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Last year was a total cunt, with my brother’s suicide, and my mum being sectioned. My best friend secretly arranged a collection, and only went and got me this…

GAME OF THE YEAR 2021 RESULTS GOTY 2021 - METROID DREAD (SWITCH) 2ND - FORZA HORIZON 5 (PC, XB1, XSS, XSX) 3RD - HALO INFINITE (PC, XB1, XSS, XSX) BEST GAME OF 2021 NOT RELEASED IN 2021 1ST - YAKUZA: LIKE A DRAGON (PC, PS4, XB1, XSS, XSX) 2ND - HYRULE WARRIORS: AGE OF CALAMITY (SWITCH) JOINT 3RD - SACKBOY: A BIG ADVENTURE (PS4, PS5), CRASH TEAM RACING: NITRO FUELED (SWITCH, PS4, XB1), CYBERPUNK 2077 (PC, PS4, XB1), SHINING FORCE:THE SWORD OF HAIYA (GAME GEAR), INFAMOUS: SECOND SON (PS4), GHOST OF TSUSHIMA (PS4, PS5), CARRION (PC, SWITCH, PS4, XB1), STELLA GLOW (3DS) MOST ANTICIPATED 2022 GAME 1ST - THE SEQUEL TO THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD (SWITCH) 2ND - ELDEN RING (PS4, PS5, XB1, XSS, XSX, PC) JOINT 3RD - GRAN TURISMO 7 (PS4, PS5), GOTHAM KNIGHTS (PS4, PS5, XB1, XSS, XSX, PC) Thank you very much to everyone who voted, see you all again next year.

Some more games arrived Horizon I have digitally and saw it cheap enough to buy physically. Killzone I just never got around to picking up, I'm not expecting much from it. Danganronpa Decadence came back in stock and I saw Collection of Mana for a decent price. The Gameboy Colour game, which I don't actually have a means to play, is Shin Megami Tensei Devil Children

Near enough finished the gaming / entertainment room this week, still want a CRT to sit where the Speccy is on the desk, so I can run the old Light Gun games, and eventually a Mister to run the retro stuff off, as Musch as I would love to rebuy the Megadrive ans SNES I just dont have enough sockets to connect the all or the space. That being said may yet move a couple of other bits around in future to accomodate those. Under TV currently Have PS1 / 3 /4pro and Evercade.

I’m such a child.

Thanks again @Maf

Welcome me into your fold.

Another one for Danganronpa Decadence.

Found an old friend in my parents loft over the weekend

A few weeks ago I talked about showing my 3DS collection but until today my game room has been literally inaccessible. But I sorted some stuff out and could get back in there so here's my 3DS stuff Games And consoles I also have an original 3DS and a normal red 3DS XL but I dunno where they are right now

Bar 10, which I shouldn't bother picking up but now I've done this probably will, I've now got all the mainline Dragon Quest games across various systems, and a few spin offs too

Another batch of stuff turned up Twin Caliber I'm kind of regretting. I was bored in work on Christmas Eve and thought it might be a good curiosity to play, I now think it might just be shit rather than curiously shit. Maken I got because it's a LOT cheaper than buying the English Dreamcast version. Yakuza 0 I got just to have physically for the collection. And the Game Gear game is Wrestlemania Steel Cage Challenge

😬 No idea if Go Go Cosmo Cops is any good, just never heard of it before so thought I'd give it a go as it was cheap

Capping off the year with a little treat. £15 for both!

Woops.

Part 2 of my Christmas present to myself has arrived,

Bought this today in Argos for £24.99. It comes with a manual, but only for one of the three titles. Worst idea for a blind box ever. Also grabbed Kiwami and Kiwami 2 digitally while they are on offer, at £3.74 and £4.49 respectively.

Almost forgotten I had preordered these.

Bought AI: The Somnium Files for £14.39 (from £35.99) and Cursed Castilla for £8.18 (from £12.59) on the eShop sale which ends on the 12th. Been playing AI on the Xbox via Game Pass, but wanted it on the Switch for handheld play. Cursed Castilla I saw on the latest Consolevania, and looks awesome. It's on 3DS, too.

