What Was The Last Game You Played?

[Busta Nut]

18 minutes ago, Miguel Sanchez said:

13-2 is a different game and plot with 13's characters thrown in, 13-3 is glorified fan service

longer reviews of both available on request

I just realised I fucked that up

 

[NotThePars]

I always group 7-12 together and the 13 trilogy, 15 and 7 Remake together. Not sure why. Maybe it’s Nomura being seen as the figurehead for the latter games? Nomura...

[Gaz]

7 hours ago, NotThePars said:

I always group 7-12 together and the 13 trilogy, 15 and 7 Remake together. Not sure why. Maybe it’s Nomura being seen as the figurehead for the latter games? Nomura...

1-3 (NES)

4-6 (SNES)

7-9 (PS1)

10 & 12 (PS2)

13 (Xbox 360 / PS3)

15 (PS4)

11 and 14 don't get lumped together because they're MMORPGs.

[19QOS19]

WatchDogs: Legion

Loved this in the beginning but it did suffer as I predicted from repetitiveness. The gadget were cool at first and I enjoy/ed the the stealth side but by the end I just went in all guns blazing as it became tedious. Even if you never took out the reinforcements guy there was never really much resistance. I only died a handful of times throughout.

I liked how there were a variety of characters you could play. Well practically any AI was playable. But with this came a lack of character depth. I used about 3 characters throughout on rotation and yet had no connection to them. The AI computer was decent though and there was a mission with him that was close to being moving. Other than that I really didn't care about the characters.

The big twist was obvious from about an hour into the game. Wasn't the jaw-dropping revelation the producers probably hoped for.

Overall it was fine. It won't win bags of awards and it won't be slated as utter guff. Probably the definition of a 'meh' title. I do like how WD's trophies are very doable and managed 100% there. I'd have been pissed paying £50 for this but if I forked out £20 I'd have been content enough.

[accies1874]

Pretty much the only thing that would make me want to buy it is that it's set in London. I want more games, particularly open world ones, set in the UK.

[Miguel Sanchez]

Wreckfest (PS4, 2019)

I recently had cause to go through all of the video games I own for consoles I no longer regularly play. Of the 23 PlayStation games I still own, 14 involve driving or racing. My theory is that as a child it was easy for my mother to buy racing games without having to worry about the suitability of the content. I'm sure if I still had all the PlayStation and PS2 games I've ever owned that this theory would hold up, and if anything the ratio would be even higher. 

One of the games in that pile is Demolition Racer, a game based around demolition derby contests and races. You have a range of cars, you have some tracks, you have a speed metal soundtrack and you get points for doing damage to your opponents which are multiplied by your finishing position to give you a score. Thinking back, it's a perfect formula. This is why I so closely followed the development and release of Wreckfest, which was on PC before console and which looked to carry over the fun and general sense of carnage I remembered from my childhood. The name of the game itself has even entered the modern sim-racing and real-life lexicon, with a pretty self-explanatory reason.

The result is a game which contains everything I could want it to and more. There's a range of tracks with dirt and tarmac surfaces. There are bottlenecks on several of those to facilitate close-contact. There are tracks that are a figure of 8 or feature sections where cars can be moving in two directions at once. There's a wide range of feasible and not so feasible vehicles, with ordinary cars as well as a lawnmower, a schoolbus, a combine harvester and a sofa, and that's even before the DLC options available. There are closed arenas too where the objective is just to wreck your opponents, and there's a level of detailed destructibility in the vehicles and the environments which is genuinely impressive in its depth. 

The vehicles themselves are great too. There are several available for you to buy, upgrade and customise. The livery editor is a bit unintuitive but you can usually get the result you want. Each vehicle feels unique and there's a surprising amount of depth - in my limited expertise - to the handling and tuning models. Cars will behave differently on different surfaces, so there's a fair bit to think about when you're in a race. The upgrades also make a significant difference to your car's performance and can be added/removed when you want, so there's a lot of variety available. It would be nice to have saved setups, especially online, but once you understand how it works it's easy enough to navigate.

Why, then, am I so underwhelmed by a game I've followed for so long which has so much of what I could want in it? I'm still not entirely sure. There are plenty of gameplay options. For single-player you have a career mode where you can progress through various different championships, with the quality of vehicles you're up against increasing the higher you go. There are some special challenges thrown in here too, mainly including the special vehicles like the school buses and lawnmowers. They're great fun. There are a lot of events and if you play enough to earn credits you can buy a wide range of your own cars and upgrade them as you progress, so there's a definite sense of reward for your efforts. 

