Topic: 🍁 PUSH SQUARE GAME CLUB 🍁 | November | The Plucky Squire ⚔️

Hola!
So far if i've scanned the thread correctly these games have been mentioned to be up for contention, i've took the liberty of removing a few titles the club have already played. Feel free to keep suggesting titles but so far we have...

Death’s Door
Inscryption
Endling
Alan Wake Remastered
Trek to Yomi
Children of Morta
Desperados III
Dodgeball Academia
Jett
The Ascent
Observer Redux
NEO: The World Ends With You
Outer Wilds
TMNT: Shredder's Revenge

Should we replace the current list or add these and any other suggestions into the overall pot? A direct answer from the masses would be really appreciated

Thanks Gang! 👍

@Pizzamorg @Mr_B021 @QualityGeezer @KilloWertz @Th3solution @Ryne-Gaia @crimsontadpoles @RogerRoger @Hallowmoonshadow @R1spam @CaptD @Th3solution @ralphdibny @LobsterJohnson @SillyBoyJudas @Kidfried

@AgentCooper My vote is for Deaths Door. A good selection for August by the looks of it.

@AgentCooper outer wilds or Alan wake for me mate

Well if you land on Alan Wake or Trek to Yomi I think I may just join in this (next) month, don't let that sway it though...

I've recently been playing Endling and it only takes about 2-3 hours to complete so unlikely to last you a month!

...although Deaths Door is probably my favourite game I've played this year and Children of Morta is a superb hidden gem of a game so you should probably all opt for one of them.

@AgentCooper I’m fine just rolling with the new list you have there.

I’d vote:
1) Inscryption
2) Death’s Door
3) Alan Wake

Toy Story 2 - Level 1

My thoughts on this game may be a bit top heavy as in I probably will have more to say in this first post than I will about the rest of the game...

I managed to do Level 1 and I got all the pizza tokens in one go and also 91 coins. I think I missed a single coin that came out of a flying robot I blasted over the corner some kitchen cabinets. When I chased after the coin, it was gone :/

This was easily one of my favourite games on PS1. To say I played it a lot as a kid would be an understatement. It stands among MGS, Crash 3: Warped, Area 51, Rival Schools, WWF Attitude, WWF Smackdown, THPS1&2, Destruction Derby 2 and TOCA 2 as my most played PS1 games at the time! (I may update that list if I can have a look at my ps1 games on the shelf lol). It was probably close to being one of the first games I finished all the way through.

I revisited it briefly when I was a teenager and I played it on my then-girlfriend's-brother's PS2 with her (I had a GameCube myself). I don't think we played a lot of it that time tbh.

So with my rose tinted glasses, I don't think I will allow the ravages of time to make me think any less of this game. But I will point out some jarring things I've noticed revisiting this game in 2023.

Most jarring is the lack of use for the Right Analog stick. I think the Active Camera mode that follows you does a good enough job when you get used to it. Having L2 and R2 to move left and right is OK to have enough in a pinch but I would still rather it was on the stick. Even then, without a sensitivity adjustment, manually adjusting the camera regularly would be quite tedious at its current speed.

Also the inverted flight stick style camera controls is jarring for me too. Both up/down is inverted in first person mode and L/R is inverted when using the triggers. I've never been one for inverted cameras so this'll have to be something I get used to. I also don't like using the left stick to control the view in FP mode, it's weird and I naturally go to the right stick only to find it does nothing lol.

It's very nostalgic seeing the old Traveller's Tales logo and hearing the old TT jingle on start up. They made some amazing games back in the day before they moved on to exclusively making Lego games. Oh well, I suppose you have to go where the money is! They made the original Toy Story on Mega Drive as well which is also easily one of my favourite MD games. I am a bit of a sucker for a well rounded platformer whether it's 2D or 3D.

Unfortunately it seems they didn't get to work on Toy Story 3 for the PS3. I did play that one all the way through hoping it would reach the heights of Toy Story 1&2 and while it was a decent enough game, I didn't think it was nearly as good as the first 2 games and it didn't reach that same iconic status for me.

I have played around with a few of the emulator settings too being that this is the first PS1 game that I've played on my PS4 (can't believe it was possible all along and those b*****ds were holding out on us!). I like all the screen options for aspect ratio. Had a look at all of them and settled on 4:3 for 16:9 which was the default one anyway. Chunky Buzz on 4:3 for 16:10 did give me a chuckle though! It is kind of weird they include really skinny 1:1 options.

I would also never play with a black box around it in "original resolution". PS3 had that as an apparently unchangeable standard for when you played PS2 games from disc which was annoying when I played through X Files: Resist or Serve. The same black box thing annoyed me about plugging the PSP-3000 into the TV which along with the lack of component ports on the most modern TVs meant I decided to hack a PSTV to play PSP games on the big screen.

