Leaderboard

Let's go!

New Bitmap Book. It’s a beast.

My First Xbox

Time to dive in

Fuck yea!! Been really looking forward to this.

🤖 I also got a bitmaps book today. These things are mad heavy, wtf!

The latest pick ups, quiet a few i didn't get when they came out.

Not much has changed but this is my current setup.

More Switch games. Rayman Legends I got cheap at The Game Collection. I have it digitally but wanted physical for the collection, and it's getting hard to find new anymore without being a code-in-the-box variant. Currently playing again, and it's still one of the best platformers I've ever played. Kirby Star Allies is one I've been meaning to buy again for some time now. It was on clearance at Argos for £34.99, so I snapped it up. Again, getting hard to find new and it completes my Kirby collection on Switch. Dead Cells return to Castlevania edition I bought from The Game Collection and received £10 back in reward points, which went straight into a pre-order for Assassin's Creed Mirage. I love the box art and it's nice to have a complete version on card.

Pew! Pew!

Nice haul @Maryokutai. I wouldn't mind those. Finally got a replacement case and sleeve from Limited Run Games for Return to Monkey Island, after the one delivered in a jiffy bag was crushed.

Playdate finally arrived!

Well that was an unexpected bonus (in so much it turned up on time !):

Who needs Starfield I don't know when exactly I'll get around to embarrassing myself playing Samba De Amigo, but after loving the original I'll always have a soft spot for it Tingles Balloon Fight combines 2 things I don't like, but it's a cheap little obscure DS game so I thought it was worth picking it up

I'd recommend to anyone who's interested in some of these niche titles and also likes to collect a bit here and there, to keep a close eye on some of those Switch releases that are happening at the moment. With the successor looming on the horizon and even publishers seemingly unaware whether or not it's backwards compatible, I suspect a lot of these games are being produced in very limited quantities and will be hard to find in a year's time or so. Similar to what happened with Persona Q, Radiant Historia etc. on the 3DS. I do actually want to play these, not just have them. A friend of mine used to rave about the Rhapsody games back in the day, so I wonder how they hold up.

Had wanted this for a while, found physical version on amazon for about £7

On offer on PSN at minute

...*Cue the theme song*

New headset to go with new racing game.

Anyone else heard of this? Just seen this video and got to say it’s a hell of a gimmick. Very interested.

I've mentioned a few times, I'm buying somewhere, and have now started packing. Not quite everything, but here's my PS4 collection all tubbed up I'm looking forward to actually getting all my games out on display, that's the plan at least

Already put about 6 hours in. I loved the original and this hasn’t disappointed at all so far. For those that don’t know they’re basically Metroid/Souls likes. Except you don’t lose anything when you die. You just have a debuff called guilt which basically trims down what is essentially your mana bar. I imagine it may do some other long term things I haven’t realised as yet too. Everything you want from a Metroid/Souls game is here. The combat is oh so satisfying, very deliberate and punchy with a great parry. Exploring is just hugely compelling mostly because it just looks so fucking good. The art is another level in these games with plenty of weird and intriguing characters. The pacing of the extra abilities to reach previously inaccessible areas feels just right. Handy little marker system for the standard Metroid map is included too. Yea loving it so far.

Had a quick flick through that new Bitmap Art of the Box book. Thought I’d share a few bits or art which immediately jumped out to me. Got to say I could have done it for everyone of Shinkiro & Eisuke Ogura (SNK Artists). Their shit is just particularly fantastic.

