@Th3solution good to know. I'm glad I'm aware about the amount of cut-scenes etc going in... if I wasn't and all of a sudden I was 'hijacked' by like 4 45 min cutscenes during a 6 hour session I'd be frustrated but the fact I'm aware of it means I won't be too annoyed. Also, if I'm gonna playthrough the sucker atleast 8 times, I can happily skip them all from the second playththrough onwards.
I have to be honest, ever since I finished MGSV and it sunk its hooks in to the extent that I just had to buy the rest of the series... its 4 that I've been low-key the most excited for. First, it's obviously a far newer game that 1, 2, 3 & PW... but also I knew that by the time I get to 4 I'll have a pretty good idea of what the hell was going on (I mean... I loved V but I didn't have a frikkin scooby what was going on)... and then once I'd earned the 'big-picture', I'd then be ready to see how Kojima wanted to conclude it. Big Boss run aside, I'm super excited to play it.
@colonelkilgore I'm so sad I missed all the MGS discussion! Insanely good series, I've had my first experiences with 2-4 this year and it was rolling credits on 3 and the first hour of MGS4 that managed to crack my top 3 of all time almost 20 years later. Currently my MGS4 playthrough is on pause because FFXIV has consumed me, so there's a chance we might end up playing it the same time.
@TraCuz- it's all good Tra, I'm always up for chatting MGS. Yeah, I've obviously still got two massive titles to play in the series but even though I'm only just past the mid-way stage, it's definitely one of my favourite series of games.
Things can always change but right now I'd probably go Dark Souls, MGS and God of War as my top three. A few years ago GTA, Elder Scrolls and Mass Effect would've been up there but I don't get the same enjoyment out of those anymore... basically Dark Souls ruined/saved gaming for me depending on your perspective.
When I replayed MGS 4, I found it astonishing how little actual game is in there. Not that it's a bad thing by any stretch, the best bits of it are the movies and the few interactive gamey-film moments.
Now that I have some free time again, I decided to try out a few more PS3 Ps Plus games.
Truck Racer - OK, worth trying but I couldn't be bothered to continue after I failed to unlock the next championship. Better frame rate than WRC Rally at least. Also weirdly the physical version is still available to pre order from Amazon as of 20th May 2021 😂. I guess nobody pre-ordered it and they forgot to remove the listing!
Handball 16 - Well it's Handball, I mean what else is there to say. Might be good if you like handball but I don't like any (or at least many) sports so yeah. Might also be good if you know what Handball is... The retro style chopped up commentary makes me laugh, a bit, not much. "Oh that's a brilliant ball from.... Johnson ....what a save!....That's the end of the game and the score is..... 3 ..... 2. Rating = HS for hand shandy
Arkedo Series 03 Pixel - meh, it's ok. It's a platformer with very very light puzzle elements. You play as a cat going through 6 fairly long levels, longer than those in Arkedo 01 Jump anyway. It's pretty easy until you get to level 6 where the difficulty spikes hard. At least there's unlimited continues this time as well as checkpoints. Still though, I couldn't be bothered to persevere with it. Rating = O for onwards, in that I'm moving on from it and never looking back. Or am I? Maybe I'll look back if I fancy a painful death by boredom.
In other news, I purchased Zombie Driver for Switch as it was on sale for a couple of quid. I must update my spreadsheet!!
@ralphdibny [adds "WTT", "HS" and "O" to new catalogue of acceptable ratings] Also, what the heck is with that Amazon listing?! Am tempted to pre-order it, just to see if anybody notices. It's not like they're gonna turn around next week and dispatch me a copy, is it? Or is it?!
"We want different things, Crosshair. That doesn't mean that we have to be enemies."
I am a bit tired of PS3 plus games so I decided to charge up my Vita to play some of them. However, while it charged I did try out 3 more PS3 games (that also happen to be on Vita) and thankfully found a gem!
Hustle Kings - I played this briefly. I think I'm a bit tired but I was quite excited to play this one as I love video game versions of angle based sports like pool and crazy golf. I really loved the pool mini game in Yakuza 0 and the mini golf in Rugrats Search for Reptar for example. Hustle Kings has a few twists and quirks and I feel like I could learn a bit of skill for real life pool (which I am shockingly bad at) but honestly I just felt the game lacked a bit of character. Or maybe I just didn't gel with the character it does have. Either way, it was OK but I wasn't blown away enough to give more of my time to it. Rating = WAS for what a shame.
