VideoGame_Discussion

Ty The Tasmanian Tiger HD

6/10

I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older or what but those old-school platform games like Banjo Kazooie just aren’t having enough charm to me in my mid 30s anymore. Mostly because I find it highly frustrating to spend hours in a map, trying to find every single little thing when the map design isn’t that great to begin with. Nor is the camera. I’m not sure if I’ll be sticking with this one until the end because I read there are certain requirements you must hit in order to progress further in the story like collect 80% of every collectible in each before you can unlock the boss and I’m not sure I’m about that life anymore.

Alan Wake 2 - 9.75/10 - Excellent game, great story, great graphics, fun gameplay, creepy atmospheric horror like the first game. I highly recommend playing previous Remedy games before starting this one.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown - 9/10 - Initially I was not a fan of the character movements but once it gets going it all clicks and it works great. Excellent platforming, great level design, just lacked in worthwhile unlocks at times and had a few sections that were unnecessarily difficult.

I started to play Sundered this week. Love the visuals/art style but so far the gameplay hasnt clicked. Ill give it another, but so far I dont find it fun

Smalland: Survive the Wild - This game is pretty fun. Its a casual open world survival game. But it has a story. It reminds me a lot of Outward, but without the magic and has mounts you can tame. I say that because of the combat and having to craft armor for the right season (summer/winter), not just a certain area of the map. It does have the normal survival stuff of having to eat, collect resources and build things. But its all very casual compared to most other games like that. I guess its a lot like Grounded. I've never tried that. I might check it out since its on GP. I thought that game was something different. Smalland has also been in early access on steam for over a year, but officially released the other day. Its also on xbox and ps5. Anyway, this game is really good. If you like these kind of games or played and liked palword or outward you will probably like this one too.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage - 7.5/10

This feels like old school Ass. Creed and I’m digging it. The focus on going almost all stealth at times and its setting remind me of the very first game with Altair 17 years ago. The game map isn’t as big as the previous more recent entries which is nice and there is more of a focus on just story missions with a sprinkle of side contracts here and there which take mere minutes to complete so it doesn’t stray from the story. My only complaints so far are the graphics not being as good as I would have expected, some wonky feeling timing on the controls and believe it or not the load times when you’re fast traveling for some reason take longer than I anticipated. I’m playing it on the PS5 and fast traveling takes about 10-12 seconds, even if the fast travel point is relatively close which feels long to me in an age when load times are almost non-existent anymore. I guess when they priced this game out at $50 their budget excluded graphical fidelity, an HDR option and quick load times. But other than that I’m having a good old fashioned AC sneaky stealth time.

Archer wrote:

I was hoping it would be on switch to play with the younguns. Probably very demanding.

TalonJedi87 wrote:

Have you played Valhalla? I haven't yet. I know Mirage is a prequel, and some say Mirage can be played first while others say more is gotten out of Mirage if Valhalla was played first.

Valhalla is the only AC game I haven’t played and most likely won’t ever play it because of its length. Any game that’s 200 hours long terrifies me. Especially an AC game that’s full of tick boxes and redundant gameplay. 200 hours of that sounds like a chore.

Gotcha. I haven't played 'Odyssey' or 'Valhalla' yet. I have both for PS4, but want to play them on PS5 (which I don't have yet) because they run better. But with 'Mirage' on sale, I'm tempted to get it, because I miss old school AC so much.

Feeb wrote:

Actually seems odd this isn't on Switch. This would be the perfect Switch game. Its not very graphic intensive, so I don't think it would be taxing for the switch. And even on PS5 its modular loading, if you run too fast you come across bugs who are loading in or just standing around and their ai wont kick in until you get close. So I think it would be fine on switch.

SYNTHETIK: Legion Rising - so far I like this, but it seems like I'll be playing it on and off a lot as it's pretty hard

DCGX wrote:

Oh yeah then I’d definitely pull the trigger on Mirage. It’s the closest experience you’ll get to the AC1-3 days. A very concise story with only a fraction of things to do compared to modern day AC games.

Valhalla is daunting. Overwhelming is also a good word. There is SO MUCH to do it makes me not want to play it. Odyssey was straddling that line, but I finished it. I can’t bring myself to play more Valhalla.

I played Vampire Survivors for the first time the other day. It’s fantastic.

I'm still waiting for Mirage to have a significant sale. I have a hard time paying more than $25 for Ubisoft games now days. They don't really put a lot of effort into their games anymore. Its all just lazy copy paste of past games with minor story changes.

BucketofJustice wrote:


Dude what you just said was precisely how I felt. I struggled so much to get thru Odyssey and I love Greeky mythos. Origins I thought was meaty enough even while bloated but then Odyssey pushed that bar way over the line of bloated to sheer overwhelming standards then Valhalla said f it I’m just gonna be AC WoW.

Archer wrote:

@Bleed_DukeBlue was kind enough to sell me his copy of Mirage on here for the great price of $25, which too is all I’m willing to pay for most Ubi games nowadays.

I loved Origins, but other games took precedent over Odyssey and Valhalla when they came out (I got the gold steelbook editions of each, cheap, eventually).

I think I might just get Mirage. I'm ok with $35 for the Deluxe Edition.

Lies of P - solid
I'm not normally a soulsborne player and I'm FAR from good at this game, but I'm getting better and enjoying it. It looks great and after playing with the controls and dying a bunch I'm taking on the 2nd main boss.
I've learned to farm materials by fighting the same areas some and I want to look into a guide to get pointers on when I should use resources to upgrade my weapons. I'm hesitant to waste them too early, but feel like I'm maybe a touch weaker due to not doing almost any resource based upgrading.
The electrical weapon I've got has been pretty decent at taking down the normal foes and surprisingly was the weapon I used to kill the first human, so I've stuck with it. But I feel like digging into more info online could help me understand if my tactics are good or misguided, and when to push into upgrades.
I do find it strange that there's really no music during exploration.
I'm like 6 hours in and not very far but really only 1 section had annoyed me, but that was after I changed the controls around and was still adjusting to that. So slow and steady will likely be my path forward.

