Last Game You Finished and Your Rating

Uncharted 4: 9

My first Uncharted game, late to the party I know. Highly enjoyable, never played anything quite like it, never played a game with such well realised characters. I'll definitely go back and play the previous games!

Doom (2016)

Lose minor points for underwhelming sequel bait ending, but otherwise this is easily the my favourite single player FPS. Not that I've played many in the genre, but this is my ideal one; frenetic, absurdly over the top and yet with room for Metroid Prime esque exploration. So damn good

9/10

Day Of The Tentacle Remastered 8/10

Despite being a huge fan of LucasArts output during my Amiga owning years I haven't played much of their output since then, so it's taken me a while to get around to this...

I'm glad I did Love the mechanic of solving puzzles across time zones and your actions changing things in the past/present/future. Classic LucasArts, looking forward to the releases of Full Throttle Remastered and Thimbleweed Park now!

Virginia

4/10

Bad.

Inside (PS4)

9/10

Now I need to think about what it all means......

jiggles wrote:
Game 37 - Hacknet[PC] ★★★★★
An absolutely glorious experience. Hacknet takes the framework of Uplink, removes all of the ballaches, adds a pretty convincing command-line interface, and wraps it all up in an engaging storyline. All while a thumping electronica soundtrack (that is honestly just as good as Hotline Miami's) keeps you hyped as strawberry float. It's Hollywood-style hacking, but it complements it with enough cyber-sleuthing that it feels continually rewarding. Even though most of the systems you break into only require use of a small handful of tools, when you get in there there's enough narrative threads and personal files that you always feel you're on to something new. Two huge highlights in the story will make you feel terrified and heartbroken, before an adrenaline-fuelled revenge-hack finale leaves you feeling like a total badass while the credits roll. I am Zero Cool, mummy strawberry floater.

Put this on my wishlist after reading this review a few months ago and bought it during the Steam Christmas sale. Just completed it and thought it was wonderful, the Project Junebug mission and everything that followed was such a satisfying sequence of tasks to complete, ended up with a bunch of post its covered in notes to keep track of everything. Thanks!

Dark Souls 2 - 7/10

Not as good as either Dark Souls 3 or Bloodborne (only played about 3-4 hours of the original Dark Souls before setting fire to it), but a solid romp nonetheless. And by 'solid romp' I mean 'attritional bullshit'. My other half watched me play a good chunk of the game and she kept asking why I was persisting with what was obviously a very frustrating experience. I compared it to being in an abusive relationship. Silence ensued.

Anyways, I think I enjoyed it on the whole, though it is spoiled by a couple of areas that are pure premium-grade bollocks i.e. having to wade through water whilst being attacked simultaneously by melee and ranged strawberry floaters. I also can't shake the feeling that all I've been doing for the last 40 hours is adjusting numbers on a spreadsheet so that AvatarStat A > EnemyStat B. Perhaps its a symptom of having played 3 Souls games in a short space of time, that the mechanics have become somewhat transparent? Who knows.

Now to decide what to play next out of:

Doom
Destiny
The Division
Overwatch
Steep
The Last of Us
The Last Guardian
Bioshock
Bioshock 2
Bioshock Infinite
XCOM 2
Eagle Flight
Battlefield 1
Mortal Kombat XL
Robinson: The Journey
Final Fantasy XV
Dishonored
Dishonored 2
Skyrim

or go back to The Witcher 3.

Doom.

Oh wait, you didn't complete W3? Yeah, go back to that.

Wait. You stopped playing W3 to play DS2?! What is wrong with you, etc.

bandwagon wrote:

jiggles wrote:
Game 37 - Hacknet[PC] ★★★★★
An absolutely glorious experience. Hacknet takes the framework of Uplink, removes all of the ballaches, adds a pretty convincing command-line interface, and wraps it all up in an engaging storyline. All while a thumping electronica soundtrack (that is honestly just as good as Hotline Miami's) keeps you hyped as strawberry float. It's Hollywood-style hacking, but it complements it with enough cyber-sleuthing that it feels continually rewarding. Even though most of the systems you break into only require use of a small handful of tools, when you get in there there's enough narrative threads and personal files that you always feel you're on to something new. Two huge highlights in the story will make you feel terrified and heartbroken, before an adrenaline-fuelled revenge-hack finale leaves you feeling like a total badass while the credits roll. I am Zero Cool, mummy strawberry floater.

