Currently Playing

[Wrathbone]

If you ever do a YouTube playthrough as a jerk president, I would 100% watch that.

[Sly Boots]

As for me, I'm currently playing Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One

As I may have mentioned on here previously, Frogwares' Holmes games are a bit of a guilty pleasure for me - I recognise they can be a bit janky but I enjoy them in spite of that. So, it pains me to say this is probably the weakest of their modern 'trilogy' of Crimes and Punishment, Devil's Daughter and this. The older games are so different to these three that there's almost no value on comparing them imo.

I actually did a few episodes of the game on my channel, but I just wasn't feeling it, so I let it peter out. But I went back in to potter about more just by myself, as it were, to see if it could be redeemed. And... it's ok, I guess.

There are a few problems here that weren't present in the preceding games - chiefly that there are no wrong answers when 'solving' a case. You collect the evidence, question suspects and then pretty much choose whichever one you like on a whim, and are never informed if it's the correct choice or not. You can justify it in different ways, but essentially either suspect (usually it's down to two) has means, motive, opportunity and circumstantial evidence against them. But in the absence of damning hard evidence or confession, the result is every case ends on a bit of a wet fart and lasting uncertainty whether you got it 'right'.

The decision to make it an open world game is another issue, you just run around the town to and from different crime scenes, pointlessly. The only enjoyment I got from this was the cries of surprise from pedestrians and children as you sprint past and shoulder-barge them - because it amused me to picture Holmes as a complete lunatic charging manically around the city There is almost zero point to the open world, and rather than conveying a sense of place, it just frustrates for getting in the way of the meat of the game.

Oh, and the less said about the combat, the better. The decision to turn Sherlock Holmes into Dirty Harry was a questionable one at best

I hope the devs go back to the format that worked so well in C&P, the best Holmes game by far imo.

[Sly Boots]

If you ever do a YouTube playthrough as a jerk president, I would 100% watch that.

You literally read my mind

[Animalmother]

Finished Sniper Elite 5 yesterday. I actually held back on finishing it as I was enjoying it so much but those Nazis ain't going to explode their own testicles! I'll probably go back and try and get the challenges I missed. Really hope the next game is set in the Korean War which is where it should be heading after the end of The V2 game.

[ManBearSquid]

From the one mission that I've played of the 4th game, it seems that there's some replayability for different runs, something that I really enjoy about games like this and Hitman etc.

Xcom: Chimera Squad

Played a little bit of this last night and it seems like some really enjoyable, bite-size Xcom. I've wanted to go back to Xcom 2 WotC for some time, after losing an Iron Man run due to a long break from the game and it all going tits up upon my return, but I haven't really been up for the time investment required. This seems like it'll scratch that itch.

It's a bit odd, tonally, with the dialogue and voice acting, but I like the overall premise.

[Snowy]

Finished Sniper Elite 5 yesterday. I actually held back on finishing it as I was enjoying it so much but those Nazis ain't going to explode their own testicles! I'll probably go back and try and get the challenges I missed. Really hope the next game is set in the Korean War which is where it should be heading after the end of The V2 game.

Raid and I finished it the other week, and as he hasn't played 4 we moved onto that.

I enjoyed 5 a lot, but replaying 4 the game gives you much more opportunities to be a sniper, decent vistas that you can reach from where to cause carnage. 5 seemed to delight in pitching you in close-up fights which are not the game's forte, especially given the dim adversaries.

I also took exception at some of the stone eagle locations - one being in the exit to a pipe on a dam with water pouring over it - even knowing where it is it was nearly invisible. That felt like a real con, I have always enjoyed finding those by keeping a look out on rooftops etc.

[Animalmother]

Yeah that's a fair point, the long range sniping kind of disappears on the later levels. I'd say I did the vast majority of kills with the pistol at close range. I gave up looking for stone eagles pretty early as they just became a chore to find. I also couldn't unlock the K98 rifle even though I completed the required signature kill for it, I know this will be fixed in a patch but still a wee bit disappointing.

