What You've Been Playing This Week

[QualityChimp]

Well, we finally have a PS5 in the house, so how have I made the most of it?

That's right, I've played Skyrim on the PS4.
Such a dangerous game. Twice - TWICE, I did "I'll just got here and just do this" and ended up playing until past 2am over the Christmas break!

It's so brilliant, but I've got to be careful of burnout because it can get a bit repetitive once you've cleared a few dungeons of daedra.

Done all the werewolf missions and bought my first house. Lovely stuff!

Elsewhere in the house, my son has been mainlining Marvel Rivals (PS5) and my daughter has completed Astro Bot (PS5), with my son going back over the levels to get the collectibles. I'll definitely play through this as it looks lovely.

[wakka]

I have been playing Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru, or The Frog For Whom The Bell Tolls, on the Gameboy.



This is a fan translation of this HAL Laboratories developed 1992 game. It's a top-down adventure that I believe uses an earlier, more rudimentary version of the engine that would power Link's Awakening a year later, and it's in some ways a kind of prototype of that game, and in other ways very much its own thing.

You play Prince [your choice of name], questing to save Princess Tiramisu before your brother and rival Prince Richard can. It's a lighthearted adventure as you quest from town to town, switching into side-on platforming for dungeons and auto-battling monsters in a way that kind of reminds me of pitting Digimon against each other back in the day (the outcome of the fight is decided purely on stats without your intervention). You also transform between a human, a frog and a snake in order to navigate the puzzles that crop up.

I'm near the end now, and I'd say it's coming in at around five hours of gameplay in total. Pretty long for a GB game of this vintage! It's a really nice, relaxing game to play, and as a big fan of Link's Awakening it's really interesting to experience this earlier attempt at a portable action RPG. I really like the humorous script too, which often raises a smile. Very nicely paced, too, much like Link's Awakening.

I'm playing on the Analogue Pocket with the GB Light shader enabled, just for a change from my usual selection of GB Pocket, and because I always wanted a Light and never had one:

[wakka]

Meant to be working today but it's quiet so I've been digging into Shutokou Battle 01 AKA Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3 on the PS2.

Been meaning to get round to these Genki PS2 racing games for years as I've never played them. I wanted to do this on original hardware but I drove myself mad with my PS2 the other day, trying to get it setup for transferring games from a USB stick to the internal HDD. A lot of faffing around resulted in basically diddly squat so I don't know if the ancient IDE HDD in there is buggered or what.

Anyway I decided to just use an emulator on my computer so I could actually, ya know, play, rather than tinker.

I've done a couple of hours and it's a lot of fun so far. I'm using a Nissan Silvia like Takumi's pal in Initial D. It's an addictive gameplay loop once you settle into it, moving through the highways, flashing your lights at rivals and then engaging in battles. I like how winning and losing is governed by energy bars, fighting game style, that are depleted either by an increasing lead or by collisions with regular traffic/the wall/etc.

There is a J-Rock track on a very short loop that plays between races that's driving me mildly mental but other than that it's a very cool game.

When you pit, you can review all the different rivals that you're tracking down and battling. They've each got little bios about them which feels like such a nostalgic thing. It was kind of hilarious and endearing that back in the day it was such a standard thing to open the manual to learn that Martial Law likes movies and naps and hates noodles while True Ogre enjoys historical fiction and long walks.

[QualityChimp]

I really need to get back into Import Tuner Battle on the 360 as there's not really been anything like it since Genki stopped making console games.
They say there'll be a new game this year (2025), 18 years after their last one, so hoping it actually happens and gets a Western release.

[wakka]

Yeah, I'd really like to play Import Tuner on the 360. This one I'm playing now is the last one they made before that, excluding the version they released on PSP (which from what I've read is an adapted version of the last PS2 game with a tweaked structure to Quest mode).

Just a pain to dig out the 360 just for that one game though, honestly.

Playing this type of 2000s Japanese racer you can really, honestly, truly say they do not make 'em like this any more. Which is a shame. There is some gameplay footage of the upcoming title now, that came out the other day:



Looks solid enough and gameplay-wise pretty much identical to the one I'm playing now from 2003, right down to the colours used for the arrows on the minimap.

Hopefully it'll be decent.

