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Started this after I beat BG1 the other day, on 'core' difficulty which is like the default (no buffs or debuffs to damage or dice rolls, beyond which you naturally get). I've beaten the first dungeon and did two largeish quests in the first area of chapter 2, but have many others in the journal. There's a noticeable step up in detail, not necessarily visually but in that there's a lot more unique voice lines for each character over BG1. Characters tell you their backstories, they do this a lot actually and it's kind of annoying when you're trying to prepare spells and devise a strategy for a difficult room full of annoying snake mages and Minsc is yammering on about his hamster. But you can sort of see the start of modern Bioware here a bit, though it still feels a million miles away from something like Mass Effect 2 or 3 imo, which is where bioware got really good at this I think. The first quest I did after the tutorial dungeon, which was incredible long, was this one where you had to defend a keep of a rich aristocrat's daughter that had been taken over by trolls that required ice and fire attacks to finish them off. So they're reminding you early on about the importance in DnD of preparing spells and equipping arrows, and the baptism of fire which was BG1 and some of its late game fights have made me a bit more smart about this now. These are RTFM games, you have to read what things mean before hitting your head against stuff, like I did at times. And then you have to read again in game when you get a magic scroll, which is full of all this lovely and lore-heavy flavour text about what actually happens when someone makes themselves invisible or throws a massive fireball at something tbh, I struggled with the keep quest cause the game doesn't really tell you what level is appropriate for what quest, but I got over it when my Inquisitor Paladin found a +3 flail which applies Ice, Acid and Fire damage in the same dungeon, so sort of lucky that that is what I selected my +1 proficiency in. Then I devised a strategy which involved throwing Minsc into a room berserked to fight beetles that cast confuse, and spamming doom magic at the main boss in the next room so that my debuffs could hit it more easily, and his saving throws/THAC0 took a hit. THAC0 still sort of spins me sideways, as well as the way in which the UI will say something gives you +1 to your armour class, but actually make the number smaller, cause the way THAC0 works is it's the 20-sided dice roll you must get to hit someone with armour class 0, so if your THAC0 is 14, you must roll 14 to hit 0. If you're trying to hit armour class 6, then you must roll at least 8, if they're -6 then you gotta roll 20. Which you probably won't, so you need some buffs to even hit stuff. It actually took me playing an entire DnD game to even internalise these rules, which are simple but the way they are applied in reverse means they feel like they aren't. I never picked it up in PS:T cause you can skip so much fighting in that game. Not even going to get into what saving throws do. BG3 did away with THAC0 of course Right now, I'm playing two rival factions of the Shadow Thieves against each other, who are at war with some mages or something. I don't even know if I can complete this quest on my Paladin cause Paladin's lose abilities if they fall off the Lawful Good path, so if I can't then I might have to let Yoshimo go (and get shanked, maybe). There are also a million other quests in the capital city of Amn so I'm trying to avoid walking around too much cause they kind of bombard you a bit, compared with BG1. The chapter seems extremely open and I've had to deny some quests that would take me down an evil path, though they sounded interesting. The other quest I did was to defeat an evil gnome in a circus tent who cast illusions on everything, which is where I got hit by this. Solve it and you win maf's new monitor

I played 30 minutes of it. It asks you to create a bethesda account before even being able to play which is really annoying but you can get around by setting steam to offline. Anyway it seems good. Kind of more focused on just murder arenas from the look of things. But I'm totally ok with a game like that. You can turn HUD off but it's hard to play. The HUD is a bit much tbh, I need to spend some time figuring out what parts I can turn off. Playing on ultra violent

The long awaited sequel is here! And it's generally a decent follow-up. It takes place right after the original and it's like it's never been gone. It just confidently does being Psychonauts. It feels a bit tighter than the original but it's basic fighting and platforming for the most part but it's appeal has always been the imagination of the world and how it takes mental well being and makes these charming worlds out them and from what I've played so far it continues to do a good job of that. And with these new fangled graphics it makes it look really nice too. They really lean all of it into the art style they made in the original and I think it comes out well, it's a nice game to look at in a weird way. All Double Fine have done is make a Psychonauts game for 2021 and that's all I wanted, and that's all we got. Neat!

