The Gamers Arms

There are some really good bits in Mankind Divided and I like what they do with Prague over the course of the story. I think they refine the mechanics a bit more from HR and overall it's a more enjoyable game to play. The end of the story is not great though, it suffers from being the middle of what was meant to be a trilogy.

I've been playing Assassin's Creed Origins on PS4. I'm not very far in yet so it remains to be seen how irritating and cutscene heavy the story will get, or how repetitive the side quests will start to become; but I am really enjoying it for now. I'm being pretty thorough in the first few areas after the prologue so I'm sure I'll start to get bored when I start encountering the same style of activities in later areas, but it's been so chilled out just exploring the big map at my own pace and doing things as I find them. The usual waypoint heavy UI that Ubisoft are horrific for is fairly relaxed in this game, and I like that you don't know what the challenges are until you actually get to the area and they are revealed.

The change to RPG mechanics for the levelling and combat kind of feels more natural too, but it's been so long since I played another AC game that I can't really remember well enough to properly compare them. I'm quite liking it though, the loot isn't too heavily spammed at you so you're not constantly managing an inventory system.

Being set in Egypt helps a lot too, because I really enjoy this setting and so few games have ever made use of it.

I really enjoyed it, played it quite organically where I followed up the quests that interested me, explored, did the story etc, was fun. Still playing Odyssey too, which follows in a similar vein but ancient greece.

Re-playing Morrowind. I don't think I've ever properly played it in the past with no cheating whatsoever. Far more rewarding, unsurprisingly.

That said, it hasn't been too difficult thus far. Just going through the Fighters' Guild quests, toughening up.

Hopefully you've modded the tits out of it. Makes such an awesome gem.

I've only ever completed Morrowind the once, and probably a decade or more ago now. I don't think I could play it now, I'd find it too off-putting to look at. I keep holding out hope that Skywind project will one day be complete, but that's probably a pipe dream.

Rusty wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 17, 2019 4:41 pm

Hopefully you've modded the tits out of it. Makes such an awesome gem.

Haven't touched any yet, find it time consuming deciding which ones are correct to put on. When I get a chance I'm going to set up graphics ones but to be honest, I don't even mind that. It's just so fucking full of content. I loved Skyrim and Oblivion there's just so much to do and things to see. I can't imagine getting bored of it any time soon.

On a semi-related topic the other day I finally got stuck into the Enderal total conversion mod for Skyrim, the one that was recently released for free on Steam for Skyrim owners.

It's really good. Only ten or so hours in but I can't quite believe it was made by amateur modders. The voice work in particular is really professional, which was a nice surprise.

Definitely check it out if you have Skyrim sitting in your Steam library (it doesn't even have to be installed).

Started playing a great platformer made in a retro style called Odallus: The Dark Call, where you play a barbarian called...HAGGIS!

https://www.gog.com/game/odallus_the_dark_call

Quite hard, but I really love the graphics and theme.

Stormbringer wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 17, 2019 5:40 pm

Started playing a great platformer made in a retro style called Odallus: The Dark Call, where you play a barbarian called...HAGGIS!

https://www.gog.com/game/odallus_the_dark_call

Quite hard, but I really love the graphics and theme.

I have a spare Humble key for this if anyone is interested in playing it.

Mass Effect Andromeda

Good lord the voice acting in this is fucking woeful

Animalmother wrote: ↑

Mon Mar 18, 2019 4:44 pm

Mass Effect Andromeda

Good lord the voice acting in this is fucking woeful

There's some real standout ones, it's true. Is that the 'my face is tired' character? She was literally the worst, compounded by the fact she's one of the NPCs you'll speak to most regularly outside your ship-mates.

The rest aren't too bad for the most part, though.

I've been dumping a good bit of time on the 2012 Tomb Raider game.

I love it. I love the reinvention of the character, the moving away from stereotypical tropes, the loose but just enough to keep you going storyline, mechanics and stuff. I do feel stealth and approach could be slightly more open, but they've hit a good balance in terms of not making the maps so open that you lose interest like some fully open world games.

Production values are really good. I'm impressed. It not groundbreaking, but does what a game should - entertain and take you on a journey.

Just watched my five-year-old son play through Golden Axe III.

Man, I love the GA series. Definitely up there in my (very small) "favourite games of all time" list.

Man, I played one of the Golden Axe games to death back when I was small. I think it was on the Commodore 64, but I also had a Megadrive later on so it might have been on that.

Can't wait for my kid to be old enough to play games, assuming brain-implant VR hasn't killed off consoles by then.