Whatcha Been Playing?

[Flabyo]

Compared to the way missions are structured in AC Odyssey, RDR2 is pretty outdated. Rockstar still hold very strongly to a separation of the open world parts from the missions, to the point that the missions can feel very like walled gardens. The newest AC games make the line more blurred, they’re closer to the structure of something like the Witcher or the elder scrolls games, some missions are locked in to specific small areas, but a lot of the time you can be playing half a dozen or more at the same time without any obvious delineation.

[False Eight]

I bought myself a Playstation Classic as an early Christmas gift the day it came out, and I've been playing a lot of Metal Gear Solid since then. Although I rank the game as one of my all-time favourites, it must be at least ten years since I've had the chance to actually play it. Therefore I approached the game with some caution when I plugged the miniature console in for the first time, as I was somewhat afraid that my memories of the game would be far superior to the actual experience today. Luckily, I was wrong.

The graphics are of course outdated and almost comically unstable, the controls can be a bit frustrating, the plot makes even less sense than I remembered and sometimes the voice acting is hilarious in completely the wrong way, but the game still feels and sounds incredible. The chills I got from sneaking into the cargo elevator and watching Snake undress his scuba gear, seeing the trail of dead soldiers the Ninja had left on his path or listening to the howling of the wolves were just as intense now as they were twenty years ago. The biggest surprise has been the difficulty level, as I've found certain boss fight's infuriating even while playing on normal. In the olden days I used to see the Game Over screen maybe three or four times during my playthroughs, but this time I must have died a thousand deaths even before getting to Disc 2.

I also downloaded Pro Evolution Soccer 2019 now that it's on sale. I can't remember owning a ever PES title before, but had to give the series a try after learning that someone has made a patch of the Finnish top flight Veikkausliiga for the game. I guess that's the closest Finnish football will ever get of being featured on the Playstation. I haven't really managed to test the game out yet, since my daughter's been sick and I've had to abort both of the two games I've started. I was, of course, humiliated by the CPU on both matches well before half time.

[Flabyo]

Does the ps1 classic version have the extended intro sequence if you leave it on the title screen for a while? The tune ‘discovery’ that plays during that is one of my favourite pieces in the entire series.

[Suits]

Been playing ‘Hey Pikmin’ on the 3DS today, which was a requested gift from the in laws.

I’m a third (gauging off the ‘repair the Dolphin mk2’ main quest) into it and I can’t really see what all the fuss is about - OK, it’s not a Pikmin 4 but there’s a fun, relaxing Pikmin game in here it seems.

It uses the same control method, or very similar to the Pikmin 3 on the Wii U, with the stylus in your lead hand and goofy hand on the control stick - it’s wonderful.

No 3D mind, as it uses both the screens, which I have to admit I thought wa ms a shame.

The thought of a Pikmin game in 3D was exciting but you understand why within 5 minutes.

That said, the desire to set up the Wii U again and dip sick into Pikmin 3 is strong. Very strong.

I never actually finished that.

[hazeredmist]

My Christmas haul comprises of FIFA 19 (PS4) and Diablo 3: The Eternal Collection (Switch). I've also been playing Firewatch (PS4).

FIFA 19 I was hassled into buying for it's online co-op which is thrilling, when moves and coordinated link-up play result in goals. Much better than playing alone.

Diablo 3 is early on but is a delight, just what I was after, partway through the first act. Numbers and things flash up while I easily slay foes and I get that crackhead rush I used to love Destiny for. I can see me really getting into it.

Firewatch is excellent so far. It's probably going to be my favourite walking sim so far, the way it's going. Love that Harry from Mad Men is the lead actor too.

[Stanshall]

Good stuff all round. Great selection.

