Vampyr: I didn't love this, but I finished it as the story was somewhat compelling. The combat was so janky and everyone was kind of humorless. I did like the moody atmosphere and the voice acting. Too much backtracking, which reminded me of Dragon Age 2.
Tacoma: Excellent, short game that can be done in a session or two. The story seems to be predictable, but it takes some interesting turns.
Hellblade: I wanted to like this better, but the level design and puzzles irritated me. The backtracking was strange and I guess indicative of the lower budget. Surprisingly, the fighting was a positive. The game felt like it went on too long with repetitive screaming and visions.
Battlefield V: Pretty standard FPS campaign levels. The only War Stories that stood out were the mother/daughter MGS-type and the German tank episode.
I'm probably about 5-7 hours away from completing Spider-Man, so that'll be a May game.
I got Dragon's Dogma for Switch, but haven't played much of it yet. I also got FFXII:TZA and I'm really enjoying it, so I'm hoping to finish that at least. But I have a bad track record when it comes to FF games, so we'll see.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (PC) - 4/5
Another cool From Software game. Lots of awesome environments, cool level design, and many fun bosses and minibosses to fight (though the minibosses get recycled a little too much in the later portions of the game), but it has a few weak points compared to the Souls games - the most notable one being that the extremely frequent checkpoints make exploring the world tremendously less tense and exciting and undercut the otherwise strong level design. Combat is very fun and intense - and not as restrictive as I initially expected it to be; the variety of prosthetic tool subweapons allow for some nice playstyle variety - but I'm not sure I like it as much as the best moments in even the Souls games; blocking and deflecting while managing your posture is a little simpler than managing stamina and positioning in Souls.
Musha Aleste (Genesis) - 4/5
Cool shooter. I'm not really a fan of having to pause to adjust your ship's speed and the one-way cycle through your bits' formations is pretty clunky, but given the Genesis controller there probably wasn't any better way to handle either function, and neither hurts the game much anyway. The game has really good aesthetics and a lot of high points (interesting enemy formations and a handful of particularly neat bosses), but stages are a little overlong and often don't support their length well, making some stretches of the game feel pretty repetitive. The difficulty is low too, but the game does at least have you moving all over the screen and adjusting your aim a lot, so I think the intensity makes up for it, similar to Elemental Master. Not one of the best games in its genre, but I really enjoyed it. 1CCed on normal, but not hard mode yet.
Axelay (SNES) - 4/5
Another shooter. A bit uneven; the horizontal levels are absolutely rock-solid (the latter two, especially the final one, are excellent) but the vertical levels are a little limp with their simplistic level design and awkward visual effects that somewhat impact readability. The weapon selection is odd given that many of the weapons are extremely gimmicky and end up not being very useful; the amount of actual choice you have is limited given that you'll mostly just pick the same weapons every time. That said, the weapons that you likely will end up using are pretty varied and have some unique applications, and though the vertical levels aren't fantastic, they aren't bad either. I don't like this game as Musha but I think its high points are strong enough for me to still consider it a great game. 1CCed on normal, but not hard mode here either.
The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX (GBC) - 3/5
I've played all the console Zeldas but none of the handheld ones, so I ended up starting here on some friends' recommendations. Very enjoyable game, probably a little better-paced than A Link to the Past with a charming cast of characters and world vaguely reminiscent of Majora's Mask's. The dungeons were solid all the way through, and Roc's Feather is a cool item for 2D Zelda that allowed for a lot of neat combat scenarios and puzzle solutions. My biggest complaint is that I wish there were slightly less handholding (the game stopping to tell you the location of every dungeon whenever you complete one is a little overbearing), and compared to LttP, some of the late-game bosses were really weak.
Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (PC)
I can't really bring myself to put down a rating yet, and fighting games are pretty hard to actually rate compared to single-player games anyway. I played the original MvC3 back on release but never had the chance to get Ultimate - now I've gotten a copy of the game and have been playing a lot of matches with a group of friends. Still in love with the gigantic cast of hugely unique characters and the crazy action, though I don't think I'm really in love with X-Factor as a mechanic - even when you win using it it feels a little too overbearing.
Been churning through my backlog to free up HD space. Pretty good progress. Pretty shooter heavy as kept picking them up on sale and never playing them. Hadn't been in FPS mode in ages.
