Last Game You Finished And Your Thoughts V3.0

I bought A Hat in Time a while ago when it was on sale on the PS Store, but only got round to playing it properly this weekend (because I decided to be extraordinarily lazy and not leave the house). I haven't 100%ed it - it's sitting on 65% after seeing the credits roll - but I might one day. To be honest the only criticism I can really level at it is the camera, and even then it's almost something to be expected considering the genre. It's well-written, full of heart and charm, with a lot of varied levels. I picked The Snatcher as the picture to represent it because he is *great*. And if you haven't heard the boss music for the world he features in, then you should have a listen. I heard it before I ever played the game and it's a banger: Your Contract Has Expired

I would recommend it if you haven't played it already and want a fun and funny 3D platformer. Not sure when the Switch port is due, but - Balla, I'm looking at you - it's a delight. A good score

The kid often raves about Hat in Time so it's one I'll definitely grab when it hits switch.
I'm also very interested in katamari and Mario...

I played through Katamari only a week ago, it is excellent and well worth a look. Play the demo and bear in mind that you'll get used to the controls quickly enough!

A Hat in Time is one that I'll almost definitely enjoy. Also, that track you linked is indeed a banger, Rum!

Rum Rapture wrote:

A Hat in Time - A good score

I love the arse off of A Hat In Time, and I'm glad you enjoyed it too! I just hope that the Switch version isn't ballsed-up.

OrangeRakoon wrote:

I played through Katamari only a week ago, it is excellent and well worth a look. Play the demo and bear in mind that you'll get used to the controls quickly enough!

Aye, all of that! Another great thing about it is that it's a quick game - one of those 'palete cleansers' that we all like from time to time. It's the type of game that I feel I'll want to go back to too.

Come on, Switch port... (bobs up and down)

I thought I'd like HLD way more than I do, especially when I love games that plonk me into a world and I have to figure out what's going on by playing with little to no direction.

The art style and music are superb with the latter giving the world a great atmosphere, the combat is simple but clever where you have a gun for ranged attacks but the ammo for this can only be replenished by slashing enemies with your sword & then you have a dash for dodging. This means you have to take risks to be rewarded, do you play it safe with range on enemies you struggle with then pick off easier ones with your sword? You have a good amount of freedom to play how you like here & I had great fun trying to figure out the attack patterns of boss fights.

The meat of the game though is basically figure out a way into 4 mini dungeons per area, kill the enemies in each room to progress, activate a diamond switch thing then kill the area boss then repeat. It just get's a bit samey after you beat the first area and I wish it had something else to break that up a little bit more.


7/10 - It's good but it's missing something to make it a truly great indie game.

Thank fuck that I've finished Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes. I'm not going back for the Season Pass stuff, fuck that for a pish laugh.

In fairness, it's not without merit. Clearly, a lot of love and craft went into this, and a lot of attention was paid to it's visual style and giving it a soul. It's quite bold and brave in the sense that it's very self-aware and utterly mental, and I think the games-within-games idea is a great one.

But the rest of it is utter baws, in my opinion. The visual novel stuff was utter fluff, the humour didn't really click with me, and the visuals are just rubbish, totally without charm. I can live with all that in truth, but I can't live with the core action-based gameplay. That's the main thing, and this is an unbelievably tedious slog to get through - and unbearable to the point where I shut the game off mid-stage a few times. I only came back to it because I planted £35 on it, and I wanted to get my money's worth. That was money - and time! - woefully spent.

Unappealing a lot of the time and downright loathsome at others, and never rising above average while sometimes falling to complete and utter boredom, I'm giving this a 3/10.

Grand baw-booting there. Fun to read, sorry it wasn't as fun to play. Especially because it's a game I was keen on giving a go.

The_Jaster wrote:

7/10 - It's good but it's missing something to make it a truly great indie game.

Now this is a real shame: I hoped you'd love it. Then again, I haven't played much, and your score is well-reasoned. Sorry it didn't work out as much as I led you to believe it might.

Aye I thought I'd really really like it as well, maybe I rushed it a little as I looked at how long it'd take to finish which was about 12 hours and I've beaten it in just under 7 plus one of the achievements said I hadn't defeated all the bosses either. Maybe when I have absolutely nothing to play I'll go back for a more complete run.

I wonder if Travis Strikes Again being by most accounts bad to average and presumably not doing too well in the sales department spells doom for a "proper" NMH3...

Sorry I can't spoiler tag this - typing it on my phone!

I've not played Hotline Miami, and I'd never heard of Shadows of the Damned before I'd played Travis Strikes Again - I had to look it up online when I got to that bit. I get the feeling that I've missed out a little bit by not knowing about those games (and Killer 7, and stuff like that). Still, I thought the core gameplay was too rubbish, even with the skill chips. Glad you enjoyed it more than I did though 👍

Yeah I can see that making the experience considerably less cool.

Also, play Hotline Miami. It's fantastic! (I accept no responsibility for the soundtrack triggering you into doing a murder)

An odd game this one, if you remember a while ago I re-bought an Xbox 360 and after going through the whole digital store I found not a lot that I owned that wasn't playable on ONE (also not a lot I would want to buy if it was shut down like the Wii Channel).

I did find two games Street Fighter II Super Duper HD Edition and Hydrophobia, which I somehow owned but never played. I did start it on this Xbox 360 but wasn't a game to really warrant keeping the 360 plugged in on its own.

Then last week Hydrophobia (and Marathon) was added to BC and as I've got my Xbox One X plugged in and using it, I synced my data and continued on from where I left off on Xbox 360 a few weeks ago.