The glow up for Suikoden 1 is almost immediately apparent. The script has been tweaked IE better translated. The sprites have QoL improvements and the overworld & town maps have been given a modern facelift. I capped off my first session with acquiring your base. Roughly six hours in. It reminds me there is a reason I hold this series in very high regard. Even the "bad" one (Suikoden IV) isn't terrible. Hopefully if this remaster is a financial success, Konami might even revive the series proper. Or at least give a collection with the other three games (and maybe DS spin-off).

Spent a few hours with the game during this afternoon, suffice to say it's bloody amazing to look at... The whole driving to the festival segment right at the start of the game just put a massive smile on my face, it's so stupidly over the top that you can't help but grin. So far there's not been anything massively different from the 4th game but to be honest that was already the best open world racer by a huge margin so this just has to build on that. So far I've I think the game has been hand holding me through the early parts but not enough that I can't decide to put whatever the game is suggesting on hold and do something else, which is nice. I also think that the map is definitely going to encourage going off road far more than Britain did in the previous game. Anyway, so far so gorgeous!

Hey, maybe don't buy this Vice City squad, I come to you with gameplay clips littered with copyright claims. Not that there's a shortage of videos out there about this but it helps to see how little the gameplay has changed as well. I'm a couple hours into the opening sections. Actually, I could be a bit beyond the opening sections. Was this game short? I'm already at the bit where you are doing missions for Diaz. Visually I think it looks ok, I think they could have done a lot more work here tho and it's a bit perplexing that this is more demanding for my machine than The Witcher 3 maxed out. No ray tracing or anything like that is in it. It could be a rough one to play on PC for this reason but maybe the settings are more scalable on lower settings. I think the volumetric lighting is what is killing it. Also the game comes close to dying every time I pause, I found out I'm not the only one with this issue so it's a problem with the PC version. Vice City now is a game that is hard carried by its soundtrack I think. I don't think I could stick with this type of thing without these tunes. It's also weird to think Vice City is now more retro than the year 1986 was when Vice City itself came out. It's like a russian doll of nostalgia or something. I will say for VC first thing you should do is turn HDR off and set contrast to 0. The default contrast level is hideously oversaturated and destroys the tone of the game. At zero it is not a million miles away from the original's visual style Going back now also it really feels like Ray Liotta phoned in his performance as Tommy Vercetti, but the people around him do a good enough job to make up for that fact. Especially the lawyer guy. It's weird to think how they got all these really big movie stars in a game like this (Burt Reynolds is in this game, if you forgot). Nowadays you can see that these movie people don't exactly translate their talents to the digital screen, some of them are pretty bad at adapting to it. Or are just used to sell the game. But back then this was a really big deal for Vice City. There's one visual thing which has really annoyed me early on, the rain effect. It is a constant streak of white lines that make it impossible to see anything and actually made me feel a kind of motion sickness I've never felt with a game. I haven't heard anyone else talk about it, it could be a subjective thing. But man, it is rough to look at. On the other hand they add a cool effect where you get puddles and the grass gets wet. You slide in the rain also, I think that's new. Might not be but it seems new. Gameplay clips, spoilered for post length not spoilers cause this game is 20 years old now

Spent around 5 or 6 hours with this over the last couple of days... and so far so decent I'd say... For those who don't know the game is set in an alternate 1950's version of the Lake District where the Windscale disaster has covered much of the area in radioactive fallout. You have the age old condition of amnesia and wake up in a bunker with no recollection of how or why you're there... there's no character creation to start you off (I've no idea if you'll ever see the character, so far I haven't) and there's also no character voice over, which I don't have problem with tbh. Upon leaving the bunker (which in reality is about 3 rooms) you set foot in to the first of around 4 open areas you're free to explore and find leads which are how this game handles missions. Usually these are in the form of collectable journal entries or through conversations with characters you'll meet along the way... and the way these work is you'll never be able to do them all as completion of one characters leads will more than likely cancel someone else's in some way or another. I'm aiming to try and suss out who seems decent, I'm not feeling the General of the Protocol at the minute (the Army) he seems a little on the heavy handed side. Combat, so far, isn't anything to write home about... I'm mostly hitting things with a cricket bat at the minute, I have a shotgun and rifle but as they're single shot they're only so much use in a fight... and taking on more than two armed people head on in this is virtually suicide too. The other thing is there's no XP system in place so there's no real reason to go looking for trouble... getting stronger happens through finding skill books and crafting blueprints. I think the mystery of the story might be the main pull of the game for me. It looks nice enough to me, I think you can tell the game is cross generation but it's far from ugly. I think as I feel now, thanks to the more real world setting, I'll be getting more out of this than I did Avowed but I guess I'll have to keep playing to see.