One thing I would love for this PS1 emulator is to have a full suite of controller configuration options available which is sadly not the case. That would completely solve both the inverted camera and also give me the option to map L2/R2 to the right stick. You can do this on unofficial emulators and make old games more palatable to modern control schemes even if the right stick isn't "true analog" in those instances.

I saw the rewind feature be mentioned as well by both Kid and CT, I haven't used it yet but I noticed it. I might have a play with it but I am not sure if I will use it. So far, I haven't lost much progress with an ill-aimed/timed jump so it has been easy enough for me to get back up to where I fell. I'll see how it goes in later levels!

Another thing I will say is that I don't have any form of PS Plus. I think this game was fairly expensive on the PS4 store but I bought it on the PS3 store instead where it was much cheaper but still allowed me to play on PS4 and I assume PS5. I think this is a bit unfair to be honest to give PS3 owners a cheaper way of owning this game. I actually also bought this in a 2-pack on the PS3 store with Toy Story Racer which is unfortunately locked to PS3.

As a final thought, I won't say too much about it as I've professed my love for all 4 Toy Story films many times on this forum over the years but I will repeat it somewhat. It is easily one of my favourite film series and I have seen every one on release and I feel like the films grew up with me. Somehow, whatever message each individual film had was completely appropriate for what i was experiencing at that time in my life.

I thought I'd tag @crimsontadpoles @Kidfried and @Th3solution because I am a bit late to the party and didn't want to join in the previous convo without having actually started the game. I thought this post might get lost amongst the voting posts at the moment too.

@AgentCooper are there any other Disney Interactive games on Plus?

Hercules and A Bugs Life for PS1 were both amazing games but I haven't heard anything about them coming to Plus so I assume they're still locked to PS3?

I don't think Mafia 2 is on Plus but is Bioshock Infinite and Beyond: Two Souls? If so then those would be my suggestions/votes for September.

Toy Story 2 - Level 2 completed without incident. I got all 5 pizza tokens on my first run through. The boss was a bit touch and go because it took me a while to find a good strategy which ended up being shooting the kite while on a tree branch and using the extra length afforded by my position to run across the decking to avoid his spin attack.

Also despite Rex's protestations that I needed to get some Jet boots from another level to beat RC in a race, I just did it by racing and standing in front of and blocking RC when he caught up.

I got enough coins to give to Hamm but didn't get all the coins in the level because it would have been tedious to kill all the cars with the red laser. I also didn't make it to the last health battery atop the tree but ultimately I didn't need to get it.

@AgentCooper I've played quite a few of those games, it's a banger list though!! I'd vote for Humanity, which got some great reviews this year and got released day one on extra if its ok to add to the list. If it ended up on inscryption or outer wilds, I would still take part in the chat though! Two brilliant games and happy to try and come up with some non-spoiler clues if folks get stuck etc.

Toy Story 2 - Level 3 Boss

Seems like health carries over as the plane hit me and I lost one of my currently accrued 9 lives. Otherwise it went without incident!

I liked the bonus movie unlocked. I know it's just a clip from a film but it was quite meta in terms of when you unlock it lol

Kind of interesting to watch clips from the film in a heavily compressed low frame rate presentation throughout this game lol

TS2 - Level 4

I feel like I remember each level of this game so well. I think the construction site is particularly memorable for me and it's the main level I think of when I think of this game.

I really like the music in this level, I think it's quite a bit better and more notable than the music in the first 3 levels.

Anyway, Level 4 is now complete with all pizza tokens, now to Alleys and Gullies and beyond!

Edit: TS2 - Level 5 - ended up with 3 pizza planet tokens and I will need to progress and get the grappling hook from a later level and return for the last 2 tokens (the ducklings and the boss)

Edit 2: TS2 - Level 6 Boss I ended up just hiding behind a pipe to shoot this Oscar The Grouch/Chaos Zero combination down. Lost a couple lives but at least it was over quick!

Anyway, took some screenshots:

[url=https://ibb.co/tph1BH9]
Ray Tracing on the PS1!!!!111one

Chaos Zero but green

Some other screenshots I took:

Rex holding a PS1 Memory card never gets old

This looks like it's out of some horror movie!

@AgentCooper These five I would be up for personally:

Death's Door
Inscryption
Desperados III
Dodgeball Academia
Outer Wilds

TS2 - Level 7 - not much to report here really. Managed to get 4 of the pizza tokens but one of them (the chicks again, dammit!) Is locked behind a future power up (hover boots) so I'll have to return.

I did notice a texture that looks a lot like the Action Man logo and an action man figure.

Can't really work out what it's supposed to be or what the word underneath is, possibly canoe?

