Currently Playing

[Animalmother]

Diablo 4 is now on Game Pass. Downloaded it yesterday decided to have a quick look last night. Much to my annoyance it required setting up an account with Blizzard, this was after already logging into Xbox and Game Pass. In a fit of probable stupidity I got the hump and uninstalled without ever playing it. I might come back to it another time...

[Sly Boots]

Ha, yeah, had the same thing (minus the installation, I clocked beforehand that it needed the Blizzard account). I think I even have Battlenet after playing Hearthstone for a while years back, but I just object to having to sign into a second account in order to play a game I'm not that fussed about in the first place

[DjchunKfunK]

I think it makes sense as everything is stored on the Battlenet servers.

[Wrathbone]

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Finished this exceptional game. The vast majority has been a sheer joy to play, not falling back on nostalgia but building upon it in ways that frequently surprised and delighted me. There were obviously going to be more changes from the original FF7, but I found most to be reasonable adaptations… with a few exceptions. I’ll spoilerise the rest, focusing on the changes I'm not convinced by.

Barret and Dyne

Spoiler

Absolutely loved everything they did with Barret, though I don’t understand why they handled Dyne’s ending the way they did. The original having him conclude he was beyond help and not good enough for Marlene, leading to him falling off the cliff, was simple and heartbreaking. Rebirth seems to make out he was still nuts and had no real contrition, just getting shot by Shinra troopers. Weird change.

Cait Sith

Spoiler

Mostly still a shit, baffling character that is the Jar Jar Binks of FF7. I really disliked how they handled his ‘twist’, as they’ve made out it was some altruistic intention rather than the outright monstrous stuff he does in the original.

Gongaga region and reactor

Spoiler

Gongaga was my least favourite region for a variety of reasons, including its awkward navigation, the grating music (possibly unfair, given the high bar of the music across the game) and the fact that a tiny incidental area from the original had been extrapolated out into something massive with little justification. It felt like the plot ground to a halt until the reactor, and then it jet-boosted into bizarre and unnecessary changes.

They couldn't help themselves, could they? They couldn't wait to reveal Weapon (now apparently a fish beast) or to tease the pivotal lifestream section which presumably will come in the third game. As far as I could tell, all the reactor stuff served only two things: showing that Sephiroth is controlling the black whispers, which are engaged in a battle with the lifestream, and that he can control Cloud in dangerous ways. The latter becomes obvious later anyway, so it was pointless here, and the black whispers thing could have been explained without everything else going on. I really don't understand what they were thinking.

Red XIII and Cosmo Canyon

Spoiler

The voice change! Why?! Good grief, why? Red's deep, growling tone up to this point was perfect, and then suddenly his Nanaki voice turns out to be a bratty, obnoxious skateboarder?! This for me is the bizarrest thing in the game, being absolutely jarring and nonsensical. It turns one of the coolest characters in the game into an insufferable pre-teen. It's Poochie 2.0.

Cosmo Canyon as a whole is superb, though.

Cid and Vincent

Spoiler

I thought they were handled pretty well. It’s a shame to miss Rocket Town, but narratively it only becomes relevant later so it makes sense to bump it to the third game. I get why they’ve made Cid less of an arsehole from the get-go, though I always thought his domestic abuse in the original was an interesting (albeit horrifying) aspect to his character.

The ending

Spoiler

They were always going to fuck around with the ending, so I made my peace with it before starting the game. And yes, they 100% fucked around with it. I think most people would have preferred a simple remake of the original, but that's clearly not what we're getting as it's been signposted since the first game that this is instead some multiversal continuation of the original story. And on those terms... I don't hate Rebirth's ending.

I don't love it either, but I accept where they're trying to go with it. I'm still processing some of the implications, and I do wish they hadn't made everything so convoluted, but there is potential for it to pay off in the third game. Probably not, but you never know.

Despite all that spoilery negativity, I still consider it a huge triumph of a game. Weird plot stuff aside, the game itself, the beautifully-realised world, the vibrant characters and the surprisingly excellent comic moments are all masterfully done.

