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Had a surprise today, the Transformers kickstarter I'd backed last year turned up... I'd had a email saying DPD were expecting it but I thought that meant it was still in America somewhere... The books are awesome... really high quality... and really bloody heavy, there's no way these will be being read, I'll use the pdf's for that. Very happy that I did this and stoked everything turned up in beautiful condition.

Pathalogic 3 is currently £9.99 on Loaded Bang Average Football I saw on the back of Retro Gamer. From what I've played it's Sensi with a plot

I really hope this is actually shorter than the original 😅

First of my "try something new" approach...

£31.35 (inc. 5% off), and delivered a day early, from Gamerium.

Got a £15 eshop voucher for Xmas so picked up the voucher deal before it’s discontinued. Got Pokémon Legends Z-A and decided to pick up Tears of the Kingdom again and give it another try at some point.

Something before I get stuck into the rest of Act 3 Silksong, it's a 'horror' game apparently? 🤔 I guess cats are kind of horrible

I'm going to start by explaining Reign of Fire. I got talking to some people about the film and I remembered there was a game of it. I then bought the dvd of the film cheap... and a copy of the game, which cost more and is definitely worse Anyway, next to it on the right is Dolphin Blue, it's an Atomiswave game that someone ported to the Dreamcast. It's unofficial, and I think I have the rom, but I saw someone selling this nicely packaged version cheap so got it. Ganryu is a port of an old Neo Geo game, no idea if it's any good, a review I skipped through didn't love it, but it wasn't crazy money Same for Magic Pockets, which is a bitmap brothers game for the Amiga. Again, no idea if it's any good, but it was cheap sealed Edit: oh, the keyboard and controller are also new, recommend both although the controller seems to be a bit funny about working wirelessly on pc, I need to try it with DS4windows

I would call this my first purchase of the year but I ordered, and paid for, it last summer. In hindsight I probably didn't need a third copy of Under Defeat but I don't regret the Earthion big box (not technically a big box I suppose, it's roughly the size of an N64 game's box).

I started this yesterday and already sunk 5 hours into it. It's really good and there's been a few puzzles that made me feel smart working out. I've fired off maybe 3 lasers so far? One I had to redirect. It's gotten to a point where I am having to use a notepad now, I can only really cache so much information in my head before stuff gets pushed out. I have to be honest though, I'm not sure what the fuck is going on overall. Seeing footage from the BBC from a million years ago certain was a surprise though, I really wasn't expecting any of that.

As long as I’m not putting myself in any financially bad situations from it I don’t worry about it TBH. & usually games I’m adding to the backlog I’m picking up at steep discount <£20. A lot are even less than <£10. Yea those £10’s & £20’s add up quickly but I also limit how many I buy a month if I am picking them up. I’ve known people spend almost £10 a day on food at work. So yea, I don’t really worry about the backlog & adding to it. I do keep going back to older games I’ve added to it too. Especially as AAA gaming is moving further & further away from what I’m interested in & take 10 years to make.

So that's Dishonoured 2 finished. I thought it was amazing personally. Each time I go back in my mind to think about it there's little touches that stand out or bits that I didn't realise at the time as significant, but thinking back tot he first game and how it contrasts with this game, man, what a bit of entertainment this is. I wonder what the narrative is for Emily since I played as Corvo and a lot of what he had to say was based on the previous game and bits that happened before that game, and the parts that happened between those games and I presume stuff that occurred in DLC? There was so much I didn't get to see as well, I feel like there's a racing line you can take in this game that most people will adhere to, but you can go right off it and right around if you really want to. It actually has me considering another playthrough with the explicit reason to play through as Emily to se how she perceives that is happening, and going out of my way not to play how I played as I did with Corvo. I have a feeling that each level has so many ways to get in and out that you could play it numerous times and not find every single way. It totally wouldn't surprise me if you spend the games running time in the Clockwork Mansion only you would struggle to find every single room and secret. How they even began to envision that and then put it into practice and make a game over the top of it blows my mind. That shit is such a flex, not just creatively, but logistically as well. There's so many moving parts (literally in this case) and all of it works flawlessly. I am thinking that Dishonoured 1 and 2 might both be 10/10 games.