Could be something like this or could just be a Mish mash of things or just a texture that's made to look like Action Man. Looks kind of like they've cut the symbol and the word Action out of the logo and then they have the word Canoe underneath it with a low Res pic of another figure.

I can't see any relationship between Traveller's Tales and any Action Man games in particular but they are a UK dev and Action Man was a popular toy here in the 90s so maybe they just put it in because of that?

@ralphdibny Thanks for that great breakdown of TS2, and it’s really interesting to hear about it through the eyes of someone who loved the original (and the movies) so much back in the day.

It does sound like the camera control would do my head in. Going back to play RE4 showed me just how spoiled I’ve become with modern control schemes.

And that’s interesting about how it’s cheaper to buy it on the PS3, even though it’s ‘forward-compatible’ (not sure that’s a term, 😅)

As for the question regarding BioShock Infinite and Beyond Two Souls, they both were offered in PS+ Essential (before it was called that) a few years ago so I assume a lot of us have them in our library from that. And Beyond Two Souls is also included on PS+ Premium but I don’t see BS Infinite on either of the streaming tiers (Extra or Premium).

@Th3solution I think the Bioshock collection left ps extra/premium last month, but yeah it was a plus game a few years back.

In other news. The club should definitely try out Tren in Dreams, it is delightfully awesome.

@CaptD There’s not much rhyme or reason to when and why games are removed from the PS+ services. Now that you say it, I do recall BioShock being removed from Extra.

Good to hear that Tren is a decent outing. Seems like an interesting idea.

@ralphdibny That's quite the write-up, thanks for sharing your thoughts. Glad to see that you seem to be enjoying it.

I also find the corporate logos to be be rather nostalgic. It was the era when logos would often have cool animations and effects, instead of the more minimalist logos that get used these days.

Winning the level 2 race despite what Rex says was quite amusing. It made me laugh when I noticed that was possible.

Are you aiming to collect all the tokens this time around? If so, then you've still got the revisit to level 5 to look forward to once you have the grappling hook. That was the section I struggled with the most, as it's so easy to fall back down during the long climb. I stubbornly did it without using the emulation rewinding or save-states (after a bunch of attempts), though those options do exist if people want to use them.

@Th3solution my partner and I actually discussed the backwards/forwards compatible thing a year or two ago. I was talking about BC games and she was like, "what do you mean? The games are forwards compatible." Of course, she was right! I think we just say BC because it's a holdover from when consoles were backwards compatible and now we have consoles that are selectively backwards compatible so we refer to the games as BC, maybe because it's a shortening of them being part of BC programmes? Even though they are technically forwards compatible lol

Cheers for the heads up regarding the games, I guess it's a question for @AgentCooper then, are we allowed to choose games that were previously part of Essential that most of us will have claimed over the years, I think that's how must of the previous GC games were chosen. If so then I still vote for Beyond Two Souls and Bioshock Infinite

@crimsontadpoles thanks, I guess I'll keep doing a level by level breakdown of my playthrough. It probably won't be that interesting 😂 but I feel obliged to because I voted for this game lol

On the topic of logos, I really like when the Hookshot websites breakdown the provenance of developers in articles like when they say "a studio made up of former Rare staffers" or "the studio formerly known has Psygnosis" or whatever. Kind of gives you an idea of how what they are working on may take shape.

Oh really, the alleys and gulley's level? Hmmm, interested to see what the upper half of that level looks like! I've had a play around with the rewind thing just to see what it's like, not really to make anything easier/quicker, just to check it out I suppose. It's not as fluid as other retro collections but that kind of makes sense as those collections would have spare buttons due to being on older consoles. Without those buttons available, I guess a menu based solution for rewinding was inevitable. I have used rewind in other, much older and more difficult games like Battletoads NES on the Rare replay collection but I'd probably have to be a masochist not to 😂 it was so hard lol.

Yeah I think I will go for all the pizza tokens, might as well get my money's worth lol. I really like how this game looks blown up on a 55inch OLED telly so I'll definitely see it through to the bitter end (unless something becomes really difficult but I don't see that happening yet)

You finished it, didn't you? Did you get all the pizza tokens? I saw that kidfried dropped off it.

@ralphdibny If they’ve been offered through the service in the past and the majority have access then I’m happy for that to happen if everyone is comfortable too. Mainly I’d like to avoid people having to purchase games.

@ralphdibny Yes, I finished it with all of the tokens. I found most of them just from playing through the levels normally, as I always like to look out for collectables and secrets in games. The only ones I needed to go back for were the ones that actually required additional upgrades.

@Kidfried I really need to check out Dreams now its on plus, its crazy something like Tren is matryoshka doll style game in a game. Plus, I'm hoping there is a decent recreation of PT in there as I never had the demo downloaded.