It’s that time a again, a full dive into most of the things I’ve been playing and watching in the past six months. And as a reminder, I write this over a period of months (Although in this one’s case about a week or so) and as such the language may be a little disjointed in places.

Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops

Portable Ops is one of the few Metal Gear games I’ve never played. It takes place post-MGS3 and has the player explore bases in South America.

Let’s get this out the way, I don’t like this game. The controls are terrible, and don’t hold up at all. CQC is broken at times and grabbing enemies just outright breaks at times. By default the game runs at 20FPS, but you can mod it to be 60FPS.

The stamina system really limits your ability to explore levels, and is only restored with rations. It’s designed this way because it wants you to switch characters and place them throughout the level, which you need to do to effectively recruit people. Unlike PeaceWalker and MGSV, if you want to recruit people you need to knock them out and then drag them to a truck near the start of the level. And if that sounds tedious, it is. But there is a way around it, place your teammates at various points on the map and then drag the enemies to them and then there’s a Codec number you can call that will auto-collect them. It still sucks though.

But the thing that really gets my goat, is how uninspired the boss fights are. They’re all bullet spongy shooting fests with no puzzle to it at all. And they’re ruthless at doing damage to you. To make matters worse, you get thrown into levels thinking they’re gonna be a sneaking mission, but then you get thrown into a boss fight completely unprepared and with the wrong equipment.

Story-wise, it’s semi-interesting, but it’s also lacking the depth that something like PeaceWalker would go on to improve on. The amount of voiced dialogue is fairly minimal, but that’s not surprising considering it’s a PSP game.

I’m still getting through it, more or less forcing myself through it, but I’ll and finish it soon. I’m also streaming it, so keep an eye on the my Twitch channel.

Like A Dragon: Ishin (Kiwami)

Ishin has finally released in English. People are finally going to understand why it’s so good. Or they would if it weren’t for the problems.

You play as Sakamoto Ryouma, who is a fairly famous historical figure in Japan who was assassinated. In real history, he helped end the Edo period and bring in the Meiji Restoration turning Japan into a modern empire. Well following the events in this game, after the events in the beginning, he assumes the identity of Saito Hajime (Who was a real Shinsengumi member) and joins the Shinsengumi in order to find the culprit to the murder of his mentor.

The new visuals are nice for the most part, generally sharper. A lot of the characters have been replaced with characters from Zero and 7, which actually ends up spoiling a lot of stuff in the long run, but fun to see them nonetheless.

Getting to do a lot of the side quests for the first time is great, there’s a lot of ones I missed my first time through because of the language barrier, plus a bunch of side activities like the second home things that I never touched in my original playthrough. Plus I get some additional context for the stuff I did previously see.

The card system from the underground dungeon segment from the original has been greatly expanded upon and is now available in all battles. Although I like the powers, the whole game has been rebalanced around them, and now battles feature significantly more powerful enemies and are tougher overall as a result. Combat in general is not as great as the original Ishin. It’s much slower and input lag is prevalent, the latter byproduct of using Unreal Engine no doubt.

Other things they’ve changed is how much money you get from various activities and the value of items that you pawn. They’ve definitely taken off a couple of digits from a lot of items, especially the platinum plates that you win from the gambling mini-games. It means there’s a lot more grinding for cash now. One exploit, which is now patched, was that chicken races could be started without actually spending your money. I used that to earn a considerable amount of cash, but a day or two later the patch came in. But I got the sword upgrades I needed, so no big deal I suppose. Leveling is also slower, but it’s not that big of a problem as you can get items to boost that.

One last point on the visuals, some cutscenes have changed due to a difference in particle effects. If I say “Bathhouse scene” you’ll know what I’m talking about, and that specific scene is drastically worse than the original.

As negative as I might seem, I still like this game. I’m glad it finally came out in English and I’m glad I got to see all the content I missed. But it is a lesser version than the original PS4 version, and if you speak Japanese I would recommend getting that version instead. You can watch my full playthrough here.

I Expect You To Die

Been a while since I had a VR game on one of these posts. “I Expect You To Die” is an Escape Room style game where you play as a spy trying to thwart an international conspiracy. It’s very slapstick though, which is appropriate for VR. The opening song is fantastic too.

The puzzles are very entertaining, with multiple ways of solving them, and even some different escape routes for some of them. A favourite level of mine was the one where you’re in an underwater escape pod as various things start to break and you have to react quickly to seal broken windows or stop fires. Plus there’s a draw filled with grenades.

The puzzles definitely get harder as the game goes on, although I would chalk up a lot of the difficulty to the hints being more subtle.

I had a great time with this, I might play the next two when I can afford them. Also, I did stream this and you can watch the playthrough here.

Valkyrie Drive -BHIKKHUNI-

I wouldn’t normally talk about games like this on the blog because I don’t want people to think I’m some kind of degenerate, but there’s also not that many games to talk about.

It’s about girls with a virus that causes them to turn into weapons, and the best way of suppressing it is for them to beat the shit out of each other. It’s from the same people as Senran Kagura.

PLOT and BACKSTORY are represented well, all the girls are well equipped in that regard. But the actual plot is boring, and that’s mostly due to the characters. They’re just boring. You’ve got two sisters who are closer than anyone should be comfortable with, a stupidly powerful girl that the game hypes up a lot, a moody girl that doesn’t like anyone, a tryhard, a rival to the powerful girl, and finally a girl who just eats a lot and is 6 feet tall.

