Taccy, your woeful Trials video clip doesn't seem to be available anymore. Sadness... because I was really hoping for a good chuckle when comparing the two videos.
Works fine for me, maybe it's a region restriction.
Here's the same one from another source.
__________________ "Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how theTatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan
Yeah, I can see now how that's not really an upgrade at all in terms of graphics (although they capitalize on the '80s kids toys feel quite well, ha!).
Ingenious ... but enough about me, what about Superhot? S'alright, I suppose.
I had my eye on the development of Superhot for quite literally roughly two years. The premise seemed simple - Time runs when you move - but the style was what drew me in. They eventually released a free browser-based Beta/demo and the game played as well as it looked.
My real reservation was a fear that Superhot couldn't flesh out its core concept into something which made sense as a £15 game. A seemingly ambiguous collection of levels was the most I could hope for. Happily I was wrong.
Really really wrong.
The narrative behind Superhot isn't exactly original but (and here's that word again) the style with which the developers (a small Polish team) make things play out is stunning. Better, for me anyway, than, say, The Stanley Parable or Gone Home by a sizeable chunk.
I'll not spoil it, but it'll behove the player to dig around in the main menu, do some exploring and let it all wash over them. It really is l33t something.
The game's relative brevity (although it is extremely replayable) stopped me ranking it any higher, but Superhot is surely a game which will go down as a classic. I'm really intrigued at what the developers will do from here - They've already followed the game up with a VR spin off that I'm actually interested in playing, and that's praise indeed.
Rarely do I have to physically stop myself playing a game because the great laundry basket of life is beginning to overflow. Oblivion a decade ago was one such game, Stardew Valley is the only one I can remember since.
I've never owned a piece of Nintendo hardware, so I've never played a Harvest Moon game and thus came to Stardew Valley's core loop totally fresh. It makes no secret of its influences but a number of people I know who have played both, tell me that SV is ultimately the more satisfying game.
There's no Tom Nook shaking you down for money every week, for starters.
The game was conceived and developed by one guy and even after an hour's playing, you can see that he poured his heart into it. Stardew Valley is soulful ... it's got spirit.
It's also unabashedly nice.
You inherit a small house and plot of land and you farm it, selling your produce either in the village next door or to the nasty and corporate (although not too nasty and corporate, the game's not like that) out-of-town supermarket.
You reap, you sow, you fish, you make friends, you watch the seasons turn.
Gameplay is varied, from trading to combat to fishing to tending, enough that your daily routine is never a chore, and you have plenty of time to explore and level up (oh yes, RPG mechanics! ) your character.
There's a wistful nod towards an earlier time here, a time where you actually knew and cared about your neighbours. A community spirit.
It's rarely that I play such a warm and engaging game. I can see (a hyper stylised and rose tinted, true) the village where I grew up, and now live once more, in Stardew valley.
I'm happy you like Stardew Valley, Taccy. I got it on your recommendation and I'm still playing it (about 300 hours of gameplay so far!). It's like a happy, colorful questing RPG, with some humor, some silliness, and a weird sense of accomplishment as you hit various plateaus of achievement.
It reminds me of the Wii game Animal Crossing -- although Stardew Valley is a vast improvement over that game. (In AC, the seasons change whether you're playing or not, which is disconcerting if you step away for a month or more and come back to find crops dead, fruit gone, etc.) The achievements and goals are pleasantly out of reach without being vexing.
I've played other farming games (Farm Town and Farmville on Facebook, for instance), but this is the only one that continues to be fun after so many hours in.
I started a second farm once I realized that buying all the community center achievements from JoJo Mart would take me in a wrong direction. First farm made it to early in Year 4. Second farm is now in Year 6. Got married. Had a kid. But your trailer showed a bunch of things I haven't seen yet, so apparently I have a lot of achievements ahead of me.
The one skill I abhor and cannot get the hang of is FISHING. HATE HATE HATE it and avoid it whenever I can. I've got some crab pots and hope to just catch fish that way because I cannot get the hang of those fishing poles. Or I just wait and buy fish from either Krobus in the sewers or the traveling cart on Fridays and Sundays.
SV is the kind of game I can play when I want to veg out in front of a game but don't want anything too mind-taxing. It's oddly relaxing.
Oh, apparently one of the recent updates allows you to choose from a few farm layouts instead of always having the same one. I was tempted to start a third farm but haven't succumbed to the temptation yet.
The one skill I abhor and cannot get the hang of is FISHING. HATE HATE HATE it and avoid it whenever I can. I've got some crab pots and hope to just catch fish that way because I cannot get the hang of those fishing poles. Or I just wait and buy fish from either Krobus in the sewers or the traveling cart on Fridays and Sundays.
Until recently, I thought I'd never play another Forza game. My roots with the franchise go back to the first iteration on the original Xbox, a direct answer to Sony's Gran Turismo games, but I figured that the series' Xbox 360 swansong, Forza Motorsport 4, would be the last one (at least for a number of years) that I would own the hardware with which to play.
Whereas Gran Turismo always called itself 'The real driving simulator', Forza was more approachable - Its cars maybe didn't have their physics modelled to the same degree but the developers 'got' the reason people buy these games.
