Last Game You Finished And Your Thoughts V3.0

mas wrote:

After beating the single player I wouldn't say this is a great 3rd person shooter but a great 3D platformer as it plays more like one of those but with a shooting mechanic much like FLUDD in Sunshine and its top notch at that.

If we were to redo the Top 10 Switch vote this now would be much higher on my list and likely can only get better with the Octo Expansion.

Good to see you enjoyed it and that it would push into your overall top 10, I'm currently about 20 or so levels into Octo expansion & it really does ramp up the challenge quite nicely.

My Top 10 was

1. Super Mario Odyssey
2. Oxenfree
3. SteamWorld Dig 2
4. Fire Emblem Warriors
5. L.A. Noire
6. Night in the Woods
7. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
8. Subsurface Circular
9. Rime
10. Splatoon 2

I would now put Splatoon 2 in at Number 2 and I don't think I've played anything else this year on Switch so far that would make that list.

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Inside is a game on paper sounds right up my street but for some reason, I never really fancied playing it but seeing it was on sale as part of the Xbox E3 deals, I thought I would finally get to this 93 rated and multiple game award-winning title for that reason to see what the fuss is about.

I found it to be interesting and worth a play but not as good as some make out it to be, the other thing that is an interesting subject at the moment with Athrun bringing up the violence in some of Sony's games. Now I didn't find them to be an issue but I found Inside to be really disturbing, I don't know if it's because of the art style or as you play as a little boy compared to the realistic nature and setting of a Last of Us.

Just beat Wulverblade last night, and it's as interesting a side-scrolling brawler as I've played. What stands out most is the developer's keen interest in Roman Britain and the Roman Invasion - it properly took me back to Mrs. Jackson's Standard Grade History class, where we'd have to write Roman Journals for homework and we'd all use author names like Master Bates and Biggus Dickus and stuff like that. Anyway, Wulverblade is smarter than that, and the sheer savagery of the brawling starkly juxtaposes the smooth, almost effortless mechanics of the gameplay. Everything else is absolutely solid too, with the sound doing a great job of creating an appropriate mood and atmosphere, and the visuals really adding to what is a high-quality experience. It was too hard in it's original form, but now that they've added an Easy Mode (and slightly modified the balance of the gameplay too), it's now much more enjoyable to batter through. Maybe it's not saying that much, but Wulverblade is the best side-scrolling brawler that I've played in years. 8/10.

One of the many games that I'd like to play but will probably never get around to on Switch.

Everybody's Golf (PS4)


First off, this game is incredible and a must for any Mario Golf fans. I played the Vita version a few months back and was impressed, but the PS4 game is something else.

The game is essentially Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour, but built around an online hub where you enter tournaments (either online or offline). I've been fixated on the offline career mode as you are constantly unlocking items, clothing and equipment for your character. Even if you finish dead last you'll be rewarded with a new t shirt or some coins (the game's currency). This currency then evolves in to "Gems" later on in the game where you need these to upgrade a Custom Club. You receive gems by completing in-game tasks (get a chip-in, tee-off more than 320 yards etc.) and I imagine this is what enables the player to get the hardest trophies - one of them is to get a Condor (a hole-in-one on a Par 5 course)!

Aside from the golfing, there are fishing mini-games and the ability to drive a golf-cart around any of the courses. This makes it a bit of an open-world experience although there's not much in the courses outside of fishing, which is the only real negative. My 6 year old loves dressing up the characters and pissing about in the hub area, but the golfing experience itself has so many unlockables and RPG-elements that I must have spent 100+ hours in the game already and haven't looked at the DLC.

Highly recommended.

9/10

Splatoon 2 Octo Expansion

I finished this last week and it just blows the base games single player right out the water, a good chunk of it does feel like it's set up for players that know the game inside & out with very specific levels set up like challenges where you have to play with certain weapons or maybe even just a special that is always active. The difficulty is definitely ramped up as well to the point where I can definitely see some getting annoyed with it but thankfully you are never locked into a specific level & always have other options available.

I personally loved the extra challenge as it leads to punch the air moments once you finally clear a level or a boss etc - some of them do feel like a bit of padding though so they could get up to the 80 total (stuff like "Hey, copy this statue of a dog by carefully shooting out these boxes") but the more traditional ones are so so clever especially in the final stretch of the game that comes to a really fun conclusion.

If you don't know Captain Spirit is part of the Life is Strange Universe, it came out last night in the UK and is under demos for Before the Storm but in the USA it's under Life is Strange 2 which it will connect to.