There’s nothing really special about any of them and their personalities don’t really develop at all. I’m trying to follow the story, but I feel like skipping the cutscenes more often than not because they’re long and visually uninteresting.

Combat is decent, but I’d say about half of the characters are not fun to play. Rinka and Viola play fairly well, but Mana is fucking awful. She uses a bow and her melee attacks are pathetic, but her ranged attacks are slow and do little damage. She is dreadful to play and I loathe the levels that require her.

But the general combat revolves around air juggling for the most part. You charge your jump to dash forward and then use a launch move to get them in the air and then charge jump again to chase after them in a way that stuns them, or press launch again to close the gap with a different combo.

Customisation is a pretty big thing in these types of games of course, lots of outfits you can have the girls wear. But it seems fairly limited here, with a lot of items likely being behind bonus modes. And if you want to use a character’s outfit on someone else, you have to do a mini-game to boost your bond with them, and then you can use it. The process is a bit tedious.

I’m gonna try and finish it, but it’s something I play when I have free time in the morning.

Lost Planet

I’ve always had a weird interest in the original Lost Planet. There’s just something about fighting giant monsters to gather a key resource that you need to live is just kinda interesting to me. I don’t really care about the plot, it’s something about the main character wanting to kill the monsters because they killed his dad or something, plus a bunch of other colonisation/terraforming related shenanigans.

But who cares about that shit, shooting giant monsters with mechs is pretty fun. I like how the game just lets you jump in and out of them at will and you can swap out the weapons they’re using. The only downside is that they don’t really last all that long, and for a couple of boss fights they’re required, but it needs up being more difficult than other fights.

You get a grappling hook too, but it’s not like Just Cause. You can’t just grapple everything and go anywhere. The levels are quite linear, so the amount of places they’ll let you grapple to is pretty minimal, but you can use it on enemies and dropkick them on arrival. So that’s neat.

The biggest gripe with the game are the checkpoints, and no, the little stations you mash a button for are not checkpoints. Not always anyway. The actual checkpoints are fairly far apart from each other, often more than 5 minutes apart. It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the game’s habit of randomly killing you.

But I’ll end on a nice note, the performance is fantastic. I hit the max FPS of 120 pretty much constantly. The benchmark mode with the unlocked FPS would hit near enough 300 FPS. Good stuff, but it’s also a game from 2006, so probably not unexpected.

Ghostwire: Tokyo

Well this was a disappointment. Well, it’s not completely terrible, but there’s a lot I don’t like. But let’s get the biggest complaint out the way; the game is boring. Just fucking dull. The majority of the game is so by-the-book Ubisoft open world design that it’s painful. The map is full of icons and there’s a crap load of pointless collectables. And none of that stuff is even remotely scary or unnerving.

The best way for me to describe the game is that it’s a lesser Far Cry 3 with Yokai and Ghosts. But the combat is worse, much worse, and very repetitive. The level of combat variety you can expect is 3 different elemental powers and a few different ways of shooting them out your hand. But all the enemies are damage sponges, so expect to be fighting them a Hell of a lot.

The boss fights are a joke, extremely easy fights that usually rely on the single mechanic to defeat them. While I was playing I had a “Is that it?” reaction to a couple of them.

As for the story, everyone but the player gets spirited away in some fog and the bad guy kidnaps the main character’s sister. And I kinda stopped caring beyond that. I’m not sure what about made me stop giving a shit, but I honestly couldn’t give less of a damn if I tried.

Last thing I’ll complain about, the performance isn’t great. My PC is getting on in years admittedly, but even on the lowest of settings with FSR enabled, keeping the game above 60FPS is near impossible. Indoor environments notwithstanding, being out the city leads to a lot stuttering in and out of combat and general playability is pretty bad. The FoV also requires a mod to be changed.

But let’s talk about some of the good stuff to end on. There are some interesting segments, but they are short and not super in-depth. Most of them take place inside building and such, with a lot of non-Euclidean geometry and creepy imagery oozing from the walls.

There’s a reoccurring environment of a labyrinth city, where streets and stuff go off in all directions and you have to navigate it using the limited and pretty poor platforming mechanics. But visually it’s quite interesting.

The second memorable section, which if I remember correctly is completely optional, is a section inside of a high school. You’re basically helping out the ghosts of an occult club solve a mystery of why crazy things are happening around a school. The dark corridors, echoing sounds, and the lack of escape routes really makes the section way scarier than anything else in the game.

To top it off, there’s a anatomical model that follows you around during a part of the section and you have to keep looking at it to stop it from chasing you. Probably the most interesting mechanic the game offers.

The bad news is that the whole section lasts for about an hour and there’s nothing else like it for the rest of the game.

Overall, disappointing and under-delivers on the idea that it could have been. I kinda wish I had played it on Game Pass instead of buying it. You can watch my full playthrough here.

Hi-Fi Rush

From one Tango Gameworks game to another, except this one is actually good and not disappointing in the slightest.

It’s a rhythm-based action game where you fight robots and bosses in-time to the music. And the key thing here is, everything is synced up to the music. Attacks, jumps, everything. That sounds like a pain in the arse, but they’ve taken a different approach with it. Your attacks are timed with the music, regardless of whether you are. But you are graded on whether or not you can keep the timing yourself. The timing windows are pretty damn big however, and on top of that there are a bunch of accessibility options if you need them. Although I didn’t.

The combat works very well, there’s a good amount of combos plus you can call in a teammate for some additional attacks. Plus you get a grappling hook, which is always nice as it lets you close the distance. The battle rankings are bit off at times, if you don’t rely on teammates to help perform special attacks or get really good at parrying, your rank will never really get above a B. It’s not a big deal however.