Forgot I pre-ordered this back when I played FFVII and VIIR and I was I obsessed. Nice surprise! Only had a quick flick through but some beautiful artwork in it. Much better than the cover thankfully. One for @Nag

The allure got me, in the end...

I've always wanted to play Blood Will Tell, cost me a bit so I might sell it on once I've played through it

Xmas haul from Santa

I thought I already owned Black Knight but apparently not, I've definitely played through it before. Rush Rush Rally Reloaded is a Dreamcast game

Because I had to. First in the queue, after Dark Souls 3.

I didn't get any games for Christmas but I did buy myself Virtue's Last Reward and a usb Saturn pad. Then I got Fatal Fury for the Neo Geo Pocket and Virtua Racing for the 32X from my housemate. I don't have a 32X as things stand but I've been after one for a bit

The company Troy Baker was shilling for has been accused of stealing voice samples from another website. The more I read about NFTs the more I think it stands for Nasty Future Trend. Ripping off artists and creators, scamming investors and using up resources. Remember when we had Folding software running on distributed PCs, analysing telescope images for planets and finding new drugs (using the unused processing power on linked computers?) Now we have people buying up all the graphics cards, using a whole country’s worth of electricity and for what? Creating “artificial scarcity” and a “market” for crudely drawn monkeys? I don’t want anything to do with NFTs, especially in gaming.

Look, I made a super cut of them. I'm an influencer now @Nag Yeah I did and yeah it was

This game is pretty great, I’m not gonna lie. I couldn’t even pin point why and it’s certainly not for everyone. If you love the mechanic of mopping up every square inch in Luigis Mansion, you’ll get it. I didn’t expect to be playing this over 2 hours later after starting but there I was having to know what’s around the next corner. What was around the corner was always more gunk. I’m a big lover of gunk. It’s the new lube.

Some more games have turned up recently Dragon Quest is just to have a physical copy. The PAL Dreamcast game is Intrepid Izzy, which is a relatively recent release. I liked the DS Naruto game I played back in the early days of the DS, but that was Japanese, so thought this might be interesting to try. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, I mean, what can you say Cool Borders is filthy

You’ve entered the code at the wrong place. It’s a promotional code not a voucher.

I got a little extra for Christmas so bought the below (Dying Light is the Platinum Edition)

#theonlywaytoplay

Cut off is 21st January 2023 at 00:01. Voting template below: GotY 2022 1: 2:  3: 4:  5: 6: 7: 8: 9: 10:  Games not from 2022 discovered in 2022 1: 2: 3: 4: 5: Most Anticipated 2023 Game 1: 2: 3: 4: 5:

Look, I don't know if Edge have screwed up here, or if this is an amazing offer, but this link gets you a 3 month trial to Edge for £3, then it's £3 per quarter after that. Use code JA23. It applies to print only, print and digital, or digital only subs. Others are on the same offer, too, including Retro Gamer, Play, and a few others. I've just added All About Space, too.

😴

No new official question this week (again)... so you'll have to put up with mine.😬 One of the biggest surprises of last year was the Guardians of the Galaxy, a game which was done no favours by either its marketing or how the previous superhero game turned out... one of its biggest pluses (for me at least) is how great the actual characters are and in my opinion Drax the Destroyer is the best. Equal parts funny, tragic, melancholic and stoic. I know nothing of these characters apart from the Marvel films and Drax was done dirty in those but in this he shines and it's a joy for him to be part of the party. I think it would be impossible to talk about 2021 gaming without mentioning Lady Dimitrescu, for better or worse she pretty much took over the Internet during the run up to Resident Evil Village releasing. It turned out disappointing that her and her daughters only featured for around a third of the game or less... even more so that their area was probably the most interesting in the game. While she was around though she was a force of nature with her booming tone and stature.

Thats amazing, great freinds you have there.

The physical stuff, anyway.

