This might be old news to most people, but I just discovered the OpenEmu emulator for the Mac and it has been amazing. I spent all of yesterday filling up my library with older games from my childhood that I had wanted to revisit, but many weren't available on Virtual Console. I expect my "Games Completed 2016" list will start filling up with random, non-iconic NES and SNES games now. But it's also nice because while I own Zelda: Minish Cap back home in the US, I had no idea how I'd be able to replay it for the upcoming show (the 3DS doesn't have Gameboy Advance games on Virtual Console) and now I'll be able to play it again. This is a really sleek, well designed emulator.

Yeah as I've played through I've had the realisation I'm now equipped to go back and complete earlier puzzles that stumped me. I'm currently in the tree house area but it's bending my mind that you can send puzzle platforms off in different directions. It really makes me anxious about taking a wrong turn, or missing something! I've not encountered any paper and pen puzzles yet though. I spent a good while in a fantastic neon lit greenhouse type area set down in to the cliffs I think. I thought I'd finished that area but then got stumped by a broken lift. As you wander the island you find yourself looking at absolutely everything, every tree, every pebble, every flower - and you think 'I wonder if it means something' haha. It's a fantastic game though.

EDIT : @ Stanshall

Metal Slug 4 on Neo Geo. Played to completion with my uncle in a single sitting, what a laugh. Love a good retro run & gun.

Still playing steins;gate. Very calm compared to the more eccentric visual novels I've been playing lately but solid from most angles, some odd thoughts from the protagonist but I can let those go for now.

Been playing through Wasteland 2.

It's pretty old school, reminds me a lot of the old Baldur's Gate / Icewind Dale games in terms of visuals (although it plays more like the original XCOM game).

Very steep learning curve, it assumes some things of the player without ever teaching you them. I spent most of the first major mission I did not knowing you could crouch to increase aim accuracy.

The plot has been fairly predictable, being as it is a mashup of bits from Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas (I won't go into the tortured development history of these games, that's something a podcast would do... ahem...)

I've crossed the halfway point, and suddenly there's been a massive spike in the difficulty. If I can't overcome it, it may get left uncompleted, which would be a shame.

I've just been playing the backer beta build for Ghost of a Tale. If you haven't heard of it, it's an adorable little action adventure game that was on Indiegogo a couple of years ago. You play as a mouse in a fantasy world of anthropomorphic animals, with the setting of the game being an area controlled by rats in particular. I really liked what it seemed to be going for, so I backed it and have thus gotten this early build. Not 100% sure what to think of it right now. Obviously, as it's still pretty early in development, there's going to be some things that aren't finished and will be polished out later, but other stuff I'm not so sure can be given that benefit of the doubt.

The game does look gorgeous for one thing. Minor graphical problems aside, which I think you can mostly put down to it being unfinished, the game has a really rich and well detailed world with a lot of personality. Even though it's from a small team working in Unity, I would say it's quite reminiscent of the Wticher games in style and detail. The animations too are great, especially for the player character. They put a lot of little bouncy nuances in to the protagonists movements that really gives them a lot of character. There is one issue though which I don't know if I can put down to the game being in beta, and that's that the image on screen seems kind of blurry. I can't really put my finger on why, but it just seems kind of hazy and hard to pick detail out on, which is strange, because the environments themselves are rich in detail.

The story of the game seems pretty impressive too. I haven't delved too deep in to it, since I haven't played much, and would rather save that kind of thing for playing the final version of the game, but I've been impressed by what I've seen so far. There's actually a really well realised world built up for the game, with several different intriguing story threads introduced early on. There's loads of flavour text too, if you want to read that to flesh out the world. It's clear a lot of thought has gone in to it, and it's presented in a really nice way too. Feels very fairy-tale/storybook-ish, in a way that really makes me want to find out more and see what colourful characters there are to meet along the way.

There is another thing I'm not quite sure on though. Something which seems a lot more fundamental to the core of the game, rather than something which can be put down to the unfinished nature of the game. When the game was up on Indiegogo all that time ago, it was presented as being something of a Zelda-like action adventure. During development it took on some stealth elements, although the developer always maintained it was mostly an action adventure. Now this was a little worrying for me, since I'm not fond of stealth games, and am generally terrible at them. Plus I backed the game on it being like Zelda, not a stealth game. I was willing to give it a chance anyway, just to see exactly what the game is if nothing else, after that mixed messaging. From what I played though, it seems to be completely a stealth game. Except the stealth seems totally trivial. After a short while I found that you can more or less just run past every obstacle. It doesn't matter if you get spotted every single time, you can just outrun everything. The stealth mechanics are super simple, and the rat guards that stand in your way move very slowly and aren't particularly dangerous. But since the developer always insisted the game wasn't primarily a stealth game, perhaps this was the intention all along? Since you're supposed to be the weak little mouse in a world of scary larger creatures, it makes sense that you're not fighting everything and are instead being evasive. So maybe outrunning enemies is as valid as sneaking around? But even if that is the point, then why? Why bother with a stealth system at all? And without that, what even is there in its place? Nothing that I can see.

I don't want to judge the game from what I've played so far, since obviously that wouldn't really be fair or appropriate. I'm willing to give it more of a chance. I'm not even that concerned about it having stealth elements. I don't want to demand that the game have combat or be exactly like Zelda, and in theory I like the idea of being this little mouse in a world of scary creatures that you can't just take head-on, making you think about a different approach. But I really hope the game isn't just going to have me creeping around slowly and hiding in pots, or just running around like a loon trying to find the next NPC or inconspicuous door/item.

