indigoDos wrote:

regmcfly wrote:

indigoDos wrote:

Fin Filling in the world map of  Creed of Ass: Origins. 

Stunning technical achievement by Ubisoft. Makes me ponder upgrading hardware to potter-through in 4k with HDR enabled.

How do the side quests feel in terms of fun

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filler scale? Feels like creed has straddled both ends of that spectrum

Nothing to write home about so far, tho I've only done 3 or so.

Map is absolutely infested with icons. I predict a largese of filler to be present.

I always remember the feather stuff in 2 feeling worthwhile, but subsequent entries going off the rails in Ubi map clusterfuckness

AJ wrote:

The filler is my favourite bit of Assassin's Creed.

Have they brought back the "real world" you could drop in/out of? I liked those.

Battlefield 1 (Story Mode)

Thought it started off interestingly, where the game tries to hammer in how expendable life was in WW1, where your characters die very quickly, from a couple of shots, and your character's name, DOB and DOD are superimposed over the carnage.  You're then given control of another character, who will die equally as easily.  

It sets a tone, but then you get into the story mode proper.  It's a series of vignettes from various theatres of war.  And each of the characters you play as in those missions are you usual unstoppable FPS hero, taking multiple bullets and regenerating health.  The Aussie hard nut in the Gallipoli level says to one of his young chargers something like "Don't worry, you're Australian, you're impossible to kill" and he's not to bloody wrong!  

Missions themselves are pretty by the numbers too, like your tank will break down and you need to find 3 spark plugs in a village, with each spark plug guarded more heavily than the last.  You get turret sections and all that shit.

That aside the shooting itself is fun enough and I like that you get to sometimes use tanks or planes to mix it up.  Looks and sounds fantastic too.  It's all been done before though and I doubt it will leave much of an impression. 

EA Access looks like it might be a cool thing to subscribe to every now and then though.  Glad to have played it for 6 dollars and not 50 or whatever.

It might be a case of life's too short for me.  In my summary of the Vita one I said I wouldn't play the PS4 only sequel as the handheld aspect added a point to it.  Plus they've doubled the length, and I felt it was quite long anyway. Then a deal popped up on Black Friday (when I'd just seen it place highly on an 'underrated PS4 games' Youtube vid).  I might leave it in the swap club indefinitely, cheers.

TheDJR wrote:

I stopped playing Evil Within 2 about halfway through, enjoyed the first few acts but got bored and ran out of ammo, thought I was at the end of the game.

Got 85% way through then lost the will to carry on. Survival horror games could do with being shorter and trimming the fat. RE7 would have been much better if they cut the last 3rd out. Same for Prey.

Rime.

Might have to play that again because it all feels a bit... tenuous.

Decent game. Damn good graphics. Pretty derivative, especially the music, but it does what it does really well.

Legend of Zelda Link's Awakening DX

I'd never played this Zelda.  Think it holds up really well on the whole!  It looks and sounds about as well as you could expect from a Game Boy Color game too.  There's not much I can say about the classic Zelda formula of beating a dungeon finding a new tool and using it to open up new areas.  All as charming as expected.  

Only real tedium comes from only having 2 map-able action buttons that you regularly have to swap around, by accessing the inventory, and also having to scroll through a tad too much text every time you find a power up etc.  

I DID need to use youtube and various text guides to beat the game; it got a bit tricky about 3/4 of the way through.  One thing about modern games being a bit more helpful in collating pertinent info, I often don't really soak in (what I assume to be) incidental dialogue, and hints on where to go next.  

Really liked it, and would have absolutely loved it as a kid.  Still remember getting stuck on Link To The Past and felling so good when I finally got past a roadblock.  Glad to have played it so many years later.

Cross-post from the Ueda thread:

Shadow of the Colossus HD | PS3

Andy wrote:

Well, that’s me played through the HD version on PS3. I may have called my TV (or PS3, or controller, or the game, or me, I’m not quite sure) a ‘fucking cunt’ a number of times during the last colossus. I’ll put together my revised thoughts tomorrow.

If you’ll forgive my self-indulgence, I’ll start with a very brief personal history.

I bought the original SotC for PS2 at launch, in February 2006, but I think it may have been 2007 or 2008 before I completed it. It was certainly before October 2008. Anyway, Ico was, at the time SotC came out, my favourite game of all time. (I had bought it at launch, too, although it didn’t come out of the machine until it was completed.) SotC was firmly amongst my favourites as soon as I played it, even without knowing the full story; the mechanics were largely unlike anything else I’d played, and I loved the different ways of defeating the colossi. Once I completed it, I frequently put it at the top of my all-time favourites list.

Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Classics HD was released on PS3 (here) on 28 September 2011. My calendar tells me that I was away on a residential course when it was released, which is why I didn’t play it straight away. My trophy list says I downed the first colossus at 3.15am on Friday 14 October 2011; I was due to start nightshift on the Friday night, so in the early hours the night before, while trying to stay up as late as possible, I obviously decided to revisit it.

Except, that was it for almost a year, apparently, until 3.10am on Friday 17 August 2012, when I was once again staying up late before a Friday nightshift, and defeated the second colossus. Then, at 8.07pm, before heading off to work, I toppled the third. I still considered it one of my favourites, but for some reason at that time it wasn’t taking hold, because apparently that’s the last time I played it, until yesterday.