DCGX wrote:

Actually, there was still a seller on Amazon that had a new Launch Edition for $30. I didn't even know there was a launch edition. It comes with three lithographs and a physical map.

Spider-man 2 - 8/10 / ps portal

Terrific game. Tons going on in this iteration of spider-man. Probably the best looking Spider-Man game to date. Loved the web wings addition although (for me) I found my self using web wings 90% of the time so very little web swinging through the city which kind of pulls you out of the spider-man experience at least imo. Same ol same ol fighting mechanics, has always felt like button mashing to me. Story delivery is awesome as always, like a comic book come to life; not a huge fan of the alternate origins if you will. I only focused on main missions but will go back and do some side quests just to web wing through the city some more. Very enjoyable experience.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart {} 9/10

Alright, I'm gonna sidetrack for a bit right here. So just for old times sake I decided to watch Toy Story on Disney+ and it was my first time watching it in probably over 20 years, but now for the first time I got to see it in 4K, HDR, all that jazz.
But what does that have do with this game? Well it's just that after the movie ended I decided to start this game up for the first time and oh my goodness does this game look good. Like, really good. It made me remember back in 1995, the big question among us gaming nerds at the school lunch table was "will video games ever reach the same level of Toy Story graphics?" And I wish I could go back in time as current me to let those little punks know that video games will have not only matched Toy Story "graphics" in our lifetime, my boys we have f'n surpassed it.

This isn't exactly the first game to make me feel that way, but when I first started playing I just was so impressed, especially after just having sat through Toy Story, that's what brought out the comparison. I really like that we have reached the point where all cutscenes can be done with in-game graphics now and it's so seamless that you can't always tell the difference when a cutscene ends and the gameplay begins again because there's no load screen or fade to black when the cutscene is over. I want that to be the standard from now on. The hardware is clearly capable of it, but yet so few developers put in the freaking effort.

Now I could keep rambling on about the graphics, how nice the lighting effects are, how steady the frame-rate is even when in 4K with ray-tracing enabled, and how much time I spent in the game's photo mode taking screenshots, but I'll shut up about that now and talk about some other things, starting with the 3D audio. It sounds good, and there's a setting specifically for the Pulse 3D headphones in the options menu and that's always a plus. The bass from the music sounds good, as does bass from explosions. Also the character voices all sound good, and I have no complaints regarding the voice acting, I haven't been annoyed by any of the characters (there's usually at least one character in these types of games that get kind of annoying).

The controls as well, really good usage of the haptic feedback and adaptive triggers (it's a first-party game so I'd expect nothing less). For the haptic feedback, just neat little touches like for example there is a nightclub section early on and once you enter the room the controller vibrates to the beat of the music, like you're feeling the bass. For the adaptive triggers, when firing your weapon, the harder you press the faster you'll shoot.
The rest of the game controls great, except for this one part when you're flying on a pterodactyl, I found those flying sections to not control well. But when you're on the ground everything is fine.

So my history with the Ratchet & Clank series is brief. The first game released all the way back in 2002, but I just never got around to playing it. I kind of blame Super Mario Sunshine for temporarily making me completely uninterested in 3D platformers for a while around that time due to its horrid camera and I thought because Nintendo was unable to produce a 3D platformer with a decent camera, that must mean nobody else is able to get it right either.
I can admit now that I was wrong to think that, because I finally played the first R&C last January, 20 years after its release. I enjoyed it a lot, though there were some questionable design choices in it, but most importantly the camera wasn't an issue, they did what Nintendon't (at least by 2002 standards). I followed it up a few months later by playing the PS4 reboot of it, which pretty much fixed the few problems I had with the original release. I actually would like to check out some of the other games in the series, but I worry they'll feel too outdated after playing this one.

So besides this game, those are the only two in the series I've played. I'm enjoying this even more than I did those other two. I like the Rift mechanic even though I don't feel it is used as much as it should be, and the swapping between characters when needed to make progress (that part is something I don't always like when other games do it) and thankfully all weapon upgrades carry over between them. I wouldn't mind one bit if they did something more with that new lombax character and made the next game co-op or something

Vampire Survivors for Xbox Series X. Fantastic game. Solid 9/10.

Resident Evil 4 {2} 10/10

No regrets on waiting to play this until I was able to do so in VR, just like I did with RE7 and RE8. I feel like that was the right choice. Sorry if this is coming off as mumbo jumbo, I've just been writing down various thoughts as I've been playing through it (currently at Chapter 12).

So to start off with a somewhat negative, the graphics are good, there are some damn good lighting effects, but to be honest I did expect slightly better visuals from my first AAA PSVR2 game. The fire effects and explosions just don't look that great.

The audio is great though. The explosions sound good (much better than they look), voice acting is fine by me, I've heard fans of the series crap on Ada's new voice actor but I didn't have a problem with her at all. The sound effects in general are good, multiple times I've heard an enemy nearby and knew right where the sound was coming from which allowed me to sneak up on them (more on that later).

Controls for the most part are quite good. Actually in the beginning I outright didn't like them, but really I just needed to get used to them.
It took me a little while to adjust to the fact that I need to hold the shotgun with two hands, and give it that little "pump" after firing each shot, for example. Or that I have to manually reach down into the pouch thingy with my left hand to grab ammo to reload the gun in my right hand. Once I got used to it all, I really liked the controls. I feel like this is now the definitive way to play RE4, it finally took the crown from the Wii version. The game overall makes good use of the haptic feedback too.

