Whatcha Been Playing?

[Stanshall]

It's also got insane sound design. The Titan machine gun or shotgun sounds are so guttural and aggressive. It's something if I need a lift I'll drop in for a couple of rounds and just go apeshit. It's the equivalent of working a punchbag, a total release.

[stvnorman]

I think I enjoyed the Titanfall 2 campaign but can’t remember the first thing about it!

Finished In Other Waters on Switch. Utterly mesmerising for its ten hour duration, plus a couple more rinsing the planet of its secrets. At the halfway point it’s definitely my game of the year so far, and is likely to enter high in my favourite games ever list next time I update it!

Speaking of which, I’m most of the way through Super Castlevania IV again. If I could live in any game world...

Also loving some old-school hardcore platforming in Manic Miner 2020 - Special Edition on ZX Spectrum. Eight caverns mirrored from the original, everything else exactly as you’d expect. And the smile still hasn’t left my face!

Out this week on Switch, I’ve done a couple of levels on Duke Nukem 3D (about £3.50 pre-order bargain!) and it seems to be the crazy, over the top fun I remember; spent a bit longer on Star Wars Episode 1: Racer, and that’s feeling like another really good time!

[Alex79]

Just finished Golf Story so looking at the other games installed on my Switch, trying to decide what to play next. It's either going to be Blasphemous, Hyper Light Drifter or Celeste. To be honest, I don't think I'm in a platforming mood at the moment, so likely to be HLD or Blasphemous, but I'll undoubtedly sit here for hours trying to decide, then it'll be bed time and I'll have played nothing but Animal Crossing (it's the big bug-off competition today!!)

[NoMoreSpearows]

I've been playing AI: The Somnium Files.

I don't like it very much. I find most of the characters either flat or obnoxious, the foreshadowing is laid thicker than the creme of a Mega Stuf Oreo, and the eponymous Somnium levels are trial-and-error bullshit.

Yet despite all of this, I'm still playing through it. I put the blame squarely on the fact that my sister got it for me for my birthday, and I don't want to upset her.

[Angry_Kurt]

Just finished Golf Story so looking at the other games installed on my Switch, trying to decide what to play next. It's either going to be Blasphemous, Hyper Light Drifter or Celeste. To be honest, I don't think I'm in a platforming mood at the moment, so likely to be HLD or Blasphemous, but I'll undoubtedly sit here for hours trying to decide, then it'll be bed time and I'll have played nothing but Animal Crossing (it's the big bug-off competition today!!)

If you haven’t already got Blasphemous, it’s 45% off on Switch at the moment

[Alex79]

Thanks, yeah picked it up in the sale a while back for about the same price I think. I played about 20 minutes and enjoyed it but wasn't in the mood for it at the time.

[NoMoreSpearowsSister]

I've been playing AI: The Somnium Files.

I don't like it very much. I find most of the characters either flat or obnoxious, the foreshadowing is laid thicker than the creme of a Mega Stuf Oreo, and the eponymous Somnium levels are trial-and-error bullshit.

Yet despite all of this, I'm still playing through it. I put the blame squarely on the fact that my sister got it for me for my birthday, and I don't want to upset her.

Well I won't bother next year, then!!

[NoMoreSpearows]

I applaud your effort, if nothing else.

[Alex79]

Well that turned out a lot funnier in my head

[Stanshall]

Haha. I laughed, at least.

[Scrustle]

Picked up something a but unusual in the Steam sale. Gujian 3, a pretty high production value Chinese action RPG. It feels like an attempt to do a proper big budget AAA game, or as close to it as they could manage. And so far I'm actually rather impressed. It feels like a proper game that is simply trying to be the best it can be, with no strings attached. Gameplay takes the form of hack-and-slash combat which so far seems not particularly deep, but still tight and enjoyable. It's fast and stylish, with good sound design. The art design is really impressive too. It's a very well rendered martial arts fantasy world that has some lush environments and good use of colour. There's a large city that you also explore that rivals some of the best looking cities in the many of the biggest JRPGs out there. Character models are really nice too, with good costume design. The game may be a bit rough round the edges in some parts though, like the cutscenes being a little bit janky, and the performance being a bit inconsistent. But considering the sale price, and this coming from a country that almost never releases stuff like this (or at least not outside their borders) I'm very pleasantly surprised with it so far.

[Alex79]

Just had a look at some screenshots and it looks gorgeous! Love the art style.

[duskvstweak]

I had started Trails in the Sky SC a bit ago but fell off it pretty quick due to not wanting to put in any effort back in March. Now, I'm back on and back in! Plus, one of my twitch viewers explained to me how the Orbal magic system works to me, something I hadn't figured out after playing the whole first game. Now, I've got more power than ever!
Anyway, it's a nice game. Very cozy.

[Angry_Kurt]

I've been playing a brick breaking game since I got my Vita a couple of weeks ago called Twin Breaker by Lilymo Games who made an arcade shooter called Habroxia that you might have heard of. It's pretty good although I think sometimes luck plays too much of a role in some levels rather than skill. I wish there were more brick breakers though. Apparently there are only 4 on the whole of PSN!