I'm a few hours in, steam says 6 hours but it's closer to 4 with AFK. I'll say so far it's not what I was really expecting, which I mean in both good and bad ways I guess. Firstly it's not really a BGS take on No Man's Sky, or Elite or any of those games. It's not really like Skyrim either though, so far. What it feels more like is a Bethesda take on Mass Effect 1, in that it's an open 'universe' game that's very fragmented. You have central hubs which contain lots of quest givers, then menus which connect you to the rest of the universe. You have bespoke planets like Mars which contain a small open world and settlements. You go in your shuttle and take your pick from a map, and you end up in front of a skybox which represents the nearby planet you're orbiting, and there's some random encounters that can happen out there So that's the way the space travel works in this. You can also immediately just travel somewhere by opening the map whenever you want. That seems kind of spoiling the fun to me though, like a way of making things feel small. In a sense, this is pretty disappointing. Not because it isn't a massive seamless space sim, but moreso the way all the transitions are handled. It seems kind of dated and disconnected. Taken in context it might not turn into such a big deal when the rest of the parts come together and questlines progress. But it does feel a little bit of a misdirect by Bethesda, intentional or not, as to the true character of this game. But in any event Mass Effect 1 is an extremely good game that holds up, so its take on space exploration isn't a bad one to ape. Question is does it work well within the framework of a Bethesda game The setup is pretty dry. It also kind of feels like Mass Effect a bit. You get your macguffin and a companion goes with you. Reviews have said it's a good idea to prioritise the main quest, for gameplay and progression purposes. I don't really know why, but I did plan to mostly stick to it with the odd sidequest rather than drag the pacing out so that's fine. But the universe is not level scaled like Oblivion and Skyrim so at some point you will presumably be forced to do optional stuff to account for that. Also just in general, mainlining a main quest in these games seems like shit advice, you want to weave those sidequests in as well One thing I like: your companion can input on dialogue interactions. Went to a sort of Mos Eisley place on Mars where my companion butted it and haggled with another NPC. This was a sort of tutorial for this mechanic, but it would be an interesting example of the game's flexibility if these quest interactions also extend to the other optional companions you can find. I don't know that they do that for a fact, but you would reckon that they do. Another thing I like is this one quest early on where a guy asks you to find some patient data he misled, and just tells you the general area he lost it in. No waypoint for this quest, you just sort of wander around and it forces the player to take in the environment and incidental dialogue, as well as read signs and develop a mental map of the area layout. Not that the dialogue is riveting or anything, but it's a minor pivot back towards the design of stuff like Morrowind where the world was the point. In terms of reactivity, I picked a trait called 'Serpents Embrace' that made my character addicted to grav jumping or they take a debuff (and a buff if they do grav jump). I completely misunderstood this when I picked it, I thought it meant I had to literally jump all the time, but it means warpspeed jumps with your space ship. Doh. Turns out this also means they are a follow of a thing called the faith of the serpent, which is a pretty edgy backstory for an introverted chef. I got unique dialogue options during one quest because of this, so maybe there's more things like that which branch out and lead to different options. I also like how gravity effects the combat. You can cyberpunk style spring jump over buildings and lightly glide an explosive down a hallway, gently carried by the low gravity of Mars, like a spicey present for the space raiders. It seems like temperature might also play a part in outworld exploration, but I'm not sure in what way really. In terms of hubs, the first hub is a bit boring. Too green. But the 2nd one I went to on Mars was pretty cool and reminded me of Omega in Mass Effect 2. Also seems to be the place where you can take jobs from bounty hunters, if that's the way you want to point your character. Things I don't like, exploring the surfaces of planets seems mad boring. It's just a bunch of fucking rocks, the lack of a Mako is keenly felt. At the very least tho they have different environments. I took a radiation debuff on the surface of the moon which apparently fucked my suit up. Another thing I dislike though it's subjective, they put a weird filter on the game in certain worlds. The starter hub area has The Matrix filter on it. Shit's green all the time. The Mars area has a red filter. You can walk in a room and see the filter fade in and out, it's very weird and overdone and leads to a blown out look. It doesn't look good on OLED, looks fine on LCD though No HDR btw, at least not on PC. You can get auto hdr working using a weird work around, but it looks bad and make things more blown out so IMO stick with SDR. Apparently it's a similar situation on Xbox

Surprised there’s not a thread on this since a lot of people have been looking forward to it. It’s only just hit my radar but I was instantly interested. Pleased to report after about 4 hours it’s as good as I hoped it would be. The first 45 minutes was a real drag but after that it’s really hit it’s stride. Most of you probably know but the combat is basically handled like a mix of Paper Mario TTYD and something like Octopath. You can buff attacks and debuff enemy attacks with button presses. But the game also lets you interrupt enemy specials if you hit them with certain abilities highlighted by icons above them similar Octopath. There’s also up to a 3x boost function for every ability. It all makes for a brilliant combat system. Makes me look forward to all battles. Special mention to the art and animations too, they’re beautiful. Although I have been struggling to tell which layer of the screen I’m on sometimes. As in it can be difficult to tell if you’re above and/or behind certain paths. It’s strange and something I don’t remember struggling with in any other game. Not hurting anything though. Hopefully I get used to it. It’s full of charm too, I’m already a huge fan of all the characters but in particular the 2 extra ones I’ve met. 1 who is a party member and another who is more of just a companion. The fact they’ve pulled me in and made me care about them so quickly is a testament to how well written and smartly animated they are. Big fan. Hope it keeps it up.

This game has almost unreasonable amounts of stuff in it. I'm going to put this in a spoiler just in case but it's just a description of what you can find on a base on one of Saturn's moons, completely unrelated to any main or side story: I'm roughly 15 hours in now and haven't even seen any other big city than New Atlantis. And I'm not even engaging with the nonsensical bullet points à la 'over 1000 planets' as I haven't even landed anywhere that was randomly generated (and don't plan on doing so). But the handcrafted stuff is just so remarkably good it makes you wonder why they didn't focus more on that pre-release. To an extent I actually did worry a bit that this would lean too heavily into procedurally generated 'content', but that's absolutely not the case.