The boss fights are definitely a highlight, barring the first and last fights, they all focus on different mechanics or present themselves in a non-standard way. For one fight, you’re combating a giant animal mech, and then after damaging it enough, the pilot gets out and you can damage them normally, plus some additional bits like some laser dodging. Then another boss is just the two of you walking in a circle talking and a beat memorisation sequence pops up and you have to beat that correctly to continue the conversation.

If I was going to complain about the combat, I might give grief about some of the enemies. Especially the samurai type of enemies. Their attacks are instant and it’s hard to pay attention to when they’re going to attack while you’re surrounded by other enemies. Plus, their Sequence Attack is longest and most difficult of any enemy type in the game. That said, the bird type enemy is also a pain the backside because it relies heavily on getting your parries right.

For my last few points, the visuals and music. They’re both fantastic. Unfortunately due to the fact I was streaming the game, I had to play with Streamer Mode on, which removed all the licensed music. A shame, but the non-licensed music is still really damn good. The visuals are pretty much on-point. The characters are very expressive, and the cartoon look really pops on the screen with text-effects and various other VFX that does a substantial job selling the style.

Easily one of my favourite games of the year. You can watch my full playthrough here.

Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty

Imagine Nioh but in China. That’s the basic premise behind Wo Long, albeit with some streamlining.

Team Ninja of course doing some great work when it comes to the combat here. It’s snappy and mostly responsive. They’ve doubled-down on parrying, goes for a Sekiro-style reflect system. More or less every attack can be reflected away, staggering the enemy and buffing you, and once it reaches a certain point you can stagger them and deliver a critical hit.

It’s a good system for the most part, but the reflection timing is a bit whack, I often getting mistimed or it doesn’t work at all. On top of all that, each weapon has martial arts assigned to it, which is a special attack. The spirit animal system returns, but works very differently now. Some provide attacks and others produce an area of effect healing pool. An interesting change. The archery and magic mechanics are also present and work very similarly to Nioh.

The loot, leveling, and other systems are much more streamlined compared to Nioh. I don’t mind it so much because there was a lot of shit to do Nioh, so trimming it back a bit so I can focus on the gameplay more than the menus is preferable to me. On that note, you no longer go back to a hub menu between missions now and just start the next mission immediately, but you can travel to and from side missions from the “bonfire” equivalents and it will remember your progress on the main mission when you come back. It’s a nice improvement, but it also means I need to remember to occasionally check for side missions.

Whereas the enemies in Nioh were based on Japanese mythology, Wo Long is of course based on Chinese mythology. Unfortunately, I’m nowhere as familiar with the monster types, but some of them are really grotesque. Stuff like multiple headed birds, mutated tigers, and so on.

My last point is on the morale system. Defeating enemies, finding flag points, and even doing parries on bosses special attacks all raise a morale meter. This meter determines how easy or difficult an enemy will be. What this means in real terms is, the more exploring you do of a level, the more damage you’ll do to the boss at the end of it. This can be a bit of a double-edged sword though, as it can make some bosses an absolute joke. You also have AI NPCs you can recruit to help in the levels which also greatly lessen the difficulty. However, I don’t mind this so much. It helps the pacing a lot.

I’m still quite early with the game, I’m struggling to find the time to sit down and play it. But considering I’m playing it through Game Pass, I really should get my time with it before it gets rotated out.

Planet Of Lana

Bit of a tailend entry here, I literally played it the week of me trying to finish and publish this post. It’s puzzle platformer much in the style of LIMBO and Inside. The player character’s village gets abducted by what seems to be alien robots, and the player’s goal is to get his village back. Along the way you meet a four-legged black blob with weird powers.

I didn’t take too many screenshots, but I can assure you it’s a very pretty game. It’s a mix of drawn art and 3D models, blended together really well. A lot of colour too, with a good consideration towards of the colour pallette. The animations of the enemy robots are also very well done. The sound design is quite strong too, with some excellent atmospheric sounds.

It’s a fairly short game, so keep that in mind if you’re thinking of buying it. I got it off Game Pass alongside other stuff, so I’m less bothered. You can see my full playthrough here.

Other Stuff I Played:

Rollerdrome

Jet Set Radio with guns and also an arena shooter. The gameplay is pretty solid, pulling off tricks is fun and it flows well once you get the hang of it. But it might be a little fiddly at first. And the art style is great too.

GrimGrimoire: OnceMore

A remake of an early Vanillaware game. If you’re familiar with them, you should already know that you’re going to greeted by a very rich art style. That said, the gameplay was not what I was expecting. At its core, it’s a tower defence game with resource and unit management, but you play against AI that is also managing its own towers and resources. So it’s basically a MOBA without the hero characters. I’ll keep chipping at it, but I would have preferred this game on PC rather than PS4.

Henry Stickmin Collection

I saw gameplay of this game a while back when a bunch of VTubers were playing it and got curious. It harkens back to an era of Flash games that I haven’t thought about in years. It’s got some pretty good comedy, and a lot of memes from the 2000s up to more recent years. A lot of the fail states are hilarious, and some of the options that you think would be illogical end up being the right choice for the puzzle. It does have some severe technical problems though, it crashed an alarming amount of times for me, which is a shame. Otherwise, I really enjoyed it.