Wow, getting old aren’t we guys? Blaming entertainment for people being murderous psychopaths is pretty 90’s. Nothing to do with guns being readily available, Trump giving them carte blanche to do what they want & a previous murderer in their ranks being given total immunity? Some people are scum, stop giving them an excuse. Nothing like a bit of mob mentality to make it worse too. This isn’t happening anywhere else “developed”. These kinds of people existed way before entertainment like we have now - WWII in fact. 10’s of millions of people play games & watch films like that. Let’s add rock & hip hop music to the blame list again while we’re at it. But sure blame that stuff for a few psychos. These people don’t need games for that.

Whether it's just more well known, more recent, or just because it was a Friday - but last night's Cineworld showing of Mulholland Drive was actually relatively 'full' compared with Blue Velvet. It was fantastic to see it on the big screen and utterly compelling, a great night out.

Went and saw 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple yesterday... and it was excellent. Jack O'connell has nailed the art of being a psychopathic nutter and Ralph Fiennes is brilliant in it, much like the last film. Didn't feel at all like the hundred and fifty minute runtime and I could've easily watched an extra half hour of this to be honest. Howzat!

Come on, @Maryokutai; it has dinosaurs and boobs. It could have had a peripheral that pulled his nose hairs out at irregular intervals and @Nag still would have put himself through it.

I got an 'Act 3 clear' with 'The Silent' involving lots of discarding, poison and bonus energy and a shitton of relics thanks to getting the gold idol early on. I also got a relic that heals you for every 5 cards you have on deck when you hit a campfire, so between that and the discards for energy I opted for a (relatively speaking) bloated deck of draw cards/discard effects, had I think 45 cards by the end. For some reason the Ironclad is the one I've struggled with most, despite seeming the most simple it's a bit harder to figure out the deck building strategy with him. I die in Act 1 a lot. I'm assuming when you get a clear with all three it unlocks the real game or something.

This was in that latest Direct, I kind of glanced over it because I don't particularly like how it looks. But afterwards people pointed out this was made by the people behind Chrono Trigger and Xenogears, which at least warrants paying attention IMO (plus it has a cat in its logo). Apparently it's a revamped version of a gatcha game, so potentially a more classic progression system without whatever feature was driven by RNG.

at Loaded, inc. Ferrari J50 pre-order bonus.

I don't know what you're talking about.

Restarted this today. Was one of the first games I bought when I got my Series X but something pulled my attention away and when I saw that I was only four hours in I just decided to start fresh. It seems like they've done some work since then, or maybe I just remember some stuff wrong (was fishing always in there?). But generally feels like a more smooth experience and more QOL features than I remember it having. There's still a bit of clunkiness to climbing and the framerate chucks around a bit when it's streaming assets, but overall it feels quite polished now. Haven't left the first area yet but I plan to stick around and see it through this time. It's a very relaxing, enjoyable exploration experience. And I genuinely think this is in the top 5 of the best-looking games ever made, and will likely never age. There's a toggle to increase outline thickness (another setting I don't remember) – I set it at max, which really makes it pop to look like a Moebius panel in motion.

Mewgenics is finally out. Reviews: PC Gamer - 92% IGN - 9 Gamespot - 9 Polygon RPS I guess it’s good then!

Bought this on a whim after seeing DF's video about it. Originally came out in 2022, but has since been ported to every hardware on the planet that has a screen, the latest of which is Switch 2. The only Grid I ever played was the first one they released on PS360 back in the day, when their Ego Engine made their debut (which, to my surprise, they're still using to this day, which is neat). But this feels very much like that game, because it's still fundamentally a take on the MSR/PGR street-racing template, with city courses and other urban areas being the main stages. It also has a minor version of the kudos system in place where certain actions like staying on the racing line and doing neat driving earns you extra XP. This is also the game where people raised their eyebrows a bit upon announcement because it features full FMV cutscenes and some sort of rags to riches storyline. It's super campy and I sometimes skip the scenes, but at the same time it's kind of nice to give everything a bit more context than just picking a track and driving around. It does make me wonder if the production costs were worth it though, considering it stars, among others, Ncuti Gatwa, who can't have been a cheap booking after Sex Education and Dr. Who. But this is only part of the content, because next to the strictly curated story mode (of which there are four seasons) there's also a classic career mode where you start with slow cars, built up some reputation and money and hire your own team. There's even a mini skill tree that allows you to develop commands for your teammates to order them block dangerous opponents during a race for example – though I haven't really tried any of that yet. Handling is like that middle ground between a pure sim and nutty stuff like Ridge Racer, but there's a lot of adjustments you make in the settings that probably can shift it slightly further in either direction. I left it at normal and all the standard settings which feels relatively arcade-y, with oversteering being borderline impossible but you still need to take your corners with care. As for the Switch 2 port itself, it's quite excellent. It has two modes in TV and four modes in handheld mode (one of which is battery saving, which I've never seen before), which you can pick independently, so no switching around whenever you change the way you play. I quickly decided to stick to quality mode because it gives you native resolution in handheld and just overall a very nice picture quality with a stable 30fps (the screenshots below are from handheld mode), but DF's videos suggested they're all good and it's down to personal preference. The big talking point on Switch with these games is always the lack of analogue buttons, but due to the arcade-gameplay of it I don't find it that bothersome – though at higher difficulties without ABS and other assists it might become a more obvious downside. (You can turn a lot of stuff off you see in the screenshots, too – motion blur and basically every HUD element as well.)

