Whatcha Been Playing?

[Truk_Kurt]

I am not playing Balatro.

I've been waiting months for the mobile release which came out today. The exact same day there's some issue with the Google Play store meaning it cannot be purchased.

Ok well I have now played a few hours of Balatro and I am in to it.

One thing I'm not sure about - is there any sense of permanent progression in the game? Levelling up hands, the jokers you've got, special cards etc, none of that carries over to new runs, so are you literally starting from scratch every run or am I missing what's happening?

I'm fairly early on, still not even cleared the first 8 ante's, so not sure what the game offers after that.

You unlock more jokers as you play and then it's just about trying to complete a run with different coloured decks. As much as I love the game though, I stopped after my first complete run which took me 27 hours to get too!

[Alex79]

It's so good. I've won with four decks so far, all on the default difficulty though, not tried any harder ones yet! Can't get past ante 11 though, it's impossible!

[Truk_Kurt]

It's so good. I've won with four decks so far, all on the default difficulty though, not tried any harder ones yet! Can't get past ante 11 though, it's impossible!

you're a much better player than me, I'm kind of ashamed it took me 27 hours just to complete my first run on the first deck!

[Alex79]

It's so good. I've won with four decks so far, all on the default difficulty though, not tried any harder ones yet! Can't get past ante 11 though, it's impossible!

you're a much better player than me, I'm kind of ashamed it took me 27 hours just to complete my first run on the first deck!

I don't know, it's a lot of luck as well I think, just depends what jokers you manage to get and what hands you can upgrade quickest. My most successful runs have been when 2 Pairs is levelled up to over 15 and there have been a couple of multiply jokers (rather than plus multipliers if that makes sense).

[Scrustle]

I've been playing some Gran Turismo 4 Spec II recently. It's a fan-made mod that improves a bunch of little things about the game and even adds in some more content. It has new sound effects, new cars and events, more options for camera views, the option to use a more loose follow camera like in GT3, improved compatibility with modern analogue triggers, and a prize car randomiser that you can turn on and off at will. There's a bunch of other quality of life tweaks as well, but those things in particular really make a significant difference to how the game feels to play.

I've been enjoying it quite a lot. I have had a nostalgic appreciation for this game from playing it back in the day, but I never really got that deep in to it. It always felt stiff and rather obtuse, and once the Forza games came around I clicked with that series way more than I ever did with this one. Previous attempts at emulating it haven't gone well either. The controls never worked right, making driving feel pretty terrible. It was also very demanding to run, and had several graphical glitches. This mod, along with the progress PCSX2 has made in recent years have more or less fixed all those issues, and I've been able to get along with this game way more than ever before.

The handling model feels pretty good. It definitely has a nuance to its sense of weight and grip that I've never been able to fully appreciate before. At first I was expecting the loose follow cam to provide that feeling, but I've actually found that using the new bonnet cam much more effective. The steering is still very sensitive, but it's pretty manageable once you get used to it. The game looks pretty impressive still too. The lighting and the paint shaders on the cars look great. The tracks look good as well, especially the fantasy tracks that have a lot of really nice artistic touches to them. The car models themselves are also very good, although the low detail on certain trim textures does stand out at higher resolutions. There is an HD texture pack for this game, but I'm not using it right now. That might fix that issue.

I'm not so sure on the difficulty balancing though. I don't think this has anything to do with the mod, and is just more how the original game was designed. Events are often either super easy or basically impossible depending on what cars your opponents are driving. The points score for each race is supposed to indicate how difficult a race is meant to be, but that doesn't seem to have much consistency with how they actually play out.

Not sure how long I'm going to stick with this one though. It's a gargantuan game, and I mostly started this just to mess around with this mod to see what it was like. I'll keep going for now though since I'm having fun, but I might drop it when something else takes my attention. I can see myself hitting a roadblock with the difficulty too.

[Truk_Kurt]

I've been playing some Gran Turismo 4 Spec II recently. It's a fan-made mod that improves a bunch of little things about the game and even adds in some more content. It has new sound effects, new cars and events, more options for camera views, the option to use a more loose follow camera like in GT3, improved compatibility with modern analogue triggers, and a prize car randomiser that you can turn on and off at will. There's a bunch of other quality of life tweaks as well, but those things in particular really make a significant difference to how the game feels to play.