The biggest problem with the single-player content is the difficulty. It comes in three levels - Novice, Amateur and Expert. To me, there's at least one step between being an amateur and being an expert. It would seem that way in the game too, with the first two levels being easy regardless of your car and Expert featuring a single rabbit at the front of the pack which you will not catch, no matter how good you are or how good your car is. You don't need to win every race to progress through the career since there are bonus targets for you to hit and you get rewarded with XP for causing damage to other cars, but it's still demoralising for a racing game to have such poor options for actual racing. 

In online content there are daily, weekly and monthly challenges where you compete against the AI and amass a score which goes on to a leaderboard against other players and gives you rewards depending on how you do. From the few I tried they're on the more contact-oriented tracks, so this is great fun regardless of how you actually do. The regular online offers any race you want to create or can find. Winning here seems to be a complete lottery. Most of the time, even if your car is fully upgraded you'll be in a lobby with people who have DLC cars which are faster, so actual circuit racing won't produce any results. Any joy you might get from wrecking people in a game as detailed and as this is lost when it's random people you don't know and you're fighting over 8th while the leader is a minute up the road and crossing the finish line. 

Aesthetically the game is good. Almost too good, and I think I know where my biggest problem with it is. I think my perception of the game before I played it is from watching streamers playing it with lots of friends and enjoying the inevitable carnage that ensues. You don't get that on your own. You get incredible detail. There are piles of tyres dotted around and each tyre is an object that will move. Most of the environment is destructible, and cars lose plenty of parts in crashes as well. The main downside to this is noticeably large loading times, but I can get over that. The problem is that for all the detail in the destruction and for how pretty the cars and tracks and various times of day you can race in (no weather), it somehow all feels a bit too clean. A bit too... inconsequential. I don't care about wrecking people I don't know online. Am I too used to games as a completion exercise? Am I too good at racing games now to view this as fun and get enjoyment from finishing mid-pack while breaking someone else's car in half? Does it matter when I can just start again anyway, and when nobody else is around to see what I do?

Well, that's what I think of Wreckfest. A game which has everything I could have wanted in it, but was underwhelming. Perhaps this experience has just taught me that I don't want to play a game like this, I want to be Jimmy Broadbent. 

[Gaz]

By f**k, going for the platinum on FFIX is a fucking chore.

[NotThePars]

6 hours ago, Gaz said:

By f**k, going for the platinum on FFIX is a fucking chore.

Given the apparent input lag on the jump rope game I will probably never bother.

[Gaz]

12 minutes ago, NotThePars said:

Given the apparent input lag on the jump rope game I will probably never bother.

There's apparently a way of getting that using a script via Remote Play which I might try.

Getting Excalibur II in under ten hours is impossible* without the 3x speed booster.

*Not hyperbole, actually impossible due to games running at 50Hz in PAL territory compared to 60Hz in NTSC / Japan.

Grinding for 10,000 kills is an utter c**t.

[BFTD]

I've been having a go at Thimbleweed Park, the traditional adventure game from some of the guys who made games like Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island, notably Ron Gilbert. Yet another freebie from the Epic Games Store.

It's nice to play an old-school adventure game again, but it doesn't feel as inspired as some of the classic Lucasarts titles so far. It's a bit kooky, but not actually funny. I like the MM-style character switching, so hopefully that's going to get some inventive use, but the constant flashbacks are starting to grate as I just end up trying to get through them so I can advance the story a bit more. I know they're fleshing out the backstory, but it feels like wading through treacle to progress.

TBH, I've drifted away from it in the last few days and found myself doing chores around the house instead. Not a good sign.

[NotThePars]

3 hours ago, BFTD said:

I've been having a go at Thimbleweed Park, the traditional adventure game from some of the guys who made games like Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island, notably Ron Gilbert. Yet another freebie from the Epic Games Store.

It's nice to play an old-school adventure game again, but it doesn't feel as inspired as some of the classic Lucasarts titles so far. It's a bit kooky, but not actually funny. I like the MM-style character switching, so hopefully that's going to get some inventive use, but the constant flashbacks are starting to grate as I just end up trying to get through them so I can advance the story a bit more. I know they're fleshing out the backstory, but it feels like wading through treacle to progress.

TBH, I've drifted away from it in the last few days and found myself doing chores around the house instead. Not a good sign.