Atomic Ninjas - hmmm, this one is interesting. Another smash Bros-alike with a few different gimmicks. One thing that stood out was the grappling hook which really reminded me of Worms! A quick 5 minute tutorial serves as it's "campaign", it even has a cut scene for it! Unfortunately the servers are dead, not that I'd want to spend more time with it anyway. Rating = I for interesting...
Divekick - game of the day! I wasn't expecting much for some reason but it's instantly recognisable parodies of legitimate fighting game characters struck a chord with me! I chose Kung Pao, a female equivalent of Mortal Kombat's Kung Lao. The game plays with only two buttons, one for diving and one for kicking. One hit wins the match and it's first to 5 wins. There is a story mode (arcade ladder) with the classic opening and closing cutscenes. One character (or a pair of characters) stories are suspiciously similar to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air 😂. There's actually a really interesting story behind this game if you care to look it up on Wikipedia. Rating = MB for must buy! Well for me at least, will probably pick up a steam copy from CDkeys or something!
@Bentleyma- I thought they are wicked, I particularly loved the music in Full Throttle, I've been singing/humming the tunes all day today 😂
@RogerRoger haha thanks for reading again, I just posted a few more. I told my brother about that game and he said I should order it. I am tempted but I don't think I want to, just in case, y'know, I receive a copy 😂. So weird though!
Actually I just checked eBay and sealed copies of this game actually go for like 50-60 quid, what the hell... Maybe I will order it and see what happens!
@ralphdibny Could be quite the moneymaker. I'm seriously tempted to try now!
[also adds "WAS", "I" and "MB" to new catalogue, then removes "MB" because I doubt you can claim to be the first person to rate something as "must-buy"] Love the sound of Atomic Ninjas, mostly because I imagine it got its name after executives drew random buzzwords out of a hat. At least Divekick stuck the landing! I have enjoyed a few one-button fighting games before.
"We want different things, Crosshair. That doesn't mean that we have to be enemies."
Ok three more PS plus games to write about, one on PS3 and two on Vita...
Amplitude (PS3) - it's ok, I played the campaign and whatever other songs I unlocked. This game is by Harmonix who used to make Guitar Hero. I love guitar hero but I think the soundtrack is what makes it good. This is very similar except you only have 3 buttons to hit (L1, R1 and the dreaded R2 - really? A spongy button for a rhythm game?). You also move along tracks. I dont think I really "got" the game and understood how it worked, I am sure there is more to it than just pressing 3 buttons and moving a long different instrument tracks but I couldn't really work it out. It's OK, nothing special. The songs are ok, a bit unremarkable. I hate to bag on people's creativity but I am reviewing the game so yeah, the soundtrack wasn't really my thing. I'll probably put this down as a "completed" game on my list because I did the campaign but I don't feel good about it because there were a bunch of songs I didn't unlock. Rating = F for forgettable
Super Mutant Alien Assault (PS Vita) - umm yeah, not really my thing. I guess it reminded me a bit of Extreme Exorcism (edited from CursesNChaos because I got the two games mixed up 😅) which was another PS Plus game. I played Extreme Exorcism until I nearly finished it though (I stopped due to difficulty and disinterest). This game is kind of like single screen murder rooms. Just kill everything in site and maybe do a few objectives. It's ok, bit hard for a boring game though. I only played a couple levels. I sort of liked the enemy designs. They kind of reminded me of 90s cartoons and games, somewhere between Ninja (Hero 😅)Turtles and The Real Ghostbusters. Rating = S for standard
VVVVVV (PS Vita) - holy shiznits, what a game! I really wasn't expecting much at all. I really am not big on indie games, especially ones that use retro graphics - I've explained before that they are aping old games but they are never even close to being as good. But yeah, this game. Cripes on a cream cracker it's amazing! This has got to be one of the best 2D platformers I have ever played and that genre is my jam. I am normally harsh on the genre because I love it so much so I only ever really get into the "best" games like DKC and the Mario games up to Mario World. It's hard for me to get into indie platformers because I can never love the gimmick they introduce, something like 10 second Ninja sticks out as a game I really didn't rate at all. But honestly, this is the best 2D platformer I've played since Ori and the Blind Forest and Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii) before that!