One kill I have to share is when I shot an officer in the back and he stubbled forward. The follow-up shot went up his jacksey and exited his neck, all in glorious x-rayed slow motion

[Sly Boots]

Yeah that's a fair point, the long range sniping kind of disappears on the later levels. I'd say I did the vast majority of kills with the pistol at close range. I gave up looking for stone eagles pretty early as they just became a chore to find. I also couldn't unlock the K98 rifle even though I completed the required signature kill for it, I know this will be fixed in a patch but still a wee bit disappointing.

One kill I have to share is when I shot an officer in the back and he stubbled forward. The follow-up shot went up his jacksey and exited his neck, all in glorious x-rayed slow motion

They call that the "poop-shoot"...

[Sly Boots]

I picked up Suzerain in the Steam sale and have finished it a couple of times now. You play as the president of a fictional eastern-bloc country trying to manage and develop the nation, but it’s a narrative game rather than a strategy game, where all you ultimately do is have conversations with people and then make decisions. It’s a great way of allowing you to play politics, with a huge scope of possibilities and consequences for your choices that range from subtle backstabbing to sudden crises. If there was a Soviet version of the West Wing that was made into a game, this would be it.

The writing is admittedly a bit wonky at times, but that seems to be mostly due to the translation and it’s not that terrible. Having played through it twice now, I also noticed lots of repeated text for very different styles of play, although it’s surprising how some dialogue comes across totally differently depending on the context. There is enough choice to warrant multiple playthroughs - I played my first president as an idealistic Corbyn-style reformist who tanked the economy and eventually got betrayed by his whole party and was given the boot, whereas my second president was a misogynistic dictator and all-round ratbastard who used bribery, intimidation, police brutality, military expansionism and media censorship to achieve national prosperity and a glorious second term. Public health, education and basic human rights got binned along the way, but if I learned anything it’s that tyrannical lunacy paves the way to success.

Well worth a few quid and several hours to see how well you can ruin a country.

FYI, for anyone else tempted by this, I just spotted it's currently being given away in this month's job-lot of Amazon Prime games. I just refunded my Steam version to grab it.

[Raid]

Thanks for the heads up. I haven't grabbed anything from Prime Games in ages (not since the Twitch hack when I unlinked the accounts). Didn't realise they had their own client now (and it's surprisingly decent) rather than having to go through an unrelated (and otherwise unwanted) service.

[Me99]

I've been playing Starship Troopers Terran command. It's pretty much the game everyone wanted after first watching the film. RTS in the theme of the film with plenty of finding good choke points to fend off enough waves of bugs so you can get a squad down a bug hole and seal if off. Has some basic base building and defensive buildings to help along the way. Also has the powered armour and battlemechs they couldn't afford to put in the film.

Before that it was W40k Chaos Gate, which is like a suped up X-com squad RTS with some nice quality of life additions and surprisingly high production values. For instance, instead of being caught dead if you uncover the enemy too soon, your squad gets all its action points back. Also everyone gets 3 actions points per turn which can be used either for movement or attacks as the game does require you to be a bit more aggressive than X-com, which considering its 4 Grey Knights, does make sense.

[Alan]

Microsoft Solitaire Collection
So I downloaded it to kill some time on my laptop with minimal battery drain. It works perfect on a touch screen which so many bloody games that should dont so good for you MS. I noticed each of the games has a difficulty - pfft thinks I, how can you increase the difficulty in solitaire? I then vowed to quickly defeat it on grandmaster mode and become a grandmaster of Klondike. I quickly found out that it seems the increased difficulty just means basically every deal is unsolvable and you just have to keep brute forcing it till you get one that is solvable. I'm sure I lost a few that were solvable just in one specific way but so many game down to me knowing what cards were left and knowing there was no solution from the start.

Well my friends, after 82 losses my 83rd game was a win. I am a grandmaster of solitaire.

