Be Excellent To Each Other

1) The Forest (PC)

It's still early access but it's still quite polished and with minimal bugs. There were a few times when, say, textures at a distance didn't load in but a restart sorted it out.

The ending was added in only about 3-odd weeks ago and the end game was pretty impressive. The ending wasn't with this strange ambiguous ending. But everything up until that point was pretty awesome.

It's been a game primarily about base building (which is pretty impressive with a flexible system to design some decent structures) and living off the land and animals (again, pretty good even if me and a Dave couldn't catch a rabbit to save our lives) but when you're bored of that you can enter a confusing cave system to find weapons, equipment and story items with a view to progressing along to the end game area.

I gotta say, I enjoyed it a fair bit. The addition of the end game really spurred me on to continue to play it. It's got a great atmosphere and the enemies on the island are impressively noisy and persistent. Once you're tooled up they can be a little easy in common encounters but there's a hard mode if you're so inclined.

You could wait for the full release but it's still awesome stuff in its present form (and there's been a steady stream of updates unlike lots of other early access games).

1) The Forest (PC)

Also me

"The ending was added in only about 3-odd weeks ago and the end game was pretty impressive. The ending wasn't with this strange ambiguous ending. But everything up until that point was pretty awesome."
Reading up aout it makes more sense at least. But you can't really get away with dark souls esque mysterious storytelling when it has siginificant effects on how your characcter behaves.

"pretty good even if me and a Dave couldn't catch a rabbit to save our lives"
I caught plenty of rabbits. Enough to make all the rabbity items. Not having a fire bow helped.

I meant catching rabbits with the crafting resources. Then ribbit cages were shite (but probably just in an area of the forest where there weren't any rabbits).

Ribbit cages are for catching frogs, simpleton.

1) The Forest (PC)
2) Persona 4 Golden (Vita)

If this is the sort of thing you like, you'll like this.

Except for the dub which is ear-rippingly awful.

2) Just Cause 3 (PS4)

It's pretty good. That's about as much enthusiasm as I can muster for it.

The one thing I didn't mind at all was, confusingly, the slow down. I kinda enjoyed blowing up so much shit at close range that the game would stutter to a grinding holt like a bullet hell game with a thousand enemy projectiles winging towards you. It's just somewhat satisfying to smash the frame rate into the ground because you're a fucking nutcase. This is aided immensely by the mini nuke weapon that you pick up after completing the game which levels shit within a one mile radius. So, yeah, it's pretty good.

1) The Forest (PC)
2) Persona 4 Golden (Vita)
3) The Last Guardian (PS4)
A.K.A. Stumbley McStumbleton knocks himself unconcious repeatedly

Yeah, didn't really love this one. Very pretty, full of character. But...

The controls blow mighty pig sausage. Alas, the half minute long failed attempt to walk off a 2 foot high 'cliff' and failing due to backwards stumbling didn't get saved, but other interesting control fun is in the video down below. The camera is often unusable, and the character stumbles to a halt with the slightest provocation. Dismounting and/or moving round your mount is a right pain in the arse (For reasons similar to the climby part of the video). And for some reason, they put jump on triangle, like no other game ever. And fall on X. You know, the button that usually jumps/mantles. This in no way lead to plummety death ever. (and circle is multifunction. Usually choosing the function you didn't want. What's that, you're in a battle and want to rip that mans head off? Nah, I'd much rather wander over here and stroke this giant foot!)
And that terrible part with a cage (Spang your head back and forth in a hamsterball before it actually vaguely goes where you want. Then watch as trico punts you all the way back). And the dire barrel throwing parts.

No noticable framerate issues, at least. (Until a room near the end, where there is no danger. Not even from the dubious controls)



A shame, theres a lot to like. but quite a lot wrong too.

You can switch X and triangle in the Playstation's settings menu. You can't do it per game, sadly, but if you only play one at once it's okay.

Yeah, I did that for dark souls 3 for a short time due to Japan controls, only to find myself hitting the wrong button when on screen prompts appeared, and so reverting.

As this game seemingly doesn't stop showing tutorial prompts, I may have found the same thing had flipping controls around occurred to me.

