Never heard of it.

Finished The Turing Test this morning. Pretty good puzzle/story based game that was enjoyable if a little over serious and actually not too taxing. I only had issues with one or two puzzles near the end really, not an overtly bad thing as it actually made the game quite relaxing to play.

JonB wrote:

Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age Another of those games I always wanted to play but missed out on due to not having a PS2. Certainly lived up to its reputation, and the added autosaves and speed up option helped with some of the more dated aspects of its design. The combat really is excellent - surprised variations of the gambit system haven't made their way into more games since.

Thought it was great too.  Really enjoyed tinkering with the gambits and watching the team rip through enemies.  And the fast forwarding, for when you're faffing about/grinding etc!

Finished a couple of games over the weekend, both on Steam.

Fran Bow

It is a critical darling point and click adventure - it has a really nice story book aesthetic for the most part, although it is fairly gory in places, especially at the start.  It's about a traumatised young girl who is trying to escape from an evil (?) asylum to find her cat.  I really didn't get along with it for the first chapter or so as I've never gotten used to your typical point and click puzzle logic and even though the art is really well drawn, I can only see so many children being cuddled by demons before I stop wanting to look at it.



I took a several month break from playing it, in fact!  It does get a lot more fantastical soon after though and that was more up my alley.

It does some cool things with alternate realities and timelines to jazz up the puzzles but really for me that stuff was easier to understand than the regular old, 'combine 2 unrelated things and use them to press a button, rather than using your finger', which there is plenty of in this game.  I had to use a walkthrough.  Here is an excerpt.

In spite of all that stuff I thought it was a pretty engrossing story and I found it hard to stop playing once I got into it.  Well worth a look.  Also;

Baldur's Gate Series

BG2 Is one of my personal favourites and I've made an effort to play it every couple of years since release.  I think this might be my last time playing though!  Just seen it too many times and - especially playing it directly after the first game - all the boring/tedious/clunky bits weighed down on me too much.  

I mostly just wanted to try the new BG1 expansion and it was pretty good, as well as being a bit of a novelty seeing an expansion for such an old game.  Plus, I wasn't burned out on the game by that point (that happened about 10 hours into BG2).

I maintain BG2 is still a top game but there's really nothing to go back for now and I'll gladly never play any of them again.  Might be time to get into those obsidian CRPGs that have come out recently!

Back when released, it was amazing. I’ve not played it since, but I can see how it might not have aged very well.

Completed Dishnonored 2, straight after going back and replaying Dishnonored (Def Edition) - ran through them both, although I need to go back and do DLC.

They’re both good but I think D2 is the superior game. It’s still far from perfect, it must be said, however they do so much right that I think it’s be curmudgeonly to nitpick too much.

It’s worth noting that I was generally going stealthy and low chaos, but that I wasn’t sticking religiously to it, which might have helped me enjoy it more.

Great game.

The Turing Test (Xbox One)

If you judge a game by how long afterwards you think about it, this is an all-time classic. Stellar work, all told. Minor gripes include some puzzles requiring me to have my index finger hooked around the front of the pad so I could keep my thumb on the right stick and still have access to the X button - odds on this game'd be easier on PC. Some of the philosophising is a bit heavy handed - literal pages of text are left lying around. Some pruning could have been done, and still have had the same impact, I think. Thumbs up for mentioning Daniel C. Dennett, though.

[9] mind-body problem thought experiments out of [10] AI-human conversations with disturbing undertones.

Need to play Turing test someday.
It's somewhere in my yet to play Steam playlist.

Resident Evil 7

Very good overall. Excellent sense of atmosphere and use of horror tropes, including gore of course, and the first person perspective emphasises it all.

Perhaps it's a little thin as a concept though. There are a handful of really great sequences, but also a bit of padding even in a leisurely 10 hour completion time. A couple more family members with their own distinct sections would have been welcome.

Mechanically as well, the combat can get awkward. The first person perspective isn't suitable to some of the more close up fighting you're expected to do. And in boss battles it's not always effectively communicated what you should be doing.

But that shouldn't take away too much from a very well put together experience with some really memorable moments. A strong 8, I reckon.

I liked that part a lot. Btu the final stretch just after was uninspired.

Assassin's Creed Origins.

The journey is finally over for Bayek or By Heck as I came to call him. We've unearthed all of Egypts secrets and collected every trophy possible in our 80 odd hour stint.
The combat system was tripe. I missed the black flag days of countering a sword swing and following up with a flurry of attacks. Now it's a clumsy push of your shield and swish of your sword which relies heavily on luck of you actually landing that blow. Horse combat is far superior as your later told that the faster your travelling the more damage you output, this results in a single blow killing four people in a typical ride by.
Wish I could've played more with Aya as everything seemed so simple yet rewarding.

Horizon Dlc:

impressive... most impressive.. Loads of content + a graphics-whore-paradise + post-game/dlc narrative diversions:

Muy interesante: 9 - 1 (por some cringy dialogue)
= 8

Bound

Even taken on its own terms as a low interactivity prancing simulator I think it failed on just about every level.

It doesn't gel as a concept. The visual style is just there for its own sake. The balletic movement lacks context and is badly underused. There's a roll move introduced in the first part which you literally never have to use again. Plus it's very clumsy, which undermines the whole idea of graceful control, and the camera only makes it worse. Even as an allegory it's heavy handed and doesn't particularly represent its subject matter well.

At least it's short.

JonB wrote:

Bound

Even taken on its own terms as a low interactivity prancing simulator I think it failed on just about every level.

It doesn't gel as a concept. The visual style is just there for its own sake. The balletic movement lacks context and is badly underused. There's a roll move introduced in the first part which you literally never have to use again. Plus it's very clumsy, which undermines the whole idea of graceful control, and the camera only makes it worse. Even as an allegory it's heavy handed and doesn't particularly represent its subject matter well.

At least it's short.

Yup. I really wanted to like it. But I couldn’t. Because it’s a bit shit.

I thought it started off well. Then got repetitive and uneventful. But I still liked the central premise.

acemuzzy wrote:

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (PC)

So I never played this when it firs seet came out, but it's been on the pile of shame for a while.  And then kindly sponsored by @yossarian.

Thoughts were pretty muted to start with - a bit clunky, didn't seem to have a aged well, pretty awful combat, slow progress no challenge.  And it stayed that was for the first few hours to be honest.  But then it got going, and I could start to see why people like it - while still clunky the combat found it's rhythm, and the environmental puzzle started having enough challenge to be fun, with the time-rewinding oft needed.  And the PC version did show its merits with some nice big views from the final tower etc.

And on top I guess I have to respect it's importance as a title - so I think in generous mood it's ended up being a pseudo-rose-tinted [8]...

I have a huge love for this, one of my favourites from the original xbox era. I was going to get it on pc but maybe it's best leaving things to memory.