My guy as mentioned is an introvert cook, and I finally got to dismiss my companion so I'm getting that O2 buff I wasn't getting before. Beforehand, I was actually debuffed, cause of having a person following me I guess. So now I can drink all the beers I find for the damage mitigation upgrade and the O2 debuff from all the beer doesn't affect me as much. I've unlocked 'mixology' for the cooking skill as well which I guess will dovetail with this direction I'm going in, which is a weird ass wino in space running around with a knife. I also got a perk to go faster on knife kills, so it all links together in a pleasingly psychotic fashion. Season 3 of The Bear goes places. Right now I'd liken this game as a weird hybrid of Mass Effect, Death Stranding and No Man's Sky. With very little Skyrim about it, maybe a tiny bit of Fallout (I did not play Fallout 4 which is the one this gets compared to moreso) I'm playing on the hardest difficult, not cause I'm good at it but it really forces your hand with the RPG mechanics and slows the pace right down, but the game is open enough you can pursue other avenues when you hit a wall. The skill tree seems to funnel you along different directions too, so that if you aren't that interested in base building (zero interest here, at least so far) then maybe you double down on being a ship technician. Or maybe you invest in the social skill which gives you a better success rate at making other ships surrender, so you can pirate them. There's some interesting approaches there and the ways of doing things aren't so linear I'm liking it. I dunno, it's fairly inoffensive, low calorie fluff for a lot of it. But it feels like a deeper RPG than Bethesda have been making in recent years. My character took some drugs on one mission and was able to move and jump really far, the combat was similar to an alteration mage in Morrowind, with all the jumping across an entire room going on. They really embraced the jank with this one, but in a largely good kind of way There's a lot of other interesting gimmicks that have been happening on missions, some cool tricks with gravity, boosters and physics. But I don't want to be too specific about it cause it's cool to just discover yourself

Still got one of them:

FromSoft isn't messing around! Giant Mech✔️ Missile launcher✔️ Big gun✔️ Laser sword✔️ Jet propelled agility✔️ ..And go! This isn't Metroid however, this is your standard tool kit. Master it quickly. You get about the first couple minutes to introduce you to the controls. Then, you're on your own. Free to roam and battle as you wish. Your first objective has four markers, to be approached in any order. Naturally there is a lot of distance between each and From is quick to demonstrate that the enemies have the advantage. This is their base, you are the intruder. Be prepared to fight waves around any given corner. Some nice little Codec-like voices are your only warning the enemy has spotted you. The controls have come a long way since early AC's. After only an hour or so, I get what they were saying about taking what they've learned from Souls (more from Sekiro, really) and applying it to AC. Combat is fluid, reactionary and fast-paced. It all feels really intuitive, however. I imagine the first boss will be a rude awakening to any new to AC. I died a handful of times. But, this isn't Souls. This ain't no Vanguard either. I didn't defeat the boss by learning it's patterns, tells and counteracting them. No, I beat the boss by making the most of my own abilities. Your handler gives you one hint to dodge a specific attack. But it's more important than it seems. I mentioned Sekiro before, because you have the same meter system to the boss fights. Get the bar into the red with sustained damage and not only does this put the boss in a stunned state. But they take more damage too. Be careful that it does work both ways. Not to mention the cooldown to all your weapons and dodge/agility capabilities. This is all demonstrated in the first boss fight. When I "got it", I smashed the boss quite easily. I didn't get long to play today and likely even less time tomorrow. But just from the opening mission, I'm very impressed.

Sod it. Bought.

Silksong delayed until 2028 as it moves from Unity to Unreal

Jesus Christ. Better send in your will with your order with a secondary address in case you die before it gets shipped.

Temporary setup just for Starfield 😂

They're owned by Gamer Network Limited which is essentially Eurogamer, who are part of something called Reedpop, which also isn't owned by Microsoft