I've played more of the one I'm on since I posted earlier. It's a cool game, it's really quite compulsive. I've realised it's essentially a driving dungeon crawler - you grind for a while, finding rivals you haven't beaten yet, then eventually your engine temperature gets too high and you return to the garage to spend some of the money you've accrued on upgrades, take a quick look at your progress towards clearing all the rivals on the particular teams, then head back to the highways for more. And rinse and repeat. It's a really nice formula and an interesting adaptation of that type of RPG structure to a racing game.

I like the handling a lot, too. It's a bit Initial D: Special Stage, but with more weight behind it and less twitchiness.

At some point I'm going to check out Kaido Battle, or Kaido Racer as it was called in the West. That's the Genki series which focuses on touge mountain drift racing rather than urban highway battles.

[Golgo]

Been playing Vampire Hunters on PS5. It's basically Vampire Survivors in first person with an Enter the Gungeon approach to weapon fetishism (you can wield up to 14 weapons simultaneously). Also channels the speed/feel of Ziggurat and some of the goofiness of Timesplitters in the enemies. It's really good. Varied maps, great music. Hectic but tactical - you can find yourself with multiple boss battles on the go at once. (Ps.: I recommend using manual rather than autofire for secondary weapons).

[Dogg Thang]

I've been doing a bit of VR on my Quest 3, trying to make use of it rather than buying a PSVR2 and not making use of that too (learning that Wipeout doesn't work on PSVR2 was a factor there). Played through both Red Matter games and enjoyed them, although the combat in 2 became a bit of a slog. The games work better without combat. They look incredible on Quest 3. It's interesting to see the variety in how good games can look on that system. Red Matter feels so tactile and the reflections and dirt, even hints of footprints on the floor, really make you feel like you're there. It's very smart visually in how it anchors you to the place.

[Neon Ignition]

I'm resuming progress on Wandersong, starting a replay of Mass Effect 2 and now starting the new content on Sonic x Shadow Generations

Replaying the old content is a reminder of Generations dirty little secret - the game was always ****

[QualityChimp]

More quest-within-a-quest simulator, aka Skyrim.
I was tasked with breaking into a house and stealing something.
The house was guarded.
I could kill the guard, or...
Go to the town boss, see if you can pay off his debt, then retrieve an item the boss wants at the bottom of a lake, then return the item to the boss, paying off the debt, then going to the house to tell the guard who then leaves with his obligations complete.

Obviously, I did the latter.

So much fun as the house had loads of traps and mercenaries inside.

[Dogg Thang]

After making my way through some VR games, I went back to my Switch and picked up game after game that each just didn’t land for me yet. I started with The Talos Principle. Didn’t grab me. The puzzle aspect is nicely clear and the tasks are quick to grasp but they might just not be my thing and the setting felt at odds with the puzzles.

So I got Hellblade Senua’s Something. Even at the lower resolutions that it is output on the Switch, it looks remarkable on the system, almost impossible on that machine. Very impressive. And it seems like a fantastic game, very well made and the story seems good, even though I found the combat to be a chore. But man, it’s so dark and miserable that I just don’t have it in me right now, as good as I think it is.

So… I picked up The Thing. I’ve always wanted to play it and so the remaster is the perfect way to do it. Instant regret. It couldn’t possibly be more of a product of its time, janky without a hint of nostalgic charm. Maybe I would have enjoyed it back in the day but it’s not what I was hoping it would be at all. Maybe that’s down to my own unrealistic expectations.

Anyway, back to VR for a few rounds of Pistol Whip.

[Golgo]

Tried Hollow Knight again. Got a few hours into it again but I just don't like it very much, certainly not as much as other Metroidvanias like Blasphemous or Axiom Verge or Guacamelee. Controls are tight, though. Environments are gorgeous if somewhat over-designed so you sometimes can't quickly parse the backgrounds from useable platforms. Character design strikes me as Alien Hominid in Halloween fancy dress.

[importaku]

I have been playing Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru, or The Frog For Whom The Bell Tolls, on the Gameboy.



This is a fan translation of this HAL Laboratories developed 1992 game. It's a top-down adventure that I believe uses an earlier, more rudimentary version of the engine that would power Link's Awakening a year later, and it's in some ways a kind of prototype of that game, and in other ways very much its own thing.

You play Prince [your choice of name], questing to save Princess Tiramisu before your brother and rival Prince Richard can. It's a lighthearted adventure as you quest from town to town, switching into side-on platforming for dungeons and auto-battling monsters in a way that kind of reminds me of pitting Digimon against each other back in the day (the outcome of the fight is decided purely on stats without your intervention). You also transform between a human, a frog and a snake in order to navigate the puzzles that crop up.