Spent about 5 hours with this yesterday and just left the first planet. I really like that sort of game design in open world games. A complete but bite sized chunk to get you ready for the rest. Places like White Orchard in The Witcher 3. As for the game, it's okay. Crushingly okay. There's nothing in the game I don't like but there is nothing I love either. The writing is pretty good and there have been a few funny moments but there hasn't been a character introduced yet that really connected me to the world and the world itself is your generic capitalism gone wild scenario. Which I like, I'm an easy sell on that sort of thing but it's been done so often that it's just okay. Combat is okay. Loot is okay. Graphics are okay. Character creator is okay. Skills are okay. Player choices are okay. You get it. I'll be putting some more time into it today so hopefully it just starts off slow because there is definitely potential but I worry that they have spent so much time on giving the player a million different choices that none of them really mean anything.

Well,it’s finally out. I’m three missions in,and thus far,it’s off to a very good start indeed. It looks glorious,thanks to the RE engine. You start off as Nero,the only character that was in the demo. And he’s a riot to play as. I’ve never been a master of this series. I can throw down a few SS/SSS combos here and there,get the odd A rank from time to time. But I’ve long since accepted that I’ll never be a top tier DMC player. But that doesn’t matter to me. All that mattters is, “am I having fun?”. And thus far,DMC 5 is absolutely fun. There’s a ton of skills to play around with,the Devil Breakers add a new level of tactics to combat. I went for the Digital Deluxe edition,so have access to the Mega Buster from Mega Man. Which is definitely a favourite thus far. Now,on to the issue of micro transactions. A lot of people kicked off when it was announced this game has them. Jim Sterling has already said in his review that due to his standpoint,this excludes the game from “Game Of The Year” consideration,despite the huge amount of praise has for it. So,are they actually that bad in DMC? Honestly,no. They’re hidden away in the Menu screen,at no point are you obnoxiously told “Hey Kids,want to buy some stuff?”. And the prices of the items themselves,aren’t that much at all. £1.70 gets you either 3 Blue Orbs,or 100,000 Red Orbs. All of the reviews I’ve read have said you get more than enough without resorting to them. And I feel that seems about right. So yeah,it’s not the end of the world that they’re in this. There’s a catch up video that sums up important events in the previous games,which is pretty decent. It made me laugh that DMC2,the worst entry in the series,gets less than 10 seconds mention,whereas the rest get several minutes at least. So yeah. I’m excited to finally have this. Should be fun.

Kinda surprised there's no thread on this yet, but anyway. I've tried to get into the Yakuza series over and over again. I love the juxtaposition of serious gangster shit and nutty stuff like collecting softcore porn and helping a Michael Jackson ripoff remake Thriller. For whatever reason, though, it's just never quite managed to get its claws into me. After 15 hours, I think this might have changed that mindset. It's like Black Flag through the lens of a JP developer, and I'm having a blast with it. Collecting crewmates, making friends, just being a pirate in general, it's just fun. I'll post more a bit later, but I wanted to open the conversation, because this is dumb in all the best ways.

Played an hour, on PC. The game defaulted to High graphical settings, so I left it at that. I chose the Vagabond class. So far, so Dark Souls. Looking forward to losing my life to this game. The opening cinematic is very cool. One of my Steam friends has already played this for 8 hours.:.

First off it's slightly different from the demo, for one the intro is much longer, which lets you see more of Arkham and see more of the Joker. The game itself starts off with the same tutorial battle against the goons, and is the same up until you beat Zsasz. In the demo you then do some more stealth stuff, here though it takes you through some basic climbing stuff and a bit more fighting, before you move onto the 'boss' fight against against one of Jokers mutated henchmen. The fight is a massive anti-climax, it's really just to teach you to dodge, which might be for the best as the camera is a bit like Gears' (right behind you) and so it's a little hard to manoeuvre around. I thought I'd worked out the tactic to beat him, but well I'll leave it to you lot to find out. It's pretty good so far. At points it looks brilliant, at points the ps3's lack of AA shows through. Characters faces are still bizarre, the the environments are really well fleshed out, it doesn't just feel like a crate has been dumped in a room to fill it up a bit. I've just got to a bit where I have to backtrack. On the way through I noticed rooms, items and areas that I couldn't access yet, so my guess is that Arkham might not be all that massive. Although there's every chance it is, and the game is just longer than I'm expecting