Hydrophobia is more polished than most XBLA games of the time and looks good still along with playing well for what it is,  along with a lead sort of reminds me of Jade from BG&E.

But this is the ENDING, I guess more acts were coming but then I've seen what seems to be an enhanced version on PS3/PC on Youtube after I looked up to see if my game didn't just crash at the end, which I found cutscenes talking about nanomachines and other things which aren't in the 360 version at all.

That's what I call being crushed under the weight of expectation!

DMC5 is a very very good game and at the moment I would say it is my GOTY but seeing I've only played it, KHIII and ReMake 2 that's come out this year maybe take with a pinch of salt.

Bayonetta 2 is still the best game in the genre and Devil May Cry 3 is still the best DMC.

Now Jay has recently played nearly all the DMC games and maybe even the Bayo's that he might come back to us, saying DMC3 hasn't aged well.

I tried the DMC5 demo and really just didn't get on with it. The fighting just didn't click *at all*, which is pretty key for a game like that. Shame, as I really love Bayonetta. Maybe I'll try again one day.

Odd as it pretty much plays the same unless you're using V who's not in the demo.

That Bayo and DMC are like siblings.

Just got done playing the DMC V demo as well and I think it's a poor showcase of the game as you are only playing with the base move set, with new abilities etc that are either completely locked off in the demo or too expensive to buy. I can see a good game in there though and I'll probably pick it up down the road.

masofdas wrote:

Now Jay has recently played nearly all the DMC games and maybe even the Bayo's that he might come back to us, saying DMC3 hasn't aged well.

Sort of? I prefer DMC4 to DMC3 as the styles in 3 felt like a prototype version of what they did in 4 with Dante.

I'm afraid I can't add a comment about DMCV; I'm being a bit selfish. But I've actually finished two games - bangers incoming - sorry this might be a bit long and self-indulgent:


I'd spent a heck of a lot of time playing Minecraft with an old mate of mine, but we'd really run out of ideas with that - it had already become more of a background thing as we talked over Skype, but even then it was too much. We tried Terraria - well this is just the same but in 2D... not really great. But Starbound, from the word go (I'd started playing it myself before we took it up as our multiplayer "thing") this was/is amazing (clunky tense change here). Set in outer space rather than "mysterious fantasy land", everything is more interesting. The dialog is great - obviously Minecraft didn't have any, but bad writing is worse than none. However, everyone's got something interesting/funny to say, and everything's got a description - a description that changes based on your species, and their opinion. A galaxy full of procedural-generated planets / moons / spaceships means that you don't just have to build a wooden house on a green field and see out your days (although... er... we did that anyway). It also manages to find a perfect balance between well-crafted scripted missions and the afore-mentioned random worlds. We totalled about 120 hours on this - it was bloody worth it.

Also it has that plant woman in that they nicked for Wargroove - guess who should be in Smash Bros.? Nuru, that's who-ru.

I give it a Hammer.Meathook (oh sorry, 9.5)


Oh but also


I was a bit nervous about this - Breath of the Wild was still in memory, and any other big open adventures between now and then seemed a little flat - Fallout anyone? I started off trying to rush through this, yada yada tutorial origin story yada yada do stealth failed try again do stealth failed try again do stealth like the tutorial says well done etc etc... But. The story was actually interesting. It actually made me want to play the game, go round, help people out, get better at things, help more people out, make friends, try to save the world while getting 5 doodads for people... I was invested in the world and its people. A lot of "clever storytelling" usually revolves around some "twist" - usually one that, given 2 minutes thought, doesn't make any sense. Or, having played and moulded a character for 100 hours, the final steps of the game result in the character doing something you'd never have done ever. But this game avoided doing all of that - it kept a lot of the mystery until the very end, and - would you believe it? - you were actually rewarded for doing the seemingly mundane things away from the main path.

Spoiler - what I mean by that is:

It's not quite at the Zelda level - it is still a little po-faced at times, whereas Breath of the Wild managed to keep the Nintendo sense of whimsy (for want of a better word, I'm going to bed in 30 minutes and have a headache) but I was so relieved that I've invested a lot of game time in something that kept me compelled to the end.
That title's still bollocks though.

I give it another robot-9.5 out of robot-10.

I’ve completed the main modes in Rollercoaster Tycoon Adventures on Switch. I didn’t know until I was most of the way through it that it’s a port of a mobile phone game, just with all the microtransactions removed. That probably explains why it so utterly lacks the Rollercoaster Tycoon series’ most well-known aspects and important attributes. There’s bugger all in the way of micro-management and customisation of your park, your rides and your staff.

There’s no complexity to this. It’s just a very plain and straightforward sandbox game where you get to decorate a theme park without any of the manual stuff you got to do in all the similar games from the last twenty years. Adventures is really buggy, overly simple and far too easy...but it’s still Rollercoaster Tycoon. So, that means it’s still a playable, relaxing and addictive way to pass a few hours. Have a look when it's under a tenner, 6/10.

Does it still allow you to make a really cheap but incredibly salty chips stall and pop a stupidly overpriced drinks stall next to it to rack up lots of cash?

JayMoyles wrote:

Does it still allow you to make a really cheap but incredibly salty chips stall and pop a stupidly overpriced drinks stall next to it to rack up lots of cash?

Amazingly, no. It's not that clever. If you're customers are complaining that they're hungry, it's the sort of game that lets you plonk a nacho stand anywhere at all in your park - that sorts it out, just like that. Honestly, the original Theme Park from 1994 has more to customise than Rollercoaster Tycoon Adventures.