I'm near the end now, and I'd say it's coming in at around five hours of gameplay in total. Pretty long for a GB game of this vintage! It's a really nice, relaxing game to play, and as a big fan of Link's Awakening it's really interesting to experience this earlier attempt at a portable action RPG. I really like the humorous script too, which often raises a smile. Very nicely paced, too, much like Link's Awakening.

I'm playing on the Analogue Pocket with the GB Light shader enabled, just for a change from my usual selection of GB Pocket, and because I always wanted a Light and never had one:

That shader is extremely close to a light pretty much nearly identical except your screen is a lot clearer the gb light screen has a weird grainy texture due to the indieglow backlight.

[wakka]

That's interesting! I've never used a Light IRL. Mine is actually a terrible photo. It was just a quick snap I took while on a train so I could record the on-screen sequence which I was supposed to write down/memorise for the next section of the game. I'll take a better one for reference later.

By the by, I'm planning to pick up Metal Slader Glory on the Pocket next. I did some of the earliest stages last year then my life kinda blew up for a bit and a bunch of stuff fell by the wayside. I was recently reminded of it so last night I re-read the manual, which is actually a proper (if short) manga which encompasses the opening of the game. I don't think it could be included on the actual cartridge due to space limitations, as the game already required a huge (and expensive) quantity of memory for a Famicom game.

[Golgo]

Been playing Lords of the Fallen (the 2023 reissue) quite intensively for a few days cuz I blagged it for 4 quid. They've worked hard to fix things after the somewhat slated launch code, and I was pleasantly surprised. It looks amazing, combat is nice and crunchy. Runs decently, apart from quite frequent stutter and occasionally wacky camera (played on performance as quality mode is too jerky). Still, is better looking on the whole than any FromSoft to date, including the Bluepoint reissue of Dark Souls. The environments are complex and twisty but also fairly compact so I don't get that fatique I felt when playing Elden Ring. But holy cow is it derivative! Everything is so obsessively copied - UI, progression systems, player movements and the smallest gestures, the way ambivalently-motivated NPCs stand about like lemons in a hub world talking vaguely threatening nonsense, the world itself with its looping pathways and 'aha!' moments when you unlock a shortcut - it's almost pathological. If this game was a friend you'd discretely recommend they seek help. The one original idea, the Umbral Lamp (which distorts and reveals a ghostly world-within-a-world that you can step into), they went and nicked from Soul Reaver instead of Dark Souls. The shift does look amazing, though. There are some good QOL improvements that FromSoft could definitely pinch back, e.g. the way all in-hand type items (grenades, throwing knives, traps, etc.) all come from a single 'supplies bag' rather than you having to source each one individually. That was really good, and had me simply chucking stuff about in a Soulsborne for the first time ever. Multiplayer is also I hear better, with proper coop, but I haven't tried this. I'd like to see the devs stretch themselves a bit more for the next iteration, though, as it is really too close for comfort. I won't play it to completion as I've played better before - did about 9 bosses (three biggies and six smallies) before calling it a day. None were very tough or took more than 3 tries to solo, and that comes from a really sub-par Soulsborne player.

[importaku]

Still chopping away at Megaton musashi wired it's an incredible game might be even better than gundam breakers 4 for my super large robot fix the game is packed PACKED i say. LOL oh my goodness. Just reached chapter 23 and it's about to play a cutscene and it brings up a warning saying that it's 30 mins long would i like to skip it. How thoughtful but no i'm too invested in the story looks like i'm about to watch a mini movie

EDIT: managed to complete the main story the game had me guessing right to the end where the story was going to go as it gets crazy. Weirdly when it's over it plonks you back into the main game with the hint of more stuff by telling you to prepare for the next battle as it's not over. There's a lot of anime cutscenes in this game as well as full blown songs the games presentation is super high not to mention the amount of upgrade mechanics going on is crazy there's so much to play around with. Now back to grinding my parts as i start trying to go for the iconic rarity stuff to build the robot of my dreams there's a lot of tough missions still to go through as been able to play through any of the ones i did on story mode. Also a load of side stories to complete too i'll be a while yet with it passed 50 hours so far.

Towards the end they even go full kaiju on you, i mean the regular bosses are big but these are ridiculous lol