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What Was The Last Game You Played?


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1 hour ago, Busta Nut said:

I am playing days gone and until I looked it up I was having a pure Mandela effect about it having Daryl from the Walking Dead in it.
I must have mashed that and the Death Stranding thoughts together.

Imagine those games smashed together. 

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On 30/07/2021 at 13:09, Blootoon87 said:

Alien Isolation is the scariest game I've ever played, a genuinely terrifying experience. It's a brilliant game, but not enjoyable in the slightest.

I very rarely chuck a game without completing it, but that game glitched on me at the end of a massive level and the only fix for it was to start the level from scratch again. Absolutely no chance.

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Finished Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. A pretty good game albeit not brilliant. Platforming was pretty fun although not as fluid as it sometimes needs to be. Combat was a good imitation of a Souls game even if the game had problems with recognising commands occasionally. It did feel really nice and crunchy tho with the force powers and the lightsaber. Loved scything down crowds with the double blade. Story was fine. Pretty formulaic and often fell into background noise but the last 10-15 minutes were superb. 

A decent game definitely a high 7/10 and I think it's really apparent that given more time for the sequel they'll iron out most of the problems with the gameplay. Feels like a great introduction to the Souls series as well with its more forgiving combat. Would be good for emphasising sticking with a fight and learning strategies. And it's free on Game Pass.

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Rise of the Tomb Raider (PS4, 2016)

A few months ago I played the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot and I didn't write it up. I had nothing to say. I didn't think anything about it. I'd played it before on PS3, I remembered bits of it but the whole thing sort of passed me by the second time. Looking at the reviews of it from the time it seems to be well-regarded in pretty much every aspect, which I find a bit surprising. Maybe playing it several years since made it feel generic, because there wasn't much that really stood out. I mean that literally - the environments and characters are all drawn from the same palette of browns and greys.

Fast forward a bit to Rise of the Tomb Raider and... shouldn't she rise in the first game? Is it because she seems to go up a lot of mountains in this? I don't know. Anyway, Lara Croft is on the hunt for something her dad was looking for before he died - the source of immortal life. It seems he was getting close, so Lara sets off to Siberia to look for the lost city of Kitezh, which I've just discovered is actually a real place of legend. What follows is your standard third person runny jumpy shooty climby crafty adventure.

After something like two hours of Rise, I was delighted. That period alone was better than anything I remembered from the first game. The platforming was extremely Uncharted and the presentation was still gratuitously cinematic like the first game, but it all felt and looked better. In the first semi-open world area you have to scrounge together some resources to make some poison arrows to get past a bear that's blocking your path. Great, I think, as the crafting system is going to be more convincingly survival-focused this time, rather than the last game where you just collected bolts from boxes and then made stuff. You need to collect different plants and resources to make different types of ammo or health, so I thought it was going to be an interesting challenge as the game went on.

I'm speaking in the past tense so that probably tells you what happened after that. Weapons went the same way as the first game. Crafting went the same way as the first game. You're still swimming in materials. Apart from when you try to upgrade a weapon, then there's always one thing you're missing. As a result you might struggle for that first hour or so, then you have more than enough ammo for the crossbow and you can safely neglect everything else. The game even seems to acknowledge this, as upgraded weapons make little difference outside of adding silencers to guns to allow for proper stealth. That's only for human enemies though, you can have a fully upgraded military rifle and still need to empty the magazine and more into a bear's face to stop it charging at you. Or you can upgrade Lara's climbing axes, with four upgrades to unlock where three of them are "unlock locked boxes even quicker". I'm not kidding. The same goes for Lara's upgrades, with her Skill Points ending up only unlocking slightly more convenient ways to do things that already work fine.

Gunplay is okay, but not amazing. The crossbow is ultimately the best weapon, with poison arrows taking out almost every enemy silently and instantly. There is a real option for stealth and it's fun trying to sneak around and get headshots, but enemies aren't really much of a challenge either way. It's also often quite difficult to separate groups of enemies, so you're going to have to be lucky with an area effect attack or else everyone within a hundred feet is going to be after you.

This being a Tomb Raider game there are some tombs for you to raid and this is one area where the game notably improves on its predecessor. There are lots of tombs and caves, and there are actual puzzles to solve with a range of gameplay mechanics used to solve them. They're not overly complex, but it's the only times where I really felt engaged by Lara and what was going on.