1) Hidden My Game By Mom (iOS)
2) Hidden My Game By Mom 2 (iOS)

These are both incredible. Free (but ad supported) and will only take about ten minutes each, but they're joyous. Think Warioware meets escape the room with Japanese surrealism thrown in. Very easy, but good for a quick break.

1) Hidden My Game By Mom (iOS)
2) Hidden My Game By Mom 2 (iOS)
3) Toast Girl (iOS) - same developer as above. Avoid the obstacles whilst running towards the screen. 5 minutes and done.

I finished a game the other day... I think it counts.

1) Double Dragon Advance - An amazing remake of Double Dragon but on the GBA. It's brilliant.

1) Hidden My Game By Mom (iOS)
2) Hidden My Game By Mom 2 (iOS)
3) Toast Girl (iOS)
4) Nyardle (iOS) - Avoid the obstacles, one-touch scrolling platformer

3) Enter the Gungeon (PS4)

Not as good as Nuclear Throne for one reason: you never get overpowered. You never get a weapon or weapons that is just fucking insane and tears everything a new arsehole. A weapon so fucking nasty that it scares you to use it. That's Nuclear Throne. Here, you're juggling moderately good guns because you haven't got enough ammo but you've got a few of them.

And I never thought I'd finish a run. Fuck me, the amount of times I'd died on the fourth chamber. Before today I'd reached the last stage once before and I was bloody lucky on my final run that I'd got a fair few guns I liked, got lucky with some extra hearts and an extremely rare medic box drop.

But I did it. I was going to jack it in yesterday and play something else with a view to returning months down the line but it really got its hooks into me.

And I haven't even seen the secret endings but I'd done a fair few secret things, kicked some blokes hat down the dungeon four times, did some monster hunts, unlocked a shit ton of guns and items and generally speaking had a right jolly time.

I'd say that Enter the Gungeon was pretty bloody great after all. Play Nuclear Throne first though. It's even better.

4) Mirrors Edge Catalyst (PS4)

Mehors Edge Catalyst more like. What a tremendous fuck up from DICE.

1) The Binding Of Isaac - Rebirth+

Finished all nine bosses with all fourteen characters on hard level. Some of it was utterly maddening, but at least it's done now. Still got 24 of the 339 achievements left to get, but I'm not too concerned about getting those as I've just had to do a three-hour run just to unlock one of them, with the last thirty minutes as a character that can be killed in one hit, which was rather tense.

5) Resident Evil 7 (PS4)

Brilliant. I can't believe they've gone and done it: A really excellent Resi game that's well worth the excitement.

Mind you, outside of the house the creators originality takes a bit of a dive bomb. And I ain't a fan of the supernatural in a Resi game either. But hey, at least it didn't have any of the previous Resi's storyline in it aside from a nod or two here and there.

Given that I consider weapon accuracy to be something that people who are crap at logistics care about, will I hate this?

Hmm, maybe at the beginning on normal difficulty but once you've got a shotgun about 2 hours in you'll care less. By the end, you'll have a rocket launcher, flame thrower and remote bombs which barely need any accuracy. I doubt you'll have any problems on easy difficulty.

Nice. It's not shooting things I have an issue with, it's more that this appears to hark back to older Resident Evils where a missed headshot meant basically reloading because of ammo scarcity.

I had a shit ton of stuff that I hadn't used by the end of the game. I didn't even fire a rocket out the rocket launcher once and got by mainly off the back of the shotguns.

Apparently the difficulty massively reduces how plentiful the ammo is and moves items on the hardest difficulty (madhouse). I haven't heard whether easy gives you more ammo. I'm going to say...it does. X 100.

All in all, I wouldn't worry about it. You can even dark souls some enemies and just run around them. Shut a door on them and they're fucked.

1) The Forest (PC)
2) Persona 4 Golden (Vita)
3) The Last Guardian (PS4)
4) ABZU (PC)

Swim down an admiteddly pretty corridor for 80 minutes, somewhere along the line have a crap attempt at pathos. The end.
Boring.