[Raid]

I'm just hoping it gets a PC release sooner rather than later.

I also finished a game I very much enjoyed over the weekend; Jedi Survivor. It's a better game than its predecessor, and extremely generous in terms of content (I think I clocked up about 55 hours in total, I'd hunted down 95% of the cosmetic boxes). I'm still not really sold on the more expansive maps (it doesn't really feel like a true open-world game, but it contains some wide-open areas that require animal mounts to traverse), but they do at least give you a fast travel option in this one which was a big failing of Fallen Order. The new lightsaber styles add variety that the first game didn't have, and I ended up settling for the Blaster / Saber combo and Double-ended. It's generally quite forgiving in terms of difficulty, so much so that I played the vast majority using the perk that decreases the parry timing window to grant a boost to your black-gauge damage. Despite playing on the second-highest difficulty setting, most bosses I managed to defeat in two or three attempts, although there was one I simply had to turn the difficulty down for (big story spoiler here):

Spoiler

It's Cere's fight with Darth Vader. I'm not sure what it was, but I just couldn't click with this one. There were just too many unblockable attacks with timing that felt unintuitive and unfair. I could reliably get to the last phase, and there were a couple of times I got him down to within one or two hit's worth of health, but it got to the point of being so frustrating that I called it quits. Maybe it was the fact that it forces you into playing a different character with a lightsaber style I was unfamiliar with, I reckon if I'd been playing as Cal I'd have made short work of it. It's also quite irritating that an obviously pivotal story moment ended up being a tiresome slog and, by the end I just wanted it to be over. I mean sure, making that fight easy would have been to do the character a disservice, but Vader does so much to interrupt your flow that it was more annoying than exciting.

I can't remember the first time I ever actually bothered with a New Game + run, but I've leapt straight into this one. You're given a handful of new perks at the start that increase the difficulty that sounded fun. There's one that massively increases all damage (both taken and dealt), meaning your lightsaber actually does one-hit kill a lot of enemies, but you can also only take a single blaster hit before you need to heal. There's one moment during the intro area where you're grabbed from one of those narrow passages and thrown off a ledge into an arena by a Security Droid (who are normally quite dangerous enemies when they attack with others). The cutscene ended, Cal took a step back, and then just sliced the thing in half in one swing, which was beautifully cinematic. It makes the crossguard saber attacks (Kylo Ren's saber style) extremely satisfying as they have a long wind-up time and are clearly meant to look powerful, and it's how most people imagine a lightsaber to work. I'm not sure how long I'll stick with it as the bosses doing one-hit kills are maybe a little much (I may just use the perk that upgrades enemy types instead).

Technically it's a mixed bag. I think I'd said back when I started that I wasn't having many crashes; that comment didn't age well. There's a repeating crashing problem around the home-base area of Pyloon's Saloon, which happened often enough that it made me actively avoid the area, or at least regularly visit save points when I was nearby. I don't think I had many crashes in other areas. The loading times however are excellent - the game does run through a shader cache building every single time you start it which takes a minute or two, but after that the load times are maybe three or four seconds at most, even when moving to entirely new areas. It's a little frustrating how many animation glitches there are, particularly with fabrics that jitter all over the place, and I don't really understand why they gave you so many cosmetics that your holstered lightsaber clips through - it's not like that position ever changes. There are lots of little bits that don't quite work right, and while the map is generally very good at pointing out places you haven't visited yet but have the ability to access, the game just does not point out the narrow gaps that are almost a trademark of this series - in the first game they tended to be marked with good use of texturing to draw your attention, but in this one they just haven't bothered and they're far too easy to miss.

The biggest problem I had was a bloody annoying design choice that makes it impossible to drop more than a certain height before it just fades to black and puts you back from where you last had your feet on the ground. The game involves a hell of a lot of vertical traversal, and there's an invisible boundary that stops you from jumping back down again, despite Jedi being shown to be capable of falling from enormous heights without issue. It's clearly designed as a general catch-all to put you back where you started when failing a tricky bit of platforming, but it affects the entire game rather than those specific instances where it would be helpful.