The plot is absolute nonsense which contributes to the under-developed characterisation. Lara is searching for 'The Prophet' and 'The Source' somewhere in unspecified Eastern Europe. She's being chased there by the mysterious organisation known as Trinity, who've tried for centuries to do what a girl with a rich dad managed to do in about a week. They're led by a guy named Konstantin who thinks he's Jesus, and his sister Ana, who romanced Lara's dad for a bit to find out what he knew about The Source. She's got a cough which is supposed to make her seem less evil, even though she was the one who gave her brother stigmata to make him go looking for The Source, so who can really say? 

I really don't understand why I'm supposed to care about either side in this. Trinity are the generic corporate military group who have an unending supply of bad guys and body armour, Lara is Lara Croft who teams up with the local rebels who've lived in the area for centuries and continually defended it from invaders. It should be easy to see which side you want to win but Lara kills so much and causes so much destruction it all rings hollow. There's a post-credit scene (I think it was after the credits) that sets up the next game and is presumably supposed to add to the mystery about what Trinity is and how it connects to the Crofts' lives and just... no. I'm not bothered about what happens up until now, I'm not going to care after a few minutes of cutscenes thrown on at the end.

There's a lot of DLC for Rise of the Tomb Raider, and the one I want to talk about is Endurance mode. In theory it's a perfectly focused example of the core gameplay. You get dropped into randomly generated terrain and you have to survive, collecting as many artefacts as possible. There are hunger and warmth meters you need to keep filled by killing animals and finding/making fires, and as time goes on enemies get harder and resources get more scarce. There are tombs dotted around for you to raid, and while they don't have any puzzles in them there are traps you'll need to avoid. There are also shelters which are effectively enemy outposts - do you go searching for supplies, or do you avoid the ten tooled up guys with rifles and armour?

This is a mode which is, to a point, enjoyable. If I really liked (or thought anything about) the main game I'd probably love it. It suffers from the same problems though, in that the pacing isn't very good. Run about a lot on your first day and you can find plenty of resources and weapon parts. You can earn enough XP to upgrade all the important skill points, and if you unlock enough things you'll be able to see enemies and traps and pretty much anything you need to with her instinct skills. That's if you didn't use any of the game's token card system to start you off with skills and upgrades, which can completely remove all challenge from the game. This is definitely the sort of mode I would have loved when I was younger and didn't have many games. I would have found the repetition of areas helpful rather than unstimulating, and I would have really tried to score as highly as I could. Now though, there's just very little to care about. 

I didn't really think about the Uncharted games as I was playing this, but I've been unable to shake them since I've been writing this. I didn't really like the Uncharted games for various reasons I wrote about at the time. I don't remember the finer details all that well, but I do know that certain things were clear - the characterisation, the stakes, and the visuals. The characters were all dreadful, but there was some variety in them. The games were centred around mythical treasure which doesn't exist, but what you were doing felt like there was a tangible connection to the real world as it existed in the game. This was reflected in the depictions of the areas you visited, which all looked spectacular. 

None of this applies to Rise of the Tomb Raider. Lara Croft is an iconic video game character who exists here as a posh accent and some breathy exertion noises. She sets off to find The Prophet and The Source in some hidden part of Europe, and a group of bad guys goes to try and get there first. Any challenge in the gameplay is mitigated early on, and I even forgot to mention I played on the second-highest difficulty (which I think is the same as the highest but without perma-death) and had no problems at any point. There is nothing challenging about this game on a mechanical or intellectual level. As I reach this point in writing it up which admittedly is some time after I played the game, I realise why I had nothing to say about the first Tomb Raider reboot. Here is some more of it. The end. 

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21 hours ago, NotThePars said:

Finished Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. A pretty good game albeit not brilliant. Platforming was pretty fun although not as fluid as it sometimes needs to be. Combat was a good imitation of a Souls game even if the game had problems with recognising commands occasionally. It did feel really nice and crunchy tho with the force powers and the lightsaber. Loved scything down crowds with the double blade. Story was fine. Pretty formulaic and often fell into background noise but the last 10-15 minutes were superb. 

A decent game definitely a high 7/10 and I think it's really apparent that given more time for the sequel they'll iron out most of the problems with the gameplay. Feels like a great introduction to the Souls series as well with its more forgiving combat. Would be good for emphasising sticking with a fight and learning strategies. And it's free on Game Pass.

It actually reminds me a lot like the Uncharted game in terms of movement. 