Bow before me.


I had been planning on playing Underrail and I could probably have finished it in the time I wasted becoming a grand master of solitaire.

[Animalmother]

God of War
I started this about a year ago, put it down with the intention of coming back but just forgot. Picked it up again last night and am now going to finish the game. Graphics are beautiful even on the now "old" PS4 version. I am struggling with the combat though, just not very good at these sort of games and tend to rely on the axe throw too much. Also the camera feels too close to Kratos, wish you could back it off a smidge. These aren't real complaints mind you, it is a very good game and cantankerous old bastard Kratos is the best Kratos.

[Raid]

You can currently play F1 2022 as a 10 hour trial through whatever EA's app is called these days (I get it via Gamepass so never actually manually launch it), and given that they've *finally* added VR support (after what, 6 or 7 years of PC VR being a commercial product?) and I hadn't used my racing rig for a month I decided to try it.

It, err, doesn't start with a great first impression. Firstly it took 3 boots for it to actually display in my headset, though in fairness mine isn't officially supported (only Oculus and Vive headsets are, and neither of those are considered modern) and there was a funky interaction between WMR and Steam VR. When I did get it working, the game immediately takes you into the "F1 Life" screen (a decorating sim where you spec out your driver's living room... no, I have no idea what they were thinking either) rather than just letting you select actual driving bits. You can very quickly skip past it all, but then it keeps reminding you of sodding microtransactions. As far as I can tell there's a sodding battle pass.

Given my love of the sport and my appreciation of sim racing games, it feels a bit weird that this is the first time I've actually tried an official F1 game, but to be honest I never really enjoyed open-wheelers in sim games - they're too twitchy and too much like hard work. But not in this, the devs have done a really good job with tweakable driver aids, which let you set up the sim to be as arcadey or sim-ish as you want. It's a bit odd that if you select the middle of the difficulty settings it still gives you fully automated gear switching and brake assist, but they're easy enough to find and turn off, and you can do it mid-lap rather than having to go back to the main menus.

Aaaaanyway, I did about 30 time-trial laps of Silverstone in both a Ferrari and a Mercedes (which are appreciably different), got a 1:32.something, which is about 8 seconds faster than this week's pole time. Maybe one in ten of those was actually valid as I kept going off at Club (which invalidates the next lap to prevent you gaining an advantage). I'm e-mailing all of the team principals as we speak because I'm obviously an undiscovered talent. I'll not mention that I did it in the dry on soft tyres.

I'll not be buying it, at least not until it's heavily discounted. I had two proper crashes... by which I mean the software crashed, I actually didn't hit the barriers once, and the monetisation invading the menus is just gross in a game this expensive. But it's fun, and I may play through the full ten hours of trial period.

[Lenny Solidus]

Need for Speed Payback

Picked up for the price of a mocha and spit on me y'know what, I'm having a very enjoyable time with it already. If you can't always afford the latest greatest Forza title (even at its current sale price) you could do a lot worse than this, after all the backlash this game received at launch it's a fairly solid package. Lots of cars, in depth customisation plenty to do and see those much loved police chases burnout style take downs the works. Handling takes getting used to but comes together with upgrades nicely over time. It runs very well thanks to Frostbite 3 and cars are highly detailed because of it maybe not immaculate Forza detail but good enough.

Admittedly, I'm a colossal fucking idiot for thinking I was smart buying it at £4 on a key site when the deluxe version was on sale through Steam for £7.49. Oh well, live and learn. I'm having fun anyways.

Control

Eight hours in and I want to almost give up on this, never have I found myself so consistently infuriated with what should be rather basic pathfinding toward the next objective area in a game. Whoever the fuck designed the awful completely useless in game map, just fuck you. Sadist.




In all seriousness though, it's a beautifully designed game the combat is great and it becomes ever more a completely unique feeling experience the further you delve. I got the hang of navigating, eventually. Thank you sign posts and fast travel.