[DjchunKfunK]

No Rest for the Wicked

New ARPG from Moon Studios, the people behind Ori. It's been described as a cross between Diablo and a Soulslike but it mostly avoids ARPG staples. The world is handmade rather than procedural, combat is very considered a feels a lot like a Souls game. The only thing they take from classic ARPGs is the random loot.

As you would kind of expect from moon Studios it looks beautiful and the combat is very tight and a lot of fun but also can be quite hard, especially when you are up against more than one enemy. It has a similar bonfire system to Souls games where you will resurrect if you die but enemies you have killed in the vicinity stay dead and it's where you save. It has a fog of war system on the main map which will cover parts of the map with a translucent grey so you know that you have already visited there but if you go back I think enemies and loot can respawn, at least I think that is how it works. Levelling is also very similar to Dark Souls with dex, str, intel and faith(?) effecting the damage you do with weapons that have an affinity with that stat. You also have equip load and stamina. So as I said very Soulslike.

Out the gate the game got a fiar bit of criticism, partly because despite what Moon Studios had said I think a lot of people expected it to be much more like Diablo and it really isn't. On top of that the stamina usage was incredibly high which made combat seem a tad unfair, the drop chance on weapons was way off, I spent half an hour or more without finding one for instance, and durability degradation was rather punishing. That coupled with the low chance to find weapons meant some players would find a weapon die multiple times and then have their weapon break. Thankfully all these three issues have been tweaked since launch and feel a lot better.

After putting an hour or so into the game over the weekend I can see myself loving this game as it has such a good combat system and a gorgeous world that rewards exploration. It still needs some tweaks and I'm not sure how much content is in this Early Access version but the base is already there.

[Raid]

It's certainly appealing looking for me, but I read a review that said that healing items are consumables that don't get automatically replenished, and you have to gather materials to craft them. That's an instant deal-breaker for me; I like games that are challenging, but the second you make me grind for basic necessities like healing items, it makes failure punishing rather than a learning experience, and I just don't have time for that. It's one of the reasons I'd never touch Bloodborne, even when it's the Soulsborne that appeals most on an aesthetic level.

[Sly Boots]

I'm just hoping it gets a PC release sooner rather than later.

I also finished a game I very much enjoyed over the weekend; Jedi Survivor. It's a better game than its predecessor, and extremely generous in terms of content (I think I clocked up about 55 hours in total, I'd hunted down 95% of the cosmetic boxes). I'm still not really sold on the more expansive maps (it doesn't really feel like a true open-world game, but it contains some wide-open areas that require animal mounts to traverse), but they do at least give you a fast travel option in this one which was a big failing of Fallen Order. The new lightsaber styles add variety that the first game didn't have, and I ended up settling for the Blaster / Saber combo and Double-ended. It's generally quite forgiving in terms of difficulty, so much so that I played the vast majority using the perk that decreases the parry timing window to grant a boost to your black-gauge damage. Despite playing on the second-highest difficulty setting, most bosses I managed to defeat in two or three attempts, although there was one I simply had to turn the difficulty down for (big story spoiler here):

Spoiler

It's Cere's fight with Darth Vader. I'm not sure what it was, but I just couldn't click with this one. There were just too many unblockable attacks with timing that felt unintuitive and unfair. I could reliably get to the last phase, and there were a couple of times I got him down to within one or two hit's worth of health, but it got to the point of being so frustrating that I called it quits. Maybe it was the fact that it forces you into playing a different character with a lightsaber style I was unfamiliar with, I reckon if I'd been playing as Cal I'd have made short work of it. It's also quite irritating that an obviously pivotal story moment ended up being a tiresome slog and, by the end I just wanted it to be over. I mean sure, making that fight easy would have been to do the character a disservice, but Vader does so much to interrupt your flow that it was more annoying than exciting.