What's your take on VTM:B2? It's all going tits up, brother!

[BFTD]

3 minutes ago, NotThePars said:

What's your take on VTM:B2? It's all going tits up, brother!

Ha, the wife just sent me the latest press release about that. I hadn't heard about it.

For anyone unfamiliar with what's going on, Paradox Interactive started a sequel to Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines 2 a few years back, and it's been delayed many times. Paradox then 'let go' the lead writer, Brian Mitsoda, who was heavily involved in the writing of the original game. He claims to have no idea why, and Paradox haven't explained it. Now they've severed ties with the developers that they employed to make the game, Hardsuit Labs, and I don't think they've named who's going to continue development, but they've withdrawn any release date, although they say it's still coming.

It sounds like a fucking mess. With so little information, it could be just an absolute clusterfuck behind the scenes, or maybe Paradox haven't been happy with the quality of the game that should be close to completion at this stage, and actually have a plan to fix it. They've been publicly cordial towards the people they've severed ties with, and thanked them for their work, but Hardsuit have apparently been forced to lay people off as a result (although there's nothing to say that wouldn't have happened at the end of development anyway, and they're way past the original release date now).

Personally, delays to game release dates don't bother me. I know it really annoys some people, but it reassures me a little bit that the studio doesn't just want to dump something out to make their money. It's no guarantee of quality, but at least they're trying. I bought a game at Christmas that was obviously rushed to release, with all of the obvious cuts and bugs that come along with that and, while I did enjoy Cyberpunk 2077, it would've been a far better game if it'd had an extra couple of years to cook.

I pre-ordered Bloodlines 2 when the physical collector's edition of the game came online, which is a godawful idea for anyone to do, but my main reason for doing so was because I never got to buy a similar collector's edition for the original game, and it wasn't going to ruin my life if the game I was buying turned out to be a shit sandwich. It doesn't look like there's any danger of Paradox going under and disappearing with my money, as they've plenty of other products that keep them afloat, so I won't be asking for my money back or anything. It'll come out when it comes out.

[BFTD]

The Bloodlines thing reminds me a little of another game that I "bought" on Kickstarter a few years back - System Shock Remake. The developers Nightdive Studios knocked up a pretty impressive-looking playable demo, and they got plenty of money for their project. Unfortunately, they fucked up the development and realised that they'd scope-creeped their way into making something different to what they'd promised, and weren't happy with the way it was going. So, after about eighteen months and close to the estimated release date, they scrapped the whole thing and decided to start again. They'd spent all the Kickstarter money, so they had to arrange for more funding from other sources.

The Kickstarter backers went nuts, claiming the whole thing had been a scam and that it was all over. I was disappointed, but had already worked out that you need to accept that you might never see the end result when you invest in these projects. In the meantime, Nightdive have been quietly working away on another version of the game for the past few years, and recently announced that the game's almost ready for release. There's a new demo out, and apparently we'll get to see what they've made this summer.

There's nothing to say that I'll be playing a masterpiece in a few months, but at least it'll be the game that the studio wanted to make, and will hopefully be proud of. It's not always practical, but ideally that's how I'd like every game to be made. And if it turns out to be shit, I won't regret chipping in my $30.

[Miguel Sanchez]

 

Concrete Genie (PS4, 2019)

Concrete Genie is a third person painting-platformer game where you play as Ash, a young boy with a big paintbrush and an annoying haircut. Ash carries a sketchbook with him in which he draws things to distract from the town he lives in, Denska, after it was largely abandoned when an oil tanker crashed nearby. One day one of Ash's sketches, a shapeless blob with a face he named Luna, comes to life and appears on a wall. At the same time the local gang of bullies turns up, steals the sketchbook and tears it up, scattering the pages around the town. What follows is Ash's quest to retrieve all the pages, save the town from the Darkness that covers all the walls, and make friends with the bullies.

The game's quite simple. Denska is largely abandoned and covered in Darkness, a black/purple coating on building walls which looks largely like mould to me. To brighten the place up Ash goes around and paints the walls with the various designs in his sketchbook. Occasionally he has to paint a Genie in order to get past certain obstacles. Some genies can set objects on fire, some can blow objects out of the way, that sort of thing. The genies can be customised in the same way as the scenes Ash paints, with a range of nature details - plants, trees, the sun, etc. The default means of controlling the painting is through the DS4's motion controls. This is bad and can thankfully be swapped for the right stick. The designs you can create are pretty limited, but the genies usually show up in different locations and ask for certain things, so there's some variety.