Having said that though, there was one puzzle in particular where you have to rotate these hexagonal things. I have nothing good to say about that part, because the controls were uncooperative and I had almost rage-quit for the night. There were a couple of other parts too where when you turn your hand to rotate an object, Leon's in-game hand doesn't exactly turn the way it should be. Those parts don't happen often though.

The controls on the speedboat could use some work too. You hold R2 to accelerate and that's pretty much it. Just putting light pressure on the button won't do anything, so you're either parked or going full speed, not much room for in-between.

I do think it is kinda wack that your save file is tied between VR or flat, meaning you can't play in VR until the VR2 Sense controllers' batteries die and then continue in flat mode. That isn't much of a problem for me though since I don't intend on ever playing it flat anyway, but still it kinda sucks and I don't recall it being an issue in Resident Evil 7 on the last-gen PSVR.

One cool thing I want to point out is that I've been using my knife a lot, and in addition I've been using it to stealth kill zombies from behind. First off, I almost never use the knife in Resident Evil games. You get so many cool guns to defend yourself with, who has time for a knife? But stealth kills make it worth upgrading your knife in this one. I would never play stealthily in the flat games because they've never really encouraged you to play that way in RE before, but in VR it's really fun to sneak up on a zombie and stab them in the neck. And yes, I know they're technically not called zombies in this game, but I'll never not call them that. And the mini-boss knife fight later in the game, VR just makes that so much more fun (same for the minecart section, which I was looking forward to but it ended up being shorter than I remember.)

Another thing to say is that...the game just isn't very scary, even in VR. Now you may say "no duh" to that, because this was where the series sorta shifted away from its survival/horror roots and became more action, but it feels abundantly clear now. It's like a night and day difference between playing Resident Evil 7 in VR and Resident Evil 4 in VR. In Resident Evil 7 there were lots of scares, and the whole atmosphere was creepy. In Resident Evil 4, well I'm at Chapter 12 so far and the first moment of the game that scared me was a short scripted sequence in Chapter 5 or 6 (I think) where I was walking on a wooden platform and fell through it with no warning. There have been a couple moments later on too where I was surrounded by enemies and one snuck up on me from behind and I wasn't expecting that. I don't mean to imply there are no scares at all, but it's not like RE7. But later on you realize the game gets way more intense than RE7 did.

The game also isn't very "VR AF", (the slang term the VR kiddos use these days for VR games that really immerse you in the experience). You can't just pick up random items on tables scattered throughout the game, doors and drawers are opened by pressing the X button instead of you actually using your hands to open them, and cutscenes are all 2D. Since it's a hybrid flat/VR game, I'll give it a pass on not being able to pick up random objects, but hybrid or not I don't like 2D cutscenes in my VR games, that just comes off as lazy IMO.

One more little nitpick that I don't really even need to mention because it affects so many other VR games too, is that when walking it really feels more like your character is just gliding across the floor. I feel like not many VR games get that part right, but it's not a deal breaker or anything.

Despite some of my minor complaints, I'm really enjoying the game. It's not perfect (no game is, just because it gets scored a 10 doesn't mean it's without flaws), but they've managed to make an already great game even better. I do not want this game to end.

Slickriven wrote:

I feel the same way, just got this recently on PS5. It has been enjoyable and certainly met my expectations for an indie title. It’s a nice chill exploration game with minimal combat but it’s also pretty clumsy.

The “map” is really just a way to select which zone you fast travel to, and the way you check side mission progress by hovering over a certain section of the map and it shows in a little side tab is vague and easy to overlook. The NPC doesn't even have to be in that area. Weird.

And having to go to the robot companion dude to ask if you got all collectibles in that area or not sure seems like it should have been something just listed on the map as "# out of 4". And the only way to see all of your outfits is to go to the change outfit option...by asking him.

The game tries to overcome some of those flaws by throwing a story at you but none of it makes any sense and it only gets worse as it goes on.

The most frustrating thing for me has been the slo-mo button that then lets you grapple. It's awfully inconsistent. You can sometimes grapple from a mile away but during bosses you can't always use it? Only on certain nodes and not all of them? And sometimes you can use it multiple times in a row and it doesn't need to recharge. Very bad UX for such a key aspect of the game.

This sounds all negative but i've enjoyed it and am 3/4 through it. Got it for $16 and that price feels fair.

Cyberpunk 2077 - boring/10

I’m about 4 hours in and I don’t really want to play any more. I hate abandoning games tho, especially when I was as eager as I was to finally play this game. It’s just not vibing with me.

Does it get better? Do I need to sink more hours into it? Maybe I’ll shelf it and come back or maybe I’ll trade it for something better.

nah, it sucks

bill wrote:

Thanks Bill. That’s a shame cause it looks great… oh well moving on then.

It sucks, yes.

loztdogs wrote:

That's exactly how I felt. Granted I was playing it near launch on a PS4 Pro, but nothing about the characters or story was interesting to me.

Helldivers 2- disappointment/10. On paper, I should have really liked this. I love co-op online shooters with progression systems, and I played several matches for a couple of hours, but it’s just not very fun. The servers were a pain, and getting into a game took awhile. Once I was in, it was annoying how easily you run out of ammo on higher difficulty levels while engaging with a bunch of enemy robots. Every time you want a new weapon or more resources, you have to pull down a drop-down menu and press a series of buttons like “up down left up right up down” to send supplies down and then wait for the supplies to land. It’s not a huge deal, but it’s just an unnecessary interruption you have to deal with over and over again. The gunplay is OK, the graphics are great in cutscenes but muddy in-game. I was looking forward to this one, and it was just kinda meh. On the plus side, it’s sold out everywhere, so I was able to sell it for $50 on Mercari and more or less got paid to play this.