That you may consider it to be like Ground Zeros, Final Chapter Prologue and Ducsae that it is sort of a demo but not at the same time but unlike some of those Captain Spirit is free and has got me excited for Life is Strange 2 which we know nothing about part from the characters of Captain Spirit will be in it and that it's £33 on PSN to preorder, which does seem a little outrageous but I was someone that was worried that Square was milking the series and rather quickly, however, the three games in the universe so far have all been good that LiS2 might warrant the price tag.

Will the TV Show be good though?

masofdas wrote:

and that it's £33 on PSN to preorder

For what I'd assume would be 5 episodes of a game at the calibre of Life is Strange, I'd say that's worth it.

I'd totally forgotten Captain Spirit was headed our way. I'll need to download it and give it a try on my days off this week.

It's just that's it's £20 more than Season 1 and Before the Storm, that it does seem a massive price increase compared to those and even against Telltale it's almost a Tenner more.

You won't need days off, you can do it in a hour or so.

Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies

I liked this! It was certainly a big step up from Apollo Justice. The writing and the mysteries all felt tighter, and I very rarely felt as though control was wrested away from me. It still doesn't live up to the series highest heights, and I dislike the increasingly over-the-top aesthetic compared to the earliest entries' believable lawyers in suits. On the other hand, smoother investigation portions and mostly standalone cases made this an easy game to sit down and enjoy. Maybe it would be foolish to expect the magic of the original trilogy to be recreated, and maybe the creators were smart not to try?

That final villain, though . . . yeah, look forward to the final case review

10/10

I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, I've now played enough of the series to listen to the Ace Attorney GNamer podcasts?

Anyway, onward to Spirit of Justice in a couple of weeks! (I'm not gonna pay for any DLC cases just now).

You can listen to the first two: the third one's an SoJ special, I believe.

Your views are pretty much mine where DD is concerned! (Score aside, natch.) The main DLC episode ain't bad either if you want to try it.

Looking forward to that review greatly...

Aha, I'm incredibly excited to read your thoughts on the Big Bad.

Yeah, I totally get why you enjoyed DD, but I think they simplified the investigations too much for my tastes. As you'll soon find out, they got a great balance with SoJ.

As for the podcast, the first two focus on our top 5 and bottom 5 cases in the first five games, so you're good to go. We do talk a little bit about SoJ at the beginning of part one, but it's only really some chat about what was shown off in trailers and previews along with the other two lads talking about their very early impressions - the first case, really - without going into any particularly detail. If you're uneasy about even that, I'd recommend skipping to the 20 minute mark on Part 1 as that's where we get on to the meat of the cast. You're probably as best doing that anyway as we've got a whole podcast about SoJ anyway.

Nothing to say about anything other than about gjone's Everybody's Golf write-up - agreed, it's brilliant. It's one of my favourite PS4 games, and highly recommended by me too!

You're really tempting me on Everybody's Golf now - I only held off because of a middling reception on release

I must be imagining things as I'm sure yesterday I saw Athrun post he beat BotW.

Anyway, I'm the first to actually beat a game put forward for the game a month game that EofGiz is doing with me and Pete but I reckon out of the three games combined I've still played the least amount of hours and I think Pete was going to continue on with Yakuza.

That game was


If you've not listened to the game a month podcast then the idea of it is to play a game you've not played, well Jade Empire is slightly different as I have played it before back in 2005 and not since.

That much like SotC it's a game that I've had in my Top 25 games for years and I'd argue with anyone that Jade Empire is Bioware's best singular game. That I wanted to find out if I would still think that, as after playing the SotC remake it stayed in my Top 25 and I would go as far as saying it's the best game I've played this year (wouldn't count for GOTY as it's a remake).

Jade Empire is, of course, an OG Xbox game which is One X enhanced and does look great but some issues like it being in 4:3, not 16:9 and things from that time which would have been acceptable then but not now like characters walking through doors.

Now I have played another Bioware OG Xbox game recently and that's KOTOR which doesn't hold up in my opinion but Jade Empire does and very well. I think it's down to the more action-oriented combat system and it looks so much better as even if KOTOR is X Enhanced it's still rather grey corridors, not ancient China heaven which lovely and colourful.

I would say Jade Empire is still very much worth playing but does it still make my Top 25 and the answer is no but is it still like an 8/10 game, yes very much so and worth tracking down on OG Xbox, 360, One, PC or Mobile.