I've been enjoying it quite a lot. I have had a nostalgic appreciation for this game from playing it back in the day, but I never really got that deep in to it. It always felt stiff and rather obtuse, and once the Forza games came around I clicked with that series way more than I ever did with this one. Previous attempts at emulating it haven't gone well either. The controls never worked right, making driving feel pretty terrible. It was also very demanding to run, and had several graphical glitches. This mod, along with the progress PCSX2 has made in recent years have more or less fixed all those issues, and I've been able to get along with this game way more than ever before.

The handling model feels pretty good. It definitely has a nuance to its sense of weight and grip that I've never been able to fully appreciate before. At first I was expecting the loose follow cam to provide that feeling, but I've actually found that using the new bonnet cam much more effective. The steering is still very sensitive, but it's pretty manageable once you get used to it. The game looks pretty impressive still too. The lighting and the paint shaders on the cars look great. The tracks look good as well, especially the fantasy tracks that have a lot of really nice artistic touches to them. The car models themselves are also very good, although the low detail on certain trim textures does stand out at higher resolutions. There is an HD texture pack for this game, but I'm not using it right now. That might fix that issue.

I'm not so sure on the difficulty balancing though. I don't think this has anything to do with the mod, and is just more how the original game was designed. Events are often either super easy or basically impossible depending on what cars your opponents are driving. The points score for each race is supposed to indicate how difficult a race is meant to be, but that doesn't seem to have much consistency with how they actually play out.

Not sure how long I'm going to stick with this one though. It's a gargantuan game, and I mostly started this just to mess around with this mod to see what it was like. I'll keep going for now though since I'm having fun, but I might drop it when something else takes my attention. I can see myself hitting a roadblock with the difficulty too.

I love that mods like this exist for old racing games.

[Jobobonobo]

I am returning to the 6th gen of gaming by checking out the 20th Anniversary remaster of Beyond Good and Evil. Never played this back in the day but was always a title that interested me. It starts off strong with you fighting off alien invaders within seconds of the game beginning getting you sucked into the story straight away. When I got my camera I immediately was running around looking for wildlife to snap pictures of, I absolutely love this mechanic and have already got three rolls of film completed from photographing all the varied species in this world. The game has a nice flow to it and it just has this moreish quality to it that makes you want to explore as much of this world as possible. Quite liking this at the moment, beginning to see why it has such a devoted fanbase.

[Truk_Kurt]

So who has been playing Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom? Overall I would say I am enjoying it so far but with some caveats. I like how open some of the solutions to puzzles are and that there is room for experimentation like in the recent 3D Zeldas. I also really like the dungeon designs so far.
It does however seem that I am always reverting back to the same view items (particularly the bed) and the UI doesn't help with wanting me to try new items as the menu for choosing new items to spawn isn't particularly intuitive. I also think it has far too much talking for a Zelda game, particuarly in the second water themed area. Then sadly there is also the same performance issues that plagued Links Awakening remake.

[Alex79]

This might be my favourite bot we've ever had. He simply paraphrases what Steve said six years ago and adds a gambling link in to the quote that wasn't there in the first place Amazing.

[Jobobonobo]

Since I tried out Final Fantasy IV a few months ago, I figured I would try the 4th entry in the other big JRPG series, Dragon Quest. I am playing the DS remake and I have to say it looks really lovely. Not HD-2D levels of lovely but considering it was a DS title in the late 2000s, this blend of 3D and 2D really brings the world of the NES original to life. This has been the earliest entry of the Dragon Quest series I have played so far and with it come some more old school JRPG tropes which I am not too fond of such as random battles but it has been tolerable enough here so far. It is all pretty basic so far especially compared to the small little things later entries add to the combat system but this is really quite a nice little thing to play if you want to just do some grinding in small bursts or while listening to a podcast. It has that same whimsical charm that is present throughout the entire series with each region having their own particular accent and silly puns abound. Dragon Quest is just a very cozy series and I am interested to play through more of this when I have the time. I do like that it is chapter based and each chapter has you playing as different characters. Currently on the second chapter and intrigued to see where this goes.

[Truk_Kurt]

I've been really enjoying the new Call of Duty BLOP6 campaign. It feels more like a Mission Impossible game than a Call of Duty game. It does some things I haven't seen in a Call of Duty before like open world sections with multiple objectives you can approach in different ways similar to Far Cry and then, without spoiling anything, the fourth mission in particular does something totally unexpected.

[Alex79]

I'm interested in this, but waiting for Indiana Jones to come out before getting a couple of months of Gamepass again.

