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Bought this on PS5 and never played it but here we are again, 2nd time lucky.

First PS5 game of the year.

~£40 digital from Xbox Iceland store.

Started the new Batman earlier on Xbox. It's very good. This Batmobile is the first one you get in the game, and I've just got back from Argos with it. 😆

Yoshi really impressed by that pre-order bonus

Bond’s going Yoshi hunting With that I think I own every big Yoshi game and been waiting for 007 to show up for like a week. Been avoiding footage of it the whole time. Very excited

I've also bought this, I didn't know it was a horror game though My genre categories are meaningless at this point, with how Steam tags them

Unfortunately I won’t be able to play it properly until Sunday though.

Long weekend coming up, so either I get hooked on this and play it for 15 hours or refund it edit; long weekend is next week, doh

I like the cute/dumb look this is going for so just randomly picked it up as it's only 5 bucks. Technically both visible and invisible on this picture is also a matte screen protector I recently got. Usually not a fan of these things but the Switch 2 display is so fragile that I decided to make an exception.

Played maybe 30 mins of Call of the Elder Gods (Gamepass) then saw the first game was on sale, and perhaps that I'd better play that (since it felt there were already some call backs to it in the sequel). Anyway was <£5 (sale ends tomorrow).

This rules! It basically is Hitman mixed with Uncharted style set pieces. Don’t worry if you don’t like Hitman that much like myself though. It still has the impressive open areas but it’s a more authored experience and it leads you a lot more meaning a lot less time being overwhelmed, getting lost and caught constantly. For those of you who want to do your own thing though it does seem like these areas do let you tackle them in a non linear fashion too. Mixed with these parts are proper action set piece parts. & these are just expertly done. It’s all set up to make you feel and look cool constantly. There’s big red explosive containers everywhere and the hand to hand fighting is so satisfying. It’s really context sensitive, you have a grab and throw and can the fighting sections are set out for you to be able to throw dumb bad guys into or off of stuff constantly. It’s so much fun. The environment has so many great little options for you to take out or mess with bad guys from a distance too. It’s all just so well designed to be as fun and cool as possible. It’s made me laugh out loud a couple of times with just how OTT some of the things it’s let me do have been. Love all the characters as well. I’ve said before how much I didn’t like the Bond actor from trailers, but now I’ve played it, he’s perfect. Great game so far.

So happy this turned out to be true, it's the game that needed an update the most in my opinion as it felt dated even on release. Code Veronica has some really good areas in game though which could be made really fucking freaky with RE Engine... 2027's most wanted right here.

Genuinely excited for this!

Guess we didn't have a topic for this yet. This got announced a while ago but the first proper trailer was the one we saw at Sony's event the other day. It's the debut project from Unseen studio which is lead by Ikumi Nakamura, who worked on Okami, Evil Within and Ghostwire Tokyo in the art department (I think even a lead role for the latter two). So no surprise this has a lot of style, but the gameplay looks like a really interesting mix of character action with amped up movement options that remind me of some superhero games, or Sunset Overdrive on (even more) drugs. One to keep an eye on I think. The main theme is also very catchy.

I’ve played about 45 minutes of this. I had heard that it is kind of a combination of Zelda and a Souls game, and I think that sums up it reasonably well so far. Time will tell how hard the game is, but I have died a couple of times. Dying sent me back to the start of the level, but I kept my stat gains from leveling up. You have a choice of starting weapons, I chose the default weapon (the Morning Star I think). You also pick up “sidearms” that are like magic weapons, but you can only hold one at a time. What distinguishes this game most is probably that you can dig, or “hollow” as they call it in this game, hence the title, which has lots of uses in terms of combat, exploration and finding treasure. All in all, it’s a neat and tidy game so far. The pixel graphics are gorgeous, needless to say, but shoutout to the music as well.

Crafting.

Saw this in a small independent art shop in Italy last week, so I had to get it.