I can't remember the first time I ever actually bothered with a New Game + run, but I've leapt straight into this one. You're given a handful of new perks at the start that increase the difficulty that sounded fun. There's one that massively increases all damage (both taken and dealt), meaning your lightsaber actually does one-hit kill a lot of enemies, but you can also only take a single blaster hit before you need to heal. There's one moment during the intro area where you're grabbed from one of those narrow passages and thrown off a ledge into an arena by a Security Droid (who are normally quite dangerous enemies when they attack with others). The cutscene ended, Cal took a step back, and then just sliced the thing in half in one swing, which was beautifully cinematic. It makes the crossguard saber attacks (Kylo Ren's saber style) extremely satisfying as they have a long wind-up time and are clearly meant to look powerful, and it's how most people imagine a lightsaber to work. I'm not sure how long I'll stick with it as the bosses doing one-hit kills are maybe a little much (I may just use the perk that upgrades enemy types instead).

Technically it's a mixed bag. I think I'd said back when I started that I wasn't having many crashes; that comment didn't age well. There's a repeating crashing problem around the home-base area of Pyloon's Saloon, which happened often enough that it made me actively avoid the area, or at least regularly visit save points when I was nearby. I don't think I had many crashes in other areas. The loading times however are excellent - the game does run through a shader cache building every single time you start it which takes a minute or two, but after that the load times are maybe three or four seconds at most, even when moving to entirely new areas. It's a little frustrating how many animation glitches there are, particularly with fabrics that jitter all over the place, and I don't really understand why they gave you so many cosmetics that your holstered lightsaber clips through - it's not like that position ever changes. There are lots of little bits that don't quite work right, and while the map is generally very good at pointing out places you haven't visited yet but have the ability to access, the game just does not point out the narrow gaps that are almost a trademark of this series - in the first game they tended to be marked with good use of texturing to draw your attention, but in this one they just haven't bothered and they're far too easy to miss.

The biggest problem I had was a bloody annoying design choice that makes it impossible to drop more than a certain height before it just fades to black and puts you back from where you last had your feet on the ground. The game involves a hell of a lot of vertical traversal, and there's an invisible boundary that stops you from jumping back down again, despite Jedi being shown to be capable of falling from enormous heights without issue. It's clearly designed as a general catch-all to put you back where you started when failing a tricky bit of platforming, but it affects the entire game rather than those specific instances where it would be helpful.

This recently hit Game Pass, so I've jumped in - only played as far as Koboh (so basically the opening area on Coruscant) and enjoying it so far. It sounds like I'll likely run into technical issues the more I play, but thus far I haven't really been affected by any, which was a nice surprise.

Looking forward to playing the rest, wanted to play it upon release as I enjoyed Fallen Order so much, but the technical issues meant I held off until now.

[Wrathbone]

Just started playing Dragon's Dogma 2 yesterday. I wasn't a fan of the first game so I went in with doubts, but I'm really enjoying it after a few hours. The combat is great - it has a real physicality and flow to it that makes you feel like you're being more dynamic than you actually are. I'm still having to retrain my brain not to try and roll through attacks like in Dark Souls.

What I'm not so thrilled about are the bizarrely low standards for certain things. Dialogue, for instance, requires you to manually press a button to progress after each sentence, and because I don't use subtitles it results in NPCs standing there blankly staring ahead in silence until they're told to continue. Thankfully I've found a mod to do it automatically, but what a dumb design choice! The writing and wooden expressions are still distractingly awful at times, though (particularly the excessive use - and misuse - of "aught", which brings to mind Two Worlds' overuse of "Forsooth!"). Not to be bitter, but poor writing and wooden NPCs are things that Starfield got raked over the coals for, and yet in the discussions I've seen about DD2 nobody seems to give a shit.

I do have a soft spot for janky games, and the core gameplay is a lot of fun, so I'm hopeful that it's one I'll end up rabidly defending in the future.

[Lenny Solidus]

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide

It's been fourteen years since a group of us collected together and played Dead Air Part 1 on Left 4 Dead 2, fourteen, the fuck is that nonsense? Pew-Pew screaming in my ear (then laughing his chalkboard laugh) nigh on incessantly making me want to quit out the game (fuck you still James, it haunts me) and we often took to playing regular stints with others such as Wmain00, Mantis and Neth. The ten man modded sessions were also highly memorable.