It's tough but not unfair. The gimmick in this game is that when you jump, you fall to the ceiling. So you can't jump exactly, you flick between the ceiling and the ground which makes for some buttery smooth platforming action. The controls are really really tight. It just works so well. The characters ooze charm from every orifice (uhh what did I just say? 😅). And the soundtrack, the soundtrack is just amazing. I loved basically every tune that played. The main theme that kinda gets mixed up in a few different songs sounds a lot like the street fighter 2 theme so I'm not surprised that I loved it.
There's probably a metroidvania-lite aspect to it in that there is a big map to explore but you don't get the items that open new areas that's common to that genre though - everything is explorable from the get go. Ori was very similar except it did have the items. Ori was the first metroidvania I ever played all the way through and it softened me to the perceivably impenetrable genre. Plus both Ori and VVVVVV (that's 6 Vs!) are platformers at their hearts.
Also for some reason there is a sad elephant that takes up four screens and flashes different colours in an a seizure fit of psychedelic WTF-ness. I didn't screen shot all 4 screens but I tried to screen shot the different colours on the head. The colours are almost imperceptible during play though because it flashes by so quick.
So I should clarify that it's a platformer where you go from screen to screen rather than the screen scrolling with you. So some bits are very tricky as you have to remember exactly where to hit the edge of the screen to come out safely on the other side. Here is a particularly tricky part that reminded me of one of the later levels in Battletoads (NES). I've ordered it from top to bottom, so scroll to the bottom pic and you will see the trinket you have to collect being blocked by a tiny nub taunting you with the fact that you just can't jump over it. You have to jump and guide your fall all the way to the top screen without hitting any spikes on the way, hit the platform at the very top and jump quickly off it because it dissolves on touch and fall all the way back down to the bottom!
But, I managed to do it!!! Took me about 3 hours to learn the path but I bloody well did it! And it was so very very satisfying...
Ok, so now I come to the hard part. Should I buy this game? I've said it's one of the best games that I've never played before but the thing is with tricky platformers, you are never keen to go back and put yourself through that again. It's fun, frustrating and rewarding while it lasts but that emotional rollercoaster is often a one time deal, for people like me at least. Can I put myself through its roughly 5-6 hour run time again?
I think I will buy it, maybe on a different platform, not sure. But for now my Rating for it is = WBR for will be remembered! Fondly, I might add!
@RogerRoger 😂 I've ordered it. I highly doubt it will ever arrive but could be quite funny if it did.
Haha maybe they have used Must Buy, I'll have to step up my game! It's becoming unmanageable because I'm forgetting which ratings I've already used and I want them to all be unique.
I've done another game that stuck the landing and then some (review above). It's easily the best game I've played so far on this mission of mine and one of the best platformers I've ever played. Short sweet and difficult, but not unfairly so. It was a blast!
@ralphdibny Aww, that poor elephant! I wonder why it's so sad?
Great stuff, as always. You're really on some kinda quest to discover gaming's most esoteric relics! At least, whenever they do shut down the stores, you've been able to preserve this record. Bonus points for finding a legitimate use for the word "orifice" as well.
Also, if that Truck Racer game does arrive from Amazon, you're gonna need to persevere beyond its first championship, because I'll expect a full review. With screenshots.
"We want different things, Crosshair. That doesn't mean that we have to be enemies."
Squares (PS Vita) - a game where you have to touch blue squares on the touchscreen to turn them gray. Sometimes you have to touch a square twice if it has a darker blue border and sometimes you have to slide a square if it has an arrow. Unfortunately the time limits for these are ridiculously short. You can touch multiple squares at once to save time if you have the dexterity. It's kind of a twitch reflex puzzler. It's ok but far too difficult for me. Rating = ⬛
Draw Slasher (PS Vita) - meh, it's like a melee combat game but you have to slash the enemies in certain directions using the touchscreen. A bit like Skyward Sword, but y'know, without the amazing game that surrounds the combat. I used my handy Switch stylus from Brain Training to swipe my way through its 2-3 hour campaign. It's ok, a bit boring really. The characters are mildly amusing, I mean incredibly mildly. Maybe a short non committal huff for a laugh here and there. There's an old Sensei who speaks like Yoda. Rating = SSE for slash something else
Papers Please (PS Vita) - out of all the PS3/Vita games from PS Plus, this is the one I was looking forward to the most. I think I read a preview/review on this site a good while ago and I thought it sounded like a really good idea for a game. Many years later, I have finally given it a go.
