Current gaming

[Ginger Yellow]

I'm not digging the story as much as the first one They seem to be compensating for the lack of central mystery, at least after the first act, by just shoving more dialogue at you. But otherwise, yeah, it's a big improvement.

[Snake Plissken]

Power Wash Simulator is free on Gamepass.

Yes, you are welcome.

[hobbes]

God of War Ragnarok anyone?

I've been replaying Spiderman but on the PS5 updated version. There's noticeably more side stuff and easter eggs in there.

[Mr Delicieux]

CD projekt red released a remastered version of the Witcher 3 leading up to Christmas, which amounted to a free upgrade for existing owners of the game.
What a trip! I could live without the voice actor making Geralt so incredibly dull sounding, and the game does not signpost the big decisions as well as I'd like, but minor gripes aside, I don't think I've ever had so much fun or experienced so much variety within a game. The side quests are what makes it for me, and at its best feels as though I'm playing through a series of the better storylines you'd get in something like Star Trek: the next generation as in telling a story which resonates today, albeit in a fantastical setting.

Still having great fun with PES 2021, the master league mode remains a true personal gaming joy.

[Ginger Yellow]

God of War Ragnarok anyone?

I was playing it before Christmas but I've kind of run out of steam. I'm not enjoying the combat or puzzling as much as I did in the "first" one, and the story is just pissing me off.

[hobbes]

CD projekt red released a remastered version of the Witcher 3 leading up to Christmas, which amounted to a free upgrade for existing owners of the game.
What a trip! I could live without the voice actor making Geralt so incredibly dull sounding, and the game does not signpost the big decisions as well as I'd like, but minor gripes aside, I don't think I've ever had so much fun or experienced so much variety within a game.

I spent 8 months playing it in 2018. Amazing game.

I was playing it before Christmas but I've kind of run out of steam. I'm not enjoying the combat or puzzling as much as I did in the "first" one, and the story is just pissing me off.

Yeah, I've persevered with it based on not having much else novel to play. I agree though, it's not a patch on the "first."
And after playing lots of open world it's just frustrating when you can't just clamber over everything.

It's funny when you play a game that has universal acclaim and it just doesn't do it for you. I've been trying The Last of Us again, thinking it must be me whose wrong about it being annoying and boring to play. And yet here I am again, just about to get to the Capitol Building and it's been a relentless trudge of dullness interspersed by exactly the same fight scene over and over again against fecking zombies.

[diggedy derek]

We've been playing Stray recently where you are a cat roaming a post-apocalyptic underground world. I'm completely gripped.

[delicatemoth]

The thing about Witcher 3 is that it is so fucking grim, it wears me out after a while. No-one ever has a normal conversation, all interactions are shot through with bitter cynicism ("I'd like some armour that is light and flexible, please" "I suppose you want it to wipe your arse as well!"). But there is something weirdly lovable about Geralt and the large open world is cool.

I watched a few streams of Stray and decided to pass. The cat is wonderful, but the exploration did not look engaging to me, especially with those blob things that go after you. I realised that what I actually want is a game where cats do cat things - basically Untitled Cat Game - and I'm hoping that Little Kitty Big City will come through whenever it's ready ("cats don't have deadlines").

Recent adventures I've picked up - Pentiment, a murder mystery set in Switzerland at the start of the Reformation with lush medieval-style art, and The Excavation Of Hob's Barrow, a moody horror set on the Derbyshire moors in Victorian times.

[Ginger Yellow]

Surprise demo of the new Steamworld game just dropped. It's Anno mashed up with Dungeon Keeper and I'm super excited for the full release.

[johnr]

Anyone played/playing Immortality? It's immensely enjoyable, and something happens a few hours in that I have never seen - in fact, that cannot happen - in any other medium. And it's absolutely chilling, to the bone, when it does.

[Ginger Yellow]

I played it when it first came out. The craft is really impressive, but I found I liked it less as a game the more I played it - the thrill of the thing you're talking about wore off for me after an hour or two. I preferred Her Story, where the limitations of Barlow's structure were mostly masked by the interface design, which felt more detectivey thanjImmortality's video scrubbing/cutting, which just gets tiresome toward the end. The bigger problem for me was that while I enjoyed what was going on with the individual movies, I really didn't care about the overarching mystery, even more so once its nature began to become apparent.

[johnr]

Yes, I see that potential flaw. I'm a dunce when it comes to following narrative in any medium, so the gradual revelation was fascinating - and necessary - for me. To be honest - having read some plot summaries - it turns out that, being rubbish at video games, me and ms johnr missed so much stuff that I'm surprised we pieced anything together at all.

I loved it, though, and think about it most days.

[hobbes]

Not long until my PSVR2 arrives. Looking forward to the VR horizon game

[Mr Delicieux]

The stone cold N64 classic GoldenEye 64 is now available on Xbox via gamepass and Nintendo switch.