Star Wars Jedi Survivor -

A grappling hook of a good time/10

Seriously I think people in the writers room at the developer just sat in a round table and said oh boy how can we really make this game any better than the first? And one guy was like guys guys gals gals… Grappling hook.

The grappling hook was always great in Zelda games.

Oh yeah, Zelda pioneered the grappling hook. Good times man.

Played Robotron 64 for the first time today. Got to level 194 and finally got game over.

It's a fun game bug some of those later levels are surely impossible to do on one life.

loztdogs wrote:

Never got too far in that game. I finished the 1rst main mission and met with the Asian dude at the dinner. Havent gotten back to it since

Moved on to Diablo IV / Portal

Much more promising/10

I'm 2 hours into Persona 3 Reload and I don't think I like it. At all. I've played other remakes of games I love and never had an issue with changes, but this one just isn't clicking. I'm trying to keep an open mind though and I definitely need to stop comparing every little thing to the original, but everything just feels...off. The soundtrack just doesn't sound right and the voice acting, while not bad, just doesn't sound right either. I don't like Yukari's voice actress at all. And I don't mind Mitsuru's new voice actress, but Tara Platt, who voiced the OG Mitsuru, has a really unique voice and I keep expecting to hear her and then I don't and it's kinda jarring. Still very early on, though. Fingers crossed that it grows on me because the original is probably my fav JRPG of all time.

Oh wow. That’s a shame. Was hoping it would rub off some P5 attributes in the gameplay and soundtrack. That’s a bummer though.

I haven’t revisited p3 since ps portable. I definitely recognize the music but it does seem like it has been made more “complicated” or something. Maybe it’s just the fidelity of the newer sound- but it’s off for sure. Sort of like listening to NIN with headphones- you miss more than you hear when it’s not as clear- and that can be good or bad.

Heavyd814life wrote:

This is exactly how I felt for the first few hours, maybe like 5 or more hours. But then I tried to play the OG and Portable version, and it made me appreciate the updates. I got over the voices, but never got over the music.

I will also add, that I found a lot of the voice changes to end up being better. Like a lot of the non SEES members. Yuko (sports team manager) being the most outstanding change in voice acting. The non SEES members ended up being way better because of the full voice acting. And lot of the VA nailed the characters. But for SEES, it did take me a long time to get over Yukari (shes too nice and not sarcastic/mean enough). Mitsuru sounds pretty close to me after a bit.

Severed Steel - If Mirrors Edge was good it would be this game.

DCGX wrote:

And despite the Amazon listing saying launch edition and the packing slip saying launch edition, I receive the regular edition, so it's going back. I'll have to wait a little longer to play this.

Archer wrote:

Yeah dude I think I was just being a bit of a crybaby. It's definitely jarring at first, but I'm about 5 hours in now and I really don't mind the voice acting or even the soundtrack anymore, tbh. I like Color Your Night a lot (the track the plays when you go out at night). It's a better fit for the downtempo/mellow feel the new OST has. And the QOL improvements to gameplay are objectively great and an upgrade over the original. So yeah, I'm definitely enjoying it but I'm sure I'll find something else to complain about at some point lol

DCGX wrote:

29.97

ASSASSIN'S CREED MIRAGE - STANDARD EDITION, PLAYSTATION 5 https://a.co/d/65Oy1U9

Heavyd814life wrote:

I also really like Color Your Night as well. But I also really liked When the Moon Reaches Out, the one it replaced. But it was a bit too upbeat like you said, so the new one fits better. The only song that kept upsetting me was the advantage battle song. Hearing It's Going Down, and the lady yelling "Disturbing the peace" constantly I found annoying. It reminded me of P5 every time. I don't honestly know why either. But it did, and I didn't like that. Mass Destruction should never have been relegated to just standard battle music. The -reload- version of it isn't bad either. So not sure why these two were not swapped. It made me go out of the way to not get advantage a lot of time, lol.

One of the tracks has a rhythmic “beep” that I hate. It’s in the mall area I think because I run inside a shop and it stops.

Feeb wrote:

I don't have a PS5, but I reordered the Launch Edition for Xbox yesterday for $39.99, with free delivery for this morning. I was up around 4am to see they dropped it another $10, but it was too late to cancel or change my order. So I ordered it AGAIN, for free delivery for today, and I'll return the copy from yesterday's order.

I better gosh darn love this game lol

All versions are that price on Amazon- or were this AM. At least you scored one. Hopefully you like it!

Feeb wrote:

I don't think I know what song you are talking about. Which shopping area, Paulowina (velvet room, arcade, etc) or Iwatodai (old couple, wilduck burger, etc), and during the day or at night?

Pretty sure it was paulowina mall. It may be my pulse explore buds- these things have been a mess.

I think evening. I know for sure whatever it was stopped when the track changed- and it’s happened a few times.

Archer wrote:

Think I figured it out- it may not be the music tracks- but if you stand still for about a minute a beeping noise happens about every second - I guess it’s to alert you? I’ve just got it to repeat three times while standing in the strip mall- during the after school. It will stop if you go to menu or interact with a door or by itself after a few beeps as well.

Edit - now I’m not so sure it isn’t part of the track- lol- it does not stop when I go to menu or interact- it’s just a pretty short series of beeps.

New Tales of Borderlands - I liked it, but also hated it. The two of the main characters are just so overly annoying, you have to see all 5 endings for the Plat and I said I would not before I have to take it back to the Library.. but If I get Price of Persia done and platinumed and have time left I may just have to.
I hate how one piece of the story is left unanswered maybe in one of the other 4 endings it will... We will see.

