Shenmue II (XB1X)

Played on Xbox Game Pass. Part 2 literally follows on from the ending of part 1, even using your end game save so that you begin with the same money and item collections. Though I believe these new HD versions are missing a comic book that is chapter 2 of the overall story- it tells what happens on the boat from Japan to Hong Kong. Anyway, the first game is a remaster of the Dreamcast version because that's all there was to work with. Part 2 seems to be based upon the Xbox version, so it looks a bit better.

Story is interesting and made me want to keep going, though it is still far from complete.

The game has two issues for me, one that is just annoying and the other one is potentially game destroying for many. The combat is the minor issue. Just like the first game there are many move combos to learn. That's the problem though- they are pointless. I won every fight simply by pushing towards the enemy and pressing "X" (punch attack) as fast as possible. All of those special moves are pointless then, which is lucky for me since I can never remember more than about 2 or 3 combos anyway.
But the games critical issue are the QTE's. The first game had them, but they were easy and rarely slowed progress. Normally I find QTE's really easy. Not the ones in Shenmue II however. The game is full of them, often at the end of long boss fights and often stringed together- where you have to watch a string of button presses and then repeat without error (like that game Simple Simon). I came to loath them, whilst in the first game they didn't bother me.

Whilst I'm glad to have played the game and finished it, had I known before hand just how torturous the QTE's were going to be, then I'd have passed. It's a shame because the story really does have its moments and it's hard to think of any game quite like it.

Portal (PC)

It's dirt cheap on Steam now and I finished it not long after buying it. Its good. I think Portal 2 had funnier jokes but I liked the one about "android hell". If you play it yourself, just know that the ending was updated at one point to be more of a cliffhanger (although, it's weirdly fitting based on some lines in the vanilla game).

Typing of the Dead. House of the Dead except it's a typing game, which is fine with me because I enjoy working on my typing skills. I'm okay but nothing amazing, and although I type a lot at my job, I'm mostly typing the same kind of things and the same words, so when a game like this throws a word like "encephalopathy" or whatever at me, it can get my fingers tied in knots. It's actually a pretty tough game because on normal difficulty the time limits you get before a zombie nails you get very tight later in the game. Even with maximum continues, I barely scraped by, although the game seemed to give me a solid grade when I was done.

The voice acting is so bad that I have to think it was deliberately done. Either that, or maybe they used some kind of voice synthesis instead of actual actors because it's flat to the point that it's hard to believe an actual human could even fake being that bad.

Dust: An Elysian Tail, Jun 28 (GOG)-I think this could be considered an intro to the Metroidvania genre. It's a pretty good one to start out with and I've learned I'd like something a little more complex next time out. The story was a little cliche but the dialog and voice work were good. I thoroughly enjoyed searching out as many of the secrets as I could. My only complaint is that the game is a little on the easy side on normal difficutly.

Full List

Space War: Infinity

A very fun little vertical scrolling shmup I picked up in a $1.50 3 game dev pack on the Steam sale. Took about 3 hours to 100%.

Space Smash

A twin stick arena shooter from the same pack as above. Fun game for a while, but once you've unlocked the last ship and notice that with Wave 8 the difficulty stops increasing, there doesn't seem to be any more reason to play. Still, for the price it's pretty decent.

Just finished Spider-Man on PS4. It's great. Incidentally the last game I beat was Arkham Knight and there's actually tons of similarities between these two games but honestly, Spider-Man's colorful and comparably innocent world was a very welcome change. That's not to say that Spider-Man doesn't have some very dark moments - and those are particularly powerful thanks to the game's highly lighthearted nature. Anyway...

A lot of the gameplay is indeed quite similar to the Arkham games. There's naturally tons of melee combat (including a highlight each time you're about to get hit) and stealth sections in an open world. What makes the game stand out is certainly the movement: swinging and jumping around the city is just pure joy (most of the time) and also during combat Spider-Man is ridiculously mobile. The great thing is that swinging and jumping isn't all that trivial and there's a lot to master here, a bit like with the parkour in the Assassin's Creed series. It becomes second nature soon enough and somehow keeps the game fun even when all you're doing is moving around the city.