As soon as you boot the game, the soundtrack both greets you and stops you in your tracks with its foreboding and perhaps cliché (for the setting) horn section bass line. It's good though, real good.
In an oppressive fictional Eastern European country, your ticket has been called in a "work lottery" and you have been assigned the role of border control. Your government has "graciously" given your family quarters in a squalid but conveniently local apartment. I say given, you still have to pay the rent.
You are handed a list of tasks to complete on your first day. Time is taken up by reading your instructions and completing the tasks and there isn't a lot of time in the day. You have to reject or grant entry to people crossing the border based on what seems like an insurmountable list of criteria. You get $5 per person you accept/reject and get $5 deducted for every mistake you make after the third mistake. It's not until the end of the day that you really feel the effect of your poor performance at these tasks, when you are handed a rudimentary budget screen that tells you the status of the extended family living under your roof and whether they are sick, hungry or cold. Rent is automatically taken off of your salary and you have to assign what's left of your money for food, heating or medicine, whatever you can afford.
In my brief time with the game, I met a few interesting characters that passed through border control. A cheeky chancer, a mysterious insurgent, government officials, colleagues and even diplomats from unfavourable nations all came through my booth. My game ended when I decided to give evidence of the mysterious insurgent to a government official and they executed me by firing squad for being associated with them. This was ending 3 of 20.
The game is unforgiving, as much as I would expect from doing a thankless task like that in a country where risk of execution is so high. It actually made me feel something, which is a rare thing for a game to do to me. Especially one with the bleakly pessimistic graphics to match its overall tone. A fatally high stress job plus a family represented by morbid statistics really got me in the feels for some reason, no doubt helped along by the deep brassy soundtrack.
I think this game is good. I am going to buy it but perhaps I will get it on Steam. I think the game might be easier with a mouse and a bigger screen to work with. For now I am going to move on and see what other PS Plus games may be worth a look. I only have 2 days left until my sub runs out! Rating = GBNMT for good but needs more time to be spent with it!
@RogerRoger haha I'm just on a quest to make some headway through this PS Plus backlog. Esoteric relic discovery is just a favourable byproduct! Also thanks and lol, every use of the word orifice is legitimate! Doesn't it just mean hole? 😅 I guess some orifices could be more NSFW than others haha
Haha nooo, not the crop a photo of my monitor PS3 screenshot method! In some ways it's actually a bit easier. Less steps involved. I think my time with Truck Racer is at an end. If one does arrive, it will go on eBay!
I think the sub is going on sale one day after mine runs out according to a recent Push Square article. I guess I must have bought my sub in that same sale last year! Well yeah, I'll probably get the sub again if it's £30 but I'll need a few days in-between so I can pick up the few PS3/generation exclusive games I have chosen from it. Just in case they shut down the stores during my next 12 month subscription!
Oh and I just want to say thanks again for reading the reviews! My one person audience for this niche content makes it worth writing 😅. I know that could sound a bit sarcastic so I should clarify that I genuinely mean it and probably wouldn't bother writing them if you weren't reading them lol
I should add something about a weird double feel that Papers Please gave me. It was that cheeky chancer. Every time he tipped up with no documents, blatantly forged (in crayon) documents and outdated documents, he really wound me up. Every second I take dealing with him is $5 less toward my family's subsistence.
At one point, I even tried to have him detained so he wouldn't bother me again. Also I would have got a $5 bribe from my colleague who gets paid a bonus for every person I detain, presumably hazard pay for the trauma from executing innocents. I felt bad but I needed that dollar. (Un?)fortunately, the game wouldn't let me detain him because I had no good reason to do anything other than reject his entry.
Eventually he did turn up with both the correct and legitimate documents and I let him through. A sigh of relief, the next day he wouldn't be back and my precious time wouldn't be wasted. He was so happy to be granted entry, he gave me a cheap worthless token as a sign of thanks. It was a souvenir from his country. Boy, did I feel bad for the way I had treated him and thought about him. But it also gave me a brief sense of abandonless optimism and happiness for the chappy. Until I abandoned it and got back to work.