I love the library for these sorts of games... To bad the Expanse does not have a physical release.

Archer wrote:

Dude I felt the same way! But then I found myself bopping to it after a little while and now I legitimately love it! It's crazy how much of a 180 I've done on the new OST. It's such a great remake so far. I'm 25 hours in now and it's crazy how good a job Atlus has done refining/modernizing the experience while still retaining the essence of what makes P3 so special. I really wanted to dump this game after about 2 hours and just boot up FES but now I doubt I'll be able to go back to either FES or P3P.

Mafia II: Definitive Edition (PS4) - 5/10

I think the actual story is fine and there are some interesting bits plus some fun missions. But 80% of the game is you just driving from point a to point b to continue the story. Driving is dull and sloppy since the cars are 1950's era, and the world is completely empty from anything you can actually do. The fact that there are collectibles to seek out in such a large map where you can't interact with anything is comical.

I liked the first Mafia, and maybe I don't remember if it was like Mafia 2, but this one is just so much boring driving to do a single button press to cue up a cutscene. Then repeat but at another location.

Skully {} 6/10

I originally bought this because it looked like a 3D platformer that would come from the N64-era. Not so much like a Banjo-Kazooie, but more like one of the C-tier platformers of those years, like Glover or something. The game has so far wound up to be just slightly above-average overall though (so, like Glover). Granted that could change since I haven't finished it yet, but I don't think it will since I'm currently at level 11 out of 18. I wouldn't call it one of the worst 3D platformers I've played on Switch, but it is easily one of the ugliest games I've played on Switch. It uses a dynamic resolution to help keep the frame-rate steady, so the resolution dips low at points, and I mean low. You can expect a lot of your playthrough to be in standard definition, that's for sure. I've looked up gameplay footage of the game on PC and the other consoles, it looks better obviously, but I can't excuse how bad of a job they did with the visuals on Switch. Sometimes they expect you to sacrifice too much quality just to have the benefit of being able to play it portably. And of course there are the players that will always prefer frame-rate over resolution, however the frame-rate still drops in places, so on the Switch it's a lose/lose situation either way.

I took a couple of screenshots to show as examples. I put them in spoiler tags, though there is no actual spoiler contained in them.

Anyway, I've crapped on the graphics enough (they deserved it). Now I'll talk about the rest of the game, starting with how much of a freakin' collect-a-thon it is. Collect-a-thon is a phrase I first heard of when it was used to describe Donkey Kong 64 many years ago, where to get 100% in the game you had to get thousands of collectibles. Well, the same can be said here, if you intend to go for 100% then you should expect to have to hunt down thousands of collectibles, 5,500 to be precise, with hundreds per level (the first level had 200, third level had 400+ fifth level had 500 etc.) they just went overboard with this crap, and from what I can tell you'll only be rewarded with concept art and to me that just isn't worth it (does anyone here look at concept art once you unlock it in a game?)

You don't spend the entire game rolling around as the skull, but you will spend a lot of the game doing that. The skull is made of clay, so you cannot get wet or that equals death, but thankfully checkpoints are plentiful. There will be certain sections of each level where you will have the ability to transform into a...creature (idk what it is). I guess they are made of clay too, because they will also die if they get wet long enough, but there are three different ones you will get to change into during your journey and each one has different abilities. One has the ability to punch over certain rocks to make a bridge, aother has the ability to run fast and the ability to move rocks to form platforms that make it easy for you to jump across bodies of water or lava. The third has the ability to levitate rocks and to double-jump to reach higher areas. There are certain puzzles where you will need to switch between all three and utilize each of their abilities but it is made tedious by the fact that once you exit the creature, as the skull you must roll back to the checkpoint area to spawn the next creature.

The controls overall for the most part work fine, and I haven't had too many issues with the camera, except for a few spots where the camera was locked behind you or in front of you in an auto-scroll/chase sequence level and it would sometimes be difficult to keep track of the little skull or to judge the correct distance you need to jump to the next platforms. As for the game's story, the cutscenes have minimal animation in them (which again makes it feel like a N64 game) but the voice acting isn't bad. Underneath some of the game's issues I feel there lies a semi-decent game in all of this, I just wish I hadn't settled for the ugliest version of it when I had better options (PS4 or PC, which the game is currently on sale on each of those platforms for $3).
Yesterday I ended up buying a half dozen more PSVR2 games in the current PSN sale and I really want to play them, but I worry if I stop playing this game to start up one of those, I won't want to return to this one after, so I'm going to try and stick with it and finish the second half of the game and then move on.

Edit: I ran into a glitch that doesn't let me progress on Level 14. It sucks this had to happen when I only had 3 or 4 levels to go, but I'm giving up on this game now. I'd lower the score even further now but I don't think it affects everyone.

Picked up Sports Talk Baseball for Genesis on a whim.

Thanks to playing on a system with save state support, I'm currently at 130 to 0 in the first inning

How many pitchers do they have? Yikes.

Feeb wrote:

They are finally out of relief pictchers. I think they had 6.

Been playing GameCube version of windwaker. While I’m having a blast… the camera is crap.