Now, admittedly I was also a little bit disappointed by the game. At first it was super easy, and I didn't quite know what to use all the abilities for since the most basic moves got the job done but then there was a sudden rise in difficulty which had me a bit frustrated for a few hours, until I really grasped when to use what attacks and gadgets (although some of them feel quite unnecessary). I really wish they had increased the difficulty a tad more gradually. Then there's the thing that Spidey's insane mobility, as well as the fact that you can access the whole world (all of Manhattan) since the beginning, make the world feel really small and samey - only when you take a moment to slowly walk around on street level will you notice how detailed and interesting this virtual rendition of New York is. It's a problem many sandbox games suffer from and I guess it's hard to avoid if your game is about a guy spending most of his time in the air. Also the stealth is pretty basic here and doesn't get close to the Arkham games' "predator" mode. And generally the game lacks a little bit of diversity. I feel that there's also some pacing issues due to the fact that you always have access to the whole city and it doesn't open up gradually (which made me do far too much optional stuff right in the beginning).

But besides that it's a great game. Especially towards the end combat and taking on enemy camps becomes super satisfying, the atmosphere is quite amazing (and the whole city is put through different stages with a different feel) and the story was surprisingly good. Kotaku complained about too few Peter Parker moments in the game but there's actually a whole lot of them and they add a lot of weight to the superhero stuff going on. There's a whole bunch of interesting characters who are really brought to life thanks to great graphics, animations and acting. Most big turns of events can obviously be seen from a mile away, probably even by people who know nothing about the franchise, but some moments caught me off guard and were pretty mind-blowing. I really cared about the stuff going on and can't wait to play a sequel - for now the DLC is going to have to do.

Oh yeah, and the graphics are amazing. They went for a really interesting style that's not quite photo-realism but also not very stylised and somehow makes almost every frame screenshot-worthy. So much that I spent far too much time fooling around with the game's photo mode.

I've been playing Bloodstained and enjoying the heck out of it. Though it's a 20 hour game, I actually spent 40+ hours because I wanted to get all achievements, and today I managed to do it.

As I already said, it's incredibly enjoyable, though I did feel that it's frequently too similar to Castlevania SotN and, on certain points, a small part of me wanted it to be its own thing instead of paying homage or copying.

While I didn't exactly notice early on, later, after I had most map traversing abilities, it dawned on me that the pacing was a bit off, and really takes too long for you to get some of the more convenient powers. The game also doesn't really make a few of the more useful powers easy to spot, I had already finished the game and had almost all achievements, when I noticed that I had a super jump and didn't need to invert the screen all the time.

As I was already severely over leveled by the end of the game, the last few bosses were a cakewalk (well, I did kill Dracula in six hits in SotN, so it's more or less on par with that game's difficulty), but I did have a few slightly more challenging bosses early on.

Kingdom Hearts Final Mix (PS4Pro)

I've wanted to try out one of these games, and the PS4 Final Mix collection seemed a good place to start. For some reason I went into this assuming it would be a turn based JRPG with a mixed Final Fantasy and Disney world. I got the turn based part totally wrong, it's actually real time combat. The Remix moniker in the title refers to the fact that these are not just regular remasters...some idiot lost the source code for the original PS2 games so the PS3 versions were remade from commercial PS2 code, which would take far more work. The PS4 versions are the same as PS3, just higher resolutions and 60 fps. On PS4Pro it's 4K and looks really sharp compared to the lower res pre-rendered cutscenes.

I really had fun for the most part. I really enjoyed the Disney as a video game concept. I didn't quite go all the way and find every collectable since I felt the game was drawing itself out just a bit towards the end. Initially I was a bit confused as to how to know what to do in the game- since it often just expects you to keep going to each area and talk to everyone and unlock new cutscenes to progress. So I would be there trying to look for something I needed to do when all I usually had to do was just backtrack and talk to someone again. But after the first two areas I saw how the game worked and what it expected, then it was never an issue.

Combat is quite simple, though does have optional depth. I have to admit though that I pretty much beat down every boss simply by getting right up in their face and hitting them as fast as I could. Only the very final boss, Ansem in his final form, caused me several retries- after 5 tries I even did a quick google search to see if I was missing something obvious since it was the only boss I was having issues with. None of the online advice worked- what ended up working was...right up in his face, don't take a backward step and pound him whilst out healing his damage. That tactic worked first try! So I should have just stuck to what had worked for me all game. Anyway I finished up at level 50 for the final boss.

Despite the final few hours degenerating (as so many Japanese games do) into a series of damage sponge boss fights, I really had fun with it and will gradually work though the series- well the non mobile ones anyway, I will watch the movie versions of the mobile games.

After all that though, the biggest question is still unanswered: what the hell IS Goofy anyway?