My Steam Controller arrived It seems cool so far, but I've barely used it for anything that makes the most of it However, it pales in comparison to the showstopper

This game, is mental. Could probably stop there and that's enough, tbh. Take a cup of Lollipop Chainsaw, add some essence of No More Heroes and mix well before folding in a little big of Cooking Mama. Drizzle with 2D Pokemon and serve warm. I'm still working my way into the main story, but essentially, you play as Romeo. A character who, at the start of the game, has his face ripped off, so your time-travelling grandfather puts a mask on you that will keep you alive. You're fated with skipping through time and space, finding Juliets to kill. Your first major battle is against a Juliet who cuts her own head before growing like one of Rita Repulsa's monsters. This also causes her to shed her clothes, so you're fighting a giant, naked and sagging Juliet. Who's headless. Honestly, as with any Suda51 game I've played, it feels a little bit awkward. Every now and again it feels like you're not in complete control of the combat, but I'm slowly getting my head around it. It looks good, and the scripting is a lot of fun. But it's the minigames that seem to add tons of depth. I'm still finding my feet on these, but there's one that looks a bit like Pacman. I think as you build up strength you get more fuel you can use here, picking up various power-ups as you go. There's one that looks a bit like a cross between a fruit machine and a cut-out of a pinball table. Still haven't figured out how to do that one. Oh, and there's a katsu curry cooking minigame, too. You add ingredients and make different recipes to give varying benefits. And then there are the bastard seeds. That's where the pokemon bit comes in. On board your time-and-space-travelling ship, you have a little garden. You plant seeds, and they allow you to grow bastards, which are essentially zombies with different powers. You can evolve them, combine them to create different powers, and it seems like there's going to be tons of depth in that aspect. You'll find the various seeds, and the katsu ingredients, as you explore levels and pick them up. Speaking of the levels, I don't know if this will carry through the entire game, but the first one at least is fucking weird. You start off exploring a small section of a shopping mall, and have to switch on 4 generators. But some parts of the mall are blocked, so you have to interact with one of the floating TVs, enter sub-space, explore there, and exit another TV to get to the next bit in real space. I'm writing that with a straight face, but you cannot convince me there's anything 'normal' about that. It's got all the hallmarks of Suda51's normal mental approach, and it combines 'realism' with the blocky flourishes that make his games super recognisable. Yeah, I quite like this. Not sure how much legs it'll have for me though.

The reviews, even the bad ones, made me too curious to wait for a sale. I'm about an hour into this now. It's both impressive so far, and a little underwhelming though the parts that are underwhelming are very subjective. This is basically as 1:1 a remake as I've played in a while, to the point that I'm able to rely on my memory from a few years ago to know exactly where to go and what types of curveballs a quest will throw at me, as well as how to deal with those dinosaurs that sound like chickens. Every NPC is exactly where I expect to see them, and the scale of the world seems about as small as the original, at a glance, but this could change as I progress. It is impressive because of this as well though as Gothic's progression is such an important part of its appeal, and so they've tried to preserve as much as possible of it (except potentially, its combat, as I'll mention). Even though it has a very stock UE5 look, default UE5 can still look extremely good in high res. The lighting is a bit overcranked, lots of black crush, but setting the gamma up a bit I think it's a relatively handsome game given how AA it is. Just don't play it while the sun is coming in the window if you're on OLED, cause you can't see shit unless you're on one of those ridiculously newer brighter ones I suspect from the off that this is one of those remakes where there'll almost be no point in trying the original out except for historical curiosity. The one big change I've seen is the combat, which felt like driving a tank in the original. In this, it's much more generic, possibly 'better' but I actually think the awkwardness of the original game's combat is kind of part of the genius of it, cause when you got better at understanding the timing, so did your character get faster at swinging. It's one of the coolest combat progression systems I've seen in an RPG, even if it also sort of sucks. So I'm wondering if the remake will have the same style to it, your guy certainly is shit at swinging a sword early on so they seem to have the right idea. As I'm not german I've no idea what the community has been saying about this leading up to its release, but based on Marys' comments in the news thread I'm guessing they wanted this as 1:1 as possible and that's why it turned out like this

