¡Recently, Abandoned; Games!

Me too. I own it. Bought it on sale when the PS5 version came out but I just can't be arsed. I've not played a GTA since GTA2.

I did try but something about contemporary real world settings etc don't grip me. I'm more a fantasy / sci-fi / horror type of chap.

One day I'll be in the mood. I currently have my PS5 rammed with space horror and zombie games.

I'm sure I read we were supposed to get a new Twisted Metal game, definitely in the mood for that.

Always hate getting introduced to people who are "serious gamers too" and it turns out all they ever play is FIFA and COD.

That's like introducing someone as a serious reader, but they've actually just read the Twilight series a few hundred times.

/snob

I've fully embraced my geeky gamer side these days. A good test when introduced to a supposed fellow gamer is to immediately start talking about Dark Souls. If they look confused, I simply spit in their face and walk away.

I would think even From are quite mainstream these days. Even FIFA streamers Let's Played Elden Ring

Dark Souls (and its variations) is the CoD of fantasy games.

I'm trying this at the moment but having mixed results, a few of us were talking about the last of us tv show and I just happened to mention it's based off a really good (IMO) and successful game series. You should have seen the looks of disgust I got.

Horizon Forbidden West

Given this two fair cracks of the whip but it just not doing it for me. Got 15 hours in first time round, and 20 hours in this time. Which is a shame because after a bit of a rough start I actually grew to really like the first game, to the point I plat'ted it. Tried to give it some time to see if the game would come to me but alas, I just feel like I'm fighting against it.

Both times I quite like the opening tutorial area, it's pretty good at getting you back in the swings of things, but once the game opens up it just has a mirage of problems that just begins to grate. They maybe kind of minor, but once you start to get a bit tired of the game, they just seem to reinforce that I'm not enjoying it. It's biggest issue is combat. Theres too many weapons and menu swapping at play just to take down bigger machines. The smaller ones are fine, but any biggish enemy is a major fucking pain in the arse. The combat itself is mushy, and way to many times you lose significant health or instant death to offscreen attacks (Either through projectiles or machines that think they're long /triple jumpers or pole vaulters). There is no real warning system, and it just get tiring after you die to another offscreen attack. Traversal is fidgety. Climbing is janky as hell, and it's odd to see in such a prestige Sony title. It makes you appreciate how smooth games like Assassin's creed are (mostly). Then the game world , whilst its one hell of a looker, isn't really underpinned by anything. My biggest issue are the various tribes you meet, they feel a little loosely designed, just colourful variations of each other without any obvious connection that ties them to the game world.

And then there's Aloy. She just not a nice person to be around. She is so focused on her goal that she is just a cunt to everyone she meets. Sure, the game sets up a narrative arc where she needs to let her friends help, but its not actually fun going through that. A shame. Actually killed a little hype for a potential PSVR2 pre-order too, being Call of the moutain was a title I was planning on getting. The first Horizon worked because it was something new - machine dinosaurs! but the game systems weren't over bloated and had a nice simplicity to them, whilst feel like you were having an affect on the battlefield. Abandoned.

I enjoyed V but don't actually remember much from it, certainly not when compared to 3, Vice City and San Andreas.

Also never bothered with mp.

I thought both games were similar enough that I could make my way through both (enjoyed the first) but the story was a bit wonky in the second and didn't really hold my attention.

I'm close to the end of Tunic but I'm thinking of binning it off.

I need to restore my physical form and visit all Hero's Gravestones and I just can't be bothered; this last quarter of the game has been a bit of a slog and combat is really starting to piss me off. 

It's a real shame as the first two thirds of the game were fantastic and the instruction booklet is genius - one of the few games I've played where the Dark Souls' influence has hurt the game instead of helped it. Combat and backtracking have really soured me on this and spoiled what was a great experience for a long time.

Ah well.

Ghost Song

There were two reasons I stuck with this Metroid clone for a few hours rather than chucking it immediately as I've done with every other Metroid clone, namely a friend's recommendation and a very good sense of personality about it. It's not fully voice-acted, but what's there feels very natural and makes it easy to empathize with the few people you meet. Some of the bosses you encounter even have voice lines, and I like that little detail. As far as I could tell, this doesn't have any relation to whether they play a role in the plot, so it's cool to have intelligent enemies just existing in the world rather than everything being mindless, faceless creatures.

Unfortunately, that is where my positive feelings about the game end, because the design ethos of everything else in the game is just completely opposite to my sensibilities. Those bosses, intelligent or not, suck to fight. You'll die to them repeatedly, and dying slightly reduces your max health each time until you use some XP currency to do repairs at a level-up point. You drop all your XP currency on death so you can't simply do this every time you die, and during my repeated corpse runs where I would go back into the boss room for my substantial stack of currency only to die again and again, my frustration was multiplied by the fact the hp debuff was stacking up each time. Level-up points are also not equivalent to respawn points; you have about 2.5 times as many respawn points as you do level up points, and you can only fast travel from level-up points too, leaving you with fuck all to use your currency on if you have a stack of XP and you're deep in unexplored territory. 

You have three options for combat: melee, normal gun, and special gun. Using either gun builds up heat over time, and an overheated gun has its fire rate and damage reduced, but heat also increases your melee damage. Any variety of special gun heats up quicker but is limited by a regenerating ammo bar. This all seems like a clever design on paper, but it's undercut by the fact that everything deals insane amounts of contact damage on top of what you'll take when they actually swing at you, you have what seems like a single-digit number of mercy iframes, and some boss attacks just cannot be dodged on reaction in melee range. So for the human-size bosses, I was basically forced to use the tactic of spamming missiles while outside of the range where they could hit me, which was profoundly tedious but still less annoying than actually trying to fight them up close.

After I beat the second boss exactly like that, and the game made me lug a critical item all the way back up to the surface without fast traveling and while being hounded with exploding homing skulls at every turn, I realized that game developers who like Metroid and try to ape it must be some species of extraterrestrial for whom playing that game is reminiscent of their murderous and inhospitable home planet, and as much as I try, I will never understand what they like.

DayZ

It might be unfair to judge a game after less than an hour of playtime but I simply don't see me having a lot of fun with it.