I called the game a platformer earlier which is probably generous. There are some occasions where you have to jump to a ledge, or climb up some things. The platforming is a complete rip-off of Uncharted. I realise that platforming in games exists outside of Uncharted, but here it is an exact copy. The movement animations are the same. The feel of the movement is the same. The daubs of white paint on everything you can climb is the same. Ledges breaking and looking like they're going to fall off when Ash touches them happen in exactly the same way. It's uncanny. It's so identical even that it's just funny rather than noticeably unoriginal. There isn't any consequence to these sections or anything, they just sort of happen every now and then. But the inspiration for them is obvious.

The story isn't up to much. Some bullies follow Ash around and bully him. Eventually they all touch his magic paintbrush and he sees why they're bullies - parents split up, parents in jail, parents gone, that sort of thing. When he saves all of them from the Darkness they all end up the best of friends. Fine. My biggest problem with Concrete Genie is the sense that the whole thing feels like it's trying to be nicer than it actually is. The art style is reasonably interesting in a pseudo hand-drawn way.. The Genies are reminiscent of LittleBigPlanet, largely shapeless blobs which the player gives a personality to themselves. The apparently touching story of children putting aside their differences ties in with this too, but it just doesn't amount to anything meaningful. It feels like a game which actively set out to be described as "charming," but that rarely works in something this short or obvious.

After finishing this game I realised the developers previously made a game I really enjoyed called Entwined. I'm going to play that again and remember everything about it I enjoyed so much. Pretty much none of that is found here, with Concrete Genie being short, reasonably pretty, pretty uninteresting and pretty forgettable.

[Stellaboz]

I downloaded Soccer Manager 21 on steam to try something different from FM. Real teams and names etc, a bit of USM feel to it also.

Unforgivable to still have Andy Ryan at Dunfermline while they included the new Lithuanian.

[dysartrovers]

I downloaded Soccer Manager 21 on steam to try something different from FM. Real teams and names etc, a bit of USM feel to it also.

Unforgivable to still have Andy Ryan at Dunfermline while they included the new Lithuanian.

I loved USM. Love FM but would like something that's a bit easier to dip in and out of for an hour here and there so let us know how it is

[G51]

2 hours ago, dysartrovers said:

5 hours ago, Stellaboz said:

I downloaded Soccer Manager 21 on steam to try something different from FM. Real teams and names etc, a bit of USM feel to it also.

Unforgivable to still have Andy Ryan at Dunfermline while they included the new Lithuanian.

I loved USM. Love FM but would like something that's a bit easier to dip in and out of for an hour here and there so let us know how it is

USM '98 is the first game I ever remember playing. I was so young that I didn't really have any concept about what the bung feature was, other than I knew it was funny.

 

[NotThePars]

I completed Final Fantasy XV which is more than I can say for Square Enix.

[Stellaboz]

3 hours ago, dysartrovers said:

6 hours ago, Stellaboz said:

I downloaded Soccer Manager 21 on steam to try something different from FM. Real teams and names etc, a bit of USM feel to it also.

Unforgivable to still have Andy Ryan at Dunfermline while they included the new Lithuanian.

I loved USM. Love FM but would like something that's a bit easier to dip in and out of for an hour here and there so let us know how it is

• Pros: 
  • It's free
  • Real teams and names
  • Shitload of leagues, including all 4 in Scotland
  • Real face profiles
  • Colourful interface, if maybe a little too busy
  • USM feel with the upgrades to scouting, training etc. Not exactly the same but you'll get my drift
  • Quick match option
  • Even with all the data loaded, it runs super quick and my laptop is around 6-7 years old now
• Cons
  • If you don't like playing in a microtransaction environment, this isn't for you. You can easily play without it, I'd never spend anything on a game like this but if you're not comfortable with it you should give it a huge swerve. Sometimes it will pop up with special offers for example, but you can just close them.
  • Game engine is fairly simple looking and basic, but it might become part of it's charm if you play long enough. I've not. 
  • Although the interface is colourful, it can be a tiny bit messy to navigate. Not much though.
  • Some of the objectives are a bit mental, for example wanting to expand East End Park to 20000 in 5 years. Cheers for that Masterton. 

[Stellaboz]

Should I get Baldur's Gate?  And if I do, play from the first?