played in a little over a month that I've owned a PSVR2, so going into this I was half expecting to notice a big downgrade in graphics. It actually looks pretty good though. Normally I would complain because the cutscenes are in 2D, but I feel like I can give this game a free pass because they are really well done, voice acting is top notch and all that stuff. But honestly I don't give a rat's ass about Star Wars lore, so all the talking parts that happen in-between missions really drag on too long and when I continue playing later this evening I think I'm going to start skipping them all from now on. I just want to blow crap up and these parts kind of ruin the mood.

There's a team-based multiplayer mode, it not only lets you play with non-VR players, but it supports cross-platform with PC and Xbox players too. But I can't tell you how it is because the few times I've tried searching for a match it never finds any to put me in. There's a fairly small group of dedicated players on the game's subreddit that try to get active games going on Wednesday and Friday evenings, but if I even managed to get in one of their games I know I'd just get my ass whooped because I only want to play a few rounds, I don't care enough to dedicate the amount of time it would take to actually get good enough to hold my own against players that have been at it for years. Basically if you buy this game, don't let the multiplayer mode be a deciding factor, just buy it for the campaign mode because that part is fun even for someone that isn't a Star Wars fan (me).

Bloons TD6 is the most addictive thing I've played since Diablo 3. God help me. Just a tower defense game with monkeys popping balloons, but I can't stop playing for whatever reason.

PizzaTheHutt wrote:

Yes! This is the kind of stuff VR needs in general, even if there's a flat screen version, it sings in VR. It's cheap now, but I got it at launch and it was well worth the full price.

Cave Digger: Riches {2} 5/10

I bought this for like $5 or something without looking up any reviews ahead of time (and now that I've tried, you can barely find any of the PSVR2 version specifically), just a couple of screenshots that made me think this could be like SteamWorld Dig in VR. Well, it kind of is, but it's nowhere near as fun.

You boot the game up and are literally thrown right into it. Like, there's no title screen, no tutorial, no explanation of how things work, none of that, not even a way to pause the game to make adjustments to anything (screw snap turning, I want it off!) You just start in front of a pickaxe, pick it up and start chipping away at these rocks in front of you and collecting gems that you then convert to money to buy tools and upgrades. And they don't tell you what the upgrades even do until after you've bought them, that's how much they just expect you to figure everything out on your own. I put around 3 hours into this total, but after around 45 minutes I was worried that I had seen all this game has to offer, and wasn't too impressed by it. In the saloon they start you in at the beginning of the game, within 5 minutes of playing I had gotten stuck behind one of the tables, later on got stuck through a wall where I had to restart the game (good thing it autosaves often), heck the first time I booted up the game it spawned me out of bounds, and multiple times when trying to pick up a gem off the floor I would end up taking out a tool from my utility belt, etc.

I might come back to this one a few more times, because I feel like there might be a decent (though reptitive) game in this, it's just a shame that it is buried under so much jank, and for that I can't recommend it. I've heard the sequel is better, but I really can't say I'm in a rush to give that one a chance after playing this one.
-=-

PowerWash Simulator {} / {} 7/10

I originally played this on PC via GamePass in summer of 2022. It was fun for a couple of hours before I ultimately uninstalled it because my GamePass trial was about to expire. Now it was a PS+ game and a friend wanted to try it in co-op. I started it and played a bit on PS5 not realizing that the PS5 version wouldn't let me play in co-op with my friend on PS4. So I decided to keep the PS5 version installed for single player and download the PS4 version just for co-op. That didn't last too long though, as I soon realized that I don't really want to do all this in single player again, so the PS5 version got uninstalled. To be honest it was exactly the same game anyway. Like, the load times on PS4 are already short, and the graphics on PS5 weren't significantly better or anything, so I couldn't find a single reason to keep them both installed. Both versions offer gyro aiming though, and that's something the PC version lacked. It's nice to have as an option, and I use it once in a while, but it isn't much of a game changer in this the way it would be in a first-person shooter.

Anyway, the game is slightly more fun in co-op, but after a play session I'm often left thinking "why did I just waste an hour of my life doing a virtual chore?" and then do it again the next time we play. Also, only the host's progress saves and the co-op parner won't be able to earn any trophies, and I dislike when games do that (not so much the trophy part, but when only one person's progress saves). My friend and I are 4 or 5 levels in, and I don't know how many levels there are in total, but the minute she feels bored and wants to quit I will not do or say anything to try and change her mind because I'm already kinda reaching that point now. Having said that, if it got a PSVR2 release, I'd be willing to play it again...

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