Yeah, just thought I'd share because it was a powerful process of emotion that the game put me through. I found it interesting!
@ralphdibny You're welcome, and I get your meaning, don't worry! But know that, for every person who replies to a post around here, there are a dozen or so lurkers who've also read it, so nothing's ever wasted. I wish I could reply to everybody's posts every day!
Don't put Truck Racer on eBay! That's where I'd probably end up buying it from!!
Papers, Please is a game I've watched others play, and am reluctant to play myself, because I have a horrible feeling that it'd trigger my anxiety in all the ways it was probably designed to. Your experience with it echoes a lot of what I've seen and heard elsewhere; a series of subtle gut-punches that creep up on you during a seemingly-mundane minigame, leading to impossible decisions and one of a handful of bleak, dystopian outcomes. I find the concept fascinating, but I'm absolutely terrified by its potential effect on me. If you ever do pick up the full game on Steam and see the other nineteen endings, it'll be interesting to read your thoughts about them. I'm oddly curious to know if you can actually "win" the game (whatever "winning" might look like in such a nightmarish regime, at any rate).
Ah, that's the Days of Play sale coming up, isn't it? Darn it, I recently paid full whack to subscribe for another twelve months. I should've waited. Maybe I'll top up regardless, sync the dates.
"We want different things, Crosshair. That doesn't mean that we have to be enemies."
@ralphdibny Just to add some validation to what @RogerRoger says, I’ve been following your posts and your entertaining review code. 😄
Papers, please was one of the few games you’ve been trying out that I’ve actually played. I can say there is definitely a depressing mood to the whole thing, but I remember it to be an good experience. I agree that mouse and keyboard might be easier, as the latter stages can get pretty hard while trying to click around the screen under a timeline. It’s a game that I don’t know if I’ll ever play again, but I’m glad to have experienced it.
The game does make you ask yourself difficult questions and challenges your moral code, which I appreciate, although only have the mental energy to do every once and a while.
By the way, the token is important in that it’s tied to game trophies, I believe.
@RogerRoger yeah I suppose your right! It's weird, especially in the case of VVVVVV which was made buy a person who preferred the smaller scale of indie development and Papers, Please which was made by somebody who left naughty dog after Uncharted 2 and went indie after that; well I hope, even if it's not financially viable, that the quality of these games and the fact that people such as myself are still discovering them years later really vindicates their approach to game development.
I think "subtle gut punches" sums it up perfectly. I am actually really glad that I couldn't "complete" the game in the short time I have because it would have thrown up the question of whether I should buy it or not. As it stands, I can buy it and take my time with it. I think "winning" in dystopian fiction is usually a complete breakdown of the status quo with a hopeful ambiguity to the ending, but yeah, would be interesting to see if Papers, Please features such an ending! Somehow I doubt it 😅
Would the PS Plus sync? Wouldn't it just stack on top so your renewal date would be 12 months from your current renewal date anyway? Probs worth doing it anyway, especially as you have a PS5. I just find it too stressful, I know it's only £30 but I still like to get my money's worth. I think I need to generally care less 😅.
Don't worry about paying scalpers prices for Truck Racer on eBay, it will probably still be up for pre-order at Amazon 😂
@Th3solution ahh cheers!!! Yeah I did unlock a trophy for getting the token! I wonder if the positive trophy "bing" sound had any impact on my brief elation.
I think that's exactly it regarding the moral code, how under pressure you can treat people like garbage because of how it affects your own bottom line. I sort of had an incline that the "right" thing to do would be to not grass up the insurgent to the feds but I really felt compelled to keep my head down and do the state approved "right" thing just so I could keep my family safe and fed.
Obviously I ended up with a bullet in my head for being a government lapdog! Never again!
Just wanted to pipe up and say I've been enjoying these mini reviews off you too @ralphdibny! I haven't had the time to properly look over the stuff in the review thread but these have been a fun little treat to read amidst work... Keep it up!
Previously known as Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy
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"You don't have to save the world to find meaning in life. Sometimes all you need is something simple, like someone to take care of"
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