Got through:
MW Remastered
CoD WW2
Rise of the Tombraider
Battlefield Hardline
6) Batman Arkham City Remastered (PS4) (Started- Finished- Platinumed) Score: 8.5/10
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- March 2019 Games:
2) Assassin's Creed Origins DLC The Hidden Ones (PS4) (Started- Finished- 100%) Score: 7/10
3) Assassin's Creed Origins DLC The Curse of the Pharaohs (PS4) (Started- Finished- 100%) Score: 7.5/10
4) Assassin's Creed Origins DLC The Discovery Tour (PS4) (Started- Finished- 100%) Score: 6/10
5) Batman Arkham Asylum Remastered (PS4) (Started- Finished- Platinumed) Score: 8/10
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- February 2019 Games:
1) Assassin's Creed Origins (PS4) (Started in December 2018! - Finished and Platinumed in February 2019) Score: 7.5/10
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- January 2019 Games:
Quests are sadly repetitive but combat was fun. Huge World to explore and you have a Hawk now which can tag the enemies and other stuff for you. I love that going into those forts and killing those soldiers, it was challenging. Fuck archers though, seriosly they can hunt you so fast. Not really a fan of Bayek sadly. And uh i didn't really use stealth mechanics in this one, they usually caught me when i try so i just charged my sword and hunt those unfornute soldiers.
Not many, I barely beat any games since January so I kind of came back to non online games the past month or so.
I did beat two that has been on the backburner for way too long though.
190414 - Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice [XBX]
190416 - Ori & The Blind Forrest: Definite Edition [XBX]
Also well on my way to beat Yoshi, Katana Zero and Overcooked 2 DLC that I have started in April in the upcoming weeks though.
Years after playing deep into this classic on PS Vita, I finally beat the game. The comfort functions of the re-release make the game experience much smoother and you can counter the outdated aspects of the game easily. The plot with mega coroporations and environmental destruction is great and really doesn't age. Playing this we all would be thinking of our own planet at this very moment. We'll see if the remake can live up to expectations.
Hyper Light Drifter (Xbox One X) - 6 April, 2019:
Hyper Light Drifter is all about gameplay. It's difficult and rewarding. No words are spoken in the whole game but it manages to create an atmosphere with images and world-building alone. Highly recommended. Maxing out your character adds a solid amount of hours to be played as a lot of secrets can be uncovered. I might go back at some point and play it on Switch with the additional content available there.
Game of Thrones: A Telltale Game Series (Xbox One X) - 9 April, 2019:
With the upcoming final season, I had to play Telltale's interpretation of this great universe that has only so little been featured in games. The fate of House Forrester nicely ties into the overall story arc. There are the typical Telltale problems present that are part of all of their games, but I had a good time as a fan of Game of Thrones.
Never Alone (Xbox One X) - 14 April, 2019:
An educational game more than anything focusing on the Inuit in Alaska. The platforming is nothing special and at times not accurate enough. It's still fascinating to learn so much about the Inuit's way of living, hunting, their beliefs, hell even their take on climate change. I'd compare this to Assassin's Creed discovery tours in a way.
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice (Xbox One X) - 14 April, 2019:
Play this game with headphones! Senua's attempt to save the soul of her loved one is a wild ride of emotions. She's brave, she's scared, she's confused - yet she never stops. Psychosis and mental illness are a big part of the game. The inner voices of Senua, her mind trying to play tricks with her, all those illusions really make you understand Senua's inner self well. Many people affected by such illnesses in real life have praised Ninja Theory for their efforts, a very emotional trailer was released just for those fan reactions. And that ending, wow!
Divinity 2: The Dragon Knight Saga (Xbox One X) - 27 April, 2019:
After dozens of hours enjoying Divinity: Original Sin 2 with two friends, I've finally managed to complete Larian's lone attempt of an 3D Action RPG so far, Divinity 2: Ego Draconis (later re-released with the expansion as The Dragon Knight Saga package). There are not many game out there quite like this one. There are very little quest markers, you got to solve things on your own, mindreading is important. Most are very well written. The gameplay doesn't stand the test of time as good, but enemies are at least challenging.
It's really cool you get to lead your very own battle tower at some point, and who doesn't want to be a dragon at some point?
The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit (Xbox One X) - 28 April, 2019:
Wow, poor liitle kid! Terrible things have happened to his family, his father is trying to keep the fassade going but you very quickly notice he's having a lot of problems in his life. There are fun little sections I won't be spoiling for you. Toys and child imagination are a huge part of it - it's very well done. Will play Life is Strange 2 soon where this story is supposed to continue.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - 10/10 - 2nd time, another 100 hours sunk into this which has now dethroned FFVII and RE2 to become my favourite game of all time.
Sonic Mania - 9/10- played it several times before but was off work so decided I was due another playthrough, as Tails this time. I can't beat that 5th special stage though now they've patched it :(
Football Manager 2019 - 9/10 - How do you beat FM? Well I've completed 2 seasons with Torquay United with successive promotions last month, so if we call completing a season completing the game then I've done it twice this month.