Alright, I get the diapers ready and give it a shit shot.

for me it's probably the game that sparked this thread off, Dishonored 2. Not that I didn't like it, I did, and in isolation it might be the better game, maybe, but it just didn't vibe with me as much, it didn't kick on as much as I expected, not helped that the original story felt complete, I've tried replaying it a couple of times, but never managed to stick with it for any length of time. The DLC for it was great though I never liked Jet Set Radio Future as much as the original. It changed a bit and what it removed I thought was half the fun, like the combos to spray. Ni No Kuni 2. Loved the original, loved it. The sequel had so much wrong with it. A genuinely unappealing story, messed up difficulty that made the game drag. I don't say this lightly when I say that I HATE Ni No Kuni 2 The Fall 2, again loved the 1st one, it was in my top 10 of that year, absolutely brilliant game. The sequel was really bad, or started really badly at least. Maybe it got better, but of the people I know that played it no one stuck with it

I've been meaning to post about this for a while, I got it cheap on PC, and it always seemed to be on sale on Switch, so I suspect a few people have it even if they've not played it. I will say it's a good Steam Deck game, which is where I played it all It's very much a retro style platformer, I'm not sure it could have been done as it is on an old console, but stuff like Ristar and Dynamite Heady, Castlevania etc show that they could have done something. It's very colourful, and initially fairly basic. You're a dog who gets a grappling hook, so while there is traditional platforming, the ability to grab and swing off certain platforms and objects comes in to play. Most enemies can be killed by jumping on them, or grappling in to them, and health is pretty common. The world map is pretty traditional, you move to the next level when you're done, but if you've collected enough medallions, required for progress to the boss, you can skip levels (I think, I didn't try it). There's bonus levels too, the key for these is hidden in stages, then selectable on the map. These start easy, and a quick way to get more medals, but then get really tricky. As does the game. I mean, it's not Celeste or whatever, but it does get much harder, levels take longer, health starts to matter. It's also when I found that I didn't really trust the controls. When precision started to matter more I found that, either I just didn't have the knack, which is very possible, or they were just unreliable. Aiming a swing, even attaching to things mid-jump, I never felt like I'd perfected them Still, good game, and well worth the 39p it cost

That's indeed a nice set. Or potential murder weapon.

That’s a beautiful collection @Nag what series does it include? I dunno anything about transformers comics

This came out a few days ago, a Paper Mario clone like Bug Fables, but visually more accomplished I think. Apparently it's really good, so maybe people should have directed their energy towards giving this some time in the spotlight instead of bashing Highguard, but it is what it is. It's out on pretty much everything, though it doesn't seem to have a native Switch 2 version (yet?).