Race The Sun {} 6/10
This is a hybrid game. It was given on PS+ 8 or 9 years ago, I remember because I recall originally playing this on PS Vita but I don't remember enjoying it very much. Since then I see they added a VR mode to the PS4 version, so I decided to give it a try. It's maybe a little cooler to play it in VR, but overall I still am not enjoying it very much. It's inspired by old arcade games, which means it is best played in short bursts, but you're basically racing through these areas and trying to last before the sun goes down. There's way better VR games to play. This felt a lot like they just flipped a switch and turned their game into VR with little effort.
-=-
Horror Adventure: Zombie Edition {} 3/10
Of all the years I've been gaming, I've played some real turds (sometimes intentionally). This ranks pretty high up there on the list of the worst games I've ever played. This reminds me of a Nintendo 64 game in VR, because not only are the graphics just awful, but there's this annoying fog that prevents you from being able to see more than 10 feet in front of you.

To start off with, I selected to play the tutorial right from the main menu. It was trash, because it would tell you to do things but not tell you which button you're supposed to press to do them. Also when I'd pause the game, the pause menu would show up behind me causing me to have to turn around to be able to see it, and re-centering via holding the Options button didn't fix it. So after quitting to the main menu so I can start the actual story mode and just figure everything out on my own, I was disappointed to see I had to play through the tutorial yet again. This time I just ran through the tutorial ignoring most of the messages and once the campaign started I knew then what kind of crap show I was really in for. The intro CGI cutscene was so low budget, there were typos, and the characters were mispronouncing words because they were voiced by some cheap AI program. I looked up a video of the PC VR version when I was done playing this. It's still a bad game on PC VR, but overall it looks lightyears ahead of this piece of crap version. Even for $1.49 this was a rip-off.

Farpoint {} 8/10
I wish I hadn't waited so long to play this. I'm pretty sure I've owned it for at least 4 or 5 years now, but I kept hearing how much better it is with the Aim Controller, and I just didn't want to buy one of those because Sony has a history of releasing peripherals and then not supporting them for long (Nintendo is the same freakin' way). Surprisingly the Aim Controller got more support than I expected, but I still personally wasn't sold on it and it was more of just the idea of buying a peripheral (Aim controller) that would only be compatible with certain games made for another peripheral (PSVR). That didn't stop me from buying PS Move controllers though, even though I can't use them in a non-VR game...) But anyway, finally I just dove right in using my plain ol' DualShock 4. I'm having fun with the game despite some tracking issues, but I don't doubt that the Aim controller is the superior way to play this game.

First off, graphically, this looks surprisingly good for an early PSVR game. Even more surprising is how this small dev team was able to pump this out, and it stands toe-to-toe with some of PSVR's big AAA games that were released by much bigger studios. I feel like with a little bit of tweaking, they might have been able to pitch this as something for the Aliens license. The audio is good too, I'm digging the music, and the voice acting is all done well. Even the story is good. The controls are where I'm having some trouble. Since moving in late 2022 I've pretty much always kept the PS Camera on top of my TV and have not been having too many issues with tracking in most games, but this game suggests putting the camera below the TV. I did that, and the tracking is a little better, but still gives me some trouble here and there, just not as much. I give the game props though for being able to aim down the scope of a gun. In my experience that isn't so easy to do in a lot of VR shooting games. Also, nothing to do with my enjoyment of the game itself, but a neat little feature is you can see what time it is on your character's watch. I kinda wish more VR games did that so you can see what time it is without having to open the home menu, because sometimes when you want to play a VR game but you want to stop playing at a certain time to do something or maybe a TV show coming on or whatever, it's easy to lose track of time once that VR headset is put on.

As far as the gameplay itself, it's like most typical Sci-fi first-person shooters out there. I don't know if Halo is to blame for this, or if they're just the ones that popularized it and it now became standard across every shooter, but I do kinda not like the fact you're limited to only carrying two guns at a time. I had an issue where I found a sniper rifle, I dropped my assault rifle to pick up the sniper rifle, wasn't really liking it too much and I wound up dying and when I restarted at the checkpoint I had lost my assault rifle for good and had no choice but to adapt to using the sniper rifle now. Luckily I did get the hang of it though and it has come in quite handy. Another thing Halo popularized is regenerating health. You'll need it in this game, because there are times where you are going around kicking ass, but then a big swarm of enemies appear and you're the one now getting your ass kicked. This random difficulty spike seems to happen once or twice per level, it's not that the enemies turn into bullet sponges, it's just that you become greatly outnumbered by them.

What kind of impresses me about this game is that it was the dev studio's first game. You can't really find much info about the developer either, they don't even have a Wiki page and their website's News section hasn't been updated in three years. I'd really like to see what they can cook up on PSVR2 but it might not ever happen, and that's sad. Sony published this game, I don't know any PSVR owners who didn't like it, so why isn't Sony throwing more money at this dev team for a sequel?

'Farpoint' is excellent! I wish we were seeing more games like this from Sony (or any games at this point) for PSVR2. Considering Sony just closed their London studio, it almost feels like they've thrown in the towel on PSVR2 already. Shame.

I bought Aim controller just for Farpoint and it was so worth it

Farpoint with the aim controller was great. I got stuck at one of the bosses mid-way through the game though for a loooong time. Eventually got past it but that bummed out my experience quite a bit. Everything before and after seemed to go pretty smoothly and was enjoyable.

DCGX wrote:


Yeah, everyone was asking why the PSVR2 wasn't compatible with PC, and now that it will be later this year I don't know how to interpret that. Was this something they were planning from day one, or do they want to use this as a way to just want to wash their hands of VR now? I mean, we're 3½ months into the year and they have no 1st party games to show, that's not a good look. We know there's a Astro Bot game coming possibly later this year, but we're only left hoping that it's for VR, that part has yet to be confirmed. Some people expect it'll be a hybrid game, but what made the first Astro Bot so good was that it was built for VR and that experience wouldn't have been anywhere near as good if played flat.

I've only had my PSVR2 since early January, and I've had fun with it and don't regret my purchase yet, but by the end of this year they need to convince me I didn't make a mistake buying one over a Quest 3.