Midnight Fight Express

Moderately enjoyable brawler. Takes a lot from the Batman games in terms of combat, and a tiny bit of Yakuza. Lots of parrying, picking up and using weapons, etc. Standard stuff. I did change the control scheme because what it’s set to by default isn’t great. I did find the combat to be repetitive after a while. There’s a good amount of character customisation, but requires the player to complete challenges to get the best stuff, but you have to replay the levels to get information on what those challenges are.

The game generates .gifs for some of your more “Interesting moments” while playing, but it my experience, it mostly just records fuck ups or nothing particularly special.

Prodeus

I’m having a hard time calling this a “Boomer Shooter”. It doesn’t feel retro. Some weapons have Aim Down Sight mechanics, there’s mid-level checkpoints, plus a generally modern feel. It’s pixelated look is the only old looking thing about it. The gore is pretty good, you basically paint the walls red, which helps with navigation a lot. I say that because the levels are very similar looking and there’s a lack of colour contrast or even colour variation in general. My last point is on the weapons, they sound good, but I think their very plain. Not much creativity so far. You get a pistol, a couple of shotguns, a rocket launcher, and some kind of rail gun. They’re not bad, but it’s pretty standard. DOOM Eternal managed to provide some alternative versions of its arsenal, especially its Super-Shotgun having a grappling hook. There’s nothing like that here so far.

Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengeance of the Slayer

This is related to another game called Hypnospace Outlaw, which I haven’t played. This is another old-school styled shooter, similar to Duke3D. I’ll be honest, it’s trying to look like shit and it succeeds. But it is also just kind of shit. It’s a boring game. The weapons are creative at least. You get a shotgun that fires glass shards and a crossbow that throws cans of explosive sludge. I’m not gonna keep playing this.

Touhou Luna Nights

Another late entry on to this blog post. I should start by saying that I know nothing about the Touhou games and characters. My friend knows a bit about the series, so I generally chat to him about characters in this. Anyway, you play as a maid named Sakuya who has time stopping powers and it’s a Metroidvania type of game. The platforming isn’t easy, there’s a lot of stuff that can damage you and there are even flying enemies that refuse to die that can interfere with your platforming. Enemy variety is pretty good though. You don’t get any new main weapons, but you get a few abilities that use up MP. And finally the boss fights are very damn difficult, but my understanding is that’s pretty standard for a Touhou game.

Distance

I played this for research for one of my projects, but it has been on my backlog for quite a period of time. It’s similar to Trackmania where you’re a car on a track with checkpoints, but then it adds weird horror elements and a story into the mix. Well that, and a bunch of track hazards and a focus on doing acrobatics in a car. I had fun with it though, and got a good amount of ideas for the game I’m working on.

Anime Corner:

Tomo-chan wa Onnanoko!

Quite a while ago now, the manga for this was reasonably popular. Then several hiatuses and the ending happened, and everyone more or less forgot about it; barring a handful of nutters demanding an anime for it. Well someone must have listened to them, because here we are. And you know what? It’s actually a pretty good adaptation. The animation has some dodgy bits here and there, but the characters are still fun and the voice acting is well done. Rie Takahashi does a good job as Tomo.

This is also a rare adaptation where it tells the whole story, and even improves the ending. In the manga it’s a very sudden single page affair, but here it pads it out a bit and improves both the context and the timing. Honestly, if you never read the manga for it originally, give it a shot. Hell, watch it even if you did, it’s a pretty good time. Misuzu is still great.

NieR:Automata Ver1.1a

Now this is a weird one. Automata was already a strange game with odd side stories and anecdotes. The anime doubles-down on that and adds even more, including adapting the manga chapters that are a prequel for A2 and explain her backstory. 2B looks excellent in 2D and it’s telling the story in a very interesting way. Unfortunately, only 7 episodes have aired and is currently on hiatus.

Kaminaki Sekai no Kamisama Katsudou

I don’t like Isekai… But, this show, really fucking interesting. Main character is the son of a cult leader and is sacrificed to the cult’s god. While he’s in a process of drowning, he asks to be reincarnated into a world where gods don’t exist. And so he does. The show has an interesting world, and some of the worst 3DCGI I’ve seen. But you know what? I don’t care. The show is absolutely hilarious, and it seems like the animators know it. They’ve got no budget and they don’t care. They’ll tell entire scenes in pixel art and still frames and it’ll get the point across just fine. I’d recommend giving it a look if you’re a fan of “So bad, it’s good” anime.

Other Things?

Threads

Jesus Christ, this movie is unnerving. It’s an extremely pessimistic view on Britain’s precautions and reaction to nuclear war, and shows the consequences thereof. Even for a movie from the 80s, the practical effects hold up quite well. My understanding is that Sheffield council gave them free-range to go to town on a street they were looking to demolish anyway. And they did. There’s images of destroyed houses, the whole street on fire, and so on. The make-up for people suffering from burns and radiation is also very well made. And that’s just from the nuke going off.

The rest of the film covers having to live life in a country basically sent back to the Victorian times, with little to no electricity, limited food, no fuel for cars or other machines, etc. That aspect, watching the world go to pot, makes me really uncomfortable. I ended up looking up an episode of a show called QED called “A Guide To Armageddon”, which is predecessor to this film and goes over the government’s nuclear war strategy and describes in detail why it’s in adequate. And now I want to see an even older film called “The War Game”, which is very similar to Threads, but was never aired on television back when it was originally made.

I cannot stop thinking about the things I saw in this film. Very few films have ever unsettled me like this.

Right, that’s it from me until December/January. GOTY is gonna be interesting this year, that’s for sure. And normal blog posts will resume soon.

ADMAN

Another year goes by, and another post looks back at the latter half of it.