Edit
We've put the podcast up for this

GUYS GUYS GUYS I FINISHED A GAME GUYS


This is the first game I've been really keen on since Celeste.  Not saying there aren't problems, but it's good stuff.

The gameplay is apparently a bit Marmite, but I thought it was brilliant.  Fast-paced, fun, steadily more complex without ever feeling overwhelming...  I liked the not!Pokémon, I liked the RPG-lite mechanics, I liked the side-quests, I liked how getting three stars on every battle tests you in different ways.  I liked everything about the gameplay hugely.  

The general presentation is also high-tier.  The game's graphics aren't overly taxing, but I think it looks great.  The character designs are good, the sprite designs are good, and everything is clear and colourful.  The in-battle sound effects add to the experience, and the soundtrack borders on greatness.  

The story does not.  It's mostly going for ridiculous, but at times it feels like it wants us to take the world-dominating effect of sushi seriously, and that's just hard to do.  Wars and broken families over incorrectly eaten sushi feel daft to the point where suspension of disbelief is no longer possible, and the mascot's deep-voiced proclamations of how sushi brings the world together are bloody stupid.  The snowy chapter is a high point, and a surprisingly dark one: what happens with Masa is a low point.  That's before getting to the loose ends it leaves untied.

The story is partially voiced, no doubt due to 3DS restrictions, and it feels like they should have gone for either one or the other (outside the anime cut-scenes).  And some of the characters are bloody irritating: intentionally so, but hanging the lampshade doesn't mean there isn't still a lampshade there.  

That said, go into this for the gameplay, and view the story/characters for what they are: a framing device for fast-paced sushi battles, and lots of them.  If you do what I did and go for the stars/side-quests, it'll last you for many hours.  Questions about value, I'd say, are unfair (although possibly the game isn't worth the full £50 like SMO or BotW).  

There's lots of content if you like the gameplay.  I did.



p.s. If you can get it on 3DS, probably best to do so. My sushi-scrubbing finger really hurt after a while. 😓

I mostly went for it in that it seemed like it'd something to switch off and enjoy - much like a Kirby game, actually - and the overall presentation sealed the deal for me. Well, actually, the price dropping below £20 literally sealed the deal for me...

I have also finished a children's video game.

Hollow Knight
Bloody good game, this.
I'm thinking of doing an actual review, along with a few others, but for now I'll just say that this is extremely highly recommended. There were a few infuriatingly hard moments, but they all turned out to be entirely optional so I can't moan too much. I think they stopped me getting the "true" ending, but in a way it's quite nice to know there's the option in my future of another playthrough one day with more content.
11/10

I've been flirting with putting Hollow Knight in my basket every evening since it came out but I want to make sure I've got the time to really tuck into it.

It's definitely a game that lends itself to having a nice session to sit down and explore. Overall, I was at around 30 hours and that's a very slow, ponderous playthrough that deliberately avoided looking anything up.

I've technically beaten it now, but I'm not writing it off now that I'm planning to rinse the game with 100% completion - I'm that hooked!

Heavy Rain

Boy am I glad I never paid human monies for this tripe. Laughably bad dialogue, a plethora of plot holes, dreadful pacing, nonsensical character motivations, dumb plot twist, and an insufferable amount of motion controls. If they were going for straight to video B-Movie knock off then they really hit it out of the park.

If you can overlook just how shoddy most of the writing is, then the overarching plot isn't dreadful, and the concluding chapter, when all the character arcs overlap, is alright. There's also a multitude of ways things can go down at the end - I was a good boy and found the Origami Killer (dumb) and had all the characters survive. So you could certainly say there's a good chunk of ambition here. But it's all just so laughably wooden.

It's free on PSN this month, and I'd recommend downloading it if only to fuck around in the ridiculously bad opening chapters. That said, it's a big file with a big install time so don't bother if you're internet's bad.

If you're interested in "interactive Dramas" (As the game's opening trophy applauds itself) you'd be much better off with the vastly superior Until Dawn.

5/10.

It's David Cage, so I think it's clear that C-Movie level writing is what you're getting with these games. I'd certainly never buy them full price - there's far better interactive dramas out there.

But how many emotions did it make you feel, Muss? How many?

Also, did you know he knows Ellen Page?

I really liked Heavy Rain when it came out for PS3 that I'd go as far as say it's one of my fav exclusives for PS3.

Really enjoyed Detroit which I did post on here when I beat that and it remains in my Top 5 for this year still along with God of War, Night in the Woods, Subsurface Circular and Florence.