No Thanks

Maraca based rhythm action game. The original on dreamcast was great, with maraca controllers, not played it in years mind. Was a bit sceptical about this, didnt think the joycons would work that well for the motion controls, but it works a lot better than i expected, probably partially because it seems pretty lenient in recognising hits. But at the same time it doesnt work quite as well as as it could, id expect the vr version to be better, think its quest exclusive? the music selection is sort of similar in that its better than i expected, but it could also have been better still. Didnt recognise most of the songs by name but playing through them theres certainly enough songs that ive been enjoying playing through, even though i maybe wouldnt listen to them outside the game. To register normal hits It doesnt work based on the height of the controller, it uses the angle of the controller, so if you hold your hands up the controller will angel up automatically, for middle hits your supposed to hold them straight, and for down you point them down. Its probably easier to explain how it works with a video (ill try and add one later) but theres 6 locations you can shake a maraca/controller at (top middle bottom, and each have left/right) thats how the original worked, with iirc some posing where you hold a pose. The new version has maybe too much posing and other stuff like movements/dancing stuff going on. The ones where you slide the controllers around to match movements on screen are a bit odd too in that they start far too quickly for you to follow them entirely (unless you memorise them i guess), the game doesnt care too much though and will give you a perfect hit as long as you follow the last bit ok, its sometimes a bit vague what youre supposed to be doing though which isnt great for a rhythm action game. Usually the game just gives you the benefit of the doubt and registers a hit even if im not sure i hit the note, sometimes it goes the other way though, although maybe i need to get better at it. Because of the above, if you want to play it seriously for high scores and stuff its maybe not great, although again maybe i need to get better. But i would say it is pretty fun and im enjoying it, no regrets on getting it. not tried playing with a pad yet, which worked well in the original, suspect with all the dancing/sliding going on in this it might not work as well here? the graphics i quite like (after thinking the graphics looked a bit crap in the trailer) its mainly just a load of mad stuff going on in the background, and ive got a cool hat. Its very colourful. for sonic fans the blue guy is in this dancing and stuff. oh yeah theres a roulette thing which seems odd, you can toggle it off, which i have. theres also an ios version, not sure if its quite the same game though. ive mostly been playing the songs in the quickplay mode, but there is a sort of single player thing which seems to be just challenges, most of which are quite easy so far but the one to not miss notes is really annoying but looks like it can be skipped. anyone else giving it a go? The trailer shows how the gameplay works, although in very short bits

I gave this another try today, didn't want to start something with too much substance so close to Starfield so I decided to dig up Scarlet which I quickly shelved after five hours when it came out. My initial disappointment was so big that I didn't want to engage with it all, neither by playing nor by talking about it. I felt that if they didn't care, why should I? It also didn't help that the moment I started it my Covid symptoms began, which may or may not have been a sign from the heavens depending on your beliefs. Anyway. I didn't 'restart' it and picked right off where I left, which isn't too hard to do in a Pokémon game. But even after knowing what awaited me, I'm still baffled by how hideous this is. It's so ugly it's actually hard to describe it to someone who hasn't played it. I've seen 3DS games with more detail, the entire main city, which should be a highlight, is build with laughably generic assets, NPCs warp and tumble across the screen like in those shovelware games that youtubers buy and play for clicks. It's just all very much an unappealing mess and I can only imagine the shame some of Nintendo's higher-ups feel every time they think about this considering they're basically powerless about to the state these things come out, but they all sail under their banner. Now with that all said, I almost feel bad to say that I kind of enjoyed the hour or so I played today. I switched to handheld mode after a few minutes which helps hide some of its more egregious blemishes thanks to the small screen, and running around and catching/fighting Pokémon still has the same pull it had all those years ago. I have no idea whether I will persevere or not, but as an in-between title on a handheld it kind of works for me. For now. Which is hardly the kind of praise a premiere IP like this should be getting but here we are. Up to two arena badges now.

Been a hell of a bank holiday weekend. Partner not home, turned into a teenager and basically played this the whole time. 24 hours over 5 days later it’s 100%’d. I don’t regret a thing and fucking loved it. Basically everything I wanted this sequel to be. Only negatives - the bosses weren’t as crazy and imaginative as in the original, although they were arguable better to actually fight. Could have been a tad more difficult, it was substantially easier than I remember the first being. & lack of execution animations on new enemies. Apart from that, not a bad word to say. 9/10

@OCH That level in CoC:DCotE is a great shout ! Not sure if it qualifies as such, but the Point Lookout DLC for Fallout 3 was pretty fantastic, as was the whole Bitterblack Isle area in DD : Dark Arisen. Also had loads of fun with the pirate ship sections of AC Black Flag - whether it was ship to ship combat, whaling, diving, fort assaults or just sailing along listening to the shanties.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/thank-goodness-youre-here-is-surely-the-best-trailer-from-gamescom Love the look of this. Coming in 2024.

I binned it off. If you do the no combat solution you're left with a game where you wonder around having half hour conversations with the dullest people this side of Slough. Fuck that nonsense. I played Retro City Rampage instead.

Heres most of the Amiibo i have here, there are a bunch of opened ones around here too that my son uses,

very nice, a lot of memories of those Hits boxes. Big PS2 collection too hopefully, in a few weeks, I should have my new flat and have all my games up on shelving, so I'll take pictures

Atari releasing 2600+that plays original cartridges, seems this era of Atari has been getting pushed out again and again, no love for the computer range like Atari ST or 8 bit line or even the Jaguar and Lynx. https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/the-atari-2600-is-a-modern-version-of-ataris-classic-console-which-plays-original-cartridges/

Fine, I’ll give it a go.

No. This is:

the concession: