Smashing stuff. It's great for couch co-op too.

I bet, just need to train my eldest up! Think I'm going to playthrough again on hard.

By the way...
Out of interest which other boss gave you problems ?

The Ultimate Warrior hockey chap.

Yeah it aims (and hits) such a specific sweet spot it's hard to know who'd be all in for it. The retro threaders would enjoy, I would've thought. One for @Monkey perhaps (and retroking is probably fed up with me nagging him to buy it).

Death Stranding (PC)

Just completed this after finally buying it recently and have been playing solidly, 111 hours played.

I went into it really not knowing quite what to expect, I'd seen some of the trailers and snippets of gameplay but I had mostly tried to minimise how much I knew, and forgotten much of what I had since the initial reveals. I very strongly recommend that you go into it the same and avoid any specific information. This has been one of the most incredible gaming experiences yet, up there with Metroid Prime, Subnautica, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Inside, as one of my favourite games. It's very very good, fascinating from start to finish.

I've played bits and pieces of the MGS series but never really connected with them particularly deeply; the MGS1 GC port which was fun and quite good at the time, MGS4 which I enjoyed playing a fair bit but I don't have many memories of, Peace Walker which I can barely remember, Ground Zeroes I finished, and MGSV I have played part way through but haven't felt compelled to continue.

Compared to Metal Gear I've found Death Standing to be just massively better and more interesting to me personally. I've often felt all the twisted lore and crazy story of MGS on top of the deep gameplay mechanics to be just a bit too rich somehow. Death Stranding's highly surreal setting seems to suit Kojima's style of craziness much better than the quasi-realistic military/espionage world in Metal Gear, much easier to suspend disbelief and focus on the underlying themes when they aren't being muddied by references to real geopolitics. It feels quite a bit more grown up than MGS, it's still full of playful 4th wall winks and has Kojima's particular pop-culture interests woven throughout, but lacks the 'grottiness'.

The story and writing is often unsubtle and arguably overwrought, if you think about any of it too much it doesn't make much logical sense. I don't think that matters much though, for me any game/film/piece of music/art is a vehicle to deliver ideas and emotional themes, if it can do that in an interesting way and with genuine passion then I couldn't care less about the technical specifics of its delivery. It's the overall feel that something gives me that I'm looking for, a kind of immersion in another world and a transformation of mind into a different state of being. The combination of gameplay design, setting, and characters in Death Stranding achieves that very effectively. Importantly it just feels quite honest in what it's trying to do and not overly worried about commercial appeal, for me a flawed but genuine piece is far preferable to something that is highly polished but lacks soul.

Despite the apparent bleakness, sorrow and terror of the world I've found it to be really quite uplifting, just a good vibe overall despite the extreme dystopia. The characters all feel and look like real people, the focus is not on killing but saving people, reconciliation and building connections. MGS in comparison feels very depressing, I find I have no real interest in the characters or world there. Death Stranding is about hope.

The overall gameplay design and core loop is truly excellent. Not having watched gameplay videos much I was prepared for something much slower and more like a walking sim (which I would have also loved), I didn't realise just how detailed and deep it really is. Picking up orders, planning the optimal route through destinations using the fantastic map, managing your gear and load with possibly the best inventory system ever, weighing up how much equipment to bring, setting out across rugged and often hostile terrain, keeping focus on balance, battery and stamina, and finally reaching your destination after a long journey to deliver the goods to grateful folk before moving on to the next. It's immensely compelling and rewarding.

The way it has you effectively choosing your difficulty dynamically is genius, the more orders and lost packages you take on the more weight and unwieldiness you have to deal with which makes navigating the rough terrain and dangers more risky. As you progress and gain more skill and gadgets to help get you through it becomes more about building infrastructure, efficient route planning and cargo management which have their own logistical challenges. The feeling of trepidation as you set out into the unknown with what you hope is enough gear is quite something, it reminds me a lot of Subnautica which was also very focused on managing resources and logistical thinking, as well as the challenges of navigating a potentially hostile environment and improvising accordingly.

The online asynchronous multiplayer is also genius, probably the best implementation of the concept yet, and I hope it lays down a model for how to do this sort of thing in other games. It's very cleverly done I think, there's clearly been a lot of work to keep the distribution of structures balanced across the playerbase so that there's always enough space for you to make a meaningful contribution. Finding great spots to lay down bridges or place generators next to roads or trailblazing a new route replete with ladders, ropes, and encouraging signs is immensely rewarding. It does a fantastic job of making conquering the wilderness feel like a group effort without making your life too easy. This is a game where the experience is definitely augmented by the multiplayer, I kind of wish I'd got in straight away at launch but there seems to be a healthy population right now at least. I'd recommend getting in on it sooner rather than later anyway.

I love how physical and chunky the interaction is with terrain and items, like how you stumble and skid on rocky and loose ground, how strong winds can try to tip you over when you are carrying too much on your back, how you pick stuff up and chuck it on your back or place it on a vehicle. It manages to simulate your presence in the world without making it all too fiddly or difficult, there's just the right amount of simplification and abstraction while still requiring your full attention and control. Some aspects of the control and animation could certainly be better, in intense sections you can feel very sluggish to respond, and the vehicles can feel either too light or too planted. Everything's a compromise with design though, so I don't know exactly they could have improved aspects of control to work better in one scenario without negatively affecting the feel or playability in others. Overall the gameplay is very fun and responsive.