Did you ever find yourself lost in the game? I found the map button unusable and a few times found myself with no clue how to get out of an area I had revisited.  

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55 minutes ago, SANTAN said:

It actually reminds me a lot like the Uncharted game in terms of movement. 

Did you ever find yourself lost in the game? I found the map button unusable and a few times found myself with no clue how to get out of an area I had revisited.  

Aye the platforming felt similar but better since it was way more intuitive and fluid even if it wasn't always perfect. Aye the map was maybe the worst thing about it. I kinda understood it I guess cause it meant I discovered a lot more of the collectibles as I just plodded about until I found where I was supposed to go but the map was worse than useless and often didn't have a clue really where I was supposed to go. Great looking environments though.

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Currently playing through Death Stranding. Not really got a clue what's going on, but it is an unfiltered Hideo Kojima game after all. Fair enjoying it though and it has to be one of the easiest games to lose hours or days to. I swear I looked at my phone yesterday and it said it was 22:50 and what felt like 5 minutes later it was 00:30.

Couple of gripes for me is the movement can be almost nonsensical at times where Sam trips over the smallest rock in history. Additionally the movement and use of vehicles is almost totally obnoxious, again the smallest of rocks can cause huge issues for your truck or trike.

Story-wise it's typical Kojima fare with drip feeding you the smallest amount of information to try and make sense of when your overall goal is to reunite the United Cities of America after the Death Stranding and further catastrophes. 

Also the character design for Higgs is absolute outstanding, rarely see a cooler baddie.

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58 minutes ago, Mr. Brightside said:

Is it sad that when the guy hands you the parcel manually I was like

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"That's fucking Troy Baker" just from his voice alone. 😂

Don't worry ma man I was the exact same. Love that whole section especially with it being labelled clearly in your inventory.

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Quake Remastered.

It's very much Quake, in a new engine and with an HD makeover, without looking or feeling in any way different (although it very clearly is). The only thing I'd have asked them to do differently would have been to create some boss battles for Episodes 2-4, and make Shub-Niggurath a less passive fight (I presume they haven't).

From those lovely chaps at Nightdive Studios, who are getting awfully good at these kinds of things, and will be releasing that remake of System Shock any minute now. Maybe, if we're very lucky, Bethesda will let them make a proper Quake 2, seeing as how id have never wanted to.

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  • 2 weeks later...

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Grand Theft Auto III (PS4, 2015 - originally PS2, 2001)

Grand Theft Auto III is one of the most important video games in history. Released early in the 5th console generation's life cycle it transformed its own series and video games in general. Wildly popular with the buying public, it set the course for its own series' future, its developer Rockstar's future, and every other video game publisher who has since put out a 3D, third person, open world game. "Sandbox" as a term exists because this game exists, and Vice City, San Andreas, IV, V and the seemingly endless GTA Online have all followed, with V and Online in particular dominating games for the past eight years in a way which has ironically rendered the creation of anything as influential as III redundant. 

I've played it over the last few weeks. It has not aged well. You play as Claude, a man with no voice and remarkably square shoulders who is left behind by his girlfriend when a heist goes wrong. He escapes the police and finds himself in Liberty City, a pastiche of New York City, and has to fend for himself. He ends up involved with an array of criminal gangs and other colourful individuals, trying to survive his encounters with all of them. Along the way he ends up involved in and terrorised by the hot new drug that's sweeping the city, Spank. In addition to these story missions there are a range of now standard GTA activities for you to partake in - side-missions, stunt jumps, pointless hidden collectables. All in all I spent over forty hours with the game, so you can't deny that it's filled with content. 

The story is largely irrelevant. Once you've finished a certain character's story thread they and their gang will turn on you, meaning you get shot at relentlessly when you're driving around. It doesn't really matter which gang you're involved with at any one time, since missions don't offer much in the way of variety. Although limited in scope the game's writing and characterisation is very good, with several characters memorable despite their questionable appearances and limited screen time. Donald Love and Asuka are my personal favourites, with the mafia guy's off-screen haranguing mother in the background whenever you turn up at his restaurant another highlight.