That's Super Woden Rally Edge finished. Lovely little game for a tenner. I preferred Art of Rally, that game had a lot to do in it and had handling I preferred the modelling of, but if you're looking for more rallying with an arcade twist you could do a lot worse. I was originally just gonna chuck that in the gaming shout thread, but here's so more thoughts on it since I am here. Driving feels super arcadey, but not to the detriment of the whole game. If you are more into big powerslides that are easier to start and manage, you'll enjoy this. Full pace notes, albeit some of them are a little wrong. Fuck loads of cars, all of which can be upgraded. It's bare minimum but think along the lines of the first Gran Turismo and you're mostly there. no tuning outside of buying the upgrades though. All the ones you expect are there as well as some that you might not expect. Fake names on the cars can be edited and this reflects all over the game. For example if you change the Raven Soma to it's proper name of Subaru Impreza, it's that across the game, even in leaderboards. Very easy to play in short bursts. I think even the longest stages are maybe 2 and a half minutes tops. Has more belonging than something like Art of Rally though due to you owning, maintaining and tuning the cars. Aesthetic is spot on, it has that PS1 era of looking a bit smeared and low res, but it's not. Lots of artefacts from that era like the crowds and trees being cutouts to face the driver when you're whizzing past as well. It has a very low punishment for errors, so if you do fuck up, you're not super behind. Generally it's more generous than Art of Rally with the corner cutting, but it can still catch you out with out of bounds. Proper campaign progression. I think this could be a bit better but it's a unique way of doing things from what I've seen. Getting paid for posting time trails, It's only 1k each run, but each week 3 challenges are laid down, you can do them as much as you want where everyone is on the same level. You get some rally cross against AI. You can do local MP, but who the fuck is doing that in this day and age? Things I don't like: The prices of the cars and upgrades are mega inflated, which can lead to it being a touch grindy at points. There's a few times per class that you will get given a car as well so you're in this position of not wanting to buy anything in case the thing you buy is what you would have gotten. Each time you win a class you're usually given a car that's the next class up so you have a logical progression to move upwards, but the car you get as a base would struggle to win everything in that class, so you're stuck in the weird limbo of spending money on the car that might not pay off and then you're having to grind to get another car to try again and this is something I really don't like. There's a few times where I've hit my head over and over trying to win something and no matter how hard I try and how clean I race, I can't take the top of the podium. Then I buy another car and win with a half upgraded one. There's a little imbalance like that with the classes. There's not much variation between countries and surfaces. On top of that, the track count pales in comparison to AoR. You're looking at nearly 100 tracks multiplied by the amount of classes over in AoR. In SWRE it's half of that give or take a bit. On top of that the design of AoR's tracks have a way wider variation of tests that require a deeper investment to master, SWRE they tend to be built around "How far can we slide?" which in itself isn't bad, but there needs to be more texture. Again they are very different games, and I feel that if you're just wanting to slide for 100 meters at a time SWRE is the better game from that, but for the long term it feels bit hollow. A weird thing is that they didn't populate the leaderboards with the times of the runs that players have put in. For instance I can see Spatula has put time in and finished the game, but at the same time if I go into time trails he's not got any times posted. In a rally game where a lot of the legs of it is posting times to the leaderboards, having to post a separate time for each leg despite running those legs as part of the campaign seems a bit silly. Same with the weekly 3 challenges, those times should also be used to populate the standalone time trails so you have something to shoot for. The thing that I really dislike though, and this is one thing that I have no idea why they did it, but they have fixed times for every single race. Part of rally is knowing that end goal is flexible and that you need to be pushing for every second you have, so when it looks like you're going to smash the gold star time you can just drive conservatively. I feel like the regimented times for podiums is such a weird choice. On top of this you have the top 3 drivers that will place exactly at those places no matter what. So if Harrison is going to take gold, he's always going to take gold, the number you see for the gold position is the one you're going to have to beat. Harrison can only be bumped down to silver by your own hands. He won't have an accident or a bad section or stage, he is fixed to performing at that time. There's no kinetic movement on the end of stage times unless it's the player moving up and down. Knowing that going in is something I don't want or need to know, and also having it set each time I play means that unknowing of what the final time is makes it less exciting. Having a fluid end point would be more realistic. Art of Rally is the better game. The RRP might be higher but you can get it for roughly the same price if you shop around. But for a different take on the best of motorsports, I still think it's worth a look despite all my pissing and moaning about it.

I've seen people, because of the highlighted V, say that this is now the new Resident Evil 5... these people are fucking stupid.

Yeah, obviously this'll be a replay for me so I'm not going to moan about easier ways to get around the map... there's no real fun in beating up the same scrub mobs for the 10th time on routes you need to travel repeatedly.

https://www.gematsu.com/2026/06/stage-tour-developer-spotlight-trailer-latest-details

I absolutely loved the first game regardless of what you chumps say so this is straight into my most anticipated. Don’t like the new main character though. Definitely looks a bit too young as well. Gameplay wise I’m all in. I may miss the sword though.

This looks interesting.

04/01 - Gradius (Switch 2) 11/01 - Salamander (Switch 2) 12/01 - Batman (Game Boy) 29/03 - Yoshi's Story (N64 on Switch 2) 02/05 - Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred (XSX) 11/05 - Forbidden Solitaire (Steam Deck) 25/05 - LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight (XSX) 06/06 - Final Fantasy VII Remake (Switch 2) Third play through complete, and first time on Switch 2. It still holds up as one of my favourite games.

