Go on then, I’ll try to remember to fill this in and see where we get.

1. Grauauadians of the Galaxy. PS5. 3 - 5hrs (before binning off). 48%

   Really wish I hadn’t bothered with this but I was on my christmas break and wanted a big money, linear 3rd person action em up and I plumped for this because there was literally nothing else on there I hadn’t played. Really, i should have just waited for early February as there’s basically gonna be a game a day released from then until June or so.  

   Anyway the game itself is fairly bad.  I’m pretty certain that it changed focus or direction at some point through production and was, in all likelihood, going to be a multiplayer, GaaS, always online for ever and for eternity, buy more different coloured-in characters for real world money type of affair.  It’s not that now though, and so instead we have a messy and unfocused game where the combat lacks heft, precision and clarity and the traversal between fights and cutscenes feels oddly frictionless, whilst still managing to feel like a drag.

   In a first for this style of game it also has light upgrade elements!

   You’ll find whatever the stuff is that you need to use to buy these upgrades by turning in the opposite direction to that which the game is funeling you at literally every single game world junction, and then walking in that direction until the end of the short pathway and then there they’ll be.  Every single time, but occasionally and in the name of variety(!), sometimes behind a metal space box.
   I think the upgrade materials are cogs and bolts and nuts because of course that’s how i upgrade all my computer men.  They glow too.  And shoot a bolt of light two game world feet into the sky.  I resented these magic bolts and the requirement to walk in the opposite direction to which i needed to head.
   I also came across an ice upgrade for my gun.  
   Ice! It’s used for freezing things.  
   I played a bit more and scanned an area for a motor that needed freezing, and then I went a bit further and found a baddy that needed freezing and then when I’d messily beaten this baddy up I came across another motor that needed freezing and then for variety I froze some water to make a platform before I then froze another motor. When I read in the controls section that I’d also be able to add electric! fire! and (probably) water! I stopped playing. 
   Scanning! Of course! A good game world always, and I really do mean always, benefits from a good scan.  No-one has yet to show me a game that isn’t improved by flipping into a proto wireframe mode and highlighting an area of the screen in a bolder colour.  So yeah, you can scan shit too.
  I quite like the talking tree and there’s a man on my side who takes everything literally and is grumpy and he made me smile.  There’s sometimes some spikey vines that block my way so I had to get sexy space lady to do those every time but other than that I’m not so taken with her but this is called character arcs so I’ll probably like her soon.  Amazingly, the most vocal of my friends is the little raccoon man (don't call him a raccoon, lol) who has been voiced by a irl man who sounds so similar to the player controlled character that I’m never quite sure who says what.  It’s a baffling choice and doesn’t become any easier to pick out as you progress.
   There’s some shit flashback scenes with me as a kid in a basement but there’s not the peril there that basements and kids being in them implies.
   I really like Blondie and there’s a big banger in there so that’s good and then there’s a load of 80’s hits on a jukebox that you can play and that’s great because most of the target audience will know 80’s songs so let’s do nostalgic. These jukebox songs occasionally spring up in the game but like everything else here, seem to be massively mis-timed in the placement, and lack the heft which I think the devs think they’ve added.
   
  Anyway, if it’s not that clear, it’s all pretty much not very good.  It feels a bit like a game made by a group who weren’t quite good enough or maybe they are good enough and they just weren’t guided well enough by the team at the top.  Everything is there that should be there on the third person single player checklist but its just not hanging together in a shape that suits my frame.

48% of 100 and that’s including a few extra arbitrary marks for having me sing Call Me for a day.


I’ll do proper write ups but so I don’t forget I’ve done:

2. Just Beats and Shapes on the Switch. 7/10 would be higher if I had the reflexes.

3. Road 96. Switch. 9/10. Despite the occasional jank it’s a properly cared for game.

4. The Gunk. SX. 6/10. Not what I hoped for and how can hoovering be made boring? It’s even pretty good fun irl so they’ve screwed something up.

5. Halo Infinite campaign. 7/10. Great and embarrassing within the same 5 minutes of gameplay. Just a contemporary example of what games were like 10 years ago

Paul the sparky wrote:

Yeah, that whiteboard threw me too.

The storytelling was a bit too on the nose for me, painted very fucking thick. Here I am moving into a straight man's apartment but he's so self centered that he won't take down a fucking poster to make space for my degree. Men are so bad. Now I'm living with a lesbian and everything just falls into place, it's a living nirvana fairytale land of female righteousness. Yay for womans!

Give me a fucking break

Yeah there is that. The player character seems designed to be a Venn diagram of a few overlapping Twitter groups - a role playing, video gaming, lesbian illustrator with a disability and a poor experience of men.

Tbf, the monkey version of this character would be even more of a cliche.

Is it not just based on the devs life?

DrewMerson wrote:

I didn’t get far enough in Unpacking to see any story, because it just doesn’t work as a concept for me. If I’m unpacking my boxes in a new place, I know what’s in the boxes, so I already have an idea where things will go and what’s suited to what places. Instead, it was like I was playing an imposter, I’ve been given someone else’s box of stuff and trying to work out a layout that looks normal, while everything coming out of the box is a surprise.

This is why so many game protagonists have amnesia.