I bought this off the Epic store (hiss, booo) while I should have been working. Put about 20 minutes into the demo and got a 300000 high score but the Nvidia capture failed to record (honestly no really). Anyway it seems pretty great but I can't put my finger on it but the physics are weightier than I remember. But this is 15 years ago so it's possible I just forget how it feels and have gotten bad from being older all the time. Or more likely this is base stats Tony Hawk I'm playing Anyway I'm excite. I actually never played THPS2 beyond just renting it once so that will be fun. edit forget it, 300000 points isn't even that good apparently. This guy did 100 million in a single combo

Had a few matches on this, I think I just need to accept the fact I don’t like Battle Royale Games. Feels loads better to play than Fortnite and PUBG (only 2 others I’ve played). But the gameplay loop in these games just doesn’t nothing for me, run around the same environment searching around for loot for a while, shoot a few bullets, miss, die, wait a while to load a new match and repeat. I just find it tedious and boring constantly looking for loot at the beginning of every match. Especially when I’m bad so don’t last long when a gunfight starts, it usually just feels like a waste of time. Ill give it a few more matches just to see if it clicks, maybe as I start getting a bit better. Hope it’s does. I’d like to be involved with something like this for a change. It’s definitely got the best chance just because it actually feels good to play unlike the others I’ve tried. Otherwise I’ll just go back to TF2.

Yay! Mine came. Dope delivered it to wrong address. Neighborhour just dropped it off. Let the survival begin ?

This hasn't reviewed amazingly, and while I loved Far Cry 3 and Blood Dragon, I couldn't muster to energy to do the same stuff again in far Cry 4 and 5. In fact I booted up Far Cry 4 towards the end of last year because I wanted a nonsense fps to play, and I still couldn't. I ended up doing the pacifist ending, then booted it back up and ran about it bit, then realised I just couldn't be arsed For whatever reason the more I've seen of Far Cry New Dawn the more I've been interested in it. I think knowing that it's shorter is a big part of it, like I said I loved 3 but the amount of time I spent with it, doing the same routine over and over did start to drag by the final island, although at the time I put that down to me doing everything before moving the story on. New Dawn looks amazing, maybe a bit too amazing. I'm playing it on high settings (it can go to ultra) on a GTX 1080 at 1080p, and I still get framerate drops to 50 every now and then. It's less when there's lots of combat, more when I'm in dense woodland with lots of mist and fog. Which I mention because it is ridiculously dense, so dense I've been bitten by snakes I couldn't see, and have to rely on watching when and where my A.I. teammate starts screaming and where she's shooting at. I'm impressed with how it looks though, I had this pegged as a bit half-arsed, and granted it could be I didn't play 5, but the colour and the environments look great Gameplay wise it's kind of just Far Cry. It's not as reliant on taking back encampments as the old games, although there are still some, and there's no radio towers. You're still randomly getting attacked by animals, and there's still a skill tree, you're still playing good guys vs bad guys. Enemies take more damage before they go down than I remember, with some enemies having a 2nd health bar, possibly a 3rd but I've not seen that yet. You're kind of dumped out in to the open world pretty early, you have a story mission but it's far enough across the map that you can't help but do other things along the way. A lot of the side stuff involves you stopping trucks, be it for all important ethanol or less important humans, chasing them down isn't fun, being in the right place to stand in the road and shotgun the driver in the face is fun, that said I've not managed to get an ethanol truck yet. Beyond that, I've just been rescuing people by killing bad guys I'm really enjoying it though, played for hours tonight and I've still not got halfway to the first proper story mission. Before I go there I've got some treasure to find, an ally to recruit, then a bunch of buildings to kill everyone in, then I'll do the thing I've been asked to do

Creating a thread for this as it seems like it might be quite a bit meatier than some other games I’ve played recently. Citizen Sleeper is the latest game from the developers of In Other Waters, which I played recently and was quite good. I guess like In Other Waters, it involves a lot of reading and clicking on various menus. Not quite a visual novel, but an adjacent genre I guess. You’re a “sleeper”, a robot of some sorts that escaped or survived some mysterious past and somehow gained sentience, which is apparently a big no-no, so shady characters are coming to put an end to you. You’ve wound up on some kind of space station called Havenage. Here you meet characters and complete tasks to achieve various goals. I can’t describe it beyond that. It’s too complicated. But it’s quite unique and intriguing so far. Based on what I’ve played of this, and In Other Waters, the developers’ (Fellow Traveller) focus is clearly on telling unique stories in unique settings, with an emphasis on mystery and the unknown.