I believe that's it. I've been playing a lot of Football Manager 2019 this month and started a new play though of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 which has taken up a lot of my gaming time. Also about halfway through playing Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition on PC which I started at the weekend.
Mainly just Capcom retro releases - Muscle Bomber (Duo), Aladdin (which was actually incredibly good, just very short), Rockboard (Mega Man Monopoly, fun for a while but not something I'll go back to).
The big game I spent most of April playing was Yakuza 4. Ended up putting 102 hours into the game, 100%ed the completion list and hit EX rank with Haruka. Loved it, one of the easier 100% clears and a great variety of gameplay in the characters and their side stories. Had some issues with plot silliness but still really loved many of the encounters and fights. Just wish I didn't have to replay the game twice more to get the last two trophies I'm short.
Another pretty productive month, albeit aided by Easter, of course:
Forza Motorsport: Yes, I've surprised myself, 100%ed the career. It was difficult going at the end until I found some recommended tunes for the (un-upgradeable) race-class cars; I do not class myself as anything like a particularly skilled racer, but I was pleased that I didn't need to crank the AI difficulty down to easy or throw my Drivatar at a race that often. I will throw one criticism its way in that it leans pretty damn hard on the Nürburgring in the late game; almost every series ends in a one-or-two-lap race there, which gets a wee bit tiresome when you've done it a lot already. And, well, I don't normally mind too much about the endurance races in general when I'm in the right mentality for them, but eight laps there? Yeah, no thanks. Drivatar!
Donut County: There's an odd breed of puzzle games that feel a bit like, well, going through the motions; I guess perhaps the puzzle equivalent of a 'walking sim' - not that I'm overly fond of that being used in a disparaging way. It's when a puzzle game is simple enough to basically be "figure out what you can do now. Do it. Repeat"; I've got the same criticism of Monument Valley in that regard, and Donut County falls into a similar bracket. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing - one other mantra I have of puzzle games is that you don't necessarily need to be difficult to be satisfying, and Donut County is pretty satisfying. Still, some extra layer of challenge would be nice, even just adding an optional clock could be effective (After all, it's got Katamari similarities, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to also mimic the means of failing in Katamari!)
Blaster Master: With Zero 2 released it struck me that I've never actually played the series at all properly, so with the original game on NESFlix I thought I'd give it a go. It's an interesting game in that it's clearly in an odd limbo with a bunch of ideas that aren't quite solidified yet; vague Metroidvania aspects but the vast majority of upgrades are basically glorified keys to open glorified doors; for me it only felt like the swim tool really felt Metroidvania-ey in the form of having usefulness beyond 'here's the next obstacle'... and that was limited to water areas, of course! Hover could have, but the extremely tight fuel limits got in the way of it being particularly freeing. Also the water section having an extended out-of-tank platforming sequence was a decent mixup of the gameplay, as well. On top of that there's so much exploration involved that isn't rewarded; so many side chambers that just end up recharging weapons. Adding in more permanent rewards to them would make a huge difference - I assume that's likely to be the case in later titles.
Pan Pan: Another brief Switch diversion, and this is perhaps indicative of the distinction in puzzle types between those I mentioned earlier and more robust puzzlers, because there were some pretty decent puzzles here that required a bit of ingenuity, and some good examples of teaching through environmental cues. There were one or two situations where the actions that triggered specific events weren't clear, in particular
Exactly what triggered each stage of the digging robot's progress
, and I think one situation where the camera could perhaps have been zoomed out a little further to make the cause-and-effect of a given switch more apparent, but those are petty criticisms; it's a pretty good short puzzler and a fun way to spend an afternoon.
Hydroventure: (AKA Fluidity) After the rush a couple of months ago to pick the Wii Shop dry of everything of interest before it all went away, I decided to start playing the things I'd got from it by... instead playing one I'd bought years ago and got halfway through. And yes, I'm not entirely sure just why I stopped, because back then I thought and I still agree today that this game is fabulous. Endearing, pleasingly tactile and a great collection of physics puzzles. I *think* I may have quit in the past due to frustration with the 'gather/explode' ability in that gather was an extremely useful tool for moving water in a controlled manner but you couldn't use it extensively because gathering too long caused the water to explode outwards and be difficult to control - that did bother me a bit this time, but this time I was a bit better at being less reliant on gather to keep water safe. Now I'm trying to remember if I ever bought Spin Cycle; it may be time to dig out the ol' 3DS.