Cover art aside, it does sound like a good book. Prompted me to look for this though:

I just found the stamina meter a real chore when trying to explore rather than a encouragement to find alternatives. I just want to run over to that mountain/shrine/whatever not have to think up ways of getting there without slowing to a crawl every few seconds. Anyway, been over it loads of times. & yea every list is subjective but that’s a bad one.

Why not both?

Confirmed

Great episode again. I love the latest purchases chat and games being bought by the host during the recording is one step further. "Fuck it... That's £20 spent already." It made me pull up eBay and start looking at DS games whilst I was listening.

Because it has been proven to lead to being a bad environment creatively

I thought this was intriguing since its initial reveal (back when we all thought it was called Chorvs) so I picked it up recently and played through most of it during my holiday break. I'm one and a half steps away from finishing it, so this might be as good a time as any to make a topic about it. Haven't seen anyone mention it here so it'll probably be a dead topic, but I absolutely love the game and feel like I own it to the developers to at least put something about it on the web. I'm not too experienced with this whole space opera genre and I think the last somewhat comparable game I played was Strike Suit Zero. But this genuinely feels like a bold new step for these kind of games. It's not a linear, mission-driven game, which is what I expected, but it's designed like an RPG almost. You visit a certain amount of areas that function as hubs for main and sidequests, three of them medium-sized, the rest a bit smaller. Because space is large and dark exploration is very streamlined: a button press reveals items and money pickups scattered across the world and holding the button unlocks points of interests on your map, i.e. the aforementioned sidequests, for example. Completing those usually rewards you with new weapons and equipment, hence why I say this very much feels like an RPG. But just like the size of its world, the stuff you find doesn't overwhelm you. I completed every sidequests I came across and still only have six different laser weapons, for example. Rather, everything you have fulfills a certain function, so mix-and matching for the best combination is key here. While it does seem like putting on extra hull energy is a good thing, getting hit in Chorus usually means you already made a mistake. So I went to max out my energy meter and recovery instead, to be able to use more special moves. And it's here where you can see just how forward-thinking this game is designed. Usually dogfighting games are 50% shooting at enemies and 50% turning your ship/plane around to find an enemy to shoot. Chorus just gives you all the power you need to reduce that downtime to almost zero and it's just wonderfully executed. Those special moves I mentioned (called Rites in the game) are the key here, particularly the first two: one allows you to instantly teleport behind and enemy in your line of sight to flank them but the most important tool is the so-called Drift. By holding a button, you can freely turn around your ship in any direction while maintaining your current trajectory. So instead of flying straight at a stationary target to destroy a turret and then rinse and repeat until all of them are gone, you can just plot a course alongside them, drift at 90° and shoot them all in one fell swoop. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I'll put a poorly played little clip at the end of this post just to show it off, but the feature is so flexible it's really the one thing that turned this game from a very good game into an excellent one. Story-wise it's a modern take on the Dancing with the Wolves formula, but the lore is rather interesting and the two main characters - the pilot, who has a special gift (lore explanation for the usage of her "Rites") and her sentient ship. The ship in particular is really well realised, floating somewhat between the robotic AI of something like HAL and the basically human-like portrayal of the concept in Cortana. It's a very unorthodox pairing but really well realised. I particularly enjoyed how both characters responded to stuff happening during the action scenes, with the ship being surprisingly blood-thirsty or how both of them finish each other sentences the stronger their bond grows. Definitely low-key blown away by this. The excellent gameplay, interesting lore and overall tone and atmosphere (somewhat channeling Remedy at times) just make for a superb combination. I'd probably have to nitpick to find stuff I didn't like, like dialogue being cut off way too often when random encounters spawn (should have looked into that Uncharted 4 tech) or how there can be a tad too much flying around in the beginning and towards the end (think Wind Waker, but at lightspeed) but other than that this is just great. Anyway, here's the simple drift clip to conclude: And for the record, and despite being the only one here still playing on last-gen, this runs absolutely fine on Xbox One and probably on PS4 as well. But I'll definitely go back to it when I have a new system to see just how much it improves by running at 60fps.

didn't get these for xmas, arrived over the last few weeks. can't resist physical copies of cave games.