Now, the gameplay. It seems that on PC you can play this game with an assortment of mods that make the game look a lot nicer. From what I've seen that is genuinely nice, but not essential. From what I've seen you can also play with control of the third person camera. You get a crosshair you can move around manually. I honestly can't explain how it feels to not have independent camera control. Imagine trying to walk without feet. Imagine not being able to move your neck from side to side. Then imagine it being even more awkward. Whenever I play older games I can easily make excuses for them. Rayman 2 remains one of my favourite games and I could play it right now with no problems. I never got used to GTA III though. Not being able to move the camera when on foot and having to rely on very vague aiming mechanics when you're surrounded by enemies means you'll have the health and armour cheats memorised quickly, and you'll be using them a lot. 

Mission design isn't great in this respect, as you're usually faced with a group or groups of people shooting at you. Complete some missions and you'll have people shooting at you the whole time as you start angering the various gangs that populate the streets. There are a few design and mechanical choices like this that feel a bit poorly thought through, with ideas that seem good in the moment but just get annoying quickly when you have to deal with them for any length of time.

The worst part of the game which is bad from a historical perspective as well as in its own right is the map. It's awful. There isn't a viewable map in-game and I don't have a physical one since I was playing a digital version of the game. The minimap only has two colours and doesn't distinguish when roads are on top of one another. As you progress through the game's three islands this gets worse. The first area is fine. The second area is a bit more complicated with alleyways and overhead bridges making things a bit more complicated, but it's manageable. The third area is the worst of the lot, with about four separate areas with only one route between each. By the end of the game I'd almost remembered how to get around. Bonus points too for your safehouse here being in the least logically designed part of the map. If Vice City has a map you can access through the menu and custom waypoints, I'm happy to take back everything I've said about III's influence and transfer it.

That said, there is enough detail in the game to find charming and overcome its flaws. The different handling characteristics of the different cars is noticeable. Same goes for driving offroad or in the rain. As mentioned the characters are mostly well-written and entertaining, certainly enough to compensate for the lack of engagement from the player-character. Several radio stations are brilliant. Rise FM is amazing and it's nice to hear the original version of Chatterbox. If I was able to overlook the flaws I've described and stick with it for forty hours, the good points surely have to count for something. 

All in all, my verdict is wait for the remakes supposedly to come in 2021. I know people generally think highly of Vice City, so at least I have that to look forward to.

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Everyone who owns Game Pass owes it to themselves to spend a maximum of 4 hours playing Twelve Minutes for arguably the dumbest twist of all time in any medium. I used a guide to blast through it on Tuesday in about 2 hours and I’m still laughing.

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7 minutes ago, NotThePars said:

Everyone who owns Game Pass owes it to themselves to spend a maximum of 4 hours playing Twelve Minutes for arguably the dumbest twist of all time in any medium. I used a guide to blast through it on Tuesday in about 2 hours and I’m still laughing.

I watched Limmy playing that, literally one of the worst games I've ever seen. Written by people who think they are more intelligent than they actually are.

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7 hours ago, Mr. Brightside said:

I watched Limmy playing that, literally one of the worst games I've ever seen. Written by people who think they are more intelligent than they actually are.

Watched the cut of him working it out! The whole thing is even better knowing that Willem Dafoe, Daisy Ridley and James McAvoy do the voices. Dafoe has been in two of the worst games of all time, some going.

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20 hours ago, NotThePars said:

Watched the cut of him working it out! The whole thing is even better knowing that Willem Dafoe, Daisy Ridley and James McAvoy do the voices. Dafoe has been in two of the worst games of all time, some going.

Did I ever post my Beyond: Two Souls review on here? What an experience that was.

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Far Cry 3: Classic Edition (PS4, 2018 - originally PS3, 2012)

Far Cry 3 was really the first Ubisoft game which established and perfected the open world formula which would go on to dominate their release cycles. A world, a bunch of collectables, some crafting, a bunch of enemy outposts you need to flush out to take over the area. With the 7th and 8th console generations this formula was expanded across several franchises and eventually made its way into the online realm, with the concept of games as a service becoming Ubisoft's main business model. The result is a seemingly endless production line of games which differ little in gameplay, with only the aesthetics and characters changing.

With this change came a lot of success, as it seems (the only one of these I've ever played is Far Cry 3) the formula is actually quite enjoyable. Since Far Cry 3's release the workplace culture that defined Ubisoft was largely horrific, with widespread and appalling accounts of sexual abuse and a general abuse of power by those in charge. Despite the head of the company saying things about inclusiveness and accountability very little has happened. The games keep coming out. Nobody has been punished. It's almost amusing playing Far Cry 3, since almost every character is a sadistic, arrogant lunatic, and you can easily imagine most of the dialogue having been said somewhere in a Ubisoft building over the past ten years.

