Finally finished Okami HD on the switch. I've been playing on and off for a couple of months. I love the art style, the water colour cel-shaded art and the general aesthetic throughout the game. The music is also fantastic, particularly the early game. The writing is largely excellent with some decent humorous interludes but some of the narrative from a key protagonist gets to be a pain in the arse! The gameplay and level design are a mixed bag, some of the dungeons and bosses are brilliant but long before the end of the game the majority of the routine goons and world traversal become a bit dull. The game is too long, I cant help bur think it would have been better if it was 10 hrs shorter!! Overall i enjoyed the game but i really find it hard one to recommend to others. Given how old the game is, its aged well but its design is showing its age and some of the repetition feels unnecessary.
@Ralizah great review, cant wait to try it out after I finish bastion! Did you play the new levels they released and if so, did they just integrate these into the 8 chapters?
@R1spam No. Chapter 9 is supposed to have some of the hardest challenges in the game and take multiple hours to complete, so I'd like to get to it after going back and trying out the C-sides for each level at some point.
@R1Spam I played Okami HD last year. Beautiful game, absolutely gorgeous, but you're right it's so bloody long! It's like Return of the King, there are about three bits where you think 'right here we go, this is ending now'.
Good job, Parappa. You can go on to the next stage now.
Celeste is one of many games on my radar that I'm sure I'd enjoy but don't think I'll ever get around to playing but that does make me want to add it to the ever expanded backlog..
Thanks It'll be a challenge for games on older consoles, but for PS4/Switch/PC/Vita games, there's no real reason not to include them. It's always fun to actually physically see what the game in question that is being reviewed looks like.
Honestly, even a month ago, I wasn't planning on playing Celeste any time soon either. It was just one of those "one day" sorta games. But it won't on sale for a price I've been holding out for since launch ($10), so I thought: "Why the heck not!" and bought it. Initially, I was intending to wait and make this the first game I played on my Switch Lite, but my curiosity got the better of me, and that clearly didn't happen.
I don't think it's some sort of modern classic of the genre like some people do, but it's well worth picking up, on sale or at the normal asking price.
@Ralizah Wonderful and entertaining review to read, as always. I don’t really have much interest in Celeste since I’m not much of a platformer fan, but I’ll bank it in my memory in case I get the urge.
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I finally put Marvel’s Spider-Man out of its misery. Completed the story and 100%’ed the map. So much has been said about it I really won’t report more. @mookysam said it all the other day much better than I could have.
Interestingly, although I’m glad to have finished the game, and I feel like the length was just about right, I find that I am craving more open world icon chasing. My plan had been to continue to work on my Valkyria Chronicles 4 playthrough (I’m finishing up chapter 7, at about 20 hours in - I figure I’m about 1/3 of the way through the game), and then add a completely different type of game as my other game to rotate in with it. But I find myself considering another open world game to replace Spider-Man. I’ll let the dust settle a little bit and see what strikes my fancy.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@Ralizah yeah issun's busty lady routine completely wore thin, and I don't think I would have thought differently of I had played it at launch! Also wearing how he spells somethings out to the nth degree, leave some player agency. I've only ever played botw so would love to give an older zelda game a go sometime. I played mostly in handheld, though there are sections where the touchscreen didn't feel precise enough (like the susano power slash sections) and I used my pro controller in table top mode. @Gremio108 great analogy!! I remember reading the book and being like, they've thrown the ring in the bloody volcano, why is there still a 150 pages left?!
@Th3solution I love it when that happens; when you finish a game and you think it was just right, yet you're craving more of the same. Gaming can come and go from my focus at times, and long stretches of playing nothing (or very little) can make me doubt my choice of pastime. Getting back into the zone like that can be so satisfying. Here's hoping you find something to scratch your itch!
"We want different things, Crosshair. That doesn't mean that we have to be enemies."
I'll admit all the praise I've heard for Celeste before yours is typically "best game evarrrrrr" which just seems to rub me the wrong way nowadays after all the hype I've heard for various games over the years that I didn't end up enjoying... So it's nice to hear yours being much more reserved but still very positive too.
Also that pixel artwork is rather naff... All over to me but the characters do look especially rough
The tracks you chose from the soundtrack are quite nice on the other hand!
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"
@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Yeah, I usually steer clear of almost anything that's generating such ridiculous levels of (usually undeserved) hype and praise. Humans are herd animals by nature, so they're more likely to exalt or pile on a game when they see a lot of their peers doing the same. And, to be honest, the sprite work put me off the game for a long time.
The artwork for the environments on a pure design level isn't great, but the fantastic use of color helps to redeem them to some degree. But, yeah, the character sprites are pure garbo. I initially wasn't a huge fan of the artstyle employed in the character portraits, either, as it struck me as a bit Tumblr-ish, but it grew on me.
Yeah, the music is uncharacteristically good for the type of game it is.