I have been catching some of the remake hype but, as I’ve forbidden myself from spending any money on videogames this year, I had to pass. When I got home from town yesterday lunchtime - a trip to town where I fought hard not to go and buy a copy - I decided I needed to scratch that itch. And boy, did I. I sat down about quarter past two, and started to play. I took a couple of breaks as the evening went on but, at half past midnight, the final colossus crumbled. (It was then 1am before the game was finished.) What an absolutely incredible game it is. But not without faults. And, at the risk of upsetting anyone, I’m going to level a few of my criticisms at it here.

It’s been said before, but the controls. Oh, man, the controls. I don’t have an issue with button placement, using triangle to jump comes as instinctively as anything else once you’re playing for any length of time, and a separate button to grasp things makes sense for the gameplay. However, various things combine to make the sometimes necessary swift movement incredibly frustrating. Directing where wander will leap from a ledge feels like a lottery. You have to let go the direction stick to make him climb the ledge. The grasp button is also the slow, careful walk button, and also part of the combination to dive-roll, except you can’t dive-roll from a slow walk. Shimmying sling a ledge, climbing up, running, then dive-rolling requires the release and retriggering of controls in an awkward, clumsy manner. And, when trying to act quickly, as you sometimes have to, the game won’t register your release of a control, nullifying subsequent activation.

When combined with a dodgy camera and some poor gameplay design, it can make for a frustrating experience. As discussed last night, the two smaller colossi, eleven and fourteen, both spam you with attacks while you’re down, or as soon as you get up. A problem they also share, due to their size, is that (partly due to unreliable controls) it is near impossible to reposition yourself once you’re on their backs. So, if you don’t land in the one position facing the one direction that doesn’t cause them to endlessly buck, then you’re not going to get them down. You won’t even have time for one short stab, let alone the five or six full force plunges you need to defeat them.

Which brings me to a fault that spans all of the colossi; they are all capable of getting stuck in a permanent loop of trying to throw you off. Holding onto some fur while you get thrown about endlessly (in a manner that would surely break every bone in your body) is not fun, it is simply tedious. Yes, you can reposition, but if a colossus is stuck in an endless loop of its wildest thrashing, good luck with that. Combined with their unnecessarily long health bars (given the potential tedium, 1-3 full strength stabs really ought to be enough, never mind five, six, yawn, seven).

Don’t get me started on climbing onto Agro. If there is a hell, mine will surely be endlessly trying to climb onto Agro when there’s any degree of urgency.

And so to the final colossus, and what a disappointment it is. Not in scale, but in execution. So much potential, squandered.


Then we get to the ending, which takes half an hour. The main reason for this, as far as I can see, is that Ueda couldn’t decide which of a few potential endings he liked, so he just puts them all in, regardless of sense or pacing. And those endings just keep coming.

BUT

Despite all of that, this still manages to be one of the best games I have played. For all the frustration, it’s one hell of an experience. It creates an atmosphere in a way that other games can only dream of. The first time you see the first three colossi, they are awe-inspiring, terrifying, intimidating. As I said last night, the thirteenth colossus is, on its own, one of the greatest sequences in all videogames. The desolate scenery, the music, the design of the colossi, all lead to a smothering melancholy that informs the gradually crushing depression of the reality of the consequences of our actions.

It may be triggered by the incident en route, but when you start your final push towards the sixteenth colossus, the rain battering your face, the perfectly mournful music kicks in, I’ve rarely felt so alone, so doomed; driven to press on but equally compelled to just lie down and let it all end now.

I won’t be leaving it so many years before I play through again.

hylian_elf wrote:

Ballad of the Wind Fish, eh? Great stuff. Did you not find it more ethereal and evocative and [enter another fancy word here] compared to other Zelda? It’s what elevates it above other Zeldas for me. Very melancholic too.

Ethereal and melancholy are good words to describe it.
and the only thing I'd heard of the game's story was basically how it ended.  I was expecting it to be pretty light or nonsensical on that basis.  That certainly wasn't the case!

Why the hell won't that fucker resize? Nobody wants a laughing raccoon that big.

I do

can you post a picture of a big beaver next please?

I think I've finished apotheon.

Just crashed on final hit on what was surely final boss.

Apart from that, it's been a fine romp. Not sure mechanics would survive the harder setting, but as a 12 hr adventure it's been a blast.

Golf Story | Switch

It definitely has its frustrations, be it challenges that you can’t quit out of or restart, competitors that don’t keep up with your skill level, or some overly long dialogue (fuck me, that interminable rap battle). However, it is mostly charming, and manages to mix up the challenges, throwing in some neat non-golf moments (frisbee golf and drone golf are quite different, despite their names, and then there are foot races and even an RC car). The story is knowingly ludicrous, and a lot of the dialogue at least raises a smile, even if it’s never as funny as I suspect the writers think it is.

I’ve completed the story, the Switch play-clock says 20 hours. There’s some stuff I haven’t done, I haven’t found all the cacher coins, or the thing you get for getting them, or the thing you do with that thing. My ‘story’ screen tells me there are three items/skills (under focus shot / power shot / ghost tee) and I have no idea what they are, or where I’ll get them. They may well pop up because, if I want to just play rounds of golf, I’ll probably do that in the story world rather than just through the front end.

Oh, and there’s a nice wee reveal at the end when the world map zooms out, I hadn’t guessed why everything was laid out that way.

I liked the rap battle.