Anxiouz wrote:

I got stuck for a while against that huge spider thing but eventually prevailed

PizzaTheHutt wrote:

I don't know. I could see them testing behind the scenes the whole time, and I can seem them making a desperate move. PSVR2 is definitely one of the best headset. I'd still choose it over Quest 3, because that already looks dated (and I don't like Meta), but especially if it gets PC support. I do think it's extremely odd Sony themselves haven't released a game since launch. I don't get it. An exclusive 'Astro Bot' game may reignite interest.

Resistance: Retribution {} via {} 7/10

I miss the Resistance series. The first game I felt was good but not great, a good starting point for the franchise by 2006 standards though. But Resistance 2 and Resistance 3 were so much better. Resistance: Burning Skies on the PS Vita was...better left forgotten about, but now playing this game for the first time, I am impressed knowing that they managed to pull this off on a PSP, even seeing it for the first time 15 years later. The controls feel a bit clunky, but I can only imagine how they were on an actual PSP without the second analog stick (or nub). And I do question their decision to open a game on a handheld system with an 8 minute cutscene.

But I've put a couple hours into this and that's all I wanted to do, I didn't plan on actually finishing it, I just wanted to see how it was and to see how well it aged, and I am pleased with it. I remember reading back in the day that the game had a fun online mode, but that's no longer an option here unfortunately.

Been playing Sifu and its amazing. I can see myself replaying this easily.

Persona 3 Reload - 10/10

They took the blueprint of the original game and added a ton of new wrinkles and many QOL improvements I didn't even know I wanted. The end result is what feels like the true definitive edition of what I consider the best JRPG of all time. This is either my 5th or 6th time beating P3 - I've honestly lost count at this point - and it completely consumes every time. The grind of Tartarus, the social sim, the incredibly strong characters and story...it's 100+ hours of JRPG bliss that I never ever want to end. I've either stayed up way too late or gotten up way too early over the past 3-4 weeks to try to fit as much of it into my schedule as possible. I don't think my girlfriend will let me touch my PS5 for at least a couple of weeks but it was sooo worth it! Oddly enough this was my first time completely maxing out entire party in any Persona game. Got everyone up to level 99 and I think that's because Atlus absolutely nailed the gameplay loop. The combat improvements and the way Tartarus has been upgraded and balanced so it's both challenging and rewarding made me just want to keep grinding and grinding. I really milked the final month of the game because I just didn't want it to end. The tweaks made to the music, the presentation, and the story in the final month of the game are pretty damn perfect. Honestly can't say enough about the job Atlus did with this remake.

But as much as I want to gush over this game, I still can't believe Atlus is charging extra for The Answer. I guess that's just the way they roll these days so no point complaining about it. I'm sure they'll release a "complete" version at some point - maybe when the Switch 2 launches - so I'll probably end up just waiting for that.

Yeah I’m waiting for the COMPLETE edition before I dive into P3 Reload. I’m riding high off P4 Golden now so I’m good waiting a bit to play P3. Still can’t see how it’ll top P5 for me though but it’s welcome to give it the ol’ college try. P5 was just breathtaking in every sense for me.

I prefer P3 characters, story and the grindy dungeon crawl. Reload just reinforced all the reasons it was my favorite.

Prince of Persia lost crown - 7/10 / portal

Meh… as others have mentioned, would have preferred a traditional Prince of Persia rather than this Metroidvania style. While the platforming is solid it does begin to wear thin about halfway through. It feels like a mobile game to me. I think it’s the art style Ubisoft chose. Not a fan. I don’t particularly care for Ubisoft games in general these days so I’m probably a bit biased. Im not gonna finish it. The story is not compelling enough to me to grind through the rest. The rpg elements (if you can call it that) are boring. In order to get the good upgrades you have to do a fair amount of exploring and It’s just not engaging enough to continue. For what it’s worth I didn’t like Fenyx Rising either.

Sonic Superstars {} 7/10
Oh Sonic, you blue, old, crusty sonofagun. How do you manage to remain relevant in today's gaming world when the quality of your games has been so inconsistent and for so long?
It was nice of Sega to return to the series roots. Just plain ol' 2D, no voice acting (that's when the series started to go downhill to me personally, the first time Sonic opened his mouth on Dreamcast).

I feel like I say this in every Sonic game review, but I was never big into this series as a kid. I've enjoyed some of the games, but definitely didn't enjoy them as much as other kids at school seemed to. But with this having a co-op mode, and the fact it dropped down to $20 only a few months after launch, I felt I had to get it just for the co-op aspect alone, so that's what this review is based on because I don't want to play it solo.

Lemme tell ya, this game's co-op mode is nothing more than a freaking afterthought. Like, no part of this feels like it was designed with co-op in mind. It was first and foremost a single player game and somewhere down the line one of the devs say "I bet this could be fun if we let all 4 characters be on-screen at once", and they did it because it seemed to have worked for the New Super Mario Bros. series. But it's not always fun here. If you zoom too far ahead of your partner(s), they will despawn and have to respawn where the player furthest ahead is. I wish the game was playable in split-screen just to avoid that, because it's gotta make the other player(s) feel like they're not contributing much or they're just being carried through the game by the more experienced player. There's way too many bonus mini-games in the early levels too. After the first hour or so I found myself actually trying to avoid them when possible.

The game itself overall is not too difficult until you get to the final boss fight, and oh boy, don't even get me started on that son of a dog. It is so frustrating, my friend and I spent 2 hours unable to beat him until we finally just gave up for the night. We'll try again tomorrow evening, but neither of us were having fun with that boss fight after 20 minutes of failed attempts, so I'll be damned if I'm going to spend another 2 hours on it, and I took a point off the score just for that alone. Everything else about the game though, the graphics, controls, music, it's all pretty damn good. If they had just toned down that boss fight and maybe put more thought into the co-op, this could've been my all-time favorite Sonic game. There's a chance it still might be, I'll have to think about it after beating that boss.