[Jobobonobo]

Playing Pepper Grinder at the moment, which is a 2D platformer where you are a young woman with a drill battling some evil doer and her gang of spiky minions. Considering I played and finished Drill Dozer, a 2D platformer about a young woman who using her powerful drill mech to navigate levels, defeat enemies and solve puzzles, it might be strange to try something similar so soon. But while Drill Dozer was more about exploration and more puzzle focused, Pepper Grinder is significantly faster paced. Here you use your drill to burrow into the ground rapidly and combined with your hookshot, engage in some very fluid platforming. It is a lot of fun to move your character around and it will throw in enough new mechanics to keep things interesting such as riding a snowmobile or operating a hand cannon. While there are some puzzly sections, Pepper Grinder is far more focused on action and offers just enough challenge where it is always interesting but you always want to give it one more go and not give up in frustration. I am already over halfway through the game and really liking it so far. 2D indie platformers are a very crowded marketplace these days but I think this one does enough with its mechanics and is well polished that it definitely stands out among the pack.

[Alex79]

A couple of weeks ago I bought The Outer Worlds, Obsidian's Fallout inspired RPG, on Switch for a tenner. I'd previously played the opening few hours on Gamepass a couple of years back but ended up deleting it having not really got in to it. But, as is often the way, I saw it for a good price on Switch and decided to give it another go.

The main reason is that I'm a real sucker for an open world on a handheld, but then herein lies the problem really, it's not open world. Not even slightly. There is zero reason to explore, and the world consists of just a number of different hub areas with nothing interesting in between. Even when you have access to two different locations on the same planet you can't simply walk between them, you have to go back to your ship and fly there via the nav-screen. Whilst some of these locations do contain multiple settlements and some abandoned buildings to look around, I have found myself fast travelling everywhere because there is never an interesting reason to take the long way round.

The characters, at least, are quite interesting, and most of your companions have a reasonably fun questline to go down, but the overarching story isn't much to speak of. I'm currently in a locale that is one big town (Byzantium or something) and it's the dullest place so far.

Performance-wise on the Switch, it's okay. Graphics have a certain blur or smudge to them which we've come to expect by now, but the frame rate has been tolerable, if not super smooth. It's not a bad port by any means (although the long load times do become an irritation at times).

Overall I think this game is 'okay'. It doesn't come anywhere close to the likes of Fallout or similar open world exploration games, but then I don't think they were going for that. They seemingly wanted a tighter, more compact experience, but with this they lose everything I loved about Fallout. I'll probably see it through to the end, but honestly, it's a bit of a disappointment for me.

[Truk_Kurt]

Started playing Vampyr as part of a game club I'm in. I wouldn't say it's a bad game at all, the premise is very cool, the setting too and the combat was better than I was expecting. But it hasn't really grabbed me narratively despite being from Dotnod. My biggest gripe is that despite you being able to make choices for which characters you harvest for blood, if you are playing in a way where you don't harvest anyone of blood like I was, it becomes pretty pointless once you enter combat and kill the other human enemies and harvest their blood. It seems at odd with the rest of the game and quite the oversight narratively. The map is also a bit of a pain to navigate despite not being huge. There is the potential for something great here and it's a shame a sequel is unlikely where they could have fleshed it out.

[Alex79]

Started Super Mario Wonder last night. I'm only halfway through the first world and it's...fine? I don't know, seems a little polished and sterile. I don't think they'll ever top Super Mario World on the SNES with a 2D Mario.

[ratsoalbion]

There are a lot of delights you haven't seen yet.

[Caligulas Horse]

Started playing Vampyr as part of a game club I'm in.

That's awesome. I wish I had enough gamer friends to start a game club. Is this something you do monthly or does it depend on the game and how long it is?

[Alex79]

Started playing Vampyr as part of a game club I'm in.

That's awesome. I wish I had enough gamer friends to start a game club. Is this something you do monthly or does it depend on the game and how long it is?

Mate, you are surrounded by them. Let's get something set up!

[Truk_Kurt]

Started playing Vampyr as part of a game club I'm in.

That's awesome. I wish I had enough gamer friends to start a game club. Is this something you do monthly or does it depend on the game and how long it is?

We vote on a new game each month. Each of us nominates 3 games and then 3 are picked for a vote. I always nominate and vote but whether I take part that month depends on what game is picked, whether I have already played it before and if there are any new releases that month I want to play. So I skipped last month because of the new Zelda coming out. We've been doing it just over a year and I would say I have done roughly half of the games picked. The best ones I've played would be Venba, Neon White, Immortals of Aveum and Tunic.