What You've Been Playing This Week

[wakka]

Oh it's scary in a good way, trust me lots of fun.

[QualityChimp]

Oh it's scary in a good way, trust me lots of fun.

X Gonna Give it To Ya.

[wakka]

[Colin]

With the optical drive in my PS4 kicking the bucket a while ago, my gaming time has been piled in to Destiny 2 which I enjoy a lot. And that’s despite the fact I have no real clue what I’m doing.

[QualityChimp]

How you keeping, [MENTION=9865]Colin[/MENTION]? Nice Christmas?

[Colin]

I’m good thanks pal. Keeping the businesses going through the pandemic is challenging but other than that life is great. Had a lovely Christmas with our small family up here, but unfortunately we can’t get to Canada this month as usual to see my wife’s family. Hope all’s well with you.

[randombs]

Halo Infinite

I got to the open world bit and... cor blimey, it's beautiful.

I really like that the aliens use human guns as well as their own stuff. The echoes from gunfire make the outdoor battles sound epic.

[Neon Ignition]

Current line up:

RG351: Donkey Kong Country 2

Series X: Metal Slug XX

PS5: Guardians of the Galaxy

PC: Alan Wake Remastered

[QualityChimp]

All the PSVR talk got me itching to play a bit as I have a few titles in the backlog.

I mainly played Trover Saves The Universe, which I loved.
It even had me laughing on the menu screen when it asks if you want the sweary or kid-friendly version.
It basically plays out like the episode of Rick & Morty where they're watching interdimensional cable. Everything is a bit freaky, but played for laughs. Trover is talking all the time and it's really funny and meta what he's saying.

The game feels like Astro Bot in the way it plays, with you as a hovering entity, controlling a platforming character.
Main differences are that you slowly follow Astro, but here, you guide Trover to teleport points and you move directly there.
You can then change the height of your position to get a better vantage point to navigate the map or look for bonus collectibles.

I would say that this game is probably fine in 2D, whereas Astro Bot really uses the VR, where you're looking around corners for collectibles or obstacles.

However, it does look great and it's fun to explore this cartoony world, but it's the humour that really sets it apart.
One section saw me walking along a really long and dark bridge and the initially soothing voice is soon berating me for how long it's taking to get there.

It knows the kind of stupid things you're likely to do and has fun with it.
I bounced a ball for an achievement, threw some paper in a bin for an achievement and I tried solving a puzzle you can quickly just smash through, thinking there was an achievement for solving it, but it's actually unsolvable and the joke is about mundane puzzles in other games you could just skip through with brute force. Seriously, I spent about 20 minutes mashing buttons until I listened to Trover's suggestion to look up a guide online...

Tracking started going, so I stopped playing, but eager to play some more!
It really is very sweary in explicit mode, so not one to play around the kids, but didn't test the kid-friendly version, so not sure how safe it is.

Then I tried Crisis Wing as a short blast before bed as I started Resi 2 and knew I'd be at it for hours if I got into it.
Oooh, this is good. Pretty tough, but not unfair. some tricky patterns to dodge, but definitely not bullet hell.

However, I was still wanting more VR, so started GunClub VR.
Ooh, this is quite nice. It's a simple premise, you're at a shooting range, but it works so nicely in VR, I was having a "blast" redoing challenges to earn more money to buy bigger guns and better enhancements.
I was actually closing one eye to sight down the barrel for more accurate shots.
There's a nice realism to it where, when you run out of ammo, you drop the empty clip, get a full one from your belt, slide it into the gun, then rack the slide. You get a reward for a smooth reload too.

It was gone 11 by that point, so really needed to wind up!

[Golgo]

Death's Door, which I'm finding to be a wearying and tedious sub-Zelda melange of...nothing much, really. I really don't understand the plaudits. Feels like a game that got a free pass from critics due to its winsome and gently zany atmosphere and the admittedly gorgeous visuals and animation, rather like Owlboy and Ori and the Blind Forest. Gameplay is a slow-moving bore when it's not actively frustrating. I dislike it a lot and can't wait for it to end.

And Doom: Eternal. Bought the two DLCs in Xmas sale and fired it up again. Game resumes at the ball-breaking level of speed and difficulty as the end-game of the main campaign. It's ridiculous, gross and still amazing. The multiplayer is now a lot smoother too and they've added a horde mode as well as other challenge maps. For the record: I've not won a single MP game as the Slayer and doubt I ever will, but hot diggety dawg it's fun.

[fuse]

12 Minutes, which is a bit of a dog's dinner. It borrows a lot from point and click adventure games, but it's really clunky, and wrapping it around a timeloop mechanic means that rather than experimenting with things freely, you're on a tight schedule to figure things out and meet the exact series of requirements it wants before the story progresses. If you don't do it right, you get stuck having to repeat the same basic setup over and over again for your brief shot at trying something different. Some of those things it wants you to do - including the first real "puzzle" - felt really unintuitive to me, and making progress requires your participation and/or complicity in some quite harrowing scenes. I won't say too much about the plot, but it's pretty dark, and feels like it's trying to pass itself off as far smarter than it actually is in execution. It's like a David Cage game in fast forward.

Also started Bluepoint's Shadow of the Colossus remake. It looks gorgeous, but quite unsettlingly so - it's an odd thing to bemoan, but having such facial detail is throwing me off a bit? It's been so long since playing the original that I can't tell if these are new issues or total commitment to the original, but I'm finding the controls a bit janky, and the camera's a bit of a nightmare too. I've already got frustrated with and had to turn off the over-frequent hint system, which is not a great sign given I'm only three colossi in.

[QualityChimp]

Also started Bluepoint's Shadow of the Colossus remake.

I never finished the PS3 version, but I'm fine with that because my in-game girlfriend isn't quite dead and I've also not become a black-hearted Colossus slayer.

[Golgo]

I never finished the PS3 version, but I'm fine with that because my in-game girlfriend isn't quite dead and I've also not become a black-hearted Colossus slayer.

If only you could talk to the monsters...

Get stuck in and bring 'em down, you ponce!

[QualityChimp]

[QualityChimp]

Oh it's scary in a good way, trust me lots of fun.

Just come of the phone with one of our sales team at home and he has workmen clonking around on the roof. He said it's like Resident Evil or something and then he was talking about all the Resi games he's played (most of them) and proper rinsed them.

Mentioned I was on Resi 2 remake and he was saying "Oh mate, I can't play that in the dark no more! Every time I hear Mr. X clomping around, I freak out!"