I've been finally finally getting into Octopath Traveler. I've been training myself to have some patience for almost anything in my life but especially games and I think this is going to be the one now I've shitcanned RDR2 (hot take: this would be vastly more enjoyable as a linear game). I've bounced off it (as they say) several times because the story and dialogue are so pedestrian but I decided to restart it and really really pay attention this time and sure enough, with different expectations, it's a low-key little beauty of a game. I'm not especially well versed in JRPGs to be honest, FF7 is my reference point and so I have certain expectations of a grandiose sweeping narrative and angsty characters and this is not that at all. It reminds me more of a costume drama, it's all very 'slice of life' (which I enjoy a lot with cinema) and the dialogue is repetitious and about building atmosphere more than communicating character traits or keeping any sort of narrative ticking over. Honestly, I struggle with that in the same way that Xenoblade Chronicles 2 steadily exhausted my patience by having one character say something rhetorical which another character would take literally and then the first character would explain that they were being rhetorical and the second character would deliberately misunderstand the explanation and then a third character would chip in with a snarky comment about the misunderstanding and by this point I'm seeing if I can fit a Gatling gun in my mouth. It's a bit like that but if I can just stomach those sections, the actual game is fantastic and the audiovisual presentation is as good as anything on the system. Will it be worth it in the end? Will I even persist? Who knows, but I'm prepared to try, and that's something.

[Alex79]

I didn't get any games for Christmas, but got some PSN credit and bought:

Sega Megadrive Collection (PS4)
Full Throttle Remastered (Vita)
The Gardens Between (PS4)
SP: The Stick Of Truth (PS4)
God Eater 2: Rage Burst (Vita; comes with the first game free as a bonus!)

I always try to find a nice one-sitting game to play over Christmas, so very much looking forward to The Gardens Between maybe tomorrow night. And I've had my eye on God Eater for ages as a Monster Hunter alternative for Vita, it's got decent reviews. Not entirely sure it's my thing but both games for six quid was worth a punt.

[Simonsloth]

I’m probably about halfway through Starfox Adventures which despite its lacklustre opening had become quite enjoyable until now. I’ve hit a sequence which I can only describe as awful. It’s a stupid “keep the line in the middle by waggling stick left and right” sequence akin to Tony Hawk’s grinding. It has no place in the game and what’s even more galling is that failure sends you back to the beginning of the dungeon. It’s the design decision of a masochist.

Having done a bit of googling it turns out I’m not the only one struggling but there’s plenty of game left that stopping now would mean I miss out on the second half. I am seriously considering giving up.

Edit:
1 hour later playing with the sound off I’ve done it. Phew!

[DeadpoolNegative]

I picked up Just Cause 3 over the last holiday and the story had problems- mainly that all of it was on the audio logs and those were hard to find, so Rico's childhood in Medici and his history with Di Ravello felt... "off" since most of the time stuff was implied rather than stated in the cut scenes, at least if felt that way. But overall it was a stronger entry than the much vaunted 2 since there was a lot more fun and craziness and the main missions didn't feel like an afterthought to your wanderings. I spent a lot of time there and "liberating" cities by destroying propaganda or blowing up construction sites in addition to the rote base liberalization was fun.

Now Just Cause 4 is here, and instead on improving on that formula, Avalanche- or this section of the rapidly expanding Avalanche that was tossed this game, have thrown it out, well, sort of. In the previous games, you liberated provinces and that eventually gained you access to DiRavello's compound. In this game, you do technically the same thing, but it's changed in not a good way.

Each province has a base mission to "Liberate" it. But instead of cities and other places in addition to bases, it's just bases, with Chaos destructible objects littered across the map. The first couple times you play these base missions, the missions seem varied, but then the variety dries up quick. But the real way to liberate provinces is to build up the chaos meter, because those will add troops to your "Army of Chaos". The Army of Chaos is Rico's revolutionary army that will help him overtake Solis from the Black Hand, the private army owned and run by the country's dictator. Only when you have enough troops to proceed will you be able to unlock a province and advance on Solis' Project Illapa and the end game.

The thing is, it never really feels like anything more than a way to pad things out. The Chaos meter can take a looooooong time to fill. When I discovered I would have an army, I wondered if this meant there would be pushback from the Black Hand or I would have to defend provinces but there's none of that. Occasionally there's a side mission on the map where you have to assist the Army of Chaos but my provinces were never under any threat of being overtaken, which you'd think would be a mechanic if I need to use armies to take over provinces instead of simply liberating them. This is a mechanic that feels unfinished. And it's telling that they never mentioned it in any of the pre-release hype.