They want the approximation of owning a garage full of exotic cars, being able to customise, modify and drive them at their limit. A wet dream for petrolheads, in other words, with Gran Turismo remaining, whilst still a great game, a little dry.
The Forza Horizon spin-offs took things further - You were a competitor (and by the third game, the boss) in a road racing festival. They're less buttoned-up than the numbered Forza Motorsport games, more arcade-like but still having the satisfying SimCade handling physics.
Horizon 3 is the best of the lot.
Its birth wasn't easy - Microsoft's insistence on having all first party titles launched simultaneously on Xbox and PC has resulted on a PC library which is, and I'm being kind, patchy in terms of performance. No doubt things will get a lot better now that developers know what's expected of them in a more usual timeframe but FH3 launched on home computers in a pretty ropey state.
The game's been patched a number of times since release and performance for me is generally great, but there are still a lot of people with more powerful PCs than I do complaining of worse performance - I can run the game at 60fps and UItra settings nearly everywhere but I know guys with new 6700k CPUs and monster 1080GTX graphics cards getting a lot of slowdown.
Sucks to be them, right?
I haven't had more joyous abandon in a game for years, barrelling around a lovingly rendered Australia in my car, doing pre-set events or going online for competitive or cooperative challenges. The closest thing I can compare it to is Burnout Paradise, a similarly open world racing game but one with fictional cars and a fictional location.
Burnout Paradise was one of my favourite games of the 360/PS3 generation but playing it after the 100+ hours I've put into Horizon 3? Wow .... BP is dated beyond belief.
These aren't staged shots, by the way - I took them myself in-game:
It obviously doesn't look as good, it's pushing a decade old after all, but the handling isn't as much fun, the events aren't as cohesively placed in the world and there's none of the customisation. None of the 'Forza sheen', where you can upload photos and videos to a central hub and share them.
I'm beginning to think that Forza Horizon 3 is the best racing game I've ever played...
I'd had a passing regard for earlier Hitman games, but nothing more than that. Until Blood Money I'd found them clunky and arbitrarily difficult, a cool idea hampered by so-so execution.
Blood Money turned things round - It played a lot better, goals were now more coherent and a wry humour was beginning to manifest itself. That game's sequel, Hitman Absolution (aka Hitman: Porno Nun Trailer) was a step so far backwards that most feared that the franchise would bleed out right there - Agent 47's personality was getting rounded out at the expense of gameplay, with Absolution having tiny maps and a bizarre checkpoint system.
The announcement of a new Hitman game wasn't met with much fanfare. Late in the day, it was announced that the game would follow an episodic model rather than the originally proposed 'full game'. Had developers run out of money? Was the game rushing towards a concrete release date unfinished? The gaming media then turned its back...
Thankfully for IO Interactive, Hitman is a triumph.
The maps on offer are large and varied, begging to have multiple playthroughs - The more you discover, the more challenges you complete, the higher your rating for the map (with the promise of new goodies unlocked for a new attempt).
If all the maps had been released at once, I doubt there'd have been anything like the experimentation by the player base. They'd have completed the hit and moved on to the next chapter...
Hitman welcomes new players like never before. In addition to a couple of excellent tutorial levels, every subsequent map has multiple opportunities you can highlight which will guide you towards outlandish and amusing assassinations. It's a great system that the player can choose to avail of as much or as little as they choose.
One thing the game doesn't have is much pretence to realism - NPC AI is extremely 'gamey' but I don't have a problem with it, quite the reverse. You'll soon figure out Hitman's rules - What actions you can get away with, what objects work in situations etc. They're a selection of puzzles waiting to be figured out.
If they're not exactly 'realistic', NPCs have one huge thing in their favour - The greatest book of incidental dialogue lines I've ever seen in a game. In fact, you often find yourself dallying when you shouldn't just so you can hear a conversation between two people that play no real part in the chapter.
IO have gone above and beyond here, and the flavour they have imported to the world is wonderful. For instance, one small gameplay loop gets treated like this:
I've had so much fun with Hitman. Some maps are better than others but every one is super playable, vibrant, funny and cohesive. There's an overarching story on offer which ties the chapters together - It's a little cookie-cutter but is more than sufficient to ward off the plot hole police.
The game could perform better, you could control Agent 47 a little more snappily and the UI could be a little clearer but nothing that detracts from the vibrancy and opportunity to 'mess around' that the core game provides.
I actually only finished the game a few weeks ago, having spent most of my time going after challenges on older maps - IO are constantly adding content to the game with new side mission Elusive Targets (you get one chance to get them, then they disappear) appearing every week and a potentially great Christmas bonus episode:
The existing game will be released in disc form on console soon, and IO have announced a season two for next year - I couldn't be happier.
If anyone's on the fence, the tutorial levels (two sizeable maps) and the opening Paris chapter (one of the best maps in the entire game) are for sale at £10.99.
After foiling a Paris fashion show (and, if you play your cards right, getting Agent 47 to parade the catwalk), subsequent chapters take you to Italy, Morocco, Thailand, Colorado and Japan. Lots of bad people to kill in interesting ways...
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