So, I started playing this yesterday, I pretty much grew up on Rare games on the N64 so the studio will always have a special place in my heart and memories, so buying this collection was a no brainer. Some of the games though, I'd barely heard of, then others like Conker, Banjo 1, 2 and 3, Perfect Dark 0 etc. I've already played through, and I don't replay games, so I narrowed down my 'must play' list of the collection only including games I haven't played, and games I've heard are decent. So, first off I started with Battletoads, now, as this is a NES game I wasn't expecting too much, but the gameplay holds up surprisingly well and it is pretty addictive to keep going back and trying to get through a level again, definitely played this the most today, put in over an hour at a guess and get upto the Speedster section of Level 3 before throwing in the towel, this was before I discovered Rare have put in a rewind mechanic to make things easier, so I may go back and see how far I can get with the rewind next time. Next up was RC Pro Am 2, have to say I didn't really get on with it, it just didn't seem to hold up today, I can see how it could've influenced something like Mario Kart but I just couldn't get on with it at all, after this I just started from the first game in the collection chronologically (Jetpac) and went through each one periodically just to get the 15g gamerscore per game. Didn't really get on with a lot of Rare's older games, they haven't aged well in my opinion and they just felt completely alien to me, a bit before my time I think (Jetpac, Lunar Jetman, Atic Atac, Sabre Wulf, Underwulde, Knight Lore, Gunfright, RC Pro Am, Cobra Triangle, Snake Rattle 'n Roll, Solar Jetman, Digger T Rock) I had a bit of fun with Slalom though before returning to try Battletoads Arcade, feels much more forgiving and easier to pick up and play than Battletoads NES, graphics are much better and its got more of a Streets of Rage vibe about it, pretty cool, and managed to make some decent progress by using the Rewind ad nauseum So, yeah, I may go back to Battletoads and see if I can make some more progress tomorrow or I may make a start on Grabbed by the Ghoulies, I know it's not meant to be great but I've never played it so I want to give it a go, after that, Perfect Dark.

Saw that this is getting sold for 15-20 bucks, so I decided to unwrap my full price release day copy and give it a go. Only played the first hour so far, which is the usual prologue/tutorial affair, pairing your player character up with her mentor while she explains both game features and a bit of the lore. I'm rather lost on the latter to be honest – the titular Unknown 9 are a group of knowledge keepers who fell victim to their own hubris or something, but the intro sequence only showed eight of them, so I predict a 'chosen one' plot twist at some point. The gameplay is probably best described as low-budget Last of Us/Uncharted hybrid without guns. You go through linear levels, do some easy-mode platforming and climbing and some areas are filled with enemy goons you then have to dispose of, either in hand-to-hand combat or stealth. The game seems to nudge you towards stealth, which I've been following so far. It's very by the books: tall grass makes you borderline invisible, you can take down enemies from behind, get a one-off chance to disappear again if you cross LOS. Where it tries to differentiate itself a little bit is through the player's supernatural powers, which allow her to use some sort of spirit world wallhack, affect pre-determined objects around the map or take control of an enemy for a short time, Geist-style. Conceptually it's all very cool, and I quite enjoy watching the takedown animation, which sees her pull out the soul of an enemy and knock it out, as she lacks the physical strength to do so with their material bodies. But in terms of how it plays you can tell that while this wants to align itself with the TLOU style, it only had a fraction of its budget to pull it off, and it shows (and feels). As mentioned, there's also combat, which seems more of a last resort if stealth should fail. So far it seems very basic, with one standard attack and one stronger attack activated by holding the same button. You can also use your special powers here, though, and there's a skill tree which I haven't looked at in detail yet, so maybe it'll be more open later on. So far I can see why this hasn't really lit the world on fire, because it's about as janky as your average Piranha Bytes game. Considering they went through the effort of hiring a proper actress for the main role (she's played by Anya Chalotra from the Witcher series), it's rather jarring how bad facial animations have turned out, with the protagonist in particular having severe dead-eye-syndrome. Visually it's also rather low-end and doesn't even run that well with a wonky 30fps target, though I might have to get back to this because I was playing it in its 'ready to play' state but not after the installation was fully complete. Didn't find any fidelity settings either, so I actually might have been playing the Xbox One build (speaking of: for such a small studio to be forced to build last-gen versions still is a bit nonsensical IMO). One really cool thing about this is its setting though. There's only so many dieselpunk games taking place in India out there and while I haven't seen too much of it yet, this might end up being its biggest strength. But yeah, really janky, low-budget stuff that was probably too ambitious for the amount of experience and money involved. I don't know if anyone here played Velvet Assassin on Xbox360 but it sort of reminds me of that game, in the sense that it's similarly janky and out-of-date compared to its contemporaries but wraps a stealth game into a somewhat unique package.