Put this on my wishlist after reading this review a few months ago and bought it during the Steam Christmas sale. Just completed it and thought it was wonderful, the Project Junebug mission and everything that followed was such a satisfying sequence of tasks to complete, ended up with a bunch of post its covered in notes to keep track of everything. Thanks!

Happy to be of service. I don't give out the top marks unless the game is something special.

Did you know there's a whole alternate path through the story if you immediately counter-hack the dude that hacks you? You end up getting recruited to Anonymous via 4ch*n or some gooseberry fool.

jiggles wrote:

bandwagon wrote:

jiggles wrote:
Game 37 - Hacknet[PC] ★★★★★
An absolutely glorious experience. Hacknet takes the framework of Uplink, removes all of the ballaches, adds a pretty convincing command-line interface, and wraps it all up in an engaging storyline. All while a thumping electronica soundtrack (that is honestly just as good as Hotline Miami's) keeps you hyped as strawberry float. It's Hollywood-style hacking, but it complements it with enough cyber-sleuthing that it feels continually rewarding. Even though most of the systems you break into only require use of a small handful of tools, when you get in there there's enough narrative threads and personal files that you always feel you're on to something new. Two huge highlights in the story will make you feel terrified and heartbroken, before an adrenaline-fuelled revenge-hack finale leaves you feeling like a total badass while the credits roll. I am Zero Cool, mummy strawberry floater.

Put this on my wishlist after reading this review a few months ago and bought it during the Steam Christmas sale. Just completed it and thought it was wonderful, the Project Junebug mission and everything that followed was such a satisfying sequence of tasks to complete, ended up with a bunch of post its covered in notes to keep track of everything. Thanks!

Happy to be of service. I don't give out the top marks unless the game is something special.

Did you know there's a whole alternate path through the story if you immediately counter-hack the dude that hacks you? You end up getting recruited to Anonymous via 4ch*n or some gooseberry fool.

No, was just relieved to get my system back at that point, though it does explain the bit in the ending message about being more aggressive for an alternate route.

Johnny Jalfrezi wrote:
Now to decide what to play next out of:

Doom
Destiny
The Division
Overwatch
Steep
The Last of Us
The Last Guardian
Bioshock
Bioshock 2
Bioshock Infinite
XCOM 2
Eagle Flight
Battlefield 1
Mortal Kombat XL
Robinson: The Journey
Final Fantasy XV
Dishonored
Dishonored 2
Skyrim

or go back to The Witcher 3.

I found everything outside of the story in W3 absolutely tedious.

In my personal opinion from that list, you need to play (I'm assuming you haven't played any of them before) The Last of Us and Bioshock. They are two of the best games ever game. I'm sure the Witcher 3 is too, but I found the combat and busywork tedious. Shame really because the story seemed amazing.

I would wait to play FFXV until they make the story changes they are planning to make.

Firewatch

It was a very short game, I really enjoyed the story. I started to get a little annoyed in the down moments so I didn't go out of my way to find any of the hidden stuff. Delilah is a pretty horrible human being who was really bad at her job IMO.

Would recommend playing this through. Especially as it can be finished in an afternoon.

Tales From the borderlands Ps4

I have never played the borderlands franchise but the story was very accessible and compelling. The humour was also very much of my type and the voice acting was really really excellent. Possibly the best I have ever experienced.

Technically it held up well although the last episode was a bit janky in places. Certainly not game breaking though.

As a game? I dunno.... I felt I had so little agency over it that I felt a bit impotent in places. The way you just walk through a tube not really solving puzzles felt a bit insulting sometimes. And why have the ability to being up your inventory when you never actually select anything?

Overall I did enjoy my time with it but it felt less of a game than many walking simulators I have played (and enjoyed). I am tempted to pick up Batman but am starting to feel the Telltales burnout now. Does Batman freshen it up at all? I am a massive Batman fan....

7/10 (the excellent humour and likeable characters lifted it from a 6).

kazanova_Frankenstein wrote:Tales From the borderlands Ps4

I have never played the borderlands franchise but the story was very accessible and compelling. The humour was also very much of my type and the voice acting was really really excellent. Possibly the best I have ever experienced.

Technically it held up well although the last episode was a bit janky in places. Certainly not game breaking though.

As a game? I dunno.... I felt I had so little agency over it that I felt a bit impotent in places. The way you just walk through a tube not really solving puzzles felt a bit insulting sometimes. And why have the ability to being up your inventory when you never actually select anything?

Overall I did enjoy my time with it but it felt less of a game than many walking simulators I have played (and enjoyed). I am tempted to pick up Batman but am starting to feel the Telltales burnout now. Does Batman freshen it up at all? I am a massive Batman fan....

7/10 (the excellent humour and likeable characters lifted it from a 6).

All the TellTale games are similar, just interactive stories. I've not played the Batman one but this is easily the best IMO. Shame you've not played any of the Borderlands games to see how magnificently this captured the feel of those games.

Death's Head wrote:

kazanova_Frankenstein wrote:Tales From the borderlands Ps4

I have never played the borderlands franchise but the story was very accessible and compelling. The humour was also very much of my type and the voice acting was really really excellent. Possibly the best I have ever experienced.

Technically it held up well although the last episode was a bit janky in places. Certainly not game breaking though.

As a game? I dunno.... I felt I had so little agency over it that I felt a bit impotent in places. The way you just walk through a tube not really solving puzzles felt a bit insulting sometimes. And why have the ability to being up your inventory when you never actually select anything?

Overall I did enjoy my time with it but it felt less of a game than many walking simulators I have played (and enjoyed). I am tempted to pick up Batman but am starting to feel the Telltales burnout now. Does Batman freshen it up at all? I am a massive Batman fan....

7/10 (the excellent humour and likeable characters lifted it from a 6).

All the TellTale games are similar, just interactive stories. I've not played the Batman one but this is easily the best IMO. Shame you've not played any of the Borderlands games to see how magnificently this captured the feel of those games.

They are all very similar true. For some reason this one felt more linear still though, possibly the lack of branching choices that seemed to effect the following scenes of some of the other games (most notably The Wolf Among Us which was my favourite of all of the games so far). I accept that the "branch" is largely illusionary, but it did help convince me I was shaping my own story.

Watch Dogs 2 - 9/10

It may be another Ubisoft open world game, but this is genuinely one of the most refreshing AAA games I've played in a long time. I polished up the story after about 20 hours, and I'm currently in the process of mopping up the last few side missions, meaning I might actually 100% a game for the first time in years.

It takes a pretty standard open world, GTA style big city model, but actually makes it fun by being different enough that it feels fresh throughout the whole 20 hours. The fact that you can go through (almost) the entire campaign without having to fire a shot if you don't want to, is a fantastic design decision. Not only does it feel like it suits the characters and story, but it forces you to approach the missions and scenarios in a smarter way, if that's how you choose to play. Use your drones to stake out your target, and work your way in undetected, or use your robot minions to disrupt and distract guards. Even when you're not evading guards, there are plenty of missions full of "how do I get there?" puzzles, that work really well to illustrate how much of a playground the city of San Francisco they've built can be.

The game has faults, to be sure, and many of them. The in game Car On Demand app is useless, regularly spawning your vehicle hundreds of metres away, and often in a restricted area, where guards will shoot you on sight. In fact the police/guards/gangs are so trigger happy it's barely believable. The story attempts to justify this, but even stepping through the wrong doorway will see office security guards shoot you to death in a hail of gunfire straight off. It's another reason avoiding conflict is the best way forward. It does mean that if you get caught trying to stealth your way in, you may as well just accept your fate and give up. As refreshing as it feels to try and play a game like you're not a homicidal maniac, the game repeatedly tries to push you into violent means, simply because that's the done thing for this kind of game. Another aspect that is poorly shoehorned into the story at one point, but thankfully, it's perfectly possible to avoid. There are also odd moments when the game will decide you can't quite complete the mission sending in a drone, and Marcus has to be withing range to download some data. You're able to transfer high res, lag free video between yourself and your drone, but for some reason you're not able to transfer some emails this way. And this is in a world where access to electronic devices is determined by line of sight. The worst part about these levels that insist you have to be there in person to download some data, are that it always immediately alerts the guards, who then hone in on you as the timer counts down, and there never seems to be any tidy way to get out of these situations. The area you can occupy and and complete the mission is small, and guards with itchy trigger fingers have a long time to find you. Not once did I feel like I'd been able to get out based on skill rather than luck, in these situations. In one scenario, I was trapped in a room with two doors, and the only reason I could avoid the guards was because I could incapacitate them at each door with some hack that played a noise in their ears, and then shut the door on them each time they tried to open it. If the AI was capable of taking an earpiece out, I'd have been strawberry floated, but hey-ho.

Despite all this, the game is more fun than anything else I've played this year. That characters are great, and genuinely feel unique, even if you know they're all playing off a series of tropes and stereotypes, but they're not represented as active protagonists very often, and it's lovely to see these characters interact, and be goofy together, and become the heroes in this story. There's genuine diversity in here, too, but without ever making it feel ham fisted or forced. People simply are what they are. (This makes an eventual story point about half way through all the more disappointing, because, out of nowhere, it all becomes a big cliché.Horatio gets killed in a gang thing because young black man.) Even though you'll probably fall into the routine of using the same tools for each mission, they generally all feel different. There was a total lack of the feeling I always got throughout GTA V, when starting a mission, that it was going to be the same strawberry floating thing again as always. The game never felt repetitive, and the side missions have all been excellent. Distractions from the main piece, but genuinely entertaining in their own right, and funny in many places, but without feeling like a farce like so many side missions in these kinds of games.

I'm amazed I'm still swooping around the map, completing ATM hacking missions, collecting items, playing dress-up Marcus, etc. long beyond the end of the main story, as it's not something I usually bother with. But here I am, still enjoying it. This is a game so much greater than the sum of it's parts. Even the integrated mulitplayer is a great feature. Annoying when an invasion starts as you're in the middle of another mission, and it would all have been so much more enjoyable if they'd decided not to allow firearms, as there's nothing less fun than being shot to bits by someone for hacking them as you try to escape on foot, but the satisfaction to be found in the cat and mouse games that come of it are better than so many other multiplayer experiences out there today.

Loved it.

Shame the Zodiac Killer mission was pants. No code breaking or clues to follow, just places to hack to boost computing power for someone else to codebreak, and then the worst resolution to it all. Glad it was a freebie.

F-Zero Maximum Velocity 6/10 Not my F-Zero. Brings in new racers, settings and themes, whilst sticking to SNES style gameplay, a regression from F-Zero X.

Final Fight One 6/10 A passable version of Final Fight.

Super Street Fighter II Turbo Revival 6/10 Probably would have been great to play this back in 2001, but on the Wii U VC, might as well stick to the SNES games.

Mario Vs Donkey Kong 6/10 An ugly game which doesn't manage to ape the Game Boy Donkey Kong. The second half which involves guiding a mini Mario to a door is a lot of fun though.

Klonoa Empire of Dreams 7/10 Simple block puzzler which could do with more block dropping levels, and slightly less repetitive music and visuals.

Wind Waker HD

8/10

I love Zelda games, and compared to my original attempt at this on the Gamecube, this time it made a lot more made sense. Perhaps it's me that's changed rather than the game, but I originally found a lot of the side quests a bit vague and just couldn't connect with them, and eventually stopped at one of the two sage temples.

This time it was a lot more engaging, and I had a great time with it, even doing all the block sliding puzzles in the villa.

However, it took a turn for the worse towards the end - I'd heard a lot about the triforce quest but (with a few hints from a guide) it wasn't too much of a bother, since I'd stumbled over half the pieces before I got to that point. However,the closing section, consisting of the 'Boss Rush' that I was not expecting, and the 3 form 'puppet ganondorf', were both frustrating and tedious - maybe I'd lost interest in the game by that point, but that caterpillar with it's insane speed and ridiculous random movement was a complete pain. I'm sure there is a better way to do it but brute force won the day in the end, plus a shedload of bottled fairies. But the time I reached the finale I was willing it to end.

But I'm not going to mark it down too much for that - I'd had a lot of fun up to that point, and I'm glad I finished it - it's no longer taunting me from my games shelf

NSMBU

Got all the star coins and beat the last level. Kinda disappointing last level, but the play through was great fun. Definitely going to go back to Super Luigi U and do the same.

Forza Horizon 3 - Blizzard Mountain [7]

+More of the same sublime arcade racing action that made FH3 so great.
+Looks great - and fab in HDR.

-
-Too many buggy (vehicle) races.
-Pricing of these expansions seem steep and misleading. I bought the Ultimate Edition (which was nearly double the standard edition) assuming it would have the Season Pass included. Having to pay an additional £16/17 for the expansion on top of a £60 'Ultimate Edition' seems money-grabbing in the extreme. Poor form Turn 10.