What they DID mention in the pre-release hype, is the crazy ass weather (and yes, the Apex engine used for those sandstorms in Mad Max was used for this game). And they... don't factor into things very much, actually. There's a tornado that randomly wanders the map and three of the central mission strands are dedicated to taking down the lighting machine, the tornado machine, and the sandstorm machine. But you can avoid the tornado easily if you like. The missions around them are pretty cool.

None of the characters from the last game return, excepting Sheldon. That's fine, because few of them were particularly interesting, and the one that WAS interesting was dead by the end of it. Incidentally, this is the THIRD voice actor to play Rico and the FOURTH in as many games to voice Sheldon. Orion Acaba at least makes an effort to sound somewhat like Kevin Collins from he last game for consistency's sake, while Bradford Hastings... well, in his defense, the design for Sheldon is different too.

The story, credited to comics writer Nick Gionnavetti and narrative director Omar Shakir, seems a lot like a retread of the last game. Rico's investigating Solis because his father was the one who helped their dictator build the weather machine he used to seize power. And Sheldon shows up because he feels bad about him and the Agency screwing Rico over in the last game. Would you believe that the Black Hand helped out Di Ravello when Rico's father angrily quit the Solis project and returned to Medici? The whole thing seems a bit canned, as if the storytellers were afraid people wouldn't be invested in Rico liberating Solis if he didn't have a personal stake in it. Again. You know guys, there was a way around that: you could have made Solis an interesting country filled with invidvisuals and perhaps factions vying for its control like in the Mercenaries games. You could have made the revolutionaries the focus of the story instead of Rico's sidekicks- this time there's just "The girl", "The hacker" and "then younger guy who idolizes Rico". You could have made Gabriela Morales, your much promoted new villain, someone who just doesn't show up in a few cut scenes and ads to bark orders at her subordinates- the fact that she's the cousin of the head revolutionary is not an effective shortcut.

The story does have one really effective moment- Rico liberates his father's partner on the weather machine project (Who the uncle of the Morales cousins). You take him out of the prison, he hugs his niece- and they keep Rico in the background of the shot to emphasize his loneliness (after all, he's discovering his family died because of this). Then the uncle gets in a jeep and there's an immediate jump cut to a blue sky, and it registers that this is his POV shot and he's seeing the sky for the first time in quite a while.

There's a lot of... STUFF to do. There's tons of side missions, mostly for a crazy film director and an archaeologist. But the thing is, there's not much of a reason to do them because all you get is... improvements to your grappling hook, boosters, and the balloons you can tie to people and things. And that's fine, but the grapple and everything else is pretty effective to start. And you can't unlock the film director's missions unless you do lame stunts around Solis, which is tiresome. most of the time when I tried them I kept fighting with the camera. WIth the archaeologist you have puzzle statues, which is neat but... again, not much of a reason to get these improvements.

And we haven't even gotten into the technical issues. On XBox I had a relatively stable time- only locked up once!- but I've seen clips of PS4 and PC that are complete dogshit. The game is intentionally lusher and darker than JC3- you can see in the contrast of the Army of Chaos' colors which bounce off the dark greens of the jungle. But the resolution looks worse, the motion blur is so bad they introduced an option to turn it off in the latest patch, sometimes the desert sequences are just too bright.

JC4 is the Andromeda of the franchise- it looks worse than its predecessor, and it introduces gameplay mechanics that probably looked like a good idea on paper but are so bad you can't believe this came from the same developer. And it should be noted this is the shortest development cycle of the series to date (and why do they keep happening? I swear I always hear that despite the critical acclaim and passionate fanbase these games are not big sellers). Avalanche is about to have a big year with Rage 2 and Generation Zero, and this is not a great way to kick it off.

