Be Excellent To Each Other

Plodding through Tunic on Steam Deck. It’s lovely, great art, some clever game design. The boss fights are a bit grindy, though

Astro Bot (PS5) this game is an absolutely joy filled masterpiece

Antstream has launched on PSN so I'm playing that. It's quite weird playing Manic Miner and Quazatron on a PS5.

Pretty decent service overall though.

Star Wars Outlaws is keeping me entertained. It’s got a horrible stealth mission early on that annoyed me but it’s opened up nicely now.
The gameplay is good and the look and feel of a real world is spot on

Nice to know its finally out , I do like the challenges / high score tables on it
I don't see a 'blucey' on there if you want to post your ID (Mines is just Zaphod79)

Cult of the Lamb - it's getting good, quickly. I really enjoy it.

Hitting a wall with two bosses in Elden Ring DLC...

A 'hippo' and a tree.

will do. I'm squiddycr4 as it makes you use your PSN name (even though I previously had my own Antstream account that I used on PC for a week or so).

I have a paid antstream account on PC (well Mac) , but it wont let me link on PSN and wants me to pay for a years sub on there as well :-)

FYI on the PC side you show up as Squiddycr4 (PSN) , but I can still follow you and send you challenges , you'll win both of the ones I've sent since my controller doesn't seem to want to connect :-)

There's a trophy for winning 50 challenges so I'll appreciate the easy 2. Who knows though. If it's Burger Time, I've lost!

Hippo dead!

Some of the missions were horrid. I have sunk about 50 hours into it.

I'm "helping" with a Star dew Valley run through. There always seems to be so much left to do but by the time you grid for the conditions to meet a quest it's almost not enough of a reward

I fixed my problem which was the main Antstream application was out of date and had not automatically updated so did yours and sent you a few more challenges last night - i do like the challege section of it and there are some nice modes with modifiers

Since you called out Burgertime there has to be one of those and one mode is just a score challenge for one level , your invulnerable (so can just run through the enemies) but its all about getting the maximum amount of points in the time available.

Annoyingly it freaked out when I accepted your Burgertime challenge and now I can't actually accept it properly.

First time playing Splat. Bloody hell that's a rough challenge! The controls weren't very tight on that one. Streaming didn't help.

I'm AWFUL at Nebulus on any format!

You'll find it will just eventually time out a challenge and it will vanish from your view.

Splat! is a game i never played when it came out but stumbled over it playing retro games and love it - you should have a few more now and i'm still getting games with non working controllers (Rally-X just did that to me where it just wont turn / move)

Thanks for the challenges, Zaph. I'm enjoying doing them. That Lunar Rescue is a prick!

It’s nice revisiting OG areas of Elden Ring with new weapons from the DLC.

I found a really horrible holy man.

Really, really, enjoying it now. It's like Animal Crossing with ritual sacrifice.

I feel bad for winning the Metal Slug one but i did realise that its how long you can stay alive and if you just stand still at the start nothing will hit you so the timer runs out.
The high scores on there are from people clearing the level and going further on but if you just start / not move at all you'll get 360odd seconds survived when the timer runs out :-)

Feel free to keep sending challenges my way.

Man, it's weird playing C64 stuff.

I've got myself Antstream!

I signed up for a year for £12 on a special deal and so far, it's alright. Anyway, can you add me as a friend? I'm 'RossoftheRobots' on there.

will do. I'm squiddycr4

I've added you , and will send you some challenges and now i need to practice the one I sent to Blucey yesterday as a joke again (its how fast with 1 life can you do the 9th key pattern on Pac-Man)

yeah I'm going to fail to complete that 100% of the time!

I used to have the pattern memorised for the later levels of Pac-Man but it's been so long, I wouldn't know where to start... Also, the tiny bit of lag doesn't seem to help either as I can't get the one pattern I do know to work.

Yeah the lag is what makes it difficult , I played about 20 minutes yesterday and then starting consistantly getting throught it so sent the challenge to Blucey with a score - I tried once this morning but then failed when I sent it to you :-)

You should have a few challenges from me to get started with

I was really interested in the whole Pac-Man perfect game thing. On the PSN port of Pac-Man there's this trophy.

"Om Nom Nom
Eat 2 fruits and all four ghosts in succession four times in a single round!"

And that was a major ball-ache! So when I heard about the "Perfect Pac-Man Game" I was sort of blown away by the idea of someone getting every ghost and every fruit across the whole game. I met Jon Stoodley who was like the 8th guy to ever do it and I'd actually pitched to Retro Gamer about doing a feature on it (pitching to RG is just about the most pointless thing ever as they always say no and then just do the article a year later anyway).

But anyway, Jon's approach was mad. He'd only ever do it at a live event on a real cabinet. So his opportunity to achieve it was already limited. Also, unlike all the other players, he didn't use the patterns (I think there are three that'll sort you for the whole thing). He did it all freehand so to speak.

Watching him play was unreal. It's incredible to watch that level of play.

Obviously after a few levels, eating ghosts becomes impossible as the blue pills don't make them vulnerable and instead just change their direction but even so the whole thing is mad. Especially when you factor in having to negotiate the 256th level where you can't actually see anything.

Yeah Perfect game and kill screen is fascinating , even down to why it actually happens a number of these early 80's games just get too confused when 8-bit counters clock back round to zero , Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong JR kill you because of a timer glitch , Asteroids gets really confused trying to draw too many lives on the top of the screen , Missile command also has a weird level where it tries to draw too many bases , etc etc

FYI here's a good blog post (from Tony Temple who is one of the high scorers on Missle Command) about Jon Stoodley and his perfect game :

https://arcadeblogger.com/2015/08/23/pa ... fect-game/

I’m playing the new Zelda, but I keep on getting stuck. Not just due to lack of skill, but due to lack of skill AND imagination.