It's based on what was to be a remastered Xbox 360 release which never saw the light of day.
CORRECTION: it isn't, it's an upscaled version of the original N64 release.

Graphics aside - which now look scruffy by today's standards (yet are perfectly serviceable) - you can see why this game was so highly thought of when it came out in 1997, it's so faithful to the film, and looking back I think it did an awful lot to bring James Bond back into the cultural fold, but I won't hold that against what remains a very fun game to play.

Rare were a very special games publisher weren't they.

[Mr Delicieux]

I've had a fortnight where I've been scoring some absolute beauties on PES2021, Brian.
Pogba from 35 yards!

[Mr Delicieux]

I scored a goal like what Messi would score in real life!
The one upside of being laid up with a dodgy back is getting to polish my gaming skills.

[Ginger Yellow]

Release schedule is getting too busy to keep up. Pharaoh remaster came out last week. Making my way slowly through Dead Space. Company of Heroes 3 is next week. Diablo IV beta next month. Metroid Prime remaster is out, but I can't really justify picking it up with so much other stuff to play. Midnight Suns just got a free weekend and a fairly steep discount, which persuaded me to to buy it, despite not really liking the Fire Emblem aspect. The missions are great though.

[hobbes]

So Horizon: Call of the Mountain is pretty fun to start with. It turns into a bit of a one trick pony with climbing climbing climbing.

The graphics on the VR2 are amazing though.
Sorely tempted to get a steering wheel and Grand Tourismo 7 as that looks astonishing.

I suspect it'll still be a bit of a novelty, at least until Beat Sabre arrives shortly.

[hobbes]

Beat Sabre arrived.
I've decided not to punt the vr2 after all

[Levin]

I've been tempted by Baldurs Gate, but I'd need to buy a graphics card. Which is not happening at the moment, I don't have £300 plus the cost of the game.

[johnr]

Just finished a couple of hours on Zelda totk, ms johnr is about to do a stint. We're over 100 hours in and no sign of boredom yet. On the contrary, was just surprised to find out how to find the Sage's Wills. What a game it is.

[hobbes]

Been playing it for a week on holiday. It suffers from the same issue Botw did. In fact even more so. It's TOO open and too unfocused.
There's nothing that moves the story along. Add that to the absolutely brutal learning curve and mechanics and you spend far too much time avoiding fights or gathering resources or fucking cooking FFS, so it gets pretty dull. That and the balsa wood weapons turn it into a perpetual resource grind. And the side missions seldom seem to add anything much either.
The shrines are nice but again, 4 shrines for an upgrade is too much. It means you're just resource hunting again.

I mean, The Witcher 3 is a huge game, but at no point does it feel like you're just wandering around pointlessly waiting for something to happen. And say, Horizon for example is laser focused on the story, including the side missions which build out the story more.
It's not a terrible game. It's really good in parts. And the new talents are quite clever for making you think in a different way. (Although once you've figured out you can go under something and get in, it gets boring.) But it still has all the bad bits - the repetitive cut scenes, bizarre, irritating, incidental music, twee graphics and sound and horrible weird attitudes to women (I mean, high heels in the desert? What the fuck?) It's typical Nintendo really.
It's an "hour at a time as a diversion" game rather than "days on end deeply embedded in the world, just one more mission and I'll go to bed oh god it's 3am!" game.
I never finished BotW and I've no desire to really. I suspect TotK will be the same. Whereas most games I want to get to the, with these I can't really be bothered.

[hobbes]

Still, I've got the blood and wine DLC to do on my second playthrough of Witcher3 and Starfield is out this week and I've 2 eps of the Expanse game to play through, so I'll probably put Totk on the back burner for a while.

[hobbes]

So, Starfield. It's buggier than the Scottish Highlands in midgey season. Good lord is at buggy. If I use certain weapons my character freezes and my head disappears. I've had a couple of occasions where I've had to reload a previous save point because trigger points weren't triggering.
And I had one companion lose their shit at me and refuse to work with me again when I returned fire on a security robot that was firing at me.

It's really, really bad.

As a game it's ok. But it throws you in with no real context and then bombards you with so many missions\side missions\tasks to do that within a couple of hours, it starts to get a bit stressful.
Oh and the aiming control stick is calibrated badly so that it doesn't move at al with a small movement but builds exponentially so a slightly bigger move sends your targeting reticule miles past.

The actual game is ok so far. No better than ok though.

[hobbes]

So I've persisted so far with Starfield. It's not terrible but it's sort of a bit too unfocused like the Zelda ones. But unlike Zelda you can't just mosey around, you're in and out of menus constantly to travel. I think it's a game that they hope people will play for years like GTA5 online.
But who has time for that shit?