This is a preference thing, isn't it? In my limited experience, I don't like extraction shooters. The randomised loot part of it or the closing area. I don't find it engaging to shoot someone that is art a disadvantage through no fault of their own really. Either they didn't find the good guns or supplies, it feels like shooting fish in a barrel. It's unsporting. It feels shit to have it done to you, you get someone that dropped on the nice supplies and that rich get richer ethic is something I'm dead against. Dropping in and getting killed or killing someone might be a rush the first few times it happens, but after that, it becomes a crapshoot. I hate that the geography of the level can carry you as well. I have barely played Fortnite, only really when going round to a friends to see him and his family, but we would chill and play games and sitting right on the edge of the map and inching forwards and watching everyone else fight will more often than not see you make it quite far into the game. You can watch people right and then mop up the winner, again it's unsporting and I don't really like it, it's something that has a limited shelf life. Same being on the receiving end of being third partied, it just feels shit. I was sort of hoping that this whole genre would go away into irrelevance, but the success of ARC deems that the fad isn't over. It annoys me how a lot of games lean into that design process of "the other players are your content". No thanks, I'll pass. I think in general there's a lot of bad game design going on there that has been allowed to pass. Or at least confusing game design. It always seems to crop up in these hugely popular games as well for some reason, CoD was full of terrible design as well. I don't really play pvp games at all now, but if I was going to it would be with semi prefixed loadouts that were balanced. I don't think anything will come close to the purity of the symmetrical maps and set loadouts and hitboxes of something like Halo or Gears. I am glad those games exist for the people that enjoy them, but having played and watched people on them their popularity is confusing to me.

I've never played one of these types of games and I probably never will... they just don't interest me.

It's a straight cipher that at the time would have been easy enough to crack at the time given that it was topical to here. It might be a bit harder now, but everything in there is accurate and of the time. Someone with a few hours spare could do it. First port of call would be to add spaces to the work. You could do this by using control + f and typing a phrase out and see if you had any repeating ones. For example if you put 1 2 3 in the find and it bring back multiple hits, you know that this is a potential common word. I wrote that whole thing with the idea that it could be cracked around the word "the", "there" and "their". That gives you 5 letters into the cipher as well as 2 letters into the second word which could have been used to leverage a guess. Especially so considering the third word also had 2 letters from "the" in it. Once you start replacing those letters over the top of the ones that are scrambled, the rest of the message unscrambles itself until you are left with a full cipher. How I would do it personally is copy two versions of the message into a document, and then as you work letters out, find and replace all the letters you have worked out with block capitals until you have a full line up. The hardest part is the onboarding, but if you had put your minds together it should have been easy enough. The cipher was used throughout the ARG and featured across places across the internet, MFG injokes, logic puzzles and also messages in games we had played. The idea behind it overall was to foster a community and also keep people coming back to the forum, as it was starting to lapse a little. The cipher especially was built around the idea of seeing if people would work together, say someone suspected ????x?x?t was a word that only showed once, they had the t in place from previous decodes, what words exist that end in a t that have 2 of the same letter in in such close proximity in to each other. Working out those longer words would make someone feel very smart, or as a group make them feel accomplished, as well as rewarding them with more letters to fill out the rest of the cipher. It was a pretty complex thing overall and it wasn't meant to be easy, I think I planned it to run for maybe 6 or so months. Each prominent member would have had a role to play and would have been pushed into doing things they might not have wanted for the sake of the forum. The end prize would have been store credit to the participants.

I found reading RetroGamer gave me a longing to play retro games, which was actually better than the reality of playing retro games....

So I found out yesterday that the Switch 2 dock works as a Steam Deck dock if you run a USB-C extender. It also supports VRR which the Switch 2 doesn't when docked. I bought a 0.5m cable which arrived a little while ago, paired an Xbox pad and played some Super Woden Rally Edge and a couple other games, and it's great! It charges the Deck while playing, too. I'm not sure how much I'll play this way, but it's neat that I can. It makes me want the Steam Machine even more.

If you watch a lot of GBNews, or read the Mail, whatever, you will feel that Britain is a much more dangerous place than it is. If you're on Twitter certain words will be normalised. No one here is saying that watching a film or playing a game will mean you'll kill someone. But media is a part of society and it can shape what's normal and what isn't, sometimes for good sometimes for bad. Not that it's normalised something like Ice, just to be clear, these people are fascists attracted to a fascist and being able to be fascist. It's a more nuanced argument than that

Yeah, just the end of the third iirc. I feel like the game goes out of its way to be a dick, same as Balatro. Like if you build a deck around face cards you always meet a boss that nullifies face cards. StS does this as well. Some might see it as challenging, I just see it as punishing. Then again these games are not for me, I fucking hate card games. Slay and Balatro I can see are good games, but they don't tickle my fancy as much as some others might get tickled here.

Starts in a few minutes.

I recently finished watching 28 Years Later (the last third or so, watched most of it around 2-3 months ago) and went to see The Bone Temple in the cinema. I remember liking 28 Years Later well enough but I have to say I really loved the last third, it really elevated the film for me. In the end it might have ended up being my second favourite film of 2025 after Weapons. The Bone Temple is brilliant too, a great film to start off 2026 with. It’s a very different film to 28 Years Later, but the central actors again are brilliant in it. Worth it for the Iron Maiden scene alone.