[Sinclair Gregstrum]

I've been playing a brick breaking game since I got my Vita a couple of weeks ago called Twin Breaker by Lilymo Games who made an arcade shooter called Habroxia that you might have heard of. It's pretty good although I think sometimes luck plays too much of a role in some levels rather than skill. I wish there were more brick breakers though. Apparently there are only 4 on the whole of PSN!

Yes the Colin Moriarty/Chris Ray Gun game! Played and completed it a couple of months back. Good little brick breaker I thought with some nice ideas.

You're right luck does play a factor in terms of some fortunate bounces and power-up drops, but the former has always been a part of the genre to some extent. Totally agree that I could go for more of these games as well. There's always been something incredibly satisfying about breaking those bricks!

[Angry_Kurt]

I can only remember playing one as a kid called Adiboo which was really an educational game but had this brick breaker minigame and I played it more than the rest of the game haha. I was going to look for tips as they way the ball bounces off the padel just seems really random with the angles, I wondered if there was some kind of science behind it.

[stvnorman]

Never been interested in the The Last of Us, but I like to try everything in my PS+ library and it seemed like a good time to see what the fuss is about. Played for 3 hours, which confirmed too much Walking Dead and too much stealth for my taste!

I recently read about a CPC game called Rik the Roadie in a book of terrible games, but it didn’t sound that bad so I tried the Spectrum version. Apart from the worst spelling ever seen in a game, I’m still not sure what hit me, but I couldn’t leave it alone! It goes from mind-numbing to almost impossible to something I still don’t understand, but I finished it!

Also finished my old favourite (but eternally anticlimactic) side-scrolling cycler Milk Race on the Spectrum for my blog, and have been playing a lot of Paper Boy on there for the same reason, not that it ever needs a reason!

And back to the future, finished the Japanese version of Super Castlevania IV on Switch. Still wonderful in any language!

[Alex79]

We've been playing Mario Party on Switch quite a lot. My girlfriend is not interested in games at all, but she's been playing it with me and the kids, and the other night when I was doing their story and putting them to bed, I came back downstairs to find her playing the mini games on her own, and then she said 'shall we play the board game?'. I was amazed! But we did, and she won.

[Scrustle]

More thoughts on NFS Heat. I think the problem of poor visibility/conveyance through environment and visual design is less severe than I thought it was before, but still there. But I realised there's another factor at play. A lot of important information about what is going on around you is conveyed through your minimap. Either exclusively, or because the what the larger screen shows is insufficient. So I find myself having to take my eyes off what's in front of me too often to stare down at the corner of the screen a lot. Again, this is a worse problem at night. During the day tracks are lined with colourful barriers that better show the course limits. At night these don't exist, replaced by abstract neon streaks that float above the ground and only show the vague outside edge of a corner. While I like it stylistically, it's really bad for conveying the layout of the track and where the racing line is. It's hard to judge exactly where in space it is, and it only attempts to give you half the information you need.

The minimap issue crops up with police chases too. There's no good way to tell whether a cop car is just around a corner or what to expect coming up except on the minimap. In Most Wanted there was a little radar thing on the UI that warned you when a police car was close, and in what direction. Here you get no such warning. And on the topic of cop chases, I've also come to resent them as there's no way to fast travel back to your safe house when you're not in a chase at night, meaning it's very easy to get caught in a chase you didn't want to start, and have to deal with that annoying mess that could very well ruin all your progress of that night. I never start a chase on purpose, and engaging in one only ever feels like a punitive hassle that is putting you at risk you didn't want to take. I also took a look through all the cop chase specific car upgrades, and all of them are pretty boring. Nothing that really changes how they play out at all. So I don't see any way this mechanic will improve or get more interesting at all.

I've also started unlocking some drift events, but the drifting in this game feels so bad that they are basically impossible. You can choose to upgrade you car with different parts that change the handling balance between grip or drift (and on-road/off-road) but building a car for drifting makes it actually feel worse for that task. It's like going back to the same problems with the general handling model I had in my previous post before I worked out the tweaks, except now the car just swings off to the side uncontrollably at even the slightest touch of the steering. And it's not like the car is spinning out either. It just locks itself in to a really sharp drift that you can't pull out of, until it just fish-tails in the other direction. So I tried being a bit more gentle with inputs, and the car is reluctant to respond at all. So it's just all or nothing, no control, the car never does what you want. The drift itself feels horrible too. It has no feeling of momentum or inertia. It's a total failure of a mechanic.

And a couple of other points, the soundtrack is awful. All the songs are either grating or boring. The performance of the game is pretty poor too. My PC couldn't run it at 60fps, so I locked it down at 30. Which wouldn't be too bad, and not totally unexpected given we are at the end of a console generation and even my PC being much more powerful than a PS4/XB1 can sometimes struggle to hit 60fps in some games now. But this game occasionally struggles to maintain even 30fps when things get chaotic, and when I can run Forza Horizon 4 at pretty high settings without a hiccup, I'm less than impressed. So my patience is running out for this game. Yet another mediocre-to-poor entry that focuses on flashy presentation at the cost of everything else.

[Angry_Kurt]

To what degree can you customise the aesthetics of the car?