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I'm thinking Amazon's recommendations are a little out of whack...



In less important news, I bought Cities Colon Skylines on the back of some surprisingly good reviews. Turns out it's not by the same guys who made the previous (rubbish, from what I played) Cities games and is basically the Sim City reboot that folks desperately wanted the actual Sim City reboot to be.

They've got a huge advantage in releasing their game a considerable amount of time after the ****show that was Sim City (which I've somehow got about 30 hours invested in) was chewed up and spat out by the gaming public.

Great fun so far.

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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

That looks pretty damned fun. I love city builders!

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Woo, I got a bit drunk last night, was shown the dark arts of 'ECM rushing' by Rhys, and woke up 10 million PD2 dollars richer! Those were some pricey bits of samurai armour we were lifting! I have spent much of it on making myself look ridiculous



Online really works for this game. In part because if you get a numpty crew (often this involves me being the numpty ) it's like those films where you've had to take a psycho along at the last minute, or the hacker who's not really up to it. It can be fun to improvise around that, or to get them to play to their strengths. Feels great when you get a co-ordinated team going though. In Rhy's game I was running to keep up, starting out as the bag man (and not always getting that right, as I often legged it to the getaway vehicle, rather than the closer drop-off he'd arranged ). That was great, like being led by a genuine pro, as he called out for the crew to deploy their ECMs in relay, all while we dashed about achieving the semi-randomised objectives at speed. Playing with guys of my lower-league status has been great too though - just blazing through classic bank heists, helping each other up, making sure your loadouts complement each other at the start etc.

Still can't quite nail the diamond heist on my own yet, but I'm getting closer... One little slip up and you're doomed. It's properly tense, but in a good way . Plus the payoff would be insane...

Yods if you do give it a go, the one major thing you'd should know (that the game doesn't really explain, as it doesn't explain much) is that hostages are massively important in loads of the maps. If you snaffle at least one somewhere where you can prevent rescue attempts you get a much longer pause between waves (and I think they hold off on heavier units too, not sure). They also keep cops occupied with rescue attempts over assaults on you, can be traded for captured crew members, and of course bundling civs up keeps them out of your hair if you're going quiet. Killing civs is also penalised via 'cleaner costs' which is cool, so you can try pacifist runs etc. Pretty decent game mechanic overall.

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

Apparently GTA Vee's own much vaunted heist mechanic in their multiplayer is still utterly broken...

They'd have been far better served spending all that money on a Red Dead Redemption PC port.

Oh geez, don't even joke about that. I literally gave up on playing RDR, even though I know I'd love it, because the controls on the X-Box were infuriating and I just couldn't enjoy it. I'm so stupidly bummed about that, still.

They're GTA controls though, Chris, for better or (and I agree with you) worse. GTAV's are the same, as were IV's, SA's, etc.

Hateful but at least they're familiar.

Ah yes, I phrased that wrong: I'm complaining about the combinations of controls and controller. The same controls on PC are a lot easier to cope with, for me at least, and I'm comfortable with controllers with different control schemes, but the combination of the two is too much.

Gotcha.

It mystifies me why you still have to press a button to run in these analogue times. PC controls have long been two-speed so it's less jarring but I play the majority of my 3rd person PC games with a controller these days.

I'd play it again

Yeah bit embarassing after the shonked initial launch. Pretty normal these days it seems with super launches tho. Can't test for all behaviours and demand spikes effectively apparently. Onliners are unpredictable, and problematic, i guess is the take home message

Shame all the beta footage of Battlefield Forgettable-Name looks pretty samey/bland. They're prob best placed to do the shooty/skilled-aerial-extraction/destruction end of heists
GTA's backdrop will take some beating for epic escapes tho

Not as bad as Youtube's.

I've seen recommendations for "Peppa Pig" on videos clips of Saw films.

Probably hugely questionable legally, but this is a work of genius.

Anyone who likes Old School games should check out Vizzed.com - where you can play old school Sega and Nintendo games free and legally online.

There's also similar websites like Online-console.com which have old school PS1 games (Vizzed.com does too, but you have to buy a "Playstation Pass" for about $50). I was playing Castlevania Symphony of the Night the other day, great PS1 game.

Surely this can only be great...

'It's Dark Souls meets Gone Home meets some game with a dad in it.'



Ok, I may not have learnt my lesson from buying duff novelty games. Still, looks kinda fun

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And here's something I totally don't wanna play, but I respect their chutzpah. A game you can only play once, where if you die that's it, and which will only ever be live for 3 hours a day, and played by a maximum of 8 people. Oh and the watching potential-players get all your XP...

Upsilon Circuit

If you're after a 'Like Dark Souls but...' game which is most certainly not a novelty, keep your eyes on Salt and Sanctuary.



Not been keen on previous games from the developer (a husband and wife team) but this one looks special.

Heroes 6 for me this weekend. Just one more turn...

Finally got my refund for that arcade stick which wanted to burn my house down. Bought one of these instead:



It cost more money, too, but works on PS3/4, 360 and PC. I don't think I'm right in the head.

Skylines 'anti piracy' approach is interesting, and they're very effusive about Steam in the process...

Will be interesting if metrics like this get repeated - IE the more (free) DLC & long-term updates & patches, the less piracy, so long as the updates all add in painlessly to the legal version. (Could invite even more fluff and 'here's the content you should have had at launch' stuff, but given games seem to be increasingly drifting towards these 'we can work on it afterwards' norms now with online ubiquity, might be an interesting payoff. IE more money going to developers on, or shortly after, release than normal, so more 'dream content' & improvements likely).

Just finished The Witcher, so here we go...

Story was fantastic ( I need to find those books game is based on), ending was mind blowing, it has everything, your decisions changing everything, politics, war, civilians, friends , enemy's and so much more. You have choice how you want to build your Witcher, I love sword upgrades and how they look. Voice acting is good, alchemy again adds to whatever and however you decide to build and whatever tactic you want to chose. Its not an easy game, but I enjoyed it, you need to think about your enemy, find his weakness ,use it, use your potions, bombs, swords, oils...I could go all day about how awesome this game is, but I won't, because Witcher 2 won't play itself . One last thing, I strongly recommend starting with W1, don't skip it! Because I did, I got W2 and I didn't enjoy it that much, everything was confusing, but I decided not to play further ( I have only few hours of gameplay ) and wait until I get Witcher 1, it was a good decision. Oh I almost forgot, it has mystery ,I can't forget that .

Verdict : Better Than Skyrim

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“By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be.”

I like the headphone jack feature.

Doesn't the difficulty of some side quests become ridiculously hard when you move to the next town or area after the first boss fight? I remember taking a quest that led me to a basement where I got absolutely mauled by a mob of ghosts or spirit monsters. I put the game away after that.