New book day... Mora's art is gorgeous... shame his run is already finished.

I think I've only seen that idea in animation so far, with stuff like Animatrix, the old Tomb Raider show or Star Wars Visions (?). It's cool and probably self-contained, so maybe something I can pick up as well.

This seems to be a thing that's accelerating atm, apparently one reason could be AI-assisted coding with tools like Claude. But there's a lot more recompilations of console games to native PC games happening these days. Like Armored Core: For Answer This game emulates pretty well already on Xenia/RPCS3, which is how I played it, but you still have things like shader stutter and visual glitches. According to the comments on this video this already runs better than emulation. I wonder if going forward we will see this become more of the standard way to play console games on PC, instead of emulation, given how rapidly AI-assisted development seems to be progressing There's a lot of N64 games that have gotten efforts like this, like Ocarina of Time. Will be keeping an eye on NG2: https://www.reddit.com/r/ninjagaiden/comments/1rb3774/ng2_recomp_running_this_is_not_a_drill_via/

Imagine being a bus driver, but without the stench of piss surrounding you, people spitting at you, and a general foreboding that you're going to be stabbed at some point. Then put it in America, because obviously we have to drive on the right in this game. That's the reductive premise of Bus Bound, a kinda sim published by Mud/Snowrunner guys, Saber Interactive. This was one of Rosie's free games on Friday, and I've spent time on and off over the last few days just tootling around the city. Honestly, it's puddle-deep, but it's a great way to relax and switch your brain off. You upgrade individual stops by dropping off customers, you can set up your own routes, edit existing ones, and your buses slowly upgrade as you go. The city slowly evolves, between different sectors (which also open up as you upgrade individual stops). Your goal is to make drives enjoyable for passengers. Driving below the limit, obeying traffic laws, nice smooth driving over speed bumps (basically nothing the bus drivers do here). But there's no real punishment beyond reducing the bonuses you can earn per stop. It is nice seeing all the thumbs up and smiley faces appearing whenever you drive well, though. It's not a massively tough game, although you can play in the driver's seat viewpoint to increase difficulty, and all the buses have different feels as you drive. Definitely not a world-beater, but if you want something in a similar vein to EuroTruck Sim, it's worth a mooch. Just don't expect a HUGE city. You can only do 5-6 stop routes at the start, and I'm currently up to 12, so drives take no longer than 20-ish minutes. Pop it on, get a podcast in the background and you're off to the races.

Been playing this the past few days. Chapter 3, 40% completion or so. I’m pleasantly surprised that I really like it, considering I heavily disliked the previous Lego games I’ve played It’s hard to say what’s so different about this game. A lot of it could be this is like a mini Arkham Asylum. They borrowed so many mechanics from the fluid combat, grapple traversal, summon a vehicle at any time, city is filled with Riddler challenges, random crimes happening, etc. It’s like an Arkham game, but simplified down. Which is fine. In fact most Batman media is so orientated towards adults and more mature storytelling it’s nice to play something that almost feels classic. Batman, despite all the attempts at pretence and brooding, is in fact very silly, and here we treat it as such. Something about a little Lego Batman and Robin, waddling around in a city where NPC’s make jokes about the rain (“Look at that, the rain stopped ahead of schedule”) with Batman trying to look grimace and Robin looking like a kid in a toy shop, is very adorable and likeable I will say it’s a shame the cutscenes and story aren’t that funny to me. I appreciate it, and it gets a chuckle here and there. Mostly it’s just a lot of bad jokes and childish slapstick, with most things ending up with a character covered in little Lego cake, donuts or Bat/Pigeon shit. But overall it’s a very nice game. I find myself keep exploring and traversing the city because the collectathon aspect is very moreish. Though I should mainline the story as most of it is gated by other character’s abilities I don’t have yet. But, I dunno. It’s fun One really weird thing about the game is in the accessibility options you can enable 1 button press actions which skips things like QTE’s, button mashing, button holding, etc. Which is helpful. But within that they’ve included the driving controls. So tap the accelerator or brake and the vehicle doesn’t stop doing either action when letting go of the button. Which feels weird to play. I could turn it off, but it would mean I would have to do the QTE’s and such I do wonder if the reason I like this game is because I’m so starved of a real Batman Arkham game, but I’ll take what I can get. I’m really enjoying this.