1) 10,000,000. Finally scored over frickin million. Lovely little game, bit of a grind to get to the target in the end.

1) Abzû (PS4) Abzûlutely lovely.

6) Homefront: The Revolution (PS4)

Surprisingly decent. It's a bit Fry Cry-ish but rather than giving you a massive world with hundreds of billions of shit to do it, it splits the map into areas that are gradually unlocked as the story progresses and gives you about 8 main side objectives in each area: Capture an outpost; Climb a tower; find some secret stuff hidden away etc. It makes this Ubisoft collectathon bullshit entirely manageable and, yup, actually a bit more fun. I cleared 3 of the 5 zones just because I was having fun and they didn't take that long cause they're all within running distance of each other. Frankly, Ubisoft could learn a lot from this.

Outside of collecting stuff, the graphics are detailed but a bit janky, the missions are the usual shooting fodder with a little variety but forgettable, some tedious weapon modding stuff, reasonable gunplay, some occasional dodgy AI but nothing worse than you'll find in Far Cry, some serviceable sound effects, a nice end game set up but some terrible forgettable characters and voice acting.

Oh, and some surprisingly great coop only missions! It's a shame that I was struggling to get many matches and have no friends.

Overall: forgettable but fun while it lasts. If you like Far Cry and want more of the same on a budget you'd do worse than this.

7) DOOM (PS4)

Brilliant.

Starfox Zero (WiiU)

Shit.

7) DOOM (PS4)

Brilliant.

8 ) Starfox Zero (WiiU)

Shit.

1. Fire Emblem: Heroes (iOS) - completed Main Story on Normal

Having never played a FE game before I didn't know what to expect, but it was pleasant and enjoyable, if a touch too easy considering you could just bring everyone back to life if you lost and carry on fighting with a small penalty to one of the consumables. I didn't spend any money on it and never ran out of Stamina and Orbs, so I guess Nintendo are erring on the side of caution with the freemium model.

There's still plenty to do so I'm probably not quite done yet. At least I'm beating Bamba.

1) The Forest (PC)
2) Persona 4 Golden (Vita)
3) The Last Guardian (PS4)
4) ABZU (PC)
5) Sunless Sea (PC)

81 hours, apparently. And I dare say many more will be put into it, as even though I won the game, there's still plenty I've barely touched.

I love the idea of Sunless Sea - I own it but have barely touched it!

Yeah, I did that. I tried it a couple of times but found it all a bit overwhelming.

Third times a charm.

I'd initially thought the game didn't track whether you had beaten the DLC boss, Void, but then I noticed the on the player select screen, the bit in the top left, the paper shows as jagged if that character had beaten Void -



So to properly complete it. I felt the need to beat Void with all fourteen characters. Finally managed it with the hardest two characters this weekend. Just ten more achievements to get and then I'll find something else to play.

Ah, bugger. Apparently I now need to beat Void on hard level too. With all characters. Not sure I can be that arsed.

1) The Forest (PC)
2) Persona 4 Golden (Vita)
3) The Last Guardian (PS4)
4) ABZU (PC)
5) Sunless Sea (PC)
6) Aragami (PC)

A good game. Fun 3d ninja stealth, with teleporting, ninjaing, stuff and generally feeling like a boss ninja. Played it through without killing anyone (with the exception of people you have to kill for story)). Kind of reminded me of a 3d Mark of the Ninja in terms of feeling like a boss ninja. (which was also a good game)

Recommended if you like being a boss ninja.

1) fallout 4 main quest

9) Dishonoured 2 (PS4)

MOAR Dishonoured is never a bad thing but the sound mixing problems really pissed me off. It's a great game though but I enjoyed the original more for some reason. It took me a couple of hours before I was even interested in continuing, but when it gets going and you've unlocked a few abilities it feels great.

Mind you, I did a low chaos Corvo run and unfortunately his has identical abilities to the first game with a couple of modifiers to those abilities to unlock - so it felt a little samey. Maybe I should have played Emily first but, y'know, that's not my fault, that's the game's fault for not mixing it up more/making me play Emily first/leaving Corvo as an unlockable or whatever.