Ongoing:
Forza Motorsport 2: So I of course celebrated moving on from the original Xbox title by jumping straight into the 360 one. It's going well! I've completed the Arcade side of things (both races and Time Trials) and I'm probably around 50% through the career. I was expecting the big challenge for me here to be the factory-spec championships - and I still hate the Shelby Cobra and turned the AI down to Easy for that one - but I've been doing okayish on them; nothing spectacular, but I can usually perform adequately at Normal and occasionally Hard for the lowest-class ones. One thing I will highlight is that I could really do with more granular AI difficulty levels, because on the Nürburgring it does feel very much like Normal is "They're breathing down your neck all the time, one bad mistake will put you in eighth, and it's a pain to overtake" while Easy is "You'll have a double-digit lead before you're quarter of the way through the first lap"; a difficulty level between the two would be fantastic; I know Horizon has many more AI difficulty levels so I suspect this'll be fixed in a few iterations. If I can scrape through this, though, FM3 brings the rewind feature into play and suddenly it's not so bad to screw up ten minutes into a fifteen minute race! God, I can't wait; part of going right back to the roots was discovering if I could cope without the rewind and it turns out I just about can, but having it available will reduce frustration a heck of a lot. I'm amused that my small bits of progress here are crediting me with a few extra points on my overall Forza rank as well; there's only a max of 500 points available (I assume it's gamerscore divided by 2), but it's nice that this'll have some benefits carried forwards. Although on that note, it'd be nice to figure out a way to get some token online credits to get that achievement (I know the AH is closed)
Konami Pixel Puzzle Collection: It's more Picross. Yay! This one's a little iffy, though, in that I think they might have focussed a bit too much on images having decent pixel accuracy, which can occasionally make the puzzles a bit easy. But then, I'm quite good at Picross these days, so maybe my perspective is skewed? I tend to take just under five minutes for a 15x15. All that said, there's clearly some difficulty progression hidden away in the internal systems; while on the surface it appears to offer me puzzles at random, it clearly prioritised the easier ones first, so maybe there's still extra difficulty to come? I'm on about 50% through the gallery, although I'm aware that this is a game that doesn't stop at 100%. And if nothing else, being able to crank up the volume whenever Bloody Tears comes up is always a plus!
Had a fun time with this game. I had never played the original Resident Evil 2, but always loved REmake and Resident Evil 4, so I was glad to be back with the series. I'm done with the game for now (already played it 3 times) but will probably come back to do 2nd Run with Leon on Hardcore.
Haven't gamed in a while and happy to be back, now loving the hell out of Dragon Quest XI.
Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition - as a big Final Fantasy fan i found this game underwhelming. I did most of the hunts and completed the main story. I have no desire or motivation to do anymore. I would rank XIII above it in my opinion. Maybe its just me, but it seemed XV was trying to be Xenoblade Chronicles X and failed.
Adventures of Lolo - played on the Switch NES app. This is a masterful puzzle game. I hope 2 and 3 come soon to the app.
Bloodborne. Currently on new character NG for DLC, and NG+ for chalice Dungeons. I will start a new character for platinum run. Someday, a 544 run.
Bloodborne is the first game that has made me want to do everything I can.
Sekiro and DMC5. Also blasted through WarioWare for Gamecube on the weekend with a friend.
Planning on beating Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn in May. Possibly Kingdom Hearts 2 or Rage 2 / Yakuza Kiwami 2 PC if I end up getting either of them right away.
I finished YS VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana on the switch, it was pretty fun though I feel a bit too burnt out to do any of the postgame stuff. I think I also 100% Sekiro near the beginning of April so I guess that counts, was pretty fun too. I was hoping to finish more but YS VIII took a lot longer than I expected and the other games I've been playing are all RPGs.
17. Kirby: Planet Robobot (3DS) - 8/10 18. Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (PS3) - 8/10 19. Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge (Gameboy) - 7/10 20. Sonic the Hedgehog MS (Master System) - 7/10 21. Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice (3DS) - 7/10 22. Assassin's Creed: Altair's Chronicles (DS) - 7/10 23. Guardians of the Galaxy (PS4) - 8/10 24. Final Fantasy Theatrythym (3DS) - 8/10
May might be slow since I am tackling Dark Souls for the first time...slowly. I just hit Blighttown.
Uncharted 3 for the first time. Had heard about the bullshit Ship level. Can confirm it was bullshit. Enjoyed it overall but the difficulty spikes were rough. Uncharted always has you killing 30 dudes and you're sure you're finished but lo here is another 6 to kill. Onto 4 in May see how that one handles the combat arenas.
All on Switch:
-Forgotton Anne: nothing too special but I liked it, it's pretty charming.
-Cuphead: excelent gameplay, art style, music, challenge, overall an amazing game
-Steins;Gate Elite: easily one of my favorite stories so far, great characters, concept and some pretty touching moments.