I’m not sure it’s for me but I appreciate the attitude

I'm making fairly slow progress through this, trying to find all the secrets and do the training. I love it though, so far I think it's my game of the year. I'm in the mining area, and I'm pretty powered up. My main gun just needs 2 more levels, assuming even more don't open up, same for Diana's hacking, so fights are more an issue of field of view and the main gun not holding enough ammo. I really like Diana, they've done a good job with what could have been an annoying character

Vib Ribbon - Data on a disc=music still confuses the fuck out of me. Imagine how I felt about that 26 years ago. But not only that, a game could take that data and make potentially infinite number of individual “levels” out of it. Uncharted 2. It was a playable blockbuster movie. We kind of take that for granted and even rally against it a bit these days but when this released it was genuinely unbelievable. Never thought a game could do something like that. God of War 3 - it was the sheer scale that did it for me here. Having entire levels take place on moving titans. I didn’t think that would be possible to pull off in games to this degree. The Last of Us - First game that ever made me shed a tear. I thought that would be impossible for a game to do. Mario & Sonic at the Olympics - Gaming can end wars.

Tempting, but that's not going to look good on me

Unless I missed it, there’s no thread for this Anyway, despite Square’s HD-2D team’s inability to name their projects something normal, and the main character looking very silly - this does in fact look excellent It’s another HD-2D game but this time an action RPG with seemingly loads of gameplay variety about a guy travelling through time saving people. I’m looking forward to it, but would have to play it in JPN voice track as the English VO is so typical, anime cringe I get second hand embarrassment Demo out now/soon and carries over to the full release, as per procedure

Restarted this on Xbox and just got past the Bell Beast (first boss). This game is a masterclass in mystery and suspense. Outside of the gameplay part where you have enemies to fight, ignoring that for a second and just focused on the environment. It’s amazing they capture the feel of being a stranger in a strange place that is both quiet and hostile. Opposed to Hollowknight where they’re using the same basic tools. Expressionless characters, same art style (though different aesthetic), and faint wafts of music floating through. But it has a very different feel. It’s obvious but I also appreciate in Hollowknight you go down in to dark, claustrophobia graveyard and Silksong you go up in to a religious haunting. That’s an easy mirror idea, but I like it I like it, but even after playing a little bit, maybe that was an hour or so. I feel exhausted. It requires a high level of alertness and attention I would struggle with for long periods.

Native 4K 60fps update out today. Free upgrade for owners of the game on Xbox via Smart Delivery. $10/€10 for the upgrade on PS5.

Just don't confuse the poop sock with the wank sock.

I really liked 2 but strongly disliked 3, so I'm not exactly in line with this chart. Also, looking at this, their logo is a bit of a mess. Hopefully they stick with what they have now, as clumsy as it is. And yes, this was a very informative news post, you are all very welcome.

I'm interested to see how you lot answer this.

Finally got around to watching Mulholland Drive. I've got most of Lynch's catalogue under my belt, but this came out when my interest in film was in serious decline and I sort of stopped going, except to support a local community run traditional cinema in Crosby, Liverpuddle, and that was mainly to view classics. Anyway, enough preamble. Mulholland Drive is now my favourite film of all time. After a single viewing.🎬🎬

I prefer the heavier contrast of the SNES game, feels more accomplished stylistically. DS looks relatively flat and oversaturated, which I presume was done to compensate for the then mediocre handheld displays. I remember Koji Igarashi talking about that also when they did Harmony of Dissonance, which is arguably the ugliest 2D Castlevania ever made but they wanted it to be readable on a screen that came straight out of the depths of hell. I actually never played this game, in fact if you had asked me if there was a DS-exclusive Yoshi's Island I'd probably said no as I have zero memories of this coming out. It's an interesting snapshot in time though because this must have been the last time one of these games was challenging. The more recent Yoshi games are just visually cute walks in the park after all. I wonder if anyone has ever really dug into this theme of 'kids games' being deliberately made easy today, whereas that wasn't really part of the agenda back in the day and we still ended up loving them.

at Amazon.

Finally booted the C&C remake I've had sitting in my account for years. It's not really aged that much, it took a little bit of time to get back in the swing of things, but we're getting there now. The original had a stupid amount of missions in it as well, I forgot how large it was. Considering it's about 30 years old and all it's had is a lick of paint and some control changes, it's aged spectacularly.

Spiders > flies so even in terms of threat this makes no sense