Currently Playing

[Sly Boots]

Nooooooooooooooooo. I think I finally see what it was like to not like Far Cry 2.

To be wrong, you mean

[Medicine Man]

Ouch.

[Snowy]

Nooooooooooooooooo. I think I finally see what it was like to not like Far Cry 2.

Everything, how long you got?

[Alan]

Invisible Inc
I think the name is what made me keep putting off sticking this on. Jings though, this games fantastic! The mechanics seem to make every level a by the seat of your pants affair. The most fun I’ve had with a TBS game in ages.

[Sly Boots]

I played a few missions but didn't stick with it for some reason. I do keep meaning to go back to it, though.

[Snowy]

I played a few missions but didn't stick with it for some reason. I do keep meaning to go back to it, though.

This.

I have been playing a metric tonne of Forza Horizons 4 of late. I loved the old Test Drive Unlimited games with a passion back in the day, and this is the first title that replicates that feeling. Also, the way they have set it up works perfectly for me, in that you play what you want to play. Often driving games will put in oodles of race styles and when you come up against one that just defies your ability, you get blocked (looking at you, lawnmower racing from Wreckfest) and if you are called Snowy, you lose interest.

With Forza, your open world map (set in a weirdly collapsed version of the lake district and Edinburgh, but on UK roads with UK signage, people driving on the left etc) is riddled with stuff to do, but that if it doesn't interest you can be completely ignored. For example, I love cross country races, both on and off-road, but I just don't get drifting, I can't see the appeal. When playing then, I completely ignore the drift events and focus on those I will enjoy.

Not only that but every few days of real time, the season changes in-game. This affects the map in enjoyable ways, giving you dry, wet, snowy conditions etc. It has a lovely day/night cycle and with the spectacular graphics this looks amazing. Tear-arsing up country roads as the rising sun illuminates the morning mist looks awesome.

Sure it suffers from the standard faults of all driving games, most notably that every character in every driving game is a total dudebro Edwin who needs shooting, preferably using a cannon>sun combo. That is something you can't get past though, all driving games have a terrible premise, this one being that a festival has been set up in the lake district but rather than bands it is for petrolheads to drive like maniacs. Not exactly plausible, but you just pop that to one side and see what the game has to offer.

The answer is loads. Masses of races of all sorts of stripe. Hundreds of vehicles to buy, win, find in barns, auction. Massive amounts of customisation of said vehicles, from paint-jobs to performance upgrades (and if you can't be bothered to make your own paintjob or spec out your own upgrades, just grab someone else's online, all helpfully star rated).

It's fucking brilliant.

[Drarok]

Sounds lovely, but it's £50 in the Microsoft store, so they can fuck alllll the way off.

[Snowy]

Ouch. I upgraded my rig to Win10 a month or so back, and it was on sale at that point so I snaffled it. I had a look around and it is £30 via CD Keys, so still quite a lot although I would say that's a fair price (you do get a lot of game).

RPS did a very nice review that shows the game better than I have described it.

[DjchunKfunK]

You can get a three month Game Pass sub for a quid, that gives you access to Forza on PC. You also get Gears 4, Operencia, Sea of Thieves, Crackdown 3, State of Decay 2 and some others.

[DjchunKfunK]

Dark Souls: Remastered

Decided to play some more Dark Souls over the weekend after finishing up Rage 2. To spice things up a bit I decided to use two mods, random items and random enemies. Both are pretty self explanatory, the random items mixes up all the items in the game meaning you can find boss souls as drops in the world and high-end weapons in starter areas. It's tuned so that you will still get the items like keys that you need to progress.

The enemy one is a bit more nuanced. You can set it so that everything is random which means bosses can spawn anywhere and bosses can be replaced by normal enemies if you want. You can also get the game to build a difficulty curve for you so that you don't get really hard enemies early. I decided to go for all random enemies but kept the bosses locked in their boss areas which led to some really interesting situations.

In the Asylum the Asylum Demon is always replaced by the Capra Demon and he doesn't spawn down the bottom so you can cheese him through a door early on, which is a big help as you can only use starter weapons. If you die before you fight him he will spawn down in the boss room which makes for quite a difficult fight.

Once in Firelink Shrine I managed to make it to the first bonfire in Undead Burge without any really problems but then my issues started. The enemies I had to face to make it through the first house were very difficult and required constant kiting back to the bonfire, after a fair number of deaths and with my decent weapons nearly broken I decided I needed to reset the seed as it was just too difficult. Second time round things were a lot better and I managed to make it to the first boss who turned out to be Seath the Scaless. After running up the tower to escape his crystal attack he promptly fell off the edge. Fighting such tough enemies and bosses early does require you to cheese things a bit and you can get some horrid spawns at times but I've been enjoying it.

I fought Smaug down in Darkroot Basin, who also fell off an edge, and had to reset the seed again when I got Priscilla in the Butterfly area, as she goes invisible and there is no snow on the ground to see her footprints it makes it almost impossible to beat her. Also their is no death from falling in the Butterfly area as they obviously didn't code that in as the boss usually flies.

I'm currently making my way through Darkroot to where Sif usually is. I would like to ring the first bell but the enemies up to that boss are stupidly hard so I'm going to need to level up a bit more first.