Far Cry 3 is an open world game where you play as Jason Brody, a horrible person who along with his horrible friends end up stranded on a tropical island where they're captured and tortured by the pirates who inhabit it. Jason escapes and is reluctantly thrust into a fight against the pirates, the rest of the island, and finds out what the true history of the native population is.

Gameplay is okay. You have a range of weapons you can quickly unlock. You'll need to as well, I was playing on the easiest difficulty and in the early stages I found enemies have a bit of the bullet sponge about them. It's worth pointing out that I didn't realise the menu in the weapon store scrolled down past the options on screen, which meant I missed out on "Signature Weapons" which were all much more powerful. There are only a few missions where you'll have to rely on pure firepower though and you can carry four different weapons as well as a range of (awkwardly controlled) explosives, so you can brute force your way through most tough encounters.

The controls are a bit weird, and I can't tell why. I think it's to do with the frame rate of the original. Aiming, even with auto-aim enabled, feels swaying and unresponsive. It's like what you'd get if your character was drunk, but there's no blurriness, just poor control. You sort of get used to it but it never really stops feeling weird. Getting around the island is relatively fun. There are a range of vehicles to drive which handle hilariously. You eventually unlock a wingsuit and parachute and have access to hang gliders which let you see parts of the island in a bit more detail, and there's no denying it can look spectacular. The biggest criticism I have of moving around is the amount of fall damage you can take. One of the things I liked best about Horizon Zero Dawn was being able to move around the world so easily. Here, if you fall three feet off a ledge then half of your health disappears. It gets old.

In addition to the story there are Radio Towers dotted around which you have to climb to show up the map in detail. These are a nice idea in theory but as you progress in the game the towers get harder to climb, with narrow ledges to walk on and jump to. First person platforming isn't good. It seems like a design choice made to stop a repetitive part of the game from feeling repetitive, but it's just annoying. There are also Outposts occupied by the enemy, and you have to infiltrate and kill all of them to reclaim the island. The intention is for the player to approach these from a range of perspectives, but you can't. If you try and run in all guns blazing you'll get flattened. If you manage to kill one or two guys and survive they'll trip an alarm and reinforcements turn up and you'll get flattened, so the only real option is stealth. Some locations have an animal like a tiger or a bear locked up in a cage which you can unleash to do the work for you. It's quite fun observing an outpost, tagging enemies and trying to take them out one by one, but there's very little difference between them.

On that note, there's no denying that Rook Island is well-populated with enough animals to make it feel like a genuinely threatening world. You can be looking for some plants to craft a syringe, or just exploring, then all of a sudden some tigers will run out of the trees. Or a pack of rabid dogs. Or if you're in a cave, some komodo dragons will appear. While the whole environment has lots of detail there's not much that's interesting about it. It's due to the additions like animals and enemies that it's rarely repetitive and it really does feel like you're a scared, out of your depth city boy trying to survive in it. 

I remember when I played this eight years ago on the PS3. I was bemused by how much people seemed to like it. It wasn't that I thought it was bad, it was just... there. Now though, I found the story and the characters much more engaging. For Jason there is genuine development as he makes his way through the jungle and becomes more able to deal with it. He'll gradually make more enthusiastic noises as he kills people and animals for instance, and less scared or disgusted ones. This is subtly played off against his friends as he rescues them one by one and you can sense them growing apart, as they all just want to leave while he's suddenly feeling more at home on the scary murder island. The end of the story results in a choice you have to make and really, it's one of the few choices I can recall in a game where it wasn't only easy to pick, but the easy choice was the thematically logical one too.

The antagonists are probably what this game is best known for, and there's no denying that the mohicaned, scarred, maniacal Vaas is a memorable figure. The scenes with him are the highlight of the game. Everyone's just a bit too wild to really be relatable and I won't even go in to what the natives get up to, but near enough everyone is just a well-crafted, exaggerated character who fills their role perfectly. The story and the setting have one major weakness here since you reach the halfway point and discover there's a whole new section of map and story which feels like two separate narratives thrown together because they couldn't be a game in their own right, but you're generally having too much fun to really notice.

Far Cry 3 has its flaws, it has its forgettable moments but it has a lot of enjoyable moments too. I don't think my opinion of it has changed too much since I last played it, but I don't feel as if I've wasted my time going back to it.    

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