I’m also playing the Happy Birthdays game I mentioned on a couple of other threads. I don’t want to boast, but I got from a primordial soup to modern humans in 1.5 million years. Take that, Mother Nature/God.

Every now and then I reinstall Brotato on my PS5 and it means I stop getting any of my reviews done in time.

I think it's possibly the greatest game ever made.

Been playing World War Z in co-op. No-one plays online anymore but I still have a co-op buddy on PSN and we just work our way through anything that supports it.

WWZ is pretty good. Lots of hordes but it's not as soul crushingly faffy as L4D was. It's a bit ropey, looking like an older PC game, and it does that thing where you unlock upgrades but they're all blaverage. But it's fun enough.

Axiom Verge was on the Switch store for cheaps ($6.75) and I've been really into it. I'm pretty sure it's labelled as one of those 'Metroidvania' games..... was never really into Metroid, but there were a couple of Castlevania games on the DS that I really super enjoyed.

I did fall into the 'look at a walkthrough/guide just the once' trap, and have ended up using it more than I feel I really should.

Fuck it, I'm just mostly following the walkthrough now, I can't be bothered to try and remember where things are when I have to backtrack to do the 'clear the previously impassable obstacle with your new-found ability'. It's still a good game and I'm enjoying it, I keep picking it up to play.

But as a criticism, the 'areas' are a bit bland and not all that memorable so without the guide there would be a lot of aimless wandering around and also a lot of the weapons or secrets would be easily missed.

If you still have a hankering for a metroidvania after this, the one I've enjoyed the most is Yoku's Island Express. Metroid via pinball in a delightful tropical setting. Challenging in parts, but on the whole relatively chill.

Sounds like a nice game, but I don't think I want any Metroidvania style games for a while.

Come to think of it, the last game I played like this was Guacamelee 2 (couple of years back).

It turns out that I had a bunch of unplayed challenges on Antstream. They didn't show up in my 'messages' bit but were in another sub menu somewhere. The Antstream interface on PS5 is absolutely abysmal.

Anyway, Zaph, I've finally played some of yours. You've got me started playing Mappy at least.

Zaph, Antstream hates it when you send me that one challenge for Burger Time. It never works! I've tried to send the same one back to you.

That worked :-)

We just recently received all of the stuff that we had previously been storing in the UK (but had to ship over here cos Lady T's dad sold their family home, where we were keeping it).

The N64 was in there, and it still works. Although running through an RF connection into a 65 inch TV gives quite a different experience to the 28" CRT that it was plugged into back in the day. The kids and I have been playing, you guessed it, Goldeneye. Even though we have it on the Switch through the Nintendo online expansion pak thingy. There's just something they really dig about this old hardware with the funny big cartridges and the strange-to-them controllers. They haven't really mentioned anything about the wires, which I am surprised about.

That is because the N64 is awesome!

It does feel very much like an old friend that I haven't seen for a while. And I still find the official ninty controller to be quite OK. I never really related to the hate it got/gets (except for the shitty MadCatz controller that we also ended up with - fucking MadCatz).

I review a lot of little indie games and so I don't tend to play many full games for fun. Thing is, I really struggle with them. Case in point Ghostwire Tokyo. It's okay but it's complicated, faffy, slow and repetitive. Why do all full price games ultimately feel like AssCreed or Far Cry or something?

Have started Dead Island 2 though and that's okay for now. Playing it with my co-op buddy.

Rise of the Golden Idol is amazing! Only one thing that I've struggled with so far, everything else is straightforward to deduce if you're paying attention! Even this was, really, the only thing that stopped me from getting it was just that

I'm currently reviewing a genuinely interesting game at the moment. It's called Among Ashes and the idea is that you're a guy in 2001 who is chatting to a friend on MSN Messenger (sort of) and he sends you a link to a horror game that you start playing. It's essentially Resident Evil complete with primitive 3D visuals. It's not great but it's playable enough and once you settle into it it's reasonably effective in terms of getting that creepy feeling.

The thing is, the game is cursed and eventually elements from it start mixing in with your real environment. So whenever you hit a dead end, you might need to walk around your flat.

The really cool thing is that at least three times the game has appeared to be bugged but then you'll be sent a link to a forum or a news article that'll help you push forward. I fell for that a few times, thinking the game was bugged (even reaching out to the developer) before the solution became apparent. It's fantastic when that all happens, you really feel like you're playing across two realities and it's so effective.

The only downsides are a very annoying maze chase with an unkillable monster and, more seriously, an actual bug that has stopped me finishing the game which will apparently be patched out today. That's the weird thing about games on consoles, they so often port across with existing PC bugs. Hopefully that does sort things as I'm keen to see the ending.

The only game I've ever played that managed to pull that off in the past was Eternal Darkness on the Gamecube , it really got that crossing reality stuff working so well with corrupt save messages / reboots (that were faked) , the volume bar on your TV going up and down (when your TV did have that exact same green bar)

I've stuck it onto my wishlist and will keep an eye out for it.

The patch dropped this morning and so I was able to finish the game. I mentioned Eternal Darkness in the review actually and yeah it's definitely cut from the same cloth. It's funny because it manipulates the player in the game and then manipulates you as the player of the game. There's like three layers to it all. It's very very cool. I'd avoid reviews and just experience it cold if you can.

Just started the new Indiana Jones game on the XBox. It looks lovely so far, but I've only had time to do the intro section.
I'm not a huge fan of the films, so we'll see how much it relies on nostalgia and fandom.

Anno 1800 - you build an industrial empire and a private army