What are you currently playing? V4.0

Almost almost done with rise of tomb raider.

Got distracted by those challenges but can't find one last poster in the last city so I'm giving up on that challenge.

Still have to do manor dlc.

Alone in the Dark and Callisto Protocol DLC

Although what happens is I put one of them on and start to fall asleep, juddering awake when I get attacked by something. Until then my character seems to just walk around in circles for a bit.

I think I'm too tired to play stuff just now but dammit I'm going to anyway.

Just bought 2 games I have been after, both on sale on xbox/ps5. "Banishers of New Eden" £34, actually free as I used Gamepass credit and on Sony "Nobody wants to die", £15 as it is the "bargain of the day" on PlayStation storefront. Look forward to starting both in the coming weeks 👌

Sometimes games are better than the sum of there parts, and fulfill needs we didn’t realise and just click for whatever reason. It’s nice to be pleasantly surprised by a game or find one that takes you away from everything and transports you to another place. Can’t beat a good 7/10 game, often because they have some personality amongst their quirks.

7/10 games are the best

Took the time to try a few small games off of itch.io. The Long Way, Ex Amante, a few others.

"Memory of a broken dimension" was probably the one most worth mentioning. It starts out in a DOS screen and I didn't know how to get out of there at first. The "Help" command showed some options that actually did do something.

After that it's a fairly confusing shredded visual representation of something that is fairly insubstantial and there is distortion all over the screen. I didn't really get how it works, but it's apparently about reconstructing scans somehow.

I didn't find any way to quit the game other than Alt F4. It says that "There is no exit" and that "There is no escape".

Great price for that. The first half reminded me so much of one of my favourite Master System games (Ninja Gaiden).

Thanks to your post I just have! £3.59 on Switch, so 40p Nintendo Tax.

I’m sure I’ll enjoy it, but Ninja Gaiden on NES has scarred me. I beat that game, but it probably aged me by 15 years.

You know what's annoying? Playing a game for 6 hours and then wondering how far through it you are. 
Checking HowLongToBeat and seeing that it takes 6 hours. 
Then checking a walkthrough and realizing you're only on level 8 out of 16! 

*grumps*

They'll give you like 36 of that back in gold coins though. 

Penny’s Big Breakaway

Instant regret with this purchase. I loved the look of the game and really enjoyed Digital Foundry’s deep dive into the game, but my experience has been pretty rough.

Firstly, the controls are not great. Not even on paper. The pro mode makes using the yo-yo more precise (by aiming with the right analog stick), but it’s actually harder to point two analog sticks in exactly the same direction, meaning I’m frequently swinging at angles are slightly different to when I am jumping, so momentum is often lost.

Then you’ve got the fact that dash is assigned to both front shoulder buttons and Jump to the back shoulder buttons, which is straight forward on paper, but really confusing in action. Why not have one input on the left side and the other on the right? Those buttons are also mapped to the regular face buttons, but that makes using the right analog stick for the yo-yo tricky. There’s also a button for the yo-yo, but it’s tricky to spin and direct your character at the same time. And then you start mixing the face buttons, shoulder buttons and the stick, but somehow end up pulling off the wrong actions because you hit the back shoulder buttons instead of the front one, and for some reason your brain is trying to use the left and right shoulder buttons, even though that makes no difference to input.

And then! And then! There is a brief window in which when you’ve performed one action, you can’t immediately perform a second one. Like you can dash, but then you have to wait for a brief moment before rolling. The same applies if you’re swinging from your yo-yo, but you want to land into a roll. If you hit that button too soon the roll just won’t happen and all momentum is lost. It’s as if there is a very short window after which an animation ends that doesn’t expect an input, so chaining moves together requires some tricky timing. I don’t know if it’s a design choice, a bug or a performance issue relating the the Switxh, but I find it borderline criminal.

I’ve put about 2 hours into this so far, so it’s still kinda early days, but bad controls are literally my biggest pet peeve in games and all I’ve done is wrestle them. I’ve not bounced off a game this hard since Arcade Paradise, but in that game’s defence I think it just exposed some kind of deeply buried work-related anxiety I’ve got. This game fees like it’s trying to teach me to walk all over again.

There is a simple control option available that removes the stick and shoulder button inputs, so I will give that a go, but it isn’t going to resolve that final issue where inputs just won’t register if you’re too quick.

One final moan. I like the visuals. It looks very slick on Switch too, but the solid colours actually make it quite tricky to judge distance. I’ll get a feel for it eventually, and the game is generally quite forgiving, but I do occasionally struggle with floating platforms and in moments of chaos I also seem to lose sight of Penny on the screen.

I’ve got to give it another chance, but it feels like it’s be of those games that will just annoy me the more I try with it.

NBA 2k25

This year I decided to pre-order a game that I know full well will a) be on GamePass at some point within the year, and be down to 6.99 come June next year. But hey, as part of the preorder thing, I got the NBA league pass so I can watch live games. It’s sort of a good deal. Sort of.

Anyway, it plays really well. Animations are smooth, shooting is rewarding and there’s a tonne of game modes for playing offline seasons/tournaments etc if the online competition is not to your liking.

I love tinkering with the player creator and putting time into fleshing out a build but my god 2K are horrendous when it comes to the micro-transactions. There are people playing online with builds that are in the high 90s already, which (by my calculations) means they’ve dropped another £50-100 on the in-game currency. Wow.

Despite that, I think I might be slightly addicted to the grind already after 2 days.

After the first act. Maybe 2 or so hours into it.

Have you gone outside yet? If not you’ll get a new outfit, you can’t miss it.

The characters in Unicorn Overlord were a bunch of cliches for me. Not terrible, but I honestly couldn't tell you a single thing I remember about them. And I only finished the game a few months ago.

But from a tactics standpoint, it was great. And if that part of it is good enough (see also: Fire Emblem Engage) I can overlook the rote storytelling.