[Alex79]

I did worry Just Cause 4 wasn't going to be able to bring much new to the table. It seems like where do you go with that series. The second game is one of my all timers, the pure fun you could get roaming the world and just destroying it. I played a little of the third when it was on PS+ and thought, ok yeah this is the next Just Cause game and left it there. May revisit it if I ever resubscribe, but the fourth game, not really interested at all.

[Suits]

Not stopped playing Hey Pikmin on the 3DS, or rather I did, only to set up my Wii U again.

I’m on the last world now and have amassed quite a Pikmin army that are preparing my base and harvesting me Sparkilium while I’m out on adventures.

It’s got some really good ideas for passive things this game.

Once I’m done I’m going to finish up where I stalled on Pikmin 3.

[Michiel K]

I had some time to play games, due to consciously shutting down my shop for the past 2 days and I was looking for that one game to sink my teeth into.

Frustratingly, I couldn’t settle on anything, so it ended up a weird mess of everything: Space Harrier, Breath of the Wild DLC2 and The Order 1886, which ended up feeling like the most fitting game for the season, oddly enough, no doubt due to it's old-timey feeling and my personal tradition to read classic horror stories during the holiday season.

I also had a crack at Nier: Automata, which I got on the cheap at CEX recently, and I played Nintendoland and Wii Sports with my daughter and son, which was a ton of fun. Last night we had a particularly intense game of Zelda Battle Quest and managed to get through some very tricky levels working together as a team of 3. High fiving and shouting all around.

Hope everyone had a great 2 days, gaming related and otherwise.

[Simonsloth]

I’m probably about halfway through Starfox Adventures which despite its lacklustre opening had become quite enjoyable until now. I’ve hit a sequence which I can only describe as awful. It’s a stupid “keep the line in the middle by waggling stick left and right” sequence akin to Tony Hawk’s grinding. It has no place in the game and what’s even more galling is that failure sends you back to the beginning of the dungeon. It’s the design decision of a masochist.

Having done a bit of googling it turns out I’m not the only one struggling but there’s plenty of game left that stopping now would mean I miss out on the second half. I am seriously considering giving up.

Edit:
1 hour later playing with the sound off I’ve done it. Phew!

Star Fox Adventures again! I’m tearing my hair out. It turns out I’m at the last of the three minigame difficulty spikes. All completely needless and shoehorned into the game. Don’t get me wrong I love a race, on rails shooter etc but make them easy if your game is a completely different genre. Don’t make them difficult to the point where you get through by the skin of your teeth even when flying near perfectly.

Who made these design decisions and how did they get into the final game! I am getting a bit better each time but it’s painful and not fun in the slightest. Interestingly if you removed these you’d have a solid 6-7/10 game in my opinion but with them in the score keeps dropping with each restart.

Edit:
I did it on my next go. No rhyme or reason to it but I did. Here we go let’s get this finished!

[Suits]

Done, cool, finished Hey Pikmin on the 3DS.

Rather simplistic and straight forward, very little challenge what so ever - I think I died about 5 times maybe.

But not everything has to be challenging to be enjoyable.

It's a 2D platform puzzler, where you use the Pikmin to solve very basic puzzles to collect real world items that can be converted to Sparkilium to power the Dolphin to ferry poor Olimar once again back to his children.

The stylus is used to fire Pikmin at what you choose and feels very responsive and very satisfying.

It's enjoyable, it's a Pikmin game not only by name, but by style, scale, charm, sound and gameplay satisfaction. It's just on a 2D plane.

That said, it's considerably made a lot easier if the only threat and exploration is up, down, left and right.

This is a perfect introduction to Pikmin, if anyone was intimidated by the franchise. The colours, the rules its all here, it's just made so much easier - dare I say it, this is for children I think.

I requested this (Argos £20), as a gift, as I wanted to play it and see what it was all about having just casually ruled it out in frustration when it was announced as what it was. Once that disappointment subsided, I was intrigued by it.

I'm glad I played it, I'm happy with it as a game, I'm content with it being in my collection and a game I can now talk about.

My wife is going to give this a go, who would never in a million years be able to play traditional Pikmin but would enjoy this I feel as what would seem to here to be a twist on a traditional Mario game.

