Andee

I must confess I've never really vibed with any of the main big Bethesda series, but this does look really nice, and it's good that they've finally liberated it from PS360 jail

@SuntannedDuck2 Cheers for the super-thorough answer — I think basically what I'm after is a racing/driving game that's fun, but you essentially win XP/currency in races with which you can spend on souping up your vehicles or buying new ones, basically like in the original Gran Turismo or, if you wanna go a bit older school, Road Rash

I may wait until the inevitable crossover, Ghouls and Ghosts of Yotei.

you're also earning XP for your own player level, gaining skill points to unlock perks on a per-car basis

As caRPGs go, is Forza a decent choice? I've never played any of them, and keep umming and ahhing about going in on GT7.

I'm guessing that not all the ghosts of Tsushima were caught, and a few must have got away? I've not played it, but I have to assume that's how this sequel came to be.

2 hours on a good day. And even then it's usually 1h 45m of people shouting over each other and 15 mins of actual news.

Been waiting to pull the trigger on BG3 for a while now — this absolutely clinched it.

@shonenjump86 Yeah, same - Alpha 3 on PS1 was my first experience of the Alpha series, and having come straight from Special Champion Edition on the Mega Drive it was like going from Zero to 60, and it was pretty mind-blowing, but a bit overwhelming. Alpha 2, which i discovered later on, felt a bit more balanced and grounded. Plus I actually preferred the music and character endings.

You'd be surprised, that level of acknowledgement and attention to detail when putting together retro collections such as these really go a long way. I remember the Alpha Collection on PS2 allowed you to mess around with the dip switches for each game, which (unless I'm missing something) wasn't present in the Street Fighter Anniversary Collection on PS4 (and they STILL haven't fixed the difficulty bug in Super Turbo)

Oh Queen's Blood I rather enjoyed — took me a while to fully understand how it actually worked but once I did I was well hooked. I'd actually quite like to have had it as a separate spin-off mobile game

While I think they're fantastically well-made games, naturally I'm going to compare them to the original FFVII, and while I enjoyed my time with Remake/Rebirth for the most part, they're both a bit too overblown and drawn-out for me to wholeheartedly recommend over the original.

@ShogunRok I grow tired of the teasing teasery of the teasing teasers of this teasing country...

They will never be able to live that down. A prime case of a reviewer trying to convince themselves that something a bit crap is actually good.

I believe it started out as a Yoshi game but Nintendo didn't let the devs get far past the concept stage, and thus Croc was born!

@L_Bosch Or Vagrant Story, now I think about it.

@bring_on_branstons Yeah, same — actually browsing the store I find quite daunting, so just wishlisting games I reckon I'll play at some point is far easier than having to wade through hundreds of sale items.

Oh of course, that's always the main reason when it comes to anything to do with music being used in different media.

@twitchtvpat Yeah, Konami need to pull whatever strings need pulling with Disney and get Simpsons and X-Men on modern consoles.

I haven't yet encountered a rotten disc, touch wood — but I did purge a load of DVDs after a house move a couple of years ago, and some of those I hadn't touched in years... I've fired up a few handfuls of PS1/2 discs this past year and they all worked just fine.

@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.