As per usual, I write this post over a period of months, it can affect the writing style or flow. Please forgive any inconsistencies.

Killer7

Where does one start with Killer7? I restarted this for my Twitch streams and it’s a really interesting game in places. Let’s get the bad news out the way first, the gameplay is pretty crap and the controls are even worse. The hit boxes for shooting are pretty bad too, I often ended up missing shots I thought were dead-on and sometimes getting headshots despite aiming for the chest.

The game takes place is a few different places, sometimes an apartment building, sometimes a school, and even a small town. Nothing crazy, but the layouts and how you get around them are a bit bizarre. In one of the boss fights I was running circles around the boss in a series of interconnected ambulances.

Speaking of boss fights, they’re probably the highlight of the game. The first one is pretty normal, shoot bad guy in the weak point type of thing. Then later I’m fighting a woman in a schoolgirl outfit and anime girl head mask in an empty car park.

I don’t really know how to explain the story. You’re just gonna have to play it. I will say that I didn’t like either ending. Nothing is particularly well explained. Maybe that’s for the best.

I wouldn’t say I like Killer7, but I think people should play it. Much like Drakengard.

Phantasy Star Online 2 – New Genesis

I liked the original PSO2 but there was a lot of bullshit in it. Minerals, random crap in my inventory, difficulty scaling not actually making any damn sense and just killing you instantly despite being a higher level than what you’re fighting, no real exploration, and so on. But there was a charm to it.

New Genesis fixes somethings and keeps a lot of the bullshit. There’s more exploration now because I can actually explore the world and get all those minerals and fight the same enemies over and over. To be fair, I’m spending a lot less time in loading screens and more time playing. In base PSO2 I spent most time wondering around the hub doing random crap or playing in the casino. And the missions I did were mostly the EXP boosting ones you got from the dailies. I’m still doing dailies in this, but there’s more interesting things to do and I can get side quests done in the process.

I do not know what the story is about. I don’t give two shits about it. So that’s all I’m gonna say on that.

Gameplay wise, I’m playing a Ranger and the archer classes, I did have Gunner as a subclass but switched for variety sake; and it’s pretty boring. There’s a lot of the same enemies and the amount of attacks I have is very limited. I’m not sure if I’m understanding the systems poorly but I don’t unlock any new attacks or abilities from the class menu. Maybe I need to fuck around with the other classes and see if that changes anything.

The streamlining isn’t all bad though. I no longer need to go to a bunch of different parts of a hub to do different things and can instead do them from a menu or just a single NPC. There isn’t a casino yet though. I suspect it’s gone. But the item enhancement is much better. No more secret items you need to reveal or multiple version of the same item to upgrade stuff. But there’s still a limit.

Welcome to the paywall. Want to upgrade your gun more? You need this specific item that you can only get via recycling a crap load of other items, the login bonus, or by buying it. Want to change the colour of your outfit? You need a Colour Pass which you get from Scratch Tickets, login bonuses, or buying them. And so on. The most annoying one is storage though. New Genesis shares storage with the original, so if you have a bunch of crap in there from base PSO2 so you’re very limited with what you can throw in there. Unless you pay, of course.

Last point, which isn’t as true now as when I was making notes for this post, there’s a lot of grinding to be done. Story content is gated off unless you obtain a certain combat level, which is a number that represents your level, upgrades, weapon potential, etc. in a general way. Think Light Levels from Destiny. I ended spending a couple of weeks doing dailies and side missions to boost my level up to where it needed to be so I could get to the next story part. Upgrading your weapons and unlocking class skills boosts that number considerably, as I found out at the end of those couple of weeks. Since then though, I’ve become over-levelled doing repeats of daily quests that give you a crap load of EXP.

New Genesis is alright. I’ll probably stop playing it soon though, unless something happens that grabs me. As of 7th of January 2023, I have uninstalled the game.

Final Fantasy X

I’m still pretty early into this. I stream this game with my friend while we chat about it. The HD Remaster is a bit of a mess and requires a mod to work the way I want. So I have PlayStation button prompts and Japanese voice acting enabled, making the experience a bit more bearable. However, the visuals a bit of a mixed bag.

The backgrounds look pretty good, especially the pre-rendered ones, but the characters look weird. Like their eyes are popping out and their face is rigid. Another issue is that various FMV cutscenes break and get replaced with a green screen, which is a problem with the PC port that is unfixable.

The combat is OK, it’s normal turn based stuff, no bullshit ATB system. I’m not super into the story yet, like I said I’m pretty early. I do like Lulu and Rikku though, but maybe for the wrong reasons. Blizball is fucking terrible, just layers of complicated statistical bullshit for something that really didn’t need it. Just make a handball game, don’t add all this crap.

I think Yuna sucks. And that’s all I have to say on the matter.

Shadow Of The Colossus

I started playing this again when I was doing research for that action game idea I’ve mentioned on this blog previously. I wanted to get a good idea for how the character moves and interacts believably with the world and the giant enemies. There’s a lot of animation systems at play here and to properly explain everything I learnt would take a blog post of its own. I’ll probably do that once the side project reaches a good point.

Anyway, I kinda got addicted to playing again and wanted to Platinum it on PS3, which was the version I was playing. It was going fine up until I had to do all the hard mode time attacks. Basically, the physics are bugged on the PS3 version due to the slightly higher framerate and some other changes. So movement on the Colossi causes the main character even more than in the PS2 version. This makes a handful of Colossi significantly more difficult that they should be, and it’s very frustrating. I’m struggling with the 3rd, 4th, 6th, and 15th colossi’s time attacks because I unable to get a good foothold to attack them with.