Well reg and me liked it, so fuck y'all

1. Ketsui Deathtiny (PS4/5) - 3/1 - 8hrs so far
A true masterpiece of the genre, Ketsui is a GoaT shmup. A delicate balance to scoring well without being too complicated and ramps up the difficulty nicely and uniformly through its 5 stages. A tad difficult for me on arcade, but I’m just rubbish despite enjoying shmups so much.
M2 have once again created a great overall package as they did with Battle Garegga, with a perfect arcade port as well as 3 other versions, including the titular Deathtiny mode which plays quite differently. That, and also a training mode for practising sticking points. Rounding it all up is the attention to detail with all the information available on the sides of the screen, highlighting the nuances of the system.
One of the best.
[9]

I played the whole game like that.

2. Sonic CD (PC)
I've got no idea what I've just played. Like Sonic 1 with an acid-trip palette swap but with some Sonic 2 thrown in there with smaller, tighter but still wildly chaotic level design of 3. Sometimes I went forward in time and sometimes backwards without any rhyme or reason. Some of it feels like the cutting room floor bits of the others, other bits are lifted straight from 1 and 2, then some of it feels like the best, most ambitious and varied Sonic ever. Sonic's movement feels great, like 2 but with the quicker 0-60 acceleration of 3. And his animation beats all of them. I was appalling at it. My bonus stage performance was shocking. 0 gems. But still a really easy game despite all my fuck ups. Beat it first run, hardly any lives lost. Yet feels like I've barely scratched the surface. It's going to need at least one replay at some point to get a better measure of it. Giving it a provisional 90% because it's great fun but I'm aiming to return to it later in the year and spend a bit more time on it.

I've still never played Sonic CD properly. Read plenty about what a travesty the US music is (and subsequently how it's actually quite good and the negativity was just knee-jerk fandom at the time) and distinctly remember gawping at the special stages in mags but a level or two is all I've seen. Will play at some point.

2. Steel Assault - Switch (2.5hrs)

As usual my attempts to hold onto Christmas vouchers has failed happily after less than a week of them burning a hole in my Epocket.  So I'm down £35, but up lotsofgames.  

I knew I'd eventually buy this as soon as I spotted it in the coming soon section.  It's a linear, pattern based action platformer that feels like a Contra game with the Castlevania whip and adds a grappling hook for individuality.  I was keen on the art style from the trailer but this is one of the nicest looking games I've ever played (throw that salt over your shoulder pls, I mean it).  The spritework is strong and each stage looks like Vince McMahon dressed as a Sega Saturn wobbleclomping into a 2D party.  The incidental touches and effects are a wet dream for teens of the early 90s, from the water reflections to parallax backgrounds to the hazy burning forests to the pseudo 3D effects to the Treasure level bosses.  It's in the eye of the beholder obvs, but this rivals Katana Zero for pixel art juiciness - for the record I think it's a touch more beautiful than Huntdown, and opts for a purer retro look than both.  My best description would probably be an overclocked Ranger X, in terms of style.

The game itself won't be to everyone's taste.  It manages to feel like an unearthed 32-bit belter - much like Iconoclasts, Azure Striker Gunvolt or The Mummy Demastered - but the controls aren't quite fluid enough for me to pretend that it's perfect.  Some of the timings are pretty harsh on the grappling hook and the window of invincibility on the dash seems to flap about a bit.  There's a fine line between good play and sudden annihilation, which is as it should be perhaps, but the difficulty will no doubt deter certain players.  Thanks to checkpoints it's still fairly easy to finish though. Check total time played up there - a comparably tricky 16-bit game might've taken weeks to conquer, but here you've only ever got a few screens to push through before it auto-saves at the next sub-stage.  Plus lives aren't a thing, mercifully.  There are plenty of difficulty settings too.  I stuck with normal but there are two below and at least one above.

It was effortlessly sailing towards a mighty fine [7] before the final boss threatened to knock it down a point, but I went through the seven stages of Big Bad anguish in the 45 minutes it took me to beat him and enjoyed the challenge so much I'm bumping it up to an [8] instead.  Full turnaround on my knee-jerk 'this isn't fair' reaction after my first five failures.

Tribute Games have earned a spot on my permawatch list now, they develop some glorious looking/playing 2D stuff.  Flinthook, Panzer Paladin, Mercenary Kings - all pitch perfect in terms of visuals.  I'll have to check out Mercenary Kings at some point actually, even though it sounds a bit looty for me.  Anyway, TMNT: Shredder's Revenge is in very good hands imo.

This is one for Monkey I reckon - there's definitely not a lot to unpack with its kill the baddies plot (I'm not actually sure what the storyline is tbh, but if you you play this sort of thing for the cutscenes you're a berk).  It's not a world class game and it's admittedly throwaway/lightweight, but it is a magnificent experience.  There's not much replayability past git gudder, although if you know the stages you can pretty much wreck them if you're careful with the electric whip power up.  A massively me game for sure.

Yeah it's well up your alley.  £9.50ish at the moment (25% off), but it's not been out long so 50% is probably well on the way.

It's a shame it's not a 6 level to credits affair otherwise solid would do me, it sure looks nice.  HLTB pegs it at 20hrs, which seems a bit silly for that sort of thing.

We're talking about Mercenary Kings now.  Steel Assault (wot you said looks and sounds shit in the Switch thread, neva 4get) can be beaten in around 40mins.

The 8 thing fair enough, the looking shit thing - lol.