I won't be doing another run with Emily anytime soon but I will keep hold of this to have a crack at her when this torrent of excellent games coming out finally stops.

Oh! And after finishing the game I did a little read on the story (since I couldn't make head nor tail of it mainly because I ain't reading a fucking book while I'm playing stealth-ninja-assassin-simulator) (Games with masses of reading can fuck right off. You don't watch a film and then pause it every ten minutes to read a chapter. Fuck that for a laugh.) ... oh, the story, seems I had the ability to really mix up the story about 3/4 of the way through and totally didn't because I was the ultimate stealth ninja. It made me really want to play it again just to approach that one level differently. Sounds like cracking stuff that I completely missed! Gah.

1) Firewatch

I utterly loved this. It's charming, atmospheric, tense, and engaging, and the interaction between the leads is fantastic. Only eight quid in the PS Store.

1. Fire Emblem: Heroes (iOS) - completed Main Story on Normal
2. Overcooked (PS4) - completed campaign

What seems like a fun, casual, kid-friendly resource management sim becomes a hellish, stress vehicle for angry exchanges with your coop partner when you forget to chop lettuce before putting it in the burger. It took us about six goes to do the final level! Very fun though, up to 4 player couch coop. Thanks Riles!

1. Fire Emblem: Heroes (iOS) - completed Main Story on Normal
2. Overcooked (PS4) - completed campaign
3. Titanfall 2 (PS4) - completed campaign

Well this was excellent! I don't play many FPSes anymore but this really grabbed me. If you've found the genre rather stale over the last few years then I recommend you give this a chance.

1) Hidden My Game By Mom (iOS)
2) Hidden My Game By Mom 2 (iOS)
3) Toast Girl (iOS)
4) Nyardle (iOS)
5) Escape Game: Cave House (iOS) - point and click adventure for 5 minutes
6) Escape Game: Dwarf House (iOS) - point and click adventure for 5 minutes

1) Hidden My Game By Mom (iOS)
2) Hidden My Game By Mom 2 (iOS)
3) Toast Girl (iOS)
4) Nyardle (iOS)
5) Escape Game: Cave House (iOS)
6) Escape Game: Dwarf House (iOS)
7) Escape Game: River House (iOS)

1) The Forest (PC)
2) Persona 4 Golden (Vita)
3) The Last Guardian (PS4)
4) ABZU (PC)
5) Sunless Sea (PC)
6) Aragami (PC)
7) Legend of Zelda : Breath of the wild (WiiU)

Were right good this. Apart from the Rain. Probably the best Zelda ever, although in many, many ways, it wasn't really a Zelda game. Plot!

10) Final Fantasy XV (PS4)

I'm not sure what I think about this to be honest. You drive around for half the game doing chores and then the latter half ditches all that and is all story. I liked it up until I didn't like it. I had some much useless treasure that I converted the lot into cash; brought the best weapons offered and as many curatives that I could manage and breezed through the later half only avoiding level 50+ monsters (so about 2 then) that I had no hope in taking on. I died a lot and immediately popped some medicine and was back up. Some fights towards the end are wars of attrition but the last boss was stupidly easy.

And how come I'm fighting the Empire who kill everyone but then I'm fighting some dick? When do I get to kill the evil Empire? Oh never. Great. Thanks.

I probably won't be interested in any more Final Fantasy games then.

Have you really only done 10 games this year!? Man, standards are slipping.

Those were some stupidly long games though. I really need a pallet cleanser that's a couple of hours long but astonishingly good.

Honestly, I can't even be bothered to open Zelda.

Open to suggestions.

Oh and 11) Dark Souls: The Ringed City DLC (PS4)

Absolutely brilliant stuff.

Dare I ask why you bought it then?

I'm sure I said at the time that I thought it might sell out and be difficult to find on WiiU.

I had a quick trawl through my Steam library for relatively short and excellent things so, have you played Jazzpunk? I adored it and it's cheap and short. So, maybe that?

I thought I'd never heard of Jazzpunk but apparently I watched a YouTube video on it. I'll do some research.

Jazzpunk is very fun.