Content from Last 48hrs

Resident Evil 2 Remake I really liked this game, though I do think Claire's story is a lot better than Leon's, so I'm glad I played hers first, or I might not have cared to play the second one. I do think Mr. X is a big detractor from the game, he's too omnipresent, and takes too long to go away when you reach a safe room, so you end up spending a stupid amount of time just waiting for him to leave, which is neither engaging nor scary, just tedious. Luckily I was on PC and could install a mod to remove him. If I had been on console there's a good chance I might have just quit the game. Without him though it was excellent, really top notch survival horror, especially as Claire. However, because of that, I don't feel like I can really rate it given that I only liked it because of a mod that changed a core aspect of the game, so I guess no score from me.

Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater I've been working my way through this one slowly since launch, playing a little bit here and there. Mostly because the Master Collection came out recently enough that I wasn't actually itching to replay the game just yet. So, is it good? Well, it's a fairly 1-to-1 remake, so it's kinda hard to screw that up too badly. At the end of the day, you still end up with Metal Gear Solid 3. So it's hard to complain because that's one of the best games ever made. Personally, I would've preferred something of a re-imagining like Capcom did with the Resident Evil remake. Don't turn it into an open-world or anything dumb like that but at least make it so the maps seamlessly connect to each other, maybe bring over some of the gameplay from MGSV, things like that. The original MGS3 is finally available on modern platforms, so I could've always just replayed it if I felt like having the classic experience. Something a bit new would've been more interesting. Then again, I did notice some slight changes. This may be because I did my first playthrough on hard but I feel like they tweaked how the game works under the hood just enough to throw me off and make me suck at the game in the first few areas. Small things like enemy line-of-sight, how much camouflage actually hides you, how much sound your foosteps make, etc. Also, for the first few hours I just couldn't sneak up on anyone. It was actually starting to drive me fucking nuts. I'd slowly inch up behind a guard to grab them and they'd always notice me at the last second and raise the alarm. Well, turns out this version of the game has a sneak button. So you gotta use that to sneak up on people otherwise they'll spot you. Good to know! IIRC you could walk very slowly with the d-pad in the original but I don't think it was required to be able to grab someone without causing an alarm. You could walk slowly enough with just the analog stick. Another thing I struggled with was lining up headshots with the tranq gun. I would hit nearby enemies fine but would always seem to miss my headshots on enemies further away. Turns out the darts start to drop after a certain distance so you need to account for that when aiming. I don't think it was that way in the original. Also early on I was crouch-walking a lot. That addition alone seemed like a massive QoL upgrade. But by the end of the game, I was barely using it anymore and went back to crawling like in the original. If you want to move faster, you get spotted so easily when crouch-walking that you might as well just stand up and run. I'm sure there's a slight difference but it ultimately wasn't as big of a change as I thought it would be. By the end of the game, I got used to the small changes and I felt like I was playing a shinier version of MGS3 but not necessarily a better one. I don't know if Delta replaces the original entirely for me. The original MGS3 was so ahead of its time visually that it still looks fine to me. You can tell it's an older game but it doesn't really feel dated visually because of its strong art direction. I'll probably still replay it here and there out of nostalgia. But it's nice to have a more modern-looking option now, I suppose. I don't mean this to sound overly negative. In the second half of the game when I started to get a feel for it, I was actually having a ton of fun with Delta and I definitely want to bump up the difficulty and do another run soon. It just sticked too close to the original to really leave a mark of its own, I guess. It's just MGS3 but marginally better. It's probably the best way to play the game for a new player but the original will always feel special to an old fuck like me. fake edit: So a few days passed since I wrote this and I started a new game on Extreme and oh boy, yeah there's definitely been some changes here. I made it all the way to The Pain boss fight and I just... couldn't do it. I looked up strategies online and I feel like I got it down pretty well but I just could never actually fucking get him. I would get to a point where I would only have a shot or two left but then I'd run out of ammo and would need to dive into the water to grab some grenades or some mk22 ammo. And I would just get stuck in a loop of dodging his attacks and never get an opening again. This motherfucker is seriously overtuned. It's legitimately insane. You'll get his shield off with a grenade and he'll immediately bring it back or just go right into one of his attack and you'll have no choice but to dive into the water to avoid it. So I started over in Legacy Mode to see if it was easier. Making it all the back way to the fight was actually kind of challenging because in Legacy Mode you only have access to the fixed camera angles, you can't switch to third-person on the fly like in the original. I'm assuming because the two modes are balanced differently. Anyway, I guess I got used to playing this game in third-person over the years because I kinda hated how limiting the fixed camera angles were. Oh and I wasn't crazy, sneaking up on enemies is definitely easier in Legacy Mode. They still notice you but there's a longer pause between them spotting you and the alert going off, which leaves you just enough time to body slam them into the ground. Also, in Legacy Mode you can easily headshot enemies with the tranq gun no matter the distance. I'm assuming this is part of the balancing to account for the perspective change between the two modes. Anyway, I persisted and finally made it back to the Pain and... yeah, fuck this. I don't know if he's actually easier in Legacy than in New Style but the classic controls are so counter-intuitive that I just didn't have the patience to try more than a few times. It's a bummer because after my initial playthrough I was actually looking forward to replaying the game with more of a challenge (and I was loving everything up to this point) but this is just a roadblock I don't have the patience for. I play these games for the stealth gameplay, not for the gimmicky boss fights. I don't have the patience for this bullshit anymore. If you play this, stick to normal/hard difficulty. Maybe I'll give the original a replay just to see if I end up having the same problem... So yeah, overall it's a fun game but I don't think it quite manages to replace the original. If they do another remake, they should probably do MGS1 cause that one felt dated as hell when I replayed it through the Master Collection.

Thought it was time to move this to multi-platform games.

Hades II More of this. Inching towards the end now, one run at a time. I'm not sure if this one is easier, or if it gives you more tools to succeed, or if I've just become better with failure (I started playing Souls games after I originally played Hades 1) and more understanding of its role in these games....but I've not yet engaged the games 'God Mode' and I'm not sure I need it to get to the end-credits. Speaking of which. They've got a patch on the way that'll address some of the issues with the games true ending. I'm not sure what those issues are, only that it all feels a bit rushed. It now puts me in a position where I want to continue playing the game, but don't want to finish it before this new content patch goes live. That could be a few days, it could be a few weeks. Meanwhile I'm just gonna sit here with my dick in my hand I guess? Dispatch Low-key could be my surprise of the year. I wasn't expecting to fall head over heels for a story based game from some of the people who made those Telltale games back in the early 2010's..but here we are. It's got that episodic thing going on that those games had, only (and this is the key) I believe they've already finished the game and are choosing to release it in that way; two episodes a week, each episode being roughly an hour long. For a Dad of two with limited time, that's kind of ideal. Even better? It runs like a dream on Deck. I played through the first two episodes last week, and I'm eagerly anticipating the next dump in a few days time. All in all the entire series should be wrapped up by mid-November. Oh and for what it's worth, it's not got any of that janky free-roaming adventure stuff the Telltale games had. There's QTE's and some light squad management stuff, but for the most part it's all fantastic art and even more fantastic writing.

No one in the UK can see that image but I personally feel much better knowing that whatever it was can't be viewed by my children. Thanks Keir. Anyway. I started and I finished a little game by the name of Caput Mortum last week. It's a short little thing; maybe 3-4 hours if you get a stuck (like I did). It's a horror based puzzle game that isn't overly scary, but does have a really cool vibe and some nice moments. It won't change your life, but it was a fun way to spend an evening.