Andee

@Amnesiac Yeah, it seems a lot more seamless with the general overworld pottering

@GirlVersusGame Ah well there ya go! I do recall a manga adaptation of MGS1, but I wasn't sure how essential reading it was (MGS I found worked perfectly well in videogame format)

@Brundleflies21 dang it! Beat me to it...

I've been deliberating whether to go in on Death Stranding, but knowing that these exist, I think I might much prefer them in prose form! Hell, can we get a novelisation of MGS4 while we're at it? I'm sure there's a good story in there but I found those pesky sections where you have to play the game quite distracting.

Press F to faith.

FFXIII felt like a finely-crafted tech demo to an egregiously incomplete game.

Still, it's hard to get past FFXIII's disjointed narrative, the lack of exploration allowed by its more directed adventure, and ditching of essential elements like an overworld, towns, or even many NPCs to explore and interact with.

This, a hundred percent. What really stuck out to me as well was the item upgrading system. You essentially get given a load of loot/components after battles, and you just blindly shove them into your gear, with no real way to know exactly what effect they'll have until you've done it.

Yeah I fear the one-inventory-per-character design would likely break me over time. Inventory management in games is something that really sticks out to me if it's done in a counter-intuitive way.

@themightyant Apparently in Sonic Unleashed, the PS360 versions had a hub world where you'd physically walk around and accept missions from NPCs, whereas in the Wii/PS2 versions they were just broken down into menu lists and static images. Maybe they could go down a similar route here?

Nah, that's a deal-breaker, for me

@Konks It was already flooded when the first game came out in 2013.

As bleak as the games are, I'd be perfectly content with having the story end with Part 2. I don't really know where else you can go, and what more you can "say" by adding to the plot, outside of (MAJOR SPOILERS)...

...Ellie and Abby reuniting, and coming to the realisation that revenge is not the way, and then working together combining their collective smarts of science and violence to wipe out the infection, rebuild society, and then ultimately becoming an item. Abby uses more science to rebuild Ellie's fingers, and then the two form a band for a big, super upbeat musical finale that is completely at odds with the misery that's come before.

Highly doubt that Druckman would want to go for that, but it'd certainly be a hell of an unexpected narrative swerve for the audience.

@somnambulance same — we need more weird, experimental games like his.

@Troubbble absolutely — it feels like PS3 was the last era where we truly had stuff like that.

@ChrisDeku "Spider-Folk" — hmm, sounds a bit too whimsical, like a children's story about a family of actual spiders just poddling about doing spider-things.

But how else would you be able to accumulate all your GTAlactic Readiness for the final single-player campaign mission?

Really keen to revisit AoD, and maybe finally finish it this time.

I would like to revisit 5 — I actually had a less fun time with it than I did with 6 at the time; the AI-controlled partner setup always felt a bit clunky and the overall vibe I remember being a lot more joyless than the other entries.

I'm curious, was the Witchblade crossover a standalone issue or was it part of a regular Tomb Raider arc?

Edit: Oop, not to worry, the Wiki sorted me out — it was part one of a three-part crossover which continued in Witchblade and Evo 1. No huge loss, I'd say.

Not from their single-player, story-driven RPGs they don't, mate. Now kindly p!ss off back to your ivory tower.

@Runex2121 I'm a little in two minds about DLC when it comes to expansive RPGs such as this. On the one hand it's nice to be able to return to the world again (if it's something as big as Awakening or Trespasser - although with both of those examples I played the main game after the DLC had already released), but on the other hand it's nice to have closure and be able to put a game to rest.

@ThomasHL Oh absolutely — I learned my lesson from DAI and its infamous Hinterlands — right now I'm just enjoying being absorbed in Thedas again and meeting all these new characters (I have 4/7 — just had to make a pretty big decision last night and now I'm paying for it... 😔 )

I only started Veilguard last week, so I guess the timing is pretty good, but I'm a little wary of the very defeatist vibe that I'm getting from a lot of the discourse surrounding the game's reception (both critically and sales-wise).

@mariomaster96 Yeah — remember when we got FF 7/8/9, three numbered FF entries, across one console generation? Now we'd have the reverse — one numbered entry across three generations.

@Rich33 Yeah, I only got around to playing DAI last year (once I knew Veilguard was coming I finally pulled the trigger on it!), and yeah i'm loving just how streamlined and efficient the devs have made to QoL things, mainly like gear/item upgrades and management — and yeah they've completely overhauled the combat, for the better in my opinion — it's a lot less automated than in 1-3 (so horses for courses I guess!) — playing a Shadow Dragon / Rogue

Only minor nitpick is that you only get two party companions, so group banter is a little limited compared to previous games.