The UI is probably on the best that I've come across, everything feels unified and clearly laid out, and the controls allow you to navigate and manage everything pretty blazingly fast. The map and inventory management are the best I've come across I think, once you get to grips with them there's little that frustrates or slows you down.

The sound design is seriously excellent, super crisp and detailed at all times. It really adds to how satisfying the second-to-second gameplay feels, metallic chonks as you attach and detach cargo, whizzes and whirrs of your gadgets, hums of structures and electronics, fizz of rain, slosh of mud, cronch of rock. Combined with the subtle incidental music you get totally immersed in this living breathing soundfield. Everything you do has some audio feedback, plenty of clever little noises that assist you. The sound in this is every bit as important as the graphics in bringing the whole thing to life.

The level of detail and design of the world is frequently astounding, the gnarled rocks, dense moss, and crumbling structures have a very tactile quality to them. Some scenes you could just stare at for hours, soaking it all in. I love how changes in lighting and camera are used to great effect throughout particular sections. There's some areas with smoke and haze that are the best I've ever seen. The animation are excellent too, so many little flourishes that keep your attention.

The facial animations are generally excellent though not without some uncanny valley here and there. Mads Mikkelsen is the standout performance for me, really fascinating, Léa Seydoux too. The quality of the mocapped animation is such that it makes watching the cutscenes pretty interesting even if you don't understand/care about the story.

Like with Subnautica and KC:D it's left me wanting more, much more. Like I would love a much more vast world to play around in and cross on epic journeys, but I understand why it's compressed as it is, it's still plenty sizeable enough though. I hope we'll see more of this, either DLC or some other story in this world, or other games to try something similar. It's by fair the most innovative and unique game (AAA) game I've played in a very long time, I hope it inspires more of this sort of thing.

stonechalice wrote:

LivDiv wrote:

Titanfall 2, again. Inspired by DS completing it the other week I thought I would play through again. Easily one of the games of the gen. Gutting that a sequel seems unlikely.

I'm assuming this will be on Gamepass when EA goes on there?

It’s on EA Play, so yes.

FWIW I'm just about the most anti-advertisement type of person you could imagine, and in the end even I found the product placement stuff to be really very inconsequential and forgiveable. Like I adblock as much as I possibly can, refuse to even look at real billboard type ads, I have a visceral and immediate 'fuckoff!' reaction when ads slip through my adblocker somehow or when they pop up on the YT app on my phone. Adverts are just one of these insane things I hope humanity looks back upon one day and wonders how anyone put up with that nonsense.

When I learned about the product placement in DS I was pretty deflated, and I tried to look to see if there was any mods to remove the references in the PC version before I started playing but couldn't find owt. As I played through though it was far less of an issue than I feared, it is kinda incongruous but quite ignorable, and it sort of feels like a weird 4th wall joke of the sort that Kojima likes to make. There are other small references to real products tucked away in the extras, but they just seem like things that Kojima likes or appreciates personally so whatever, maybe he happens to really like that drink. I don't know what the funding situation for the game was either, so maybe it was beneficial to them. At some point they get partially replaced by an in-game drink which looks like it would be far preferable anyway.

The way I deal with this sort of thing is to just make a point of not ever buying or talking about the product, it's my intuition that it's probably a good way to live to try and not give money to companies that can afford to advertise to you like that. I'm not into those kind of drinks at all so it's easy enough for me.

It is definitely a flaw and a negative, but a vanishingly tiny one compared to all the amazing things that the game gets right IMO. Not playing because of it would be kind of like not going into the Sistine Chapel because of a single piss stain on the walls, not that I'm comparing the game to the Chapel.

Is there an adblock for YouTube still??

You can manually add a setting to ublock origin to block the Twitch ads

https://www.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/comments/j28ada/how_to_block_the_new_twitch_ads_with_ublock_origin/

Pikmin 3

I had cleared it on WiiU. Amazing how fast you can start doing it when you know what to do. 16 days on game time and 36 fruit out of 66. 98 logs out of 120. Pretty pleased. Will go back to fully clear and do some multilayer/ challenges. The new levels are cute, small but fun.

I forgot to mention I played this too. Very nice little game. Maybe a bit too breezy for me though. Was over in a couple of hours.

Story reminded me of Celeste.

New Super Lucky's Tale (BoneX)

Pretty solid in the end. 3D platformer, nothing very novel or exciting, but nicely presented and pretty fun to play through. Fairly easy, but I was ok with that. At least until the bonus world where, as you might expect, shit gets a bit more real... and it's maybe but quite good enough for that. Nice end have could conceivably have eeked an [8] or but nah just a [7] but yknow it's on gamepass so no harm y'all having a crack...

Agreed. One of my favourite games of all time.

Silke wrote:

Agreed. One of my favourite games of all time.

Some of my villagers in Animal Crossing call me June Bug, and I'm extra proud of that now since I really enjoyed her character in Kentucky.

It's a strange genre.  Firewatch and Finch are probably still the two to beat, and both are Marmite experiences.  Would subscribe to Paul's Youtube channel to watch him huff through Virginia or Everybody's Gone to the Rapture.