Now for the expected, goofy phone pics .

[KSubzero1000]

Don’t get me wrong I love a race, on rails shooter etc but make them easy if your game is a completely different genre. Don’t make them difficult to the point where you get through by the skin of your teeth even when flying near perfectly.

Agreed. I'm not fundamentally opposed to genre-bending minigame sections in action games, but the Golden Rule should be to design them as easily accessible palate cleansers rather than frustrating brick walls that require skills the player hasn't had any opportunities to acquire up until that point. It's one of the reasons why I prefer Bayonetta 2 over the first one, for example.

Now for the expected, goofy phone pics .

I don't know why I find these so entertaining!
Maybe it's what I imagine the thought process to be like. "I need to SHOW them what my SCREEN looks like! *SNAP*"

[Simonsloth]

Don’t get me wrong I love a race, on rails shooter etc but make them easy if your game is a completely different genre. Don’t make them difficult to the point where you get through by the skin of your teeth even when flying near perfectly.

Agreed. I'm not fundamentally opposed to genre-bending minigame sections in action games, but the Golden Rule should be to design them as easily accessible palate cleansers rather than frustrating brick walls that require skills the player hasn't had any opportunities to acquire up until that point. It's one of the reasons why I prefer Bayonetta 2 over the first one, for example.

They don’t just break the golden rule but smash it to pieces. I’ve not played too many Rare games of this kind but I’m quite apprehensive that this may be part of their style as I’ve heard similar about other games by them. I hope I’m wrong as I’ve got rare replay up very soon.

[Suits]

I don't know why I find these so entertaining!
Maybe it's what I imagine the thought process to be like. "I need to SHOW them what my SCREEN looks like! *SNAP*"

I think it’s because I like to see stuff like that to be honest, so I tend to do it.

I like stats and numbers too, the Play Logs on Nintendo consoles I can study for ages, especially other people’s.

They give a good incite on how someone has interacted with a game and what sort of relationship they had with it - so to speak.

[stvnorman]

I’ve dabbled with all sorts over the last couple of days...

Trying Wipeout on my brother’s PSVR induced all kinds of motion sickness by the end of my first race. Apart from that, the speed is impressive but you’re so focussed on the race that being in VR didn’t make a lot of difference to me. I thought it looked a bit crap too, obviously sacrificing a lot of fidelity for speed in VR.

Similarly, I lasted 20 minutes in PS+ game SOMA (on my TV) before that also caused motion sickness problems. I’m really wondering if it was something to do with the colour palette and my red-black colourblindness in first-person; Doom was terrible for that and shares similar colours with the point it kicked in here. That said, SOMA’s gameplay wasn’t really my cup of tea so I was about done anyway!

I got three Switch retro compilations (Namco, Mega Drive and SNK) for Christmas. I still have no idea where to properly begin, so I’ve been jumping between all three and doing some serious dabbling! Highlights so far are finally playing the arcade versions of two old Spectrum favourites Ikari Warriors and Athena; discovering Prehistoric Isle, Kid Chameleon, Dr Robotnik‘s Mean Bean Machine and Shining Force; and catching up with my old Game Gear favourite Columns. I also got the Sega 3D Classics Collection on 3DS, mainly for Power Drift. Still love it!

[Michiel K]

They don’t just break the golden rule but smash it to pieces. I’ve not played too many Rare games of this kind but I’m quite apprehensive that this may be part of their style as I’ve heard similar about other games by them. I hope I’m wrong as I’ve got rare replay up very soon.

You're going to LOOOOOVE Battletoads!

[Suits]

I've just got over what I thought was a considerable difficulty spike in Metroid Fusion.

Nightmare. Screw that guy.

I even had to check YouTube to make sure I was doing it right - I was, it's just that tricky.

I generally try and avoid looking anything up but sometimes I feel its necessary if I can feel the game slipping away from me.

Anyway, I can crack on with this again now - I'd been stuck on that battle for about a week.

I'm also a few hours back into a new story on Pikmin 3.

Christmas is rad for smashing through games.