The music in the B-sides is often, unfortunately, much more chiptuney and can get a bit grating due to the fact that those levels get quite long (up to an hour for some of them, in my case) and the music tends to stay the same throughout.
@Ralizah I find that especially with Metroidvania type games, that the music begins to grate when you are stuck in any one area, as the ones I've played that all have the same music that play for the different areas. I loved Axiom Verge but hated the music by the end!
Life is more fun when you help people succeed, instead of wishing them to fail.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
I finally got around to finishing Tearaway Unfolded. The final couple of levels are completely bonkers, and I would hugely recommend this game to anyone who has any affinity with the Playstation. You'll see what I mean when you get near the end of the game.
Good job, Parappa. You can go on to the next stage now.
@Gremio108 I didn't really care for the drawing on the touch pad, I found it too fiddly. I got quite far but could never get past a section when you had to draw something (it escapes me what thst was). Apart from that it is a really fun game. I liked how your drawings appear in the game such as flags and trees, which no thought was a nice touch.
Life is more fun when you help people succeed, instead of wishing them to fail.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
Original Release: March 26, 2002 / GameCube, PC and Xbox
Re-Release: September 24, 2019 / PS4 (version played) and Switch
When you see a licenced game from one of the world's biggest entertainment franchises being sold for £7.99 at launch, you get a little nervous. Earlier this year, IO Interactive put remasters of two old Hitman games on PSN for fifty quid (and got away with it) and so, when the beloved Star Wars: Jedi Knight II - Jedi Outcast popped up for such a comparatively low price the other day, I was both pleasantly surprised and cautiously suspicious. This is Star Wars we're talking about; surely Disney could've charged full whack and nobody would've batted an eyelid, right?
Turns out, my mixed reactions to the price were pre-empting my mixed reactions to the game itself, not to mention the quality of its latest port. Jedi Outcast is an excellent, nostalgic Star Wars adventure but its also a frustrating, lazy exercise in mediocrity. Playing it on console was a preferable choice for me but, after watching its badly-compressed cutscenes stretched across my 4K television, I'm not entirely convinced it was the right one. That being said, it wouldn't really have mattered which version of the game I picked; there would still have been moments of intense, fiddly rage lying in wait around its otherwise-enjoyable corners.
Perhaps some of that is down to the weight I carried with me to the title screen. When I was a kid, before I got my PSone, we had a low-powered PC and a copy of Star Wars: Dark Forces II - Jedi Knight which barely ran on it. I played that game obsessively, learnt it inside and out, before Sony managed to tempt me away with a DualShock. Its live-action cutscenes were as important to me as the Star Wars films themselves, its levels eventually becoming well-known playgrounds in which I leapt about, making enemies cower at my mastery of the Force.
Waiting seventeen years to play its sequel was probably, in hindsight, a mistake. Jedi Outcast does away with the live-action cutscenes and therefore, despite improving the in-game graphics rather considerably over its predecessor, I struggled to connect with its continuation of Kyle Katarn's story. Especially since today, those graphical improvements look every frame the janky nonsense they've become.
Hardly the Second Coming: Without a live-action Kyle Katarn to sell them, big events like these look almost comical by today's standards.
Although it isn't all bad. Whilst the overall story falls flat (no need for a synopsis; just think of the most basic, straightforward good-versus-evil yarn and you've pretty much got it) the moments of fan service peppered throughout are very welcome. You'll visit a couple famous places, including the Jedi Temple on Yavin IV and the Cloud City of Bespin, all packed with little details to notice and appreciate. If you lay low upon entering a new area, Stormtroopers will chat amongst themselves, their incidental dialogue always unique and often witty. All of the gun-based weapons feel authentic, even those invented for the purposes of the game; nothing is overpowered, and none of them would look out-of-place being wielded in one of the films... and, getting back to the story, Luke Skywalker ends up being a relatively major player in certain events, as does Lando Calrissian. The former's soundalike always sounds like a soundalike, which is a shame, especially since the latter has Billy Dee Williams back in the role. As always, he knocks his performance out of the park. Getting to team up with Lando, the actual Lando, is a genuine treat (no matter how blocky his character model looks).
Permission to Lando: He may not look like much, but he's got it where it counts.
But it all rushes towards a predictable conclusion that feels a little compressed in places. After some solid, if somewhat samey, jaunts to various military facilities you'll arrive back where it all began for a rushed sequence of "Hey, we forgot to include this, quick!" levels. Suddenly, Kyle's stomping around in an AT-ST before hopping out and traversing a puzzle-filled, trap-laden temple straight out of Lara Croft's passport. It's a little jarring, and not particularly subtle; then again, a lot of the subtlety I loved about the previous game is missing overall. For example, you're no longer given a choice regarding Kyle's path. Jedi Outcast simply gives you every type of Force power (Dark, Light and Neutral) at random intervals, with no penalty for shocking or choking folks and no reward for non-lethal takedowns. You can even kill innocents if you like. Luke doesn't seem to mind.