At that given time as it was, I never thought any other similar co-operative game would ever match that what is considered the Valve/Turtle Rock gold standard, many have tried and failed quite miserably - even Turtle Rock themselves no less, twice in fact with both Evolve and Back 4 Blood respectively. As the story goes it had taken me a considerable amount of time to even join my current group, although I did purchase it on the MS store I could never get the fucking thing to actually play, so our plans were scuppered rather swiftly in that regard. Later when it finally came on deep sale for Steam instead I picked it up and finally joined the fray, of course with me taking on the role of a mr shootyhead Zealot, a role I soon felt destined to fill with a huge amount of mag dumps no less - as of a few days ago I've racked up just a little over 40,000 kills thus far. That irony is not at all wasted on me.

There are many elements of the game I could no doubt dive into all that make up what is the DT experience, I will keep it simple however as everything from the look of the game and maps, the level of interaction as a group required to push through all to the ease of use of jumping into a session and the absolute manic chaos that transpires once you do. Now the 72 hour mark I can now say without any form of measure that Darktide is one of my all-time favourite cooperative experiences - playing with Raid, Snowy and El Gaucho has had us take on and survive hordes you would not fucking believe the kind that has this old farts heart having severe palpitations more than a couple of times as we barely scraped through by the very skin of our teeth together. Though I don't feel particularly great at the game, I know that I do my part as the rush I tend to get at times unloading/assisting/reviving is simply second to none in any fps genre style game since those fabled L4D2 sessions of old. Everyone fills their roles wonderfully, and coming out the other end at times feels nothing short of nut inducing. No, that's not why my mic randomly cuts off, so don't even go there any of you.

Tempers can and do certainly fray at times against such extreme odds as there often are, but I will tell you that if anything it helps you become a more cohesive unit than anything else possibly could, you play harder you give a little meaner a little more unified and your very reliance on everyone as a team every single motherfucking inch of the way increases more with every new session played together. I have my brothers and they have me - though too often Snowy's enormous mound blocks my vision pathing the way for us all with all due attention, so I shoot him in the broad ass.

Yes I will admit I did recently suggest I was totally burned out on the game, this was in fact merely a recognition of how full on the game can actually be to play especially for my role at times I feel I've come off sessions on the harder difficulties feeling as if I was about to lose my sight and I had to have a little lie down to recover, I kid you not, fuck off I'm in my 50's I don't have the insta bloody recovery slot I once did!

What else can I say about it? Oh yes, please don't die. Get some much needed content out to the community asap FatShark, I love the maps but we are clearly desperate for something new.

[Animalmother]

It's a great game alright and Fatshark seem to keep it constantly updated. Lately they added that progress gives you ingame currency, which was also backdated from the time you started the character.

It's a bastard hard game at times and more so when you're stuck with bellends who run about like headless chickens. But I've mostly experienced other players that help each other and run back to check if you're lagging behind or rescue downed players. I generally play as a Veteran or Ogyrn, the other classes don't suit me. Few things beat bludgeoning a horde of enemies into a maggoty cloud.

[Wrathbone]

Star Citizen

If you’re not aware, Star Citizen is free to play until 29th May. I installed it mostly out of morbid curiosity and it did not go well.

Once it had downloaded I was prompted to create an account and sign in, only to find it wouldn’t let me as it kept saying I was unauthorised after entering the code it emails you. After each attempt, it wiped out my login details (despite ticking remember me) and I had to enter them again manually. Eventually I gave up on the assumption that the servers were fucked and came back the next day, where I was finally allowed in.

It takes an absolute age to get to the main menu - several minutes at least. Once in, I created a character and found myself in some kind of space bedroom. Immediately I realised the framerate was terrible, skipping between about 25-40fps on a 4080 with 32gb of DDR5 RAM. I turned off some likely culprits in the settings and put it down from very high to high. No change. I gave the game a restart and several minutes later, no change. I resigned myself to slow, choppy performance and ploughed on.