Ok, so I’m 2 hours into this. I’m an absolutely massive Yakuza/LAD fan. In over 40 years of gaming, this is by far my favourite franchise. The reviews for this have been universally high. Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first: charging separately for the New Game+ mode, sucks. There’s an entire dungeon, and trophies/achievements locked away behind that. That’s pissed some people off, and I think understandably so. There’s also multiple Micro transactions, ranging in price from £5 for instant level up boosts, to £12/£15 for other stuff. I won’t be bothering with any of that, and so far, the game hasn’t been obnoxiously highlighting them. Right. I’m 2 hours in, and it’s pretty much just been cut scenes. Which is pretty typical for a LAD game. That being said, I’ve already noticed two improvements that have been made to the combat system. You can manually control the movement of each character before making a move, making it much easier to pick up items to hit enemies with. One of the more annoying elements of the previous game, was that if you bumped into another enemy in the middle of your attack, their was a good chance they’d hit you, and cancel your move. That’s been scrapped entirely, thank god. There’s no difficulty options. When I watched the IGN video review, they specifically mentioned how annoying the difficulty spikes became about halfway through LAD. That was what made me eventually give up on my PS4 playthrough, and I found challenging to get through when I eventually finished it on PS5 last December. The reviewer said that there’s none of that difficultly spike nonsense in IW. Hopefully, he’s right… In terms of story, there’s no “Previously on LAD” to catch up newcomers to the story. Most games in the series have optional “movies” to watch, which explain what’s happened before. There’s none of that here. So if IW is your first time to the series, I’d suggest watching a video of at least what happened in the last LAD game. I won’t spoil what’s happened so far. But, I will say, it’s been an absolute joy seeing Ichiban and his friends again. Kiryu is my favourite character in all of gaming, but Ichiban is quickly becoming a firm favourite too. He’s likeable, charismatic, and amusing. Whereas in LAD: Gaiden, you had to wait a few weeks for the English dub to become available, here it’s available right from the start. I played LAD in English, and had no issue with doing so. So, I’ve chosen the English dub for this. There’s been a lot of hate thrown at Jong Jea, the YouTuber chosen to portray Kiryu. I’ll reserve judgement for his full performance. The footage of Kiryu doing karaoke that leaked a few weeks ago was legitimately awful, autotuned to buggery. But, I’ll give him a fair chance. What I can say though, is I’m very dubious about his ability to pull it off. Kiryu is a legend approaching the end of his “career”. From the lines leaked previously, he sounds far too young. Still, I won’t write him off just yet. Im away on holiday for a week after today, so won’t get to play much more. But once I’m back, this will be getting my full attention.

cheers for the games Duck! it's early days, and a bit all over the place, but i quite like what i've played of this so far. i worry i'll get annoyed with the aiming in the long run. needs more auto aim imo.

Yessir! I like what I've played alot, probably done the first hour. Its extremely similar to the first one but that's no bad thing. Poor fucking bitch, she's already taken a hell of a beating. Agree with Nag on the looks, its stunning. That snow... Controls are lovely: fluid and intuitive. Lots of stuff to do and already had tons of action. Looking forward to spending all Saturday with it.