For the time being I’m playing other things, but I do intend on finishing those time attacks.

Splatoon 2 – Single Player

I liked Splatoon 1, but felt the single player portion was a bit lacking, but it wasn’t terrible. Splatoon 2 fares better in its offering content wise, but the quality of that content may vary depending on your tolerance for bullshit.

The single player works by having a bunch of different hubs with multiple levels and a boss. However, first time through each level you’re forced to use a different weapon. And this is where the problems begin. If there’s a particular weapon you hate using, you’re probably gonna have it force upon you for some really crap level.

The gunplay is fine, but the movement is slow and when using some weapons it’s slowed down even further. And then to top it off, there’s an alarming amount of platforming to do, especially if you’re weirdo like me that wants to find every collectable first time through. And if you suck at the platforming, even more bad news, you’re on a lives system. Die 3 times, and you have to start the level again.

The music is still good and there’s a lot of charm in the game. I did play the multiplayer a bit and even won a few matches. I did not play the expansion pack, not sure if I ever will.

Bayonetta 3

I would not call Bayonetta 3 disappointing. But I would say some of it’s ideas are really bad.

To start off with there’s multiple characters now, alongside Bayonetta there’s Jeanne and Viola. They both have their different playstyles, and in the case of Jeanne, a completely different genre for her levels. Bayonetta still plays pretty well, I can muscle memory the dodges most of the time but as I got further in it became more of a problem as I was rushing to just finish the damn thing and having timing issues due to the differences with Viola. But I’ll get to her in a minute.

There’s a good amount of exploration in this one, lots of branching paths leading to challenges, items, and so on. In one level there was a whole mini-dungeon hidden away. And all the collectables are stuff like music, models, things like that. Decent stuff.

A new thing they added, most likely nicked from Astral Chain, are monster companions during fights. They’re fully controllable and do quite a bit of damage, they add quite a bit to your combo. But much like Astral Chain, you’re completely vulnerable while controlling them and it’s awkward as Hell to use. The bigger problem is that they balanced the game around it, if you want high combos and high tier awards for each encounter, you have to use them. There’s also a fuck load of them, like 6 monsters or so. Each have different attacks and powers, so there’s a lot of experimentation to be had. Or you’ll just stick to a couple like I did.

Speaking too much stuff, there’s just as many different weapons to use and most of them are kinda awful. You get to preview them early in the game too, various challenges in the levels will often provide weapons that aren’t available at those points in the story on your first time through. Again, there’s too much and I ended up just sticking to the default weapons most of the time, although I did like whip.

Right, Viola. Absolute trash. The biggest problem in terms of gameplay with her are the major differences in controls and timings for dodges and Witchtime. The biggest control issue being that pressing block in time to parry causes Witchtime, and dodge doesn’t. For further annoyance, it’s on a different button. So my muscle memory for Bayonetta is useless. The dodging itself isn’t particularly effective either, mostly being more of a side step than an actual dodge. I’ll get back to the Witch Time problem in a moment. Her ultimate attack form thing plays a lot better than her base from at any rate.

Her personality is also a sticking point. She’s a bit of a whiny git, even in Japanese. She also does stupid things often to the point where I wonder if she’s taken one-too-many hits to the head.

Back to Witchtime, I’m not sure what they’ve done, but it seems very inconsistent. Often I would go into Witchtime and try and land an attack and half way through the animation it would just wear off. This is especially irritating during challenges that explicitly set that you can only cause damage during Witch Time. It’s not as bad with Bayonetta but with Viola it feels outright broken. There were challenges that were outright impossible because I simply couldn’t get Witch Time to work.

Last negative point, I wasn’t a fan of the ending. Looking at other people talking about the game, it seems like I wasn’t the only one.

I like the game overall, and I think it’s better than 2, but Platinum need to stop adding gimmicks for gimmicks sake.

Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare Trilogy (Original)

It has been a while since I last played a COD game, and two of these I already played. Now I only played the single player obviously, because the multiplayer is either dead or a Hell hole. The campaigns are still very fun although there’s a clear shift in scope between COD4 and MW2 & MW3.

Before I get into that though, one small note. A had a weird application duplication bug that would occur when I changed my settings in-game. It would cause the game to open multiple instances of itself on my desktop and I literally could not end the process because I would get stuck in each instance. The only way I could close them was my logging out and logging back on again which would close most applications. This happened in all three games. But my settings did save so I didn’t need to re-do it again and risk the same bug.

Call Of Duty 4 is my clear favourite of this trilogy, it’s still incredible and very chilling in places. “All Ghillied Up” is still a fantastic mission, the levels are surprisingly challenging even on the normal difficulty. One thing this game does that the other two didn’t was unlock cheat codes for collecting the intel laptops. The other two don’t give you anything for getting them other than an achievement.

Modern Warfare 2 is still entertaining, but I always felt it was a little too short. A lot of the levels go by at a breakneck pace. But looking at my highlights from when I streamed it, it apparently was about the same length as COD4. But the levels are way more bombastic and absurd than anything in the previous one, and that makes it a little less memorable in my view. Not to say that levels like the oil rig and prison aren’t cool as Hell. But it’s also an easier game overall.

Modern Warfare 3 is the one game in this trilogy that I hadn’t played until this point. Just from the opening alone, it sets a very different precedent. There’s no training mission, no tutorial about how to shoot your gun and throw grenades, just straight into the meat grinder. In terms of pacing it works well and certainly makes a statement in terms of story that “Shit is fucked” and World War 3 waits for no man.