[Mantis]

The model for Seath the Scaleless is absolutely huge, it must have looked ridiculous on that tiny length of wall in the boss area for the Burg.

Could have potentially gone very badly wrong for you if he'd hit you with the attack which causes curse and you'd died a few times. Being stuck in cursed status with hugely reduced health would be game breaking at that stage. That's generally why I stay away from mods like this, I just do various challenge runs within the base game and avoid user made changes to the core experience.

[DjchunKfunK]

It did look funny. I was watching a playthrough on Youtube that uses the same mod yesterday and they had Seath spawn in the valley between Blightown and Firelink. He ends up flying through the air and clipping through the walls, was quite funny.

If I had been cursed I would have probably used an editor to fix it, I'm playing offline anyway to avoid getting banned as Namco are pretty strict about mod usage, so altering the save wouldn't have been a major issue.

[Sly Boots]

So, aside from Druidstone (which I've posted about in the game thread), I've been tinkering recently with a lot of games without playing any to completion. Most I'll continue with, but none have grabbed me obsessively just yet:

Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark

So after playing the demo I did buy the full version when I saw it discounted somewhere. Pleasingly it did continue from the point I'd played the demo up to, as I'd put a couple of hours in - despite the fact I didn't play it on Steam. I've no idea what dark sorcery is at work here, but appreciated it nonetheless.

It's ok, better than ok really. People who played FF Tactics seem to like it a whole heck of a lot, but for me it's paling alongside Druidstone while built from similar parts. With the disclaimer that I've only played the first 3 hours so this may change, the tools and options you're given just aren't as fundamentally useful or interesting. Often I'm just using the standard attacks as the ones that cause debuffs and the like cause way less damage, while the chance of getting the debuff to activate seems quite low (for instance I've tried the attack that roots an enemy to the spot upwards of 10 times, and despite a chance of 75% have only have it happen once). There are no attacks of opportunity or any penalties for just walking around opponents, so overall the tactics side feels a bit meh to me.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy

Recently released on PC for the first time, I've been having quite a blast with this. I've just started on the third of the three games included and looking forward to playing more. I'm sure most people here are already intimately familiar with the series from consoles, but suffice to say I was pleasantly surprised by the investigations around each trial case, and the level of deduction you have to use occasionally to get the right result. It's a game where you really benefit from reading each line of dialogue rather than skipping (for the most part) and keeping the pieces of the case in your head, building up a picture about what actually happened as you go. There are a few duff cases - the circus one in particular did my head in because of the irritating characters - but equally quite a few that have been excellent. I'm a sucker for mysteries and puzzles and this scratches both itches nicely.

Astrologaster

A little oddity that popped up on Steam the other day. Looked intriguing and wasn't expensive so thought what the heck. And glad I did! I can't really think of another game quite like it. Basically you play a real-life Elizabethan doctor, Simon Forman, who helped cure the bubonic plague in London. After doing so patients begin to come to you with various cases, which you solve through a process of listening to their symptoms and consulting astrological charts to diagnose them. All of this is delivered in a really nice animated pop-up book style (you manually drag the pages over to go to a new scene), and each patient is introduced with a 15th century-style madrigal which are often very funny but also exceptionally composed and recorded (for an indie game). Basically, think Blackadder II for the type of humour on show. Never crude but nevertheless amusing. If you don't mind something unusual, well worth a look.

Thief

Started replaying the (without checking) 2014 reboot. And, you know what, this may be heresy but I still kind of like it. It feels pretty fun creeping and climbing around the city, sneaking in and out of people's houses and for the most part the missions are well designed also. The story is arse, but that seems par the course for most games these days.

[Mantis]

Minion Masters

1v1 or 2v2. It's a card based strategy game a bit like that Magic The Gathering one that came out a couple of years ago. Your mana bar charges on a consistent basis and you spend it by throwing out various costed cards which then march towards your opponents half of the map to attack their hero/keep. The map is split into two lanes with a bridge in the centre of each, which if you have control of increases your XP, allowing your hero to level up and use certain boons or skills to tip the battle in your favour.

It's fast paced and really entertaining, there's an amusing variety of units and it seems like it has potential for an interesting set of deck combinations depending on how you want to play.

Free to play though and as usual with these games you are constantly bombarded with things on the menu. I'm not sure whether there's any pay to win element yet, but I'm having a blast with it so far and haven't spent any money.

[Stormbringer]

Astrologaster

A little oddity that popped up on Steam the other day. Looked intriguing and wasn't expensive so thought what the heck. And glad I did! I can't really think of another game quite like it. Basically you play a real-life Elizabethan doctor, Simon Forman, who helped cure the bubonic plague in London. After doing so patients begin to come to you with various cases, which you solve through a process of listening to their symptoms and consulting astrological charts to diagnose them. All of this is delivered in a really nice animated pop-up book style (you manually drag the pages over to go to a new scene), and each patient is introduced with a 15th century-style madrigal which are often very funny but also exceptionally composed and recorded (for an indie game). Basically, think Blackadder II for the type of humour on show. Never crude but nevertheless amusing. If you don't mind something unusual, well worth a look.

My sister worked on this one -- she was the medical consultant for 16th century diseases/ailments.