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At the end of the day it's another 3D platformer/collectathon. The polish is what sets it apart, and the fact that that type of game is harder to find these days. Zelda is equally polished but there are a heck of a lot more games which use the same template ... and have more satisfying and enjoyable combat.

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

No doubt that much of the game is head and shoulders above other platformers...except the boss battles; many of which are of Sonic Adventure level quality. Those boss battles got rightly criticized, but I'm hearing nothing about SM:O's bosses.

Keeping it even more on point, these are weak bosses compared to nearly ever other Mario game, but they're kinda just getting a pass because other parts of the game are so good.

It's frustrating because the uneven parts of the game drag down a game that is otherwise so well paced. It causes me to be a bit frustrated when the game is really good, fully using its mobility options and flow, just to know that at some point soon I'll be fighting a boss that restricts my movement to a flat circular area that feels more like a mini-game than a continuation of the premise.

With notable exceptions. There are a few pretty great boss battles. Unfortunately the "recurring" ones are the weakest.

I dunno, the bosses are, yeah, on the easy side but I can't see them making the battles much harder and still push the motion controls as much as they're doing.

Did someone say Super Mario: Odyssey???

I just beat it yesterday (the "first ending" anyway) and it's an absolute masterpiece. As good as BOTW was, this is far and away my favorite game this year or even the past couple years. For me, it reminds me of why I play video games, it's just pure fun, pure gaming bliss. I could feel the spirit of the entire franchise running through this game with amazing moments that pay homage to everything that came before without feeling forced or shoehorned in the slightest.

Also, New Donk City is gonna go down as one of the most memorable levels/stages in Mario or even video game history. I can already imagine a New Donk City track for Mario Kart 9!!!!

It might be in the bottom half of my top 10, which I've got to start and think about posting. It's been a pretty solid year.

Got Everybody's Golf yesterday in the PSN sale. Super little game, although the progression is a bit of a grind.

Was going to post a screenshot but don't have one here, but:

I passed half a million caps in Fallout 4 the other day.

At this point the best thing about playing it this long is that it's somehow already been two years since it was released, so maybe I'm not that insanely far from the next one.

I grabbed a £30 pre-order of the VR version on GMG. Will let you know if it even functions

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

Yeah, please do. I'm pretty much positive that, as much as I love Fallout, I can't really justify dropping several hundred dollars on a VR headset (and then another $60 for the game) just to experience it that way. I probably wouldn't do that even if I could be sure I'd love it, and it's entirely possible I'll have some motion sickness issue or just generally find it underwhelming, so at this point I'm pretty much committed to waiting for a price drop on the hardware.

Unless, of course, you come back with a glowing review. So yeah, I'd appreciated your thoughts.

Talking of wasting money on peripherals, my Pro Controller arrived today. It's still charging so haven't tried it yet but the D-pad hasn't fallen off so that's a good sign.

Jeez who still plays Fallout 4! Actually I started a second game a few months back, haven't played for a bit but I'm determined to play until I find EVERY bobblehead without googling. Got a couple of the expansions too that I've barely touched.

Something that's started to annoy me with Bethesda games like Fallout 3 and 4/Skyrim etc is the constant inventory management. It seems like every time you visit a spot its > put scrap in workshop>travel to shop to sell everthing else. Gets a bit tedious.

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Yeah even the current perma price drops are still a big ask ($400 for Rift etc).

On F4 one thing we can be pretty sure of is that nausea shouldn't be a big thing. The movement systems used in the Skyrim & F4 demos have been used successfully elsewhere. Everything else is up for grabs though

I am expecting aspects like the looming, creaking cityscapes to really communicate their scale in VR, the NPCs to be thoroughly odd in their 3D 'presence', the night streets to be pretty petrifying at first, and the hand shooting to be totally passable. And I'm just flat out crossing my fingers that the framerate hits 90fps at all on my 970

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm thinking. The sense of atmosphere in some of those areas is pretty great even without the VR, and I'm wondering if, with it, I'll actually just enjoy walking around a fair bit. Some of my favorite moments in open world games have come doing nothing in particular. Just soaking it in.

I imagine the combat would feel refreshed, too, but maybe not in a good way. It's already jarring when a ghoul you didn't know was there rushes you, and I've always found first-person games make me a little paranoid, anyway. I imagine this dials that up.

Yeah I actually edited a bit in above about night time streets. I am fully expecting to **** myself initially . (It definitely has potential to be more intense for sure). But I guess what is a game without risk? . (And at least some of that can be mitigated via day walking, stealth etc).

On 'walking sim' stuff, this is one of the bits I'm most looking forward to, as it really works in VR for some reason. I'm particularly looking forward to the way Bethshesda make big rolling, cursive landscapes with curled up sections that call you to peak round corners. All of that should really double down on the 'I'm in this place' aspect. (Presuming my machine can proffer it all with textures that aren't all tessellated etc... )

What's better, Wolfenstein: the New Order or Doom?

In spite of Doom looking and feeling good to play I found it tedious to get through, and I stopped playing it entirely without completing it (though I might try to play again later). I think it might have to do with how stage progression is handled in correlation with the melee system.

By the numbers Doom has a 85 and New Order (PC) has an 81 on metacritic, and from what I have seen people prefer Doom. I think my experience doesn't match with most people.

Pro Controller impressions - Yeah, the D-pad is poor, surprisingly so coming from the company who made the SNES gamepad, but it's still better than the Joycon's and the pad is a delight to use in games which don't feature D-pad use for movement.

In other news - Assassin's Creed: Oranges mo-capped a camel. I had to buy it.

Don't do it! It's just a re-skinned dolphin!

Too late!

West of Loathing is absolutely tremendous.

I like it so much I basically haven't played anything else since I started it, I've played it at least a little just about every day, and I'm immediately going to be super interested in anything else Zack Johnson is involved in going forward.



I'm almost afraid to go back and play its precursor, Kingdom of Loathing, because I don't have the time to like it as much as I like this.

Assassin's Creed went stale after Black Flag, with the two games following it being buggy/dull and competent/forgettable respectively, so it's no surprise that Ubisoft decided to give the team an extra year to get the franchise back on track.

The result is AC: Oranges.

I've played a couple of hours and, wow, it seems like they've pulled it off.



The gameplay's not exactly original but they've at last done away with the dated high profile/low profile stuff from previous games. Traversal and combat now feel like a mashup of Witcher 3 and, wait for it, Dark Souls. Yes, Dark Souls.

The usual Ubisoft map vomit is still there but moving from '?' to '?' is a lot less painful with the addition of your trusty eagle, Senu. He's basically a drone, like those in the popular Ubisoft game, Ubisoft Presents Tom Clancy's Wildlands.



Also: Mo-capped camel.



Not content with paying homage to Witcher 3 and Dark Souls, Oranges nods enthusiastically towards Destiny. Loot is liberally dotted around the world and on enemy corpses, with it being colour coded to signify rarity. We've even got Destiny's cumbersome cursor-on-a-gamepad driven menu system

This isn't to say that the game doesn't have its own identity. There are still haystacks to dive into, towers to climb (which now contain fast travel points rather than opening up the map) and fools to murda but your path between the AC mainstays is a lot slicker and a lot more 2017.

There's also hunting and crafting like in that Far Cry game.

I'm impressed. An open world Assassin's Creed seems like a very nice thing.