I didn't know about this until a few days ago (not that i remember anyway), just released yesterday, and it's pulled me away from persona, for a bit anyway. normal price is ~£12 but seems to be on offer for ~£10 currently. Initially interested because of comparisons to REZ, i like shooters like that, even the dragon one on the xbox one that didn't seem very popular. but it turns out it's not as similar to rez as I was expecting, the shooting (on the right stick) is simplified a bit and shares game time with rhythm action line following (on the left stick). On the normal difficulty you aren't asked to really do both of these at the same time, but i think that changes on harder difficulties. The shooting is quite similar to rez, but you can only aim within a circle and quite a lot of stuff is conveniently at the edges of the circle so easy to aim at, because you will be expected to do two things at once. The rhythm action bit is following a line with your ship in time with the music, a bit like that old psn game i can't remember the name of (and didn't think was that great) but it works really well here, and is good fun, imo. the music is not what i'd normally listen to, don't really know how to describe the genre either, dubstep maybe? but it fits in really well with the game and i was enjoying it. there are some problems mind, the auto lock-on can target stuff you don't want when a missile is just about to hit you, and coming back from a hit can instantly cause another hit, but these might just be me needing time to get used to it more. i've done all the 15 levels on normal, then re-did a few to get more stars to unlock the next difficulty setting but not had much time on that yet. so yeah i've been really enjoying this. wasn't sure if i should pick it up but glad i did.

Played the first hour and a half myself tonight as well, I definitely wasn't blown away by it, but I had fun with it, and it definitely gave me a kick to be in Max's world and to play as him being a fan of Fury Road. I was impressed though with how well polished everything is, some of the particle effects, sandstorms, explosions and the intricacy of the way the guy moves around on the back of your car is pretty cool, and they've stuck incredibly to the art design of Fury Road, some locations from the film have been mentioned and some enemies I've fought that were in the film already. It really does film like you could be cruising around in Fury Road, incredibly exhilarating feeling cruising around in your own car as Max, the voice acting helps a lot too, all been rather good and the story missions I've done so far have been better than I expected them to be. The melee combat, so far, to me, has been the weakest part of the game, it has the template of the Batman: Arkham games, but somehow it just doesn't have the rhythm that that game employs to go from one enemy to another with ease and feel awesome as you do so, it just feels like an average kind of combat system, like they've just got the combat template from Rocksteady, dumbed it down a bit and thrown it in the game, already feels a bit repetitive as well, but it can be satisfying, again, early on though. Seems like a huge game too, in my session earlier I was just pretty much going through the opening tutorials and main story missions to get my car, meet certain characters and learn all the mechanics of the game, but there is a lot to get stuck into, not encountered any side-missions as such, but there's been a few side-activities I've got distracted by already when they show on the map and collecting scrap and making sure you've picked it all up at a certain location is already rather addictive. Definitely seems like Avalanche/WB have employed a Ubisoft-style design philosophy as well, everything I've seen and done so far has been reminiscent of what you do in the Far Cry games in particular, like scouting bases, then liberating them to wear down a factions influence in a certain area, the car handling also feels similar to FC also. So yeah, pretty positive first impressions, need to play more obviously, but it's one huge game to get stuck into and I reckon is a must-buy for any Mad Max (especially Fury Road) fans out there, definitely the most authentic MM experience you're ever likely to get in game-form that's for sure.

Oxenfree was released way back in January which I guess makes it a retro title by today's standards. I don't know about the PS4 or Xbox One but it's currently heavily discounted on Steam so now is as good a time to pick it up as any. As it turns out, I already own it. It looks like this. http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/388880/ss_aae01eea5fc489c7fbb20c2e92440c1cf92f4e83.600x338.jpg?t=1465496144 http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/388880/ss_75af452f6e7f6c5dc1ada4f001abcccac6c57db7.600x338.jpg?t=1465496144 I just played it for sixteen minutes so I can give you sixteen minutes worth of impressions. So far it's been a pleasant side-scrolling walk and talk simulator. Not a million miles from Life is Strange if Life is Strange was side-scrolling. The conversations so far have been kind of typical preppy American teenage stuff. At the beginning of the game the characters are heading to some kind of after dark party on an island. The main point I'd like to make is that the game has a really good electronic soundtrack. The art style has a bit of Kentucky Route Zero.