The Videogames Tab

Ghost of Tsushima is me the day after I tie one on at a questionable Japanese restaurant 🤭

I’m on the Strider newsletter mailing list. The crisp controls, art and that distinctive Capcom claustrophobic hallway into an open area trope.

Ahh man, Strider was the first game I got for free (doing a 'games magazine' at school, circulation of 2 )

I can still remember phoning them up and forgetting the name of the game. I had to describe it as 'the one with the swooshy leg kick'. They said I might want to work on that part of my pitch

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

Hell yeah!

Huh, was I really the only one to post about The Last of Us Part II? So much for it being this huge event for gaming, I guess. Anyway, I think my initial impression was right, that is was fairly good but I'm not entirely sure I'd consider it great. Hard not to talk about it without spoilers (especially considering the more...derisive reactions):



Aside from that, i'm still playing Animal Crossing, but it's definitely at the point where I'm just harvesting resources and not really doing anything of import with them. I've racked up almost 200,000 Nook Miles and a couple of million Bells even after paying off all my home loans. It definitely feels like a game where there's too much compulsion to grind away like that, but to what end? Doesn't help that the prospect of redesigning the island doesn't seem overly intuitive - the idea of building paths by painstakingly laying down one tile of path at a time is a discouraging one, as is the prospect of building fences in a similar manner. Still seems like I've got to do just to build up the star rating, but that figures. Kind of wonder how people have been playing this since March when I got it at the tail end of May and am already kind of getting tired of it (unless the idea is that I shouldn't have to grind so hard at it, but then again I planted all these trees and seemingly all the hot items need iron and wood).

Having re-watched Mad Max: Fury Road recently, I decided to finally get around to playing the Mad Max game on PS4. My current feelings are...mixed. The idea of an open-world game set in that universe seems sound in theory but it seems kind of limited so far - then again, I guess I'm still in the early stages. Some of the controls are a little clumsy (turns out Square is used for both igniting fuel cans and refueling your car so if you're not standing in front of the exact right spot when you press it...yeah) and the fighting system's pretty whatever. I also don't dig the "collect X things to 100% a place" approach to locations, seems a little antithetical to the property. The driving's not bad, though. We'll see if I manage to see it through to completion or give up in favour of something that's probably better.

__________________
Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

I regret buying my Switch. It’s just an overpriced dust magnet.

I'm with ya. Bought it with a couple games a year or so ago and haven't been pleased with much of them. Still haven't finished Luigi's Mansion 3

I was similar towards the Switch for the first 3 or 4 months and was thinking seriously about selling it. Can't remember what game it was which made me pay it more attention but it's now my most used console by quite a distance. I love it to bits.

And I was never a huge Nintendo fan.

__________________
"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

I bought all the ND stock and drank all the Kool Aid after the Uncharted games. TLOU looked great, new spin on the apocalyptic threat and then it was zero fun. Everybody always talks about the pallets, but that epitomizes how boring the game got in parts. After that, I had no interest in a sequel, regardless of the FOMO on arguably Sony’s premier dev.

I don't think I've ever played an Uncharted game - maybe saw one free to play at a con one time but it doesn't seem like something you can just pick up and play. On paper, they don't sound overly interesting either - you're like an adventurer dude or something? Whatever. But people talk them up so who knows, maybe once I've chewed through my already-sizeable backlog I'll try one. Despite that, I think Last of Us is fun enough even though that arguably contradicts its lofty ideals about making a game that's not capital-F fun. It's intense enough survival-horror gameplay without being completely overwhelming, which suits me fine - I don't need it to be Alien: Isolation. I don't even know what you mean by pallets.

That may be a tad bit dismissive towards Uncharted, coming from somebody who is a movie fan. I don't get that logic, unless you don't like movies, you just like talking about them. It plays like a summer tent-pole adventure movie, big set pieces, characters, etc. At the time of release, pushed hardware to its limit to create never before seen visual and....who cares.


Last of Us, from my perspective is not fun. If the RE series is survival horror, TLOU just didn't hit it right. It was a chore and bothersome, more than anything. The pallets? You didn't play the first one? One of the common complaints was the swimming to point B, get a pallet, swim back with pallet, get Ellie, swim back to point B, snore.


I get it though, different strokes for different folks. My view of the TLOU series is it gets respect for being ND, but after people digest it they are like, ok...I guess those giraffes were cool.

I think the biggest obstacle is how uncomfortable it is to hold for any longer than 5 minutes. It seriously has some of the worst ergonomics I’ve ever experienced with a device.

I found a grip that is suppose to help but that’s just more investment, and I think that’s outrageous.

To improve my Japanese I decided to play videogames in Japanese:

I actually learned English playing videogames. They are better to learn a language than books, movies, or TV shows, because, in books, movies, and TV shows your enjoyment decreases greatly if you miss many words. On the other hand, in videogames, you can enjoy a game even if you don't fully understand what the menu says or the characters say.

So I got Hyperdimensional Neptunia Rebirth in the original language. Its gets a bit repetitive grind-style RPG after 30 hours of play.

The Uncharted games are great. Granted, if you are going back to play the first one you'll find some issues. I love the 2nd game and the 4th. They feel so grand and you get that sense of adventure with each game. Some of the climbing and shooting can get a bit repetitive, but I had a blast playing each one.

__________________
"A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Why, sometimes in life, it's the only weapon we have."

Suspect's Reviews

Interested in selling it?

That seems to be what everyone says about Uncharted - that it's like playing a big adventure blockbuster - but even that suggests a vibe that's very different from most of the games I play so I've never felt much of a need to prioritise it (and the fact that there are, what, five games make it seem like a sizeable commitment, especially if I presumably have to get through three games to reach the apparently-really-good fourth one). Then again, they're probably better than Mad Max so what do I know. Like I said, we'll see if I get around to any of them.

As for Last of Us, I had a feeling that's what you meant by the pallets, but clearly that didn't bother me enough to concede the point. There are better complaints to make about it and the sequel that are more to do with the text of the piece rather than how it plays. I think that's just part and parcel of any game that dares to stop dead for non-violent puzzles, which is a problem that plagues far more games than Last of Us.

The 4th is good, it certainly LOOKS the best as the others are all originally on PS3.

100% agree, and I've tried a couple of the cheaper grip solutions with no real difference.

My Switch is in docked mode for the vast majority of the time, plus I use an 8Bitdo Pro+ controller and not the Joycons or Pro controller.

Everyone hating on the switch? Love my Switch lite and have beaten Super Mario Odyssey, Pokemon Sword, Luigi's Mansion 3, and Links Awakening. Breath of the Wild is next but it's a pretty tedious start honestly.

I love the games, and I like the portability. But when I play for any longer than five minutes my hands cramp.

It's honestly not that great. I tried really hard to like it when I was looking for shiny stuff to test my new GPU on. The highlights I recall, in order, were:

- At one point, a really dull cookie-cutter NPC was killed mid-dialogue by some sheet metal whipped up by a storm.
- The car battles with the convoys, pulling bits off them with grappling hooks etc, starts edging towards epic.
- The engineer guy clinging to your car is a descent companion.
- Some of the locations look cool and right.
- The storms are atmospheric.
- Cars look good in chrome...

Most everything else is super rote, and screams 'ran out of budget'. There's one nice cut-scene in the middle, the Arkham fight system is fine enough, but everything else is pretty much an unimaginative grind. They use literally the same boss at the end of every story 'dungeon'. I think that says it all :/

(Although weirdly I found a variant boss in the basement of a gas station once. It was a hint of what could have been, if the open world was more populated with surprises...)

Try at least one race against the exploding spikey hedgehog cars though. That was kinda fun