Corners have been cut elsewhere, too. Released at a time when licenced games often got their own, brand new and unique soundtracks, hearing nothing but looped snippets of music lifted directly from the iconic original trilogy can get a little stale. There's also a heck of a lot of character model recycling going on; perhaps not the biggest crime when facing hoards of identikit Stormtroopers, but when dozens of droids found in multiple locations look exactly like See-Threepio and Artoo-Detoo, you're just begging for unnecessary confusion.
Attack of the Clones: These aren't the droids you think they are. You can go about your business.
In fact, some of those multiple locations can also blend together a bit and, in some areas, this issue can go beyond mere aesthetics, instead becoming a hindrance to gameplay progress. One level in particular, a taxing sniper-riddled alley on Nar Shaddaa, is constructed so poorly from random off-cuts of geometry that stumbling through it felt as though I were glitching my way to victory... but no, apparently balancing on edges barely a pixel wide is the correct route. I mean, there's being an acrobatic Jedi, and then there's taking the pee-pee.
Perhaps this is evocative of a bygone age, a time when games were allowed to be a little tricky, but the bizarre overall difficulty curve of Jedi Outcast makes me doubt that. After a first act so challenging, so fraught with old-school FPS trial-and-error, Kyle regains his lightsaber and starts to be granted that aforementioned smorgasbord of Force powers; suddenly, we're off to the races. Now he can deflect almost any incoming fire, and a quick invisible push can flatten the vast majority of his foes, but there's comparatively little escalation of danger to accompany this newfound God Mode. New enemy types crop up infrequently, usually seconds after you've been given the means to obliterate them, and so your only late-game deaths will be cheap ones, either thanks to the infuriatingly-slippery platforming or an unlucky slice from a Reborn's laser sword. Everything just becomes too easy, but not in a natural or narrative way... no, it's more of a "we give up, just get it done" kind of way.
The Force Awakens? More like the Force needs five more minutes but don't worry, Kyle won't take as many naps in the second half of the game.
If this port hadn't been half-heartedly shrugged onto PSN, then perhaps that first, Force-less act wouldn't have felt so at odds with the rest of the game's difficulty. Playing a digital release, I was oblivious to many things I can only assume would've been explained in a nice, physical manual back in the day; for example, there are glowing shield and ammo regeneration stations which I initially dismissed as neat bits of recurring environment art (until I accidentally walked into one whilst pushing square). Returning fans might've recoiled at some new tooltips or a hint system, but we newcomers sure would've appreciated them, just as I'm pretty certain those same returning fans would've appreciated the option to invert their controls at launch. That being said, given the alarming number of weird and wonderful animation bugs I encountered, maybe time could be better spent getting the gosh-darn game to work properly in the first place.
Two Plus Two is Force: Yes, that is indeed Luke Skywalker fighting a purple anthropomorphic dinosaur and no, its name is not 'Darth Barney'.
So yeah, actually, I get it now. I understand why Disney didn't try and put a higher price tag on this remaster because, as it stands, Jedi Outcast on PS4 is worth about a tenner... heck, lazy port or not, I reckon playing Jedi Outcast for the first time today, on any system, should probably cost you half that. Like so much of Star Wars, its adoration is sustained by nostalgia. Try coming to it once you've grown up a little, once we've all moved on, and it's a tough sell.
The Force might always be with you, but I reckon it's got to be your specific bit of Force.
And frankly, Jedi Outcast is not mine.
"We want different things, Crosshair. That doesn't mean that we have to be enemies."
@Th3solution And my thanks to you, too; you're right, Lando isn't the worst offender in the game, but when you (unfairly) compare him to his most recent digital incarnation...
...you see how jarring it can be.
Unfortunately, I can't get hyped about Jedi Fallen Order, no. I was, until I realised that it's released on Friday, November 15 and yet I'm leaving the country on Sunday, November 17 for six days. So I'll be picking up my pre-order, sitting on my hands for a day, then trying not to think about it whilst pining for home... at least, by the time I get back, any launch bugs will likely be patched.
In the meantime, I'm gonna avoid Star Wars games. I'll likely play the new Hitman 2 content first, before finally getting around to inFAMOUS 2.
"We want different things, Crosshair. That doesn't mean that we have to be enemies."
@RogerRoger Wow, that is jarring. 😅 Yeah the newer one is spot on.
I have been lukewarm (no pun intended) toward any new Star Wars games, but I’m liking Titanfall 2 so much, I’m now kind of excited to see what Respawn has done with Jedi Fallen Order. ....I’ve got a good feeling about it [said with a smirk 😏 ] Not sure if I’ll buy it day 1 with my backlog being as crushing as it is, but we’ll see. I might not be able to wait. Not to mention it may depend if I decide to pick up Death Stranding or not. I also want to play Concrete Genie. I can’t see myself buying more than one new release the rest of the year, but I’ve foolishly said that before. That’s how my backlog got this big in the first place!
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
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