Currently Playing in 2020...

I've put off Ori 1, my Bioshock playthroughs and several other older games that I like playing till I can on Series X cos of the better framerate/HDR.

Bioshock 2 is properly strawberry floated on Xbox at mo, it's enhanced patch wrecked it and 2K haven't fixed. it hitches every 5 seconds...

After a few months away from it, I've return to GTA IV to finish off the story, and it's amazing how it's gripped me now I'm not rushing through it. Well, it kind of already had, but I usually only spent an hour or two with it as I would always get frsutrated easily at mission failures because it meant I wasn't progressing. Now I'm in the mindset of just enjoying it, I can appreiciate the funny side of those failures and see what I'm doing wrong to not repeat those mistakes. With the Switch I'm returning to Saints Row The Third to finish the story of that. If I can, both of them will be finished before Watch Dogs Legion releases, but it makes no difference if they aren't. Not like I'll be doing the story of Legion anyway with so much London to explore.

GTA IV is locked 60fps on Series X.

Yeah, but RDR2's going to see more improvement, so may as well save that for the Series S instead. I do have the DLC I'll need to buy and complete, so I'll be saving that for the new console, too.

Tales of Verperia
Enjoying this quite a bit. Combat is enjoyable, dungeons are less annoying than Tales of Symphonia (as are the characters), exploring's good fun (world map's a bit gooseberry fool though), and I can easily sit down and lose myself in it for a couple of hours. The plot is nonsense, of course, and at this point I've pretty much lost all semblance of what's going on, but that doesn't seem to be hampering my enjoyment too much.

Zombie Driver HD
I got this for free on Steam ages ago, and thought I'd give it a go. When I first played it I thought it was a bit crap, and was close to giving up, but for some reason I stuck with it, and it's not too bad. It's pretty mindless, there are spelling mistakes in the subtitles, the voice acting's bad (and unskippable) and literally all you do is drive around and run over zombies. But it's oddly compelling (too strong a word perhaps, but you know what I mean). I'm a fair way into it now, so I'll likely see it through. Not bad considering it was free.

kazanova_Frankenstein wrote:

Jenuall wrote:
Also on recommendation of OrangeRKN I picked up Alwa's Awakening last night and put a quick hour or so into it. So far it seems like a great little game, it's giving me serious late 80s Amiga vibes as well - which is a good thing!

I may have to look in to this.

I'm only a little way into it and so far it doesn't look like doing anything ground breaking, but it's a really nice game and only a few quid to buy!

I think it's only about 4 or 5 hours long (I don't know if they fixed it, but on release it had a bug that the save file would still count playtime when the game was open but the console on sleep, so that completely threw out the number for me )

Glad you're liking it so far Jen! And yeah, it's not ground breaking, but I don't think you'd expect it to be when it deliberately retreads old ground.

Jenuall wrote:That's a shame, Minerva's Den is great as well! Don't play Infinite again, it's terrible.

Is that because it's aged badly or did you never like it? I remember really enjoying it when I played it at launch.

DarkRula wrote:Yeah, but RDR2's going to see more improvement, so may as well save that for the Series S instead. I do have the DLC I'll need to buy and complete, so I'll be saving that for the new console, too.

What improvements will RDR2 get? It’s already native 4K on X1X and it’s frame rate is capped at 30...

Zilnad wrote:

Jenuall wrote:That's a shame, Minerva's Den is great as well! Don't play Infinite again, it's terrible.

Is that because it's aged badly or did you never like it? I remember really enjoying it when I played it at launch.

Infinite is fine, some people HATE it tho.

Photek wrote:

Zilnad wrote:

Jenuall wrote:That's a shame, Minerva's Den is great as well! Don't play Infinite again, it's terrible.

Is that because it's aged badly or did you never like it? I remember really enjoying it when I played it at launch.

Infinite is fine, some people HATE it tho.

The first Bioshock game was already a massively dumbed down version of an interesting genre, it was redeemed somewhat by atmosphere and a relatively well put together story (for the most part). Infinite somehow manages to find even more ways to make the gameplay even more dull and devoid of interest or challenge, whilst removing the few redeeming features that the original had.

It's a bad game with an awful message and completely mangles any interesting interpretation of its core theme of the infinite worlds theory.

We've debated Bioshock Infinite for eons in here, Taf also hates it. It's not my favorite Bioshock but I like it.

I know it's not indicative of a good game but it's first hour is among the best opening in any game imo.

I also think it's ending is glorious.

EDIT: What in Bioshock 1 was 'dumbed down'? never mind lets not derail this.

I didn't complete Infinite - got about half-way through on the Xbox 360 version, I think - but I enjoyed it! The environments were lovely and the "flying around" mechanism was fun. It's a game that I'll re-start at some point; I picked it up for the Switch a couple of months ago.

OrangeRKN wrote:I think it's only about 4 or 5 hours long (I don't know if they fixed it, but on release it had a bug that the save file would still count playtime when the game was open but the console on sleep, so that completely threw out the number for me )

Glad you're liking it so far Jen! And yeah, it's not ground breaking, but I don't think you'd expect it to be when it deliberately retreads old ground.

Yeah I've been having fun so far, it feels very much like a "comfort food" kind of game - you know what you're getting and it hits the spot nicely!

I did have some issues at the start when "getting my eye in" in terms of the distance Zoe could jump:

twitter.com/RussellMcIver/status/1313966069002895360

Photek wrote:We've debated Bioshock Infinite for eons in here, Taf also hates it. It's not my favorite Bioshock but I like it.

I know it's not indicative of a good game but it's first hour is among the best opening in any game imo.

I also think it's ending is glorious.

EDIT: What in Bioshock 1 was 'dumbed down'? never mind lets not derail this.

If it's been covered before then I won't retread old ground. Lets just say I disagree on all of those points!

In terms of Bioshock being dumbed down (yes I'm pursuing this - it's more of a detour and a derailment!) you have to compare it to the wider genre of Immersive Sims and the specific game that it was a created as a spiritual successor to: System Shock 2. The list of features that Bioshock either completely removed or massively scaled back from SS2 and Immersive Sims in general is almost endless. It was sold to that group of fans as "your kind of game" but in the end it proved to be anything but.

Never played System Shock but Bioshock was widely regarded as ground breaking when it released on Console. The Bioshock trilogy is up there with Halo, Half-Life and Zelda as one of my all time favourite games. I play through Halo (1-3), Half Life 2 + (Ep1 + 2) and all the Bioshocks every couple of years and I still marvel at how all 3 franchises are yet to be surpassed.

I love Bioshocks aesthetic, Art deco has always fascinated me along with the political idea's of Ayn Rand back in the day. I find it one of the most beautiful games I've ever played, to this day.

Just found out B1 and B2 lose the stuttering if played offline so looks like I'll be going back down to Rapture this weekend.

Photek wrote:We've debated Bioshock Infinite for eons in here, Taf also hates it. It's not my favorite Bioshock but I like it.

I know it's not indicative of a good game but it's first hour is among the best opening in any game imo.

I also think it's ending is glorious.

EDIT: What in Bioshock 1 was 'dumbed down'? never mind lets not derail this.

I enjoyed the ending too

therearedozensofus.gif

Photek wrote:

DarkRula wrote:Yeah, but RDR2's going to see more improvement, so may as well save that for the Series S instead. I do have the DLC I'll need to buy and complete, so I'll be saving that for the new console, too.

What improvements will RDR2 get? It’s already native 4K on X1X and it’s frame rate is capped at 30...

I'm not entirely sure on that except for the faster loading thanks to the SSD, but I'm sure the auto-HDR stuff will be more effective with RDR2 than GTA IV.

Photek wrote:Never played System Shock but Bioshock was widely regarded as ground breaking when it released on Console. The Bioshock trilogy is up there with Halo, Half-Life and Zelda as one of my all time favourite games. I play through Halo (1-3), Half Life 2 + (Ep1 + 2) and all the Bioshocks every couple of years and I still marvel at how all 3 franchises are yet to be surpassed.

I love Bioshocks aesthetic, Art deco has always fascinated me along with the political idea's of Ayn Rand back in the day. I find it one of the most beautiful games I've ever played, to this day.

Just found out B1 and B2 lose the stuttering if played offline so looks like I'll be going back down to Rapture this weekend.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed playing Bioshock 1 (and the second game). The atmosphere is excellent and I too am a big fan of the art deco styling, but it was still a disappointment at the time that it didn't live up to its billing!

DarkRula wrote:

Photek wrote:

DarkRula wrote:Yeah, but RDR2's going to see more improvement, so may as well save that for the Series S instead. I do have the DLC I'll need to buy and complete, so I'll be saving that for the new console, too.

What improvements will RDR2 get? It’s already native 4K on X1X and it’s frame rate is capped at 30...

I'm not entirely sure on that except for the faster loading thanks to the SSD, but I'm sure the auto-HDR stuff will be more effective with RDR2 than GTA IV.

Auto HDR isn't used on games that have HDR. RDR2 didn't launch with HDR but it was patched in a month after.