A big control panel next to the door beckoned me with the word OPEN in glowing letters, so naturally I tried to use it and explore the galaxy. Except it didn’t work. I tried clicking it. I tried pressing F, as I noticed it was prompting me. Nothing. I tried clicking then pressing F. I tried pressing F then clicking. I eventually realised it wanted me to long-press F to bring up a contextual menu and then click. That didn’t work. After a few more minutes of prodding in frustration at it, I googled how to open doors and discovered I was not the only one having problems. I tried some of the suggested solutions, including standing at various distances from the button. Ultimately, I never found a way to open it before I quit in utter confusion. As a final insult, it crashed upon exit and automatically started the game again.

I may go back to it tonight to see if a controller works, but good god is it a mess. If after a decade of development you can’t even open the fucking door in the starting room, let alone run the game on powerful hardware at a decent or stable framerate, it’s a sad state of affairs. So far I’ve seen nothing to convince me Star Citizen isn’t the scam people claim it to be.

[Raid]

Yeah, I tried so hard to enjoy Star Citizen when I played it last year, but the number of bugs in fundamental systems made it entirely unplayable. I can't remember a single title in my 35 years of gaming where the inventory system just didn't work - picking an item up worked maybe 10% of the time. I never managed to complete a single bounty mission, as the last of a group of targets always spawned in an inaccessible portion of the map. Even the bits that worked were an utter chore to play. If you died while on foot, you spawned back at the last station you visited the medical station of, but your ship remained on the planet you left it. You either had to fly back out to retrieve it (either in a friend's ship or another of your own), or wait ten minutes while your "insurance" retrieved it for you.

These things would be excusable if the game had just entered an early-alpha state, but it's been playable for years now, and the fact that they're unfixed tells me everything I need to know about their development priorities.

[Maturin]

Just be thankful you didn't get rinsed! The amounts of money some people have liberally spaffed towards this project is eye-watering.

[Alan]

Ive not tried SC in a year or so but I couldnt believe how utterly shit the FPS module was at that time. It was like the worst 360 era FPS in extra jelly.


XDefiant
I know, I know, lol Ubi, stupid name, dumb game etc... (but at least they dropped the "Tom Clancy's" from it ¬_¬)
So its finally out and I'm having a blast with it! Its very very very CoD with a touch of Overwatch. As someone that really quite enjoys some mindless matches of CoD but hates the bullshit of killstreaks this is hitting the spot. There is the bullshit of abilities but they're nowhere as annoying as streaks in CoD and theyre less powerful than in Overwatch. The fire guys from The Division are the only ones that really annoy me and really only because they make your character go "ooh ahh" because of the fire dots (incendiary ammo, Molotov's). Having a lot of fun with the shield guy and running in willynilly shield bashing folk. I'm terrible at it, as I am at CoD but its fast and its fun and the TTK fairly decent.

The UI is also a lot more tidy than CoD. Even though XDef is free the 60quid CoD is unrelenting with its "FUCKING BUY SHIT YOU TIGHT BASTARD!" stuff. XDef is trying to hawk shit too but its more restrained... somewhat. It also seems to be all cosmetic, the only gameplay thing you can pay for is early access to an extra faction (ability set) but you unlock that with in game XP as you go anyway so I can live with that.

As someone that wants to sometimes play some CoD but never wants to pay for CoD this fits the bill quite well. Oh and it also segregates mouse and controller players! The thing everyone should copy from CoD where if you are playing with a controller you play on the console servers (unless you opt out) with all the pad players and console players can plug in a mouse and play on the PC servers! Every game should have this because sometimes I want to plank my arse on the couch and controller it and I so wish Siege had this.

Also they clearly want us to shorten it to xD so lets not do that ¬_¬


Dota 2
Not played in years now but man they nerfed my KotL. Gimme back mana leak and permanent god mode again! Blinding Light is a great skill but basekit slow/stun was way better. ;_;

Heat Signature
Ive been going back to this lately and its just such a fun, well thought out little game. I feel it doesn't get enough credit. Its a wee gem.

Street Fighter 6
Akumas out! Wee!