I've got a new hobby. Reading Reddit threads about puzzle types in The Witness for puzzles I've already solved. Watching people struggle and hypothesise over solutions I've already worked out makes me feel more cleverer than what I really am.



It's bad of me. I know.

Well. After owning it for years and getting it on PS+ when I first got a vita I've decided to give Gravity Rush a blast (for longer than 15 mins). What a gem! I'm only about 6-7 hours into it but I'm really enjoying it so for. The setting and the music are really doing it for me too. Also technically it's really impressing me too.

Rory McIlroy's PGA Tour Golf on PS4 is a ridiculous £6.49 on PSN right now... Can't pass up on that. Is anyone playing this? I'm a long, long time Tiger Woods player and had resisted this game so far. Quite excited to try it, still stunned at the price.

I played these pretty much every year for a long, long time, tracing the series right back to the 80s, but after the novelty of the Wii Motion Plus version(s), circa 2010, EA seemed to put less and less work into each iteration and launch more and more day one dlc at the same time.

At one point the game came (iirc) with 22 courses on the disc - incredible vfm - but that plummeted to around 50% of that with well over £100 worth available to download. It kinda put me off.

Still, £6 for the base game seems like a very fair deal!

Agreed, my last Tiger Woods game was the Masters (2012?) on Xbox 360, and I was seriously put off by the online pass and the fact I was starting to be asked to buy courses as DLC I had included in previous years, with less courses out of the box. I only bought it because I was desperate to finally play Augusta, and I tapped out of the series after that. I'm loving the old Tiger games now, I've recently picked up 2010 on PSP and Wii (used to just play on 360), both feel like the peak of the series feature wise with courses a-plenty and great mechanics. The big issue is lack of competition and greed with EA.

With Rory, I read the reviews ripping into the 12 courses, lack of usual bells & whistles, it wasn't something I was going to pay close to full price for. £6.49 though, we're in business! Well worth it. Not sure how I'd feel if I'd paid full price though... If you dive in I'm up for multiplayer? There might be asynchronous play like Everybody's Golf which we used to play? I had about 20 games going at once on that, I miss it!

Yeah let us know how it is - I loved the PGA games on the Megadrive. That's a good price if you get much content. I grabbed Trials Fusion on PS4 and Xcom for Vita in the sale. On holiday next week so Xcom will be great.

I've been hammering Space Harrier on the 3DS. If ever a game were perfect for a 3D retrofit, this is the one. I love the touches like cabinet movement and clicking sounds (though I did turn the latter off), if this had come out on PS4 I'd have been sat inches from the telly soaking it up. It's such a chaotic rush and the whole thing is driven by one of my absolute favourite video game themes. That key change heads off into the stratosphere. When it clicks, it's a proper 'flow' type game and scratches a specific itch.

Alex79uk wrote:Yeah let us know how it is - I loved the PGA games on the Megadrive. That's a good price if you get much content. I grabbed Trials Fusion on PS4 and Xcom for Vita in the sale. On holiday next week so Xcom will be great.

Will do, I'm going to fire it up tonight hopefully.

I got Trials Fusion too after being hooked on the Vita copycat game. Tougher than I remember from my 360 days but a lot of fun.

Rory is £7.50 on the XBO at the moment if you're a gold subscriber. A little more than on ps4, but it's an option.

I played through the Yooka Laylee Toybox today. It's rather good!

So I came here because, even though it's not recent, I just played through The Beginner's Guide and am profoundly affected. I had fully intended to play it but it just got lost, until I was reminded by Innuendo Studio's newest video to play through it.

I think it's one of the most affecting pieces of art I've experienced, and I'm sorry to keep saying "affecting" but I can't really think of another word. I just feel like I'm in such a different place emotionally then when I began to play it, and I can't quite identify what it is except I feel changed.

It's also one of the most mature-feeling games I can think of. Not in that there's sex, or drugs, or complex tax law, but in the complexity of the storytelling method and confidence in the player's ability to put things together. I'm not one to argue that some games are "art" and others aren't, but this game has such a voice and such auteur-ship (ironically so, given the subject matter) that it feels like a new high bar for video game storytelling and artistry.

I really hope someone else here has played it, or even better if I could convince someone who hasn't to pick it up. I am changed because of it.

I manage a children's nursery, and we've got a really bad sickness bug going round at the moment which has pretty much wiped us out. We've got 12 out of an expected 44 children in today - very quiet. So, my assistant manager and I shut the office door, fired up Steam on both our computers and have been playing Half Life Deathmatch Classic for the last hour. Amazing fun! Need to do some actual work now though, booooooooooo!

So, I rented Battleborn on a whim. Really disliked the beta, but, I just finished Borderlands 2 for like the millionth time, and thought "it's mostly the same team, so, it can't as bad as I've heard"

And sure enough, I kinda love it. Properly bought the digital deluxe edition as it happened to be on sale, but, I hope more people give it a chance. It's different, and, a bit weird to look at, but, it's a lot of fun.

Kind of annoying that if you want to play 99% of all the user created content on Trials Fusion that you have to have all the DLC packs installed. That was a huge part of the last game, finding awesome tracks in the Track Central thing. Now I need to spend over £20 just to get to play them. The season pass is £15.99 and the Awesome Max pack is 7 or 8 quid too. It's also kinda confusing as to what you get with what.

Whatever happened to just 'buying a game'