Topic: Games you've recently beat

Finished Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I just have an NG+ left for the platinum, which I have already immediately jumped into.

I will say, the game is fantastic. Really what I was looking for right now. A really fun distraction with addictive gameplay and a pretty decent story. Fresh characters, fun new powers to play with, and that Sony first party sheen to the whole package.

If I had any complaints they are minor —
Some of the voice acting falls flat. Overall I warmed up to Miles’s VA but some of the line delivery felt a little corny at first. Same for Ganke (sp?) and Finn.
Also, there was more than once where I got slightly frustrated at the controls. The worst offender was crawling on walls, where suddenly perspective shifts made pushing the left stick up made Miles move inexplicably downward, or vice versa. Really weird. And occasionally the web shooting wouldn’t respond as quickly or accurately as I remember the first game doing. But perhaps I am just looking back through rose-tinted glasses.

But actually overall, I think I liked this game better than the original. I liked playing as the nerdy teenager trying to figure things out, as opposed to the older Peter with his all too familiar feeling young adult life problems. But most of all, the venom powers are much more fun to play with than the traditional Spidey arsenal. It makes me worried that Spider-Man 2 might feel bland by comparison, but we’ll see.

@Th3solution yeah I enjoyed it a fair bit more than the original too. Great little game fair play

@Th3solution NG+ can be done really quickly too as you can unlock the final things easily enough and just fly through the main story.

I thought it was a nice length but there is a lot of side content, although very little of it ever felt like filler.

@Th3solution Don't forget Spider-man 2 will also feature Miles Morales too we can assume, if the teaser trailer is anything to go by.

@Thrillho If I complete it, this might just be the first NG+ that I ever finish; not being a fan of replaying games very often. The short length of MM is going to make it less of a chore. And honestly, the game is still fun for me, although I am skipping all the cinematics that I’m allowed.

@JohnnyShoulder Oh yeah, that’s true. Hopefully flipping back and forth between power sets isn’t too confusing. I wonder if we’ll also get Spider-Gwen, etc.

Epic Chef PS4

@Anti-Matter It seems you got your money’s worth out of that one

How did you do from a trophy point of view after all that time with the game?

@Thrillho
Oh, actually I finished the storyline of Epic Chef PS4 yesterday. It took 3 weeks to finish the game. I played my PS4 games not for trophies since I don't care what achievements I got but I saw I have unlocked a lot of trophies on my playing record.

Just wrapped up Yakuza Like a Dragon this evening. It was bloody good in the end. I was getting a bit bore around around the 20-30 hour mark but I'm glad I stuck it out because it picked up toward the end and the last few chapters were really good.

That's all the Yakuza games on game pass done now. Going to take a break from the series before I go and mop up the spin offs later in the year.

I have about 16 days left on my PS Plus subscription 🤔. Bioshock 2 is next for me as I voted for it in the game club but I am not sure if I might try and plough through some more games off the PS Plus list. I really really don't think I am going to renew this time. I just want to be subscription free and not have to worry about end dates. Ps plus goes in 2 weeks and game pass finishes in August. Looking forward to being free!

@ralphdibny I know what you mean about subscriptions, my uni money’s running out since I’m graduating in November and unless I find a job very soon, I’ll need to cancel them all!

@Anti-Matter Cool. It just seemed you’d spent a good amount of time with the game so I wondered how you might have done with the trophies. I can imagine that game might have you do some quite weird man’s specific things to get them all! Do you know what game is next for you now?

@ralphdibny Good to hear you (mostly) enjoyed LaD as I still have that one to go. How did you find the new combat mechanics?

I know im soooo late on this, but i just finished RE 7 main story 2 nights ago, and now i started playing the "not a Hero" dlc. (where the hell can i find the night vision thing ?!)
On a different note i also finished playing the story chapters of RDR2 (still didn't play the 2 epilogue chapters yet as i can't imagine the game without Arthur - Rip Mr. Morgan)

@Thrillho
Okay, after finishing Epic Chef PS4, I continue my progress of Dodgeball Academia PS4.
Currently my team have reached level 20 in Episode 3 and I saved my last position inside school toilet to exploit $15.00 from a boy student which you can challenge him anytime to get instant $15.00 as the reward. 😁

@nessisonett ahh im sure you will find a job! There seems to be an abundance of jobs in coding if that's what you want to do. Very well paid if you go for some of the big corps/banks in London

What subs do you have at the moment then? I think GPU is quite cheap if you do the Gold->GPU conversion at like £40+change/year - certainly better than the £130 you pay if you do it in the normal way. PS Plus was just about cheap enough for me to bite at £30/year during the days of play sale and it's mainly so I can play existing plus games but they just keep adding more 😭. May have to cut my losses this year as I doubt they will do the discount again with the big launch happening. NSO is a bit of a joke (as is Plus "essential" and Gold) but still fairly cheap at ~£15/year at shopto. The only reason I have NSO at the moment is so I can buy those N64 controllers if/when they get some in stock. It's so annoying that I bought the sub just for the controllers and they sold out as soon as I put in the code. I literally haven't used the sub for anything else.