Dang, this is disappointing — big big fan of Celeste, and the trailer looked luscious.

I finally started Veilguard last week, and so far I'm loving it — really liking how its evolved over the series, and would love to see the series continue.

Set phases to "Stable"

Ooo I never played this — would be quite keen to check it out now. So these were issues with the emulation, not the game itself?

I think you need a sixth option for "sheer undiluted frothing-at-the-mouth indifference"

@ReddMcKnight I hope so — I got pretty far into AoD but I encountered a bug while playing as Kurtis where I went through a door and the level environment just straight up didn't load. But my save file was already up to that point and with no way to revert it outside of starting over, I ended up shelving it. I'm pretty keen to revisit and finally finish it.

Sweet bulbous pulsating Christ no.

"Christ no" was too short, so have a few modifiers.

@PuppetMaster Yeah, same — I was genuinely curious at one point so I gave it go, but it just felt like a very mid-tier third person action game, and considering the amount of hours it apparently takes to play, I realised I had far more better games I could be devoting my time to.

This is awesome — I was quietly optimistic that they would at least acknowledge and repair some of the bugginess inherent in AoD, but the fact that they've gone out of their way to restore the content is music to my ears!

@GlasgowGuy Aw, giraffe to remind us?

I honestly didn't mind RE6 when I first played it. My only real nitpicks were the fact that you had to re-play entire sections of the game when switching characters, which felt a bit redundant, and that it's just straight-up overshadowed by better entries in the series, but as a standlone game I had a decent time with it.

Problem with that is, if you throw enough **** at the wall eventually you just end up smelling of **** all the time.

@Totheteeth oh yeah, same! Have you tried Everybody's Golf? I find it just arcadey enough without losing the core integrity (something I've read the new Mario Golf suffers from), and it has a really great character/career mode.

Ditto — plus I've already got a pretty sizeable backlog; I don't need MS/Sony to ladle a new glut of games on my plate every few months, 95% of which I'll honestly never get around to playing, let alone finishing, anyway.

@Andy22385 yeah, I really liked those RPG style elements from the mid '00s-era TW games; building up your golfer over time with stat-boosting gear and equipment was so satisfying.

Also I wonder if they're going to implement some sort of save migration for owners of the previous game? The one thing I felt the old Tiger Woods games lacked was a way to continue your progress between games; starting from scratch every time was a bit deflating.

Save and Shut down — as handy as Rest Mode is, I don't trust it fully enough to lose progress for the sake of the minute or so it takes to launch a PS5 game from scratch

Shonen Jump is £3 a month, which is pretty decent considering the amount of series that are on there.

Before it was released, I was hoping that the PS5 would be revealed to be fully back-compat with everything. I would totally buy a PS6 on day one if it was — the PS5 Pro has proved that there are people willing to go the extra few pennies.

I imagine if videogames had been invented today, being able to purchase them individually wouldn't even be an option. Companies seem to be pushing subscriptions to be the default way to acquire everything now, and buying a standalone videogame/movie/album feels like it's becoming a relic of a bygone era.

The charade can only have gone on for so long. Now that they're apparently making proper Spider-Man films again, they can comfortably prolong their stranglehold of those movie rights a bit longer...

@BloodyBlact Looks like it could be mint.

@Enigk I was just thinking this exact thing when I was sifting through my Spotify

Such a cool idea — whenever I buy RPGs like this my entire first evening playing them is just four hours of faffing about with the character creator, so it'll be nice to hit the ground running when I finally pull the trigger on the game!

@PuppetMaster Yep, Dreams was getting some heavy radio play during 1994, the year the PS1 launched, so a pretty perfect accompanying song.

Excellent deep cut

For me FFVIII was the misunderstood middle child between VII and IX — for my money, IX is my favourite of the three, but VIII definitely has a charm, despite its jank and unbalancedness

@Oram77 yeah, same — I got FFVII (which I finished the week before FFVIII released) with the demo/trailer disc, and seeing that opening movie, with the more realistic characters designs, blew my mind at the time. Liberi Fatali still slaps hard.

However, LEGO didn't approve of the violence and sexual innuendo common in Bond films being put in a game for kids.

Yeah, tonally I imagine that would have been an absolute nightmare of a tightrope to walk, for the writers/animators.