Mister Jack

Should've made an airless football and made Tom Brady use it.

This is what he said. "We intend to investigate and take appropriate measures to address any acts that infringe on intellectual property rights." To me that reads as "We know, we know, stop emailing us about it."

Nintendo ain't gonna do shit. They took down a Pokemon mod for this game literally overnight (and rightfully so because the creator was charging money for it). I see no logical reason the Nintendo ninjas would leave this game standing for 3+ years if they had any legal ground to stand on. The only way they'd have a case would be if the Palworld devs literally stole assets and reused them, and I would be rather shocked if they were that stupid.

I remember reading that they got a Japanese firearms enthusiast to model the guns for them for no reason other than "Americans like to shoot things." They weren't wrong.

This game is huge now and it's only going to get bigger, so it was about time it got a thread.

I really do like Palworld and I hate that the discourse around it is mostly whether or not they plagiarized. I freely admit that some of the designs really skirt the line as close as they can without getting in trouble, but I'd rather have something derivative than ugly. I remember when TemTem was a thing. The monsters in that had their own unique style but that style was so hideous that I had no desire whatsoever to catch them, let alone raise them. Besides, once you strip away the surface level visual comparisons the fact is that Palworld and Pokemon are almost nothing alike aside from using balls to catch monsters. This is a dev team that literally had to learn how to make the game as they went along and it bums me out that they're being vilified rather than celebrated. At least their game is a huge success.

What kinda hardware are you playing it on?

I'm loving the hell out of Palworld, and for me that's saying a lot because I usually have no interest in survival games at all. I think what sets this one apart is that there's more focus on building your base and less on managing hunger and piss meters and stuff like that I usually hate in the genre. There is a hunger meter for you and your pals, but it's not that hard to manage and once you get a farm going you never really need to worry about starving anyway. You'll be spending much more time building up your base and catching pals to put to work. That's really what I love most, all the different ways you can use your pals. Not only will they