In terms of levels, I’d say it’s about on-par with MW2, although there are a lot more gadgets and in-game cutscenes. On that first note, there’s a level where you pilot a small robot tank thing that’s got a whole array of weapons attached to it and just riddle any poor sod daft enough to be in-front of it. That’s a semi-new gameplay idea.

The story is alright, can be a bit hard to follow what the Hell the overall world situation is. You’re getting thrown about all over the place and playing multiple characters, some of which only for a single level. The ending is satisfying, although it is a QTE sequence, but everything up to that point is a full guns blazing experience.

Something did irk me while playing through it, and that’s just the current state of the world. Tensions are very high right now, and the strong WW3 themes in this stated to make me feel a little uncomfortable. But that feeling has eased a little bit as of late. I’d glad I finally finished trilogy off though.

ANNO: Mutationem

When I first saw this game, it was on Indie LIVE Expo. A little while later, a demo for it appeared during one of Steam’s Next Fests. Something about the demo intrigued me so I wish listed it and waited for a sale because I couldn’t afford anything. Once it was cheap enough, I picked it up. And my general opinion on it is that it good.

The art style is on point and it nails the cyberpunk look. The sprite animations look pretty good, although a lot of it seems to be using 2D bone animation rather than sprite sheet, but I think it works well. The outfit selection stuff is nice, it has a couple of gameplay related events too. But dressing up the main character as a maid or office lady is pretty great.

Combat is alright. You get handful of different weapons, I mostly used dual-blades because I prefer fast attacking weapons and the katana wasn’t doing it for me. There’s a ranged weapon and a greatsword too. It got a bit repetitive about mid-way through the game as you get stuck in this underground section for quite a while and I eventually just teleported out of there and did side quests for awhile just to stop myself getting burnt out. Crafting is a element of this game, but it doesn’t really factor in until much later as you can’t really get the money or materials easily till you get to a harbour town nearing the latter part of the game.

I can’t say I cared much for the story though. The main premise is that the main character has a illness that causes her to become violent and uncontrollable, and her brother is looking for something to cure her. He ends up going missing, so you spend the rest of the game trying to track him down. A lot of the details of the background lore and explanations about what the main character is suffering from is mostly told through text documents and things you find around the environment. I’m not really the type of person to read that stuff, so I mostly skimmed through it.

The game is full of stuff reminiscent of Evangelion is you’re into that. Lots of crosses and large underground labs and such. It made me roll my eyes a lot.

It’s a good game, I’d check it out if you got the time.

Other Stuff I Played:

SkyGunner

Short little flight game. Like a light Ace Combat. Cute art style. The controls are fine, although the emulated performance isn’t great. The auto-targeting has no bias, so trying to target your actual objective can be a pain. And the actual mission objectives aren’t all that fun. A bit of a disappointment unfortunately.

GTA III & Vice City

I hadn’t finished either III or Vice City until this point, I kept losing my saves. The first issue I have is the game logic being tied to FPS, so I had to hard-limit to 60FPS via the drivers. I installed Silent Patch and the Widescreen Patch to make the game more playable.

The story was more disjointed in III than I remember. You meet a lot of characters and then they often die soon after and you meet some new ones. The driving isn’t good, I flipped my car so many damn times. A lot of the missions are escort quests, which suck. The AI are very aggressive, and by the end of the game I couldn’t drive through many of the streets without getting shot at. Despite my complaints, the game was OK. I’m glad I finished it.

As for Vice City, I installed the same mods again. I played the whole game without its soundtrack, which is a depressing experience, but necessary for streaming on Twitch. The cars feel better, plus there’s bikes. There’s a few more weapons to use. The story is better told and follows the characters in a more sensible way, I had a much better understanding of what I was doing and why. The story does feel a bit short though, or at least it would do if not for the last part of the game being a massive slog because of all the business missions. It’s a real kick to the pacing. Better than III, but San Andreas still reigns supreme.

Call Of Duty: Black Ops II

Another game I never finished. The game has a bunch of story choices and branches, but I honestly didn’t enjoy it at all. Once you get to the end those story choices sort of play out in a disjointed manner. There’s a lot of gadgets and different guns, but I just stuck to the “Old reliables” of AR-15 style rifles and regular grenades. There’s no real reason to use them, which I guess is a downside of selectable loadouts is that the levels can’t be balanced towards certain tools.

The RTS/Tactical missions you have to do on the side are really half-arsed. It’s just a horde mode with a bit of objective defense ones. But the story around it doesn’t make sense and there’s no real reward for doing it. I’m not sure why it’s there.

Other than that, pretty standard COD campaign otherwise. Still a good amount of fun set pieces and missions.

HYPER DEMON

HYPER DEMON. That’s a title. It’s from the same guy that did Devil Daggers, so you should know what to expect. It’s a very similar game, including the replay system. It’s a pretty fun game, but I’m really bad at it. Also my eyeballs start burning while looking at it. It’s fucking cool though.

Anime Corner:

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

I haven’t played the game, but I enjoyed this. The soundtrack is good, especially the opening song. The aesthetics are on point with the game. The characters are fun bunch, the story around them is interesting enough to watch it play out. And a lot of characters die in some really fucked up and gruesome ways, which is always nice to see.

Lycoris Recoil

Do you like girls with guns doing anti-terrorist things? You’ll probably like this. I know I did. There hasn’t been much in the “Girls with Guns” genre in anime for a while, so this and Maid Wars was nice to see. The main two girls have a dun dynamic, Chisato is basically an S-tier murder robot who refuses to use lethal weapons and Takina is a shoot first, ask questions later type.