Apparently they’ve not only added stuff/content but fixed a bunch of glitches (some gameplay, mostly graphics) and put back things that were missing. I can’t find the tweet now, but there was a before and after how the sun was completely missing in the back of one of the levels. Added some languages to the game, too People seem really happy with it, but honestly releasing a game in the state this seemed to be in and only fixing it a year later is really bad for Nintendo. They usually make better quality products than that. They patch games for improvements here and there but rarely do Nintendo games need what feels like a massive overhaul. Part of what makes Nintendo’s exclusives so good is the level of polish and quality but I feel the more they outsource the more there are these games with problems you wouldn’t normally get.

I've been checking our cinemas but none of them is doing anything Lynch related, unfortunately. --- Speaking of films, I recently watched the first three Jason Bourne movies. I was convinced I had seen these before but turns out I only ever saw the spin-off with Jeremy Renner (odd choice in retrospect). It did add a funny meta layer to the narrative because I regularly went 'do I know this...? No, I don't'. Anyway, they're really good. Two and three – their naming choices are horrible, so I just call them by numbers – can feel a bit samey, but the first one is still a standout action movie that from a more modern perspective (it is, after all, 20 years old) also feels refreshing in terms of tempo, cinematography and script. I do like how it treats all the different countries they visit as more than just a backdrop for an establishing shot, there's a bit of melancholy to everything, it doesn't feature any kind of comic relief, it's absolutely serious throughout without becoming pretentious. One thing all three manage to do well is being fast-paced but simultaneously not rushing it and taking their time and letting scenes flow for a bit. They're also visually nice to look at, even though 2 and 3 totally overdo it with camera movement during action scenes. I'm unsure whether I should watch the last one, because it's relatively disliked and I think as a trilogy the first three feel quite complete. But I think these are genuine 'modern classics' now and in hindsight likely were probably always a good counterweight to the overly ridiculous Bond and MI movies that were happening at the time.

Wonder if Tropical Freeze will get an update

This game is a real collercoaster for me. As mentioned, I enjoyed it quite throughout the Canyon area but that one hour I played today in the frozen Zebra land was probably the least fun I've had with a Nintendo game since that abomination called Sticker Star. They really pull and stretch what ideas they have because the core foundation is incredibly shallow. It doesn't require you to think much, unlike, say, Zelda or Pikmin, nor does it require any amount of dexterity and precision, as you might in Mario or a 2D Metroid. And they haven't really found a reliable way to make up for it, so it switches between visually satisfying feedback loops of destruction and oddly designed obstacles courses that sometimes are decent, but often just come across as undercooked. I'm surprised maf could play this for hours on end, I kind of have to approach this like an arcade game where it gives you the dopamine rush for 30-60 minutes but after that it quickly loses steam because there's nothing really to sink your teeth into. Even the skill tree is extremely lackluster and for the most part just increases numbers (more of this and that, shorter startup here and there). On the plus side, if the trend continues, the next time I'm going to post here I'll have had a great time with it. Fingers crossed the jungle area is nice. But so far I have to say, I strongly prefer the 2D outings to this.

I booted this up for the first time in years yesterday to get back to the Blood & Wine dlc I apparently started in 2020 Fucking hell, I don't remember anything about how to play this. I stumbled on to a mission that was pretty much just one fight, but took me about 50 tries. It was so hard that I had to check I hadn't just beaten a mission multiple levels above me, or that for some reason all my armour had been unequipped. Nope, it was just hard The more confusing stuff was all UI and menu stuff. Like, I went to level up, but I noticed that I had a couple of extra skill slots I could add with more mutagens. I'd no memory of what that meant, but it wasn't what I thought, eventually I worked it out and tried to add more mutagens. However, I need certain colours, and I don't have them, I don't know how to get them, but it sort of sounds like it's gated behind some progress. No idea Then I tried crafting better Witcher gear. I've got my head around that again but it took a minute. It looks like I've got a on of stuff to do in this dlc, so I must have barely started it. It should all make sense by the time I'm done hopefully

There's a distinct lack of boobs in that trailer though... 😢

04/01 - Gradius (Switch 2) 11/01 - Salamander (Switch 2) 12/01 - Batman (Game Boy)