Also there's an online battle mode. I only played a little of it, I didn't feel it was very fun, and I don't know why that mode has online support but the co-op doesn't.

Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - Overall a good game that I enjoyed playing for months.

Probably too big - though I did all the shrines (my favorite), got all the sages, defeated Ganondorf; I skipped many side quests (most seemed kind of dumb and tedious to be honest -- glad they were optional). Also, The Depths were meh, hard to get around in, sparse content, and weak rewards. I covered less than 25% of the Depths.

I was worried the Zonai building would be annoying, but I generally liked it. I also liked the shrine quests where you had to bring the crystal to the shrine with a beam of light.

Overall, TotK seemed easier than BotW. Initially, I struggled with combat (would get one-shotted), but I think once I got my armor upgraded, I just button-mashed through it all easily. The dungeons also were not hard. The game is more long than hard. It was hard to stay focused on playing for weeks. I'm pretty tired of playing at this point. But, I don't regret it.

Yeah that’s my gripe with today’s big named games. They’re mostly bloated and overwhelming. I just got TOTK too and I’m dreading playing it cause once I do I’m probably not gonna finish it for a good half a year or more. Even now I’m playing Jedi Survivor and I’m almost 35 hours in and feel like I still have a long way to go before I finish it. I miss the days of 15-20 hour max games. They’re a lost art.

Concrete Genie {} 7/10
I wish I hadn't slept on this game for so long. When this was first announced I was hyped because I feel like Sony gave the impression that it was a VR game. But then my interest faded when I learned that it only contained an optional "VR Experience" mode and the actual game itself wasn't playable in VR at all. Well that optional VR mode is hardly worth busting out the VR headset for unless you desperately want to unlock 3 extra trophies (if you don't have PSVR those trophies are just optional and will not prevent you from getting the platinum if you care about that). The VR thing lasts around 15-20 minutes, and I admit it's pretty neat, I just wish there was more to it.

That little disappointment aside, I think the actual game itself is quite good. The graphics especially were nicer than I was expecting. I mean, I don't really know what I was expecting, because I don't know what kind of budget went into this, but regardless it looks nice in 4K even though there are some noticeable frame-rate dips here and there, but not enough of them to make me scale it down to 1080p. The controls work well too, and I like that it supports gyro (relax, it's optional).

Drawing/painting the Genies and having them come to life is pretty cool. I don't know if Warren Spector would agree, but I feel like there's a part of this game that I was expecting from Epic Mickey back in the day, but was executed a little better here.

The game seems to be on the short side, so I don't remember if they charged $60 for this at launch, but if they did, it wouldn't have been worth that and if that's what they released it at and this game bombed, that could be why.

Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs {2} 7/10

There's only one way to get me to play Angry freakin' Birds in 2024, and that's if you add VR to it. And add VR to it they did. It has been about 12 years since I've last played an Angry Birds game on my old tablet. I remember playing it quite a bit...for like a month, and then I got so tired of it that I never went back. While it is entirely possible that could happen here too, I've been enjoying this while it lasts. I won't be playing it as often as I did on my tablet back in the day, but that's not because of the quality of the game, it's more to do with the hassle of always having to bust out the VR headset whenever I feel like playing.

So...it's Angry Birds. You knock crap down using birds, some with special abilities. Not much has changed other than it being in VR now, so you likely already know what to expect from it and whether or not you'd like it. The graphics are nice and colorful, though still look pretty basic overall. Some of the music is catchy, but honestly most of the time I felt like I barely noticed any bgm while I'm trying to think of what move to make next. Controls for the most part are fine, but there were some rare times where the slingshot I was holding seemed to not be moving in the way it should've been. But it wasn't happening often, so it did not affect my overall enjoyment.

I'm enjoying the game, but I wish there was more to it. At least in the beginning it does what any good puzzle game should do, and that's make you want to replay levels over and over again to try and get a 3 star rating if you didn't the first time. If it wasn't for that, I'd say it would be entirely possible to just breeze through the game within two or three days. However I've now reached the point where I'll just be content with 1 or 2 stars and am ready to just get through the game, which I'll probably be finished with within the next couple of hours.

Another aspect where the game offers replay value is that you can create and share custom made levels, and I believe the levels are pooled together between PlayStation VR and Quest users. I have zero interest in making my own levels, but I like that it's there. I went browsing through the community uploads and there is still stuff being uploaded by the community, but I don't know how often people are playing them. For example, I sorted by upload date and there were levels uploaded from a few hours ago up until 3 days ago that nobody had played before me. But then there are other uploaded levels with over a million plays and even more with tens of thousands of plays. Unfortunately there is a lot of junk levels too, like, there were too damn many where the level starts and you begin looking around trying to assess the situation and figure out the best way to tackle the stage, but then something triggers an explosion and before you know it the level has completed itself without you even doing anything. I chalk that up to children just experimenting with the physics rather than caring about making a fun level. Just use the filter to sort by the highest rated levels and you'll be fine, because there are some good ones worth playing once you've finished the main ones in the campaign, because the campaign just by itself won't last you very long. I think I paid $10 for this on sale and I feel like I got my money's worth out of it.

Injustice 2 legendary edition - 7/10 - via portal

Knocked this one out from the back log. I enjoyed the cinematics. I went with Batman ending; kinda cheesy. Head and shoulders above the first game. It gets a little redundant in the later levels. Lots of unlockable goodness.