The episodes are fun, a good amount of action and slice of life. The actual plot though probably could have done a bit more or gotten a bit more focus at times. It is elevated by a pretty good villain though who plays off Chisato very well. It’s good watch, I hope they make more of it.

Akiba Maid Wars

Speaking of girls with guns, I was not expecting this show to be anywhere near as violent as this was. The first episode is an incredible ballet of gratuitous murder, featuring a cross-cut between a song performance at the maid cafe and a maid shooting dozens of maids in a shootout on the streets of Akiba. It is quite the sight. I know the maid cafe scene in Akiba during the 90s was competitive, but bloody Hell.

The plot overall is fairly typical of something who’d find in a Yakuza film. Extortion, protection money, rival gangs, etc. But it’s all maids, and animal themed maids at that. The characters dedication to the cafe themes make me question whether they have any humanity left. Great show.

Yojouhan Time Machine Blues / Tatami Time Machine Blues

As a fan of Tatami Galaxy is was nice seeing these characters again. As you can guess the plot this time involves a time machine. They find it in a closet and use it to go back in time an steal a remote for the air conditioning unit in the main character’s room. There’s a crapload of foreshadowing for the time travelling shenanigans they’ll undertake, including something involving a Kappa statue. It actually does a pretty good job and tying up the loose ends caused by the time travelling nonsense and looping back on itself. Great show, I hope it gets a Blu-Ray release so I can keep the physical collection going.

Chainsaw Man

Let’s get this out of the way, Chainsaw Man is not the second coming of Christ. That said, I did like it. Some of the animation sequences are very well done, especially some of the character animation. The gore and violence are as visceral as you would want it. Power is hilarious and easily the most fun character in the show. Makima is good as a character, but I’m not sure they got the right voice actor for her.

All the episodes have wildly different ending sequences and although I like the first few endings more than the later ones, they’re all pretty well done and visually interesting to look at. The ED about Power is especially well done.

I really hope they continue the show though, because I think it ends just as it was starting to get interesting.

Bocchi The Rock

Well this show became a hit out of nowhere. I went into it with the mindset of it being a discount K-On. It’s not. It’s a premium product that is vastly superior. Cloverworks really outdid themselves with this. The animation styles are completely insane, with a good amount of stop motion, non-standard art styles, and real world images superimposed in. Completely insane. The music is top notch, the album that released after the show has become a best seller and I’m still listening to the songs even weeks after.

Bocchi’s reactions and faces are a real highlight. My favourite reactions being her just fucking exploding and lying down in her bed staring at a room covered in the same photograph and just cackling. The other characters are great too, I really like Hiroi. An absolute drunken train wreck full of best girl energy.

It’s an absolute must watch.

My Top 10 Games Of The Year

Released Games That I Wanted To Play Or Play More Of

AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES – nirvanA Initiative
Koumajou Remilia Scarlet Symphony
Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin

I wanted to play these, but couldn’t afford it. I did play the demo for Stranger of Paradise on PS4 though and had a pretty good time, but I wanted to play it on PC for better performance, unfortunately (As of time of writing) it’s still an Epic Games Store exclusive.

Worst Game Of The Year

Trek To Yomi

The art style could not save this one. The combat felt bad, it was really repetitive, and the story was nowhere near as good as it could have been. Thankfully I played it on Game Pass rather than buy it outright. Saved myself a bit of money.

And without further ado, the Top 8. Yes, 8. I didn’t play that many new games this year.

8. Forgive Me Father

7. Neptuna X Senran Kagura: Ninja Wars

6. DRAINUS

5. HYPER DEMON

4. ANNO: Mutationem

3. LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga

2. Bayonetta 3

1. Windjammers 2

If I had more money to spend, I would have played more games. But to be honest, this year was kinda week. Windjammers 2 is a fantastic game, but should it really be my number one? Well for the time being, it is.

Let’s actually give it some credits. It’s classic Windjammers gameplay, snappy, responsive, super fun. It’s got rollback net code, bonus modes, some single player content, and it’s reasonably priced. It’s a damn fine game and I struggle to find fault with it.

Just to answer a question; Yes, I played Elden Ring. No, I did not enjoy it.

And now for the other Top 10 list.

My Top 10 Anime Of The Year

Special Mentions:

Spy x Family & Koi wa Sekai Seifuku no Ato de

Worst Anime I Watched:

Hoshi no Samidare

And now the top 10.

1. Koukyuu no Karasu
2. Kawaii dake ja Nai Shikimori-san
3. Birdie Wing: Golf Girls’ Story
4. Chainsaw Man
5. Kakegurui Twin
6. Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru
7. Lycoris Recoil
8. Akiba Maid Sensou
9. Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai: Ultra Romantic
10. Bocchi the Rock!

I bet you didn’t see this one coming. Shit year for games, but a pretty good year for anime. And Bocchi The Rock is one Hell of a show. It’s the kinda show that you watch and then every other anime after just looks like a pile of crap. It’s 10/10. Easily. The characters are great, the animation is great, the music is great. And it was blast to watch and talk to other people about it and see it just absolutely set the anime community on fire.

Watch this show. It’s fantastic.

And that’s your lot. 2022 is over and 2023 is now in full swing. Sorry this post took until late-January to get done. It was longer than I thought and I started working on it much later than I should have. I will try harder next time.

Hopefully things will get better this year.

ADMAN