Well, on one level Mickey is a mouse and Goofy is a dog. On another level Mickey has a pet dog Pluto, and it's imaginable that there's a story were there are little mice in Goofy's house, eating his supplies. So ... what distinguishes them from the animals? Are they mutants? It really is a pretty weird universe, if you think about it. ;)

Well, if you want to get technical, Mickey and Goofy are humans who are drawn to resemble animals in order to make them more relatable. They might look a certain way, but they walk upright, go to work, have conversations, etc. like people do. Pluto is a dog because he acts like a dog, walking on all four legs, not able to speak, living in dog house in Mickey's yard, and so forth. But if you want to kayfabe it and imagine that there's an actual reason why Goofy and Pluto are both dogs yet not the same, that can be fun :)

You have a point, but that line made me chuckle. Humans really hate each others' guts, it seems. ;D

You should watch the robot chicken disney parody where they look aghast at clarabell and goofy dating.

Fallout New Vegas


Didn't actually finish it, but made several attempts at playthrough...my last was about 34 hours and I got quite far. On the whole must have spent at least 50-60 hours with the game, so I think I can judge it.
Some parts of the game were enjoyable, but on the whole I didn't like it that much, that's why I stopped.

Cons:

- Graphics suck. I don't know if it's my laptop (could only run the game on medium settings), but I often had annoying issues like enemies already shooting at me/being shot at my companions before they were rendered on the screen...immersion-killing to say the least.
- Combat sucks, deeply unsatisfying as a shooter, and not much tactics involved either. I don't think I have too high standards...I actually enjoyed the shooting in Vampire the masquerade: Bloodlines. Deus Ex had pretty lame gunplay, but compensated by varied gameplay. Unless one goes out of one's way to play as a pacifist, there'll be lots of combat in New Vegas, and it was one of the most unfun experiences I've ever had in an rpg or a shooter. Worst of both worlds.
- The minigames for lockpicking and hacking are annoying and tedious. I'm fine with something like this in a game like Thief 3, but in an rpg with stats-based abilities, such things shouldn't be there.
- The game is too easy. Admittedly I only played on the pre-set normal mode and didn't turn on hardcore mode, which adds things like need for food and water. But as far as I understand, this doesn't change anything about the stats and skill system, where the real weakness lies. Most stats aren't that important. Unlike in the first two Fallouts, you don't really need to create a somewhat balanced character (or accept real tradeoffs for specialization), but can raise intelligence to near maximum/maximum at the start of the game or very early on. As a consequence I was eventually swimming in skill points (there are some additional perks which exacerbate that) and became a master of almost everything already by level 26/27 (level cap is 50).
Doesn't help either that most skills don't get checked much in quests. Instead you have "Speech" as a superpower which allows you to effortlessly bend characters to your will.
- Writing imo often isn't very good...successful use of "Speech" often felt forced, more like magic than any believable explanation why you managed to persuade someone to drop their long-held plans after talking to them for a minute.
- Quest design often was pretty lame...I don't know why anybody would think quests of the sort "Go to six different locations, talk to people there, quest resolved" are engaging and fun. Few quests really impressed me. And when there's something interesting or more complex, you run into stupid issues...I had to reload that cannibal quest ("Beyond the beef") several times to get the solution I wanted, because of irritating design flaws.
- There's too much filler content, samey buildings which don't provide anything interesting but getting some loot or fighting against nameless bandits.
- The main narrative is the best part of the game, but even that has flaws. Caesar's legion is severely under-developed, and quite lazily written...devs took the easy way here by making them misogynist monsters. Very unimaginative version of evil. I was also taken somewhat aback by the abysmally bad writing for Caesar when I encountered him...he rattled off something like "I want to create an aggressive, militarist, totalitarian (and some other adjectives I've forgotten) empire where the individual has no rights"...nobody speaks like that, sounded more like a design concept than a believable justification. I had expected a charismatic villain (who maybe even had a bit of a point, like the Master in the original Fallout), instead it was a disappointing and not very interesting caricature.

Pros:
- On the plus side, the world-building does have many nice touches. I especially liked the posters (of many different kinds, e.g. advertising or military propaganda) you could see in many places.

On the whole I wouldn't recommend it...the time investment needed for this kind of game (gigantomania unsupported by compelling gameplay is how I would describe it) is simply not worth it for the fun you can get out of it.
Experiences like this make me wonder, if I'm not done on some level with mainstream gaming at least (I did enjoy a few indie titles in recent years like Age of decadence or Expeditions: Conquistador).

Rating: 3/5 (for the atmosphere, gameplay is more like 2/5).

But there are those that make a very compelling argument that Goofy is Bovine and that people just assumed that his original name "Dippy Dawg" was referring to his species...but people get nicknamed Dawg as well. Being Bovine would also explain better the sometimes relationship with Clarabell...who's definitely meant to be a Cow.