@Thrillho They're OK. I had to put my RPG hat on a bit, especially for the later battles. I don't really play turn based RPGs that much to be honest but I was casting accuracy and defense debuffs like nobodies business in the second to last fight. Also summons and healing spells. It did get a bit tedious and I suppose toward the end it was basically just 3 characters supporting 1 character that had a really powerful spell which probably goes to show how unbalanced I'd let my team get. I can't say if it was more or less tedious than the fights in the older games, there is still a lot of them and they still go on for a long time. I'd say you do have to do the two main dungeons for at least a second time to grind, as well as a 30 fight colloseum thing to level up just to be good enough for the final chapters. But it's not that bad compared to some other games I've seen/played.

I just try and sort of remember that Yakuza 0 did drag in places and I consider that to be probably the second best game in the series (after 5).

Not sure where I'd place Like a Dragon in my ranking, maybe like tied with Yakuza 4 in third place? Then Kiwami 2 and 3 in fourth place, 6 in 5th place and and Kiwami 1 in last place. 4 is so linked to 5 that it's hard to rank it differently but 5 is definitely a better game but it wouldn't be as impactful if you hadn't played 4 before it.

@ralphdibny I agree Lad can get a bit tedious with the battles. But the good thing for me was the autobattle function the moments I felt the battles got to repetitive. I pressed the button and went to read some news in between or something haha. Also the humor in the weapons, the skill names and the skills themselves did make it so it wasn't that bad.

@ralphdibny I’ve already cancelled Game Pass but I currently have PS+, PS Now and NSO plus the expansion pass. And then all the tv streaming subs and Spotify! I’ll just need to see where things stand once we find out anything at all about these new tiers of PS+.

@ralphdibny @Lavalera With Judgment, getting the PS5 upgrade gives you a load of ridiculously overpowered combat items (that I didn’t even realise I had until near the end).

So when I kept running into battles, I could just rain down lightning and wipe the mob out rather than have another tedious fight.

It seems to be a problem they haven’t really addressed in any of their games.

@Thrillho yeah it was the same on the Xbox version, they went a bit overboard with the free elixirs this time. It's fine if they give you like 1 or 2 as a bonus or as a sample of elixirs you can make in the game, but using those in battles made stuff to easy. Luckily it isn't that bad in Lost judgment. I had the ultimate edition which includes the detective essentials pack. That one was mostly cosmetic stuff with only a few elixirs. So they learned from it in Lost judgment at least

Papers, Please (played on PC, but it's also available on PS Vita). The game centres around someone working at the border of a country. They've got to inspect the passports and documents of those trying to enter the country, and either allow them through or deny entry if there's a problem with the paperwork. It takes place in the fictional country of Arstotzka, though it does have a dystopian soviet bloc feel to it.

The gameplay starts simple at first, requiring the player to simply check that the passports are in order. But things gradually get more and more complex as extra rules and paperwork is added. The art is to find the balance between fast and accurate. The player earns more money from serving more people, but is penalised for any mistakes. The first time around I was barely making enough money to survive, but on later playthroughs I'd gotten quite good at it.

Where this game excels is all the little things that make it feel special. It takes place inside the immigration officer's booth, where there's a desk for rearranging all the various papers, but there's also a wall for hanging decorations on. The boss may even get angry if you display things that he hasn't approved. And it also shows outside the booth, visualising the guards along with a very long queue of people waiting to enter. There's some scripted events that happen outside, as well as some oddball characters trying to enter Arstozka. There's different endings depending on what happens.

It's not normally a type of game that I'd consider playing, but I'd seen clips of streamers playing parts of it, and that made me want to try it out for myself. I ended up getting hooked and really enjoying it.

@crimsontadpoles I also enjoyed Papers, please for what it was, which is an innovative and thought provoking indie title. I really appreciate these unique smaller games. They serve as good palate cleansers, but also often go to new places thematically.