You could play vicariously through me, I've given it an hour and sacked it off, but F is an obsessive and I may play before Silksong (so that gives me roughly 3-5 years)

Moot_Geeza wrote:

I doubt I'll bother with the arcade mode again 

Spoiler:

it's unlikely the other other endings will beat G Scott throwing a cat into space anyway

but it's very much a Here Comes a New Challenger experience at heart.  Will try online at some point, then presumably cry and pack it in forever.

I'm installing it now m8, games tonight? We used to regularly do og Windjammers on a Friday evening at work on a mame cab, I got beat sometimes but I was deffo The Daddy. I used the big American guy, powerhouse. I'm probably shit now because I'm shit at every game after many years of skill degradation. Still have the odd flourish tho.

Oi you're not allowed to practice!

I deff need the practice, Muzz. I think my highest break is 9.

Bit when I get in I'll be drink.

Hahaha

2. The Great Ace Attorney 2

Or the great payoff. What a complex and complete story that has spanned two 30+hour games. It's kind of mind-boggling in the way that everything is connected and I still think Shu Takumi might be a serial killer in that way. None the less, this is the best Attorney narrative in years and Sholmes exudes so much big Shonen energy that I want to marry him.

What a time.

7: Guardians Of The Galaxy (PS5) 8/10

 

I'm a fan of the Guardians films.  This game does a great job of nailing the tone of the films.  Thankfully I got over them not using the Hollywood actors pretty early and that ended up not being a distraction.  The game's not even set in the MCU and is a new origin-ish story, so that helped.  Even though they didn't look quite right the certainly got their personalities right and the Guardians were a real treat to hang out with.  

 

They really do carry the game, which is a bit of a paint by numbers adventure game.  You've got your detective mode, 4 elemental attacks mapped to the d-pad, light puzzle solving, platforming where the terrain gives out for a second but then you press x and you climb up, edging along cliffs, crouching through tunnels, walking sideways through crevasses, sliding down steep inclines.  The fighting's not even that good.  You have to manage your team mates' abilities so you spend a bit too much of the game managing cooldowns.  I did sigh a bit whenever a fight came up late in the game as I was a little tired of that stuff.

 

You know what I didn’t get tired of though?  The story!  Just some good old fashioned comic book nonsense about the power of friendship.  It all makes sense, had some really solid humour and sad bits and you get to meet some of the more obscure Marvel characters that I’m not sick to death of.  Sometimes I just like to turn the difficulty down, enjoy the pretty graphics and take in a fun adventure. 

 

Hot Shots Racing (Switch) 8/10

 

I'm sure the 8/10 here is coloured by the ultra cheap sale price, but I really liked this.  It's pretty famous for being a slightly underwhelming arcade throwback.  Indeed it looks like it could be a forgotten sequel to the awesome Virtua Racing remaster.  It's certainly no instant classic and there's not a huge amount for the single player gamer to do.  That said I really can't ask for much more from a cheap indie racer.

 

It's mostly nice looking without being too memorable (also: the avatars are hideous; the lady it starts on looks like she died via the Jokers laughing gas).  The cartoon graphics look nice on Switch handheld, run smoothly and there's some nice looking cars.  I'm not sure the tracks left much of an impression as you expect from an arcade racer (ie: jets and shit flying 10 metres overhead whenever you drive over a hill).  

 

The racing, your usual drift/nitro boost thing isn't thrilling but cars do handle well.  It is a case of every race coming down to whether you have a nitro boost saved for the final stretch.  

 

Also seems like one of those games where even though it's cheap the devs have spent a fair bit of time post release looking after it, good on them.  Not sure I'll revisit it unless there are some new tracks but I feel pretty satisfied with the purchase.

I've seen such wildly differing thoughts on Guardians, I can't work out if I'd love or hate it.

Same.

Diluted Dante wrote:

I've seen such wildly differing thoughts on Guardians, I can't work out if I'd love or hate it.

It’s simple as fuck but I really enjoyed the story and characters. They aren’t from the film, I assume they are from the OG comic, but they work really well and I feel Drax’ character is better for it.

21. Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games 2020 - Switch (4hrs)

I've been itching to do my own tier list for a while and no decent opportunity has presented itself so here's one for the events in this.  Please pretend it looks like it's supposed to, with tiny thumbnails tidily bunched up in each tier:

SS. (I was watching a roguelikes tier list on Youtube recently which had an SS tier, so I'm having one) N/A

S. N/A

A. Archery

B. Football, Javelin, Sport Climbing, Retro Shooting

C. Rugby, 110m Hurdles, Triple Jump, Retro Long Jump, Gynmastics, Surfing, Retro 10m Platform Diving, Retro 400m Hurdles.

D. Equestrian, Skateboarding, Fencing, Badminton, 4x100m Relay, Canoe Doubles, Karate, Swimming, Retro Kayak, Retro 100m.

E. Boxing, 100m, Discus, Table Tennis, Retro Vault, Retro Marathon

F. Retro Judo, Retro Volleyball

...which should tell you roughly what you need to know without a lengthy review tbh, but here I go anyway.  Although there are pockets of enjoyment to be found here and there, for the most part the entire package appears to have been phoned in from one-off-the-wrist land.  It absolutely reeks of 'that'll do', which is a huge bugbear of mine in games that deserve more.  NB: This is the first Mario & Sonic effort I've played, having deliberately avoided the others as I assumed they'd be pretty much what this is - cheap.  The Olympic genre is limited for sure, but there's no reason why a modern effort should spin the wheel quite so randomly when it comes to quality.  Athlete Kings and International Track & Field on the 32-bits were world class mp offerings; this falls embarrassingly short of such greats.  The 2D stages are a genuinely neat gimmick but we've come a long way since the 80s.  Retro inspired titles tend to get more things right than their inspiration imho, which is why I love the damn things so very much, but the pixel art stages somehow manage to feel like they were actually made - in a rush and with very little care with regards to quality, I might add - in the late 80s.  I remember borrowing Summer Games on Master System from a neighbour as a kid (Leanne Brisley - she ran away from home four times, and she really meant it the third time!!) and being hugely relieved to get California Games back after the swapsie was over.  The retro levels here are more Summer than California.  The judo stage, JFC.  Why create a retro event in 2020 that would've had kids groaning louder than a broken TV during wet break in 1987?

The story mode attempts to tie the modern/retro nonsense together, but it does so with the panache of a mid-tier Wii game.  It also commits the cardinal sin/ultimate troll for an Olympic game with poor cut scenes as it doesn't allow you to button mash through the inane dialogue, so even if you can batter the 100m in 9.88 seconds those skills are non-transferrable.  Which means you have to skim read characters saying things like 'are you sure about this cockamamie plan of yours?' in text form while 3D models utter irritating audio soundbites, almost like a spoof JRPG (or possibly like an actual JRPG - I haven't played one for years).  Picture a four minute stretch of hammering the A button to speed up slow text while the speakers intermittently chirp sounds like 'ah!', 'oh!' 'tee-hee!' 'woah!', 'aha!' 'uh-huh', 'uh-uhh', 'oops!' or the seemingly ever-present 'hmmm'.  Wank.  During one event my wife (who was WFH while I was supposedly WFH) politely asked if I was playing 'some sort of porn game'  as she'd been treated to three rounds of recycled grunts from the TV.  I considered saying yes to mitigate the embarrassment but opted to admit I was playing a boxing match as Luigi, which she chose to ignore.

Anyone who's ever played this sort of game knows you need a minimum of two buttons to alternate between to make your character run faster, so I can only assume none of the devs with any clout had any experience with the genre whatsoever as the track events have A ONE BUTTON INPUT for running.  The only thing a lighter would be handy for here would be to set the game on fire.

Am I being too harsh on it?  Not really.  Every now and then it threatens to be better than average (the ultra simplistic archery is good, the football isn't terrible) but the story mode felt worse than watching the actual Olympics, which ranks lower on my excitement tier list than watching paint dry, or basketball.  There are half a dozen cheap & dodgy looking track & field type games on the EShop and I'd bet a chalice at least two of them are better than this. We bought it for Tilly but she'd had enough of the campaign by the time the 2D graphics kicked in, so I played the rest solo to avoid sticking another unplayed Switch game in the cupboard to sit next to Smash Bros and the two Pokemon games she bounced off.  Possibly worth the current £20 asking price just to see how bad some of the non-event retro minigames are (Mario sneaking around a museum should be suffered by everyone at least once, as punishment for their secret sins). [5]

Edit: Although unexpectedly the first thing Tilly wanted to do after school today was play the sub-Skatebird skateboard event for half an hour.

Moot_Geeza wrote:

Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 is £8.74 on the Xbox store. Seems pretty bargainous? Was waiting until the price is right and that might suit me. Mixed reviewd but I've heard the tennis is fun.

What tier is tennis then eh? Or did you mean table tennis here?

Oh right. Two games for the same Olympics. Confusing.

23. Spectacular Sparky - Switch (2hrs)

Saw this in Retro Gamer, first as a full page advert and then as a double page article (retro inspired).  I was promised a late generation Megadrivey platform shooter and that's precisely what I got; it definitely feels like an import only title from 1995, or an unearthed unreleased 32X curio.  Unfortunately it doesn't offer much more than an approximation of a not-quite-classic 16-bit game pre-internet time forgot.  Mission accomplished for the devs I guess, but they didn't exactly shoot for the moon.  Everything is solid, nothing is great.  It's not a terrible effort by any means - I enjoyed my time with it for sure - it just lacks anything that truly makes it worthwhile (even though the voice acting/dialogue is surprisingly not bad at times).  I keep trying not to compare it to Ristar as it plays nothing like it but I'm going to anyway - imagine an 86% sort of game that you borrowed once, loved for a weekend and returned feeling glad you didn't buy it.  Sure, it still pops up in dispatches when similar games are discussed, but everyone knows it's only making up the numbers.  Speaking of which: [6]

It's on sale at £9 at the moment but it's more suited to the fiver zone.  Difficulty felt all wrong for this sort of thing too as I only died a handful of times, plus the majority of the bosses were weak.  That's not the way it should be done.  

NB: There's an Elf game on the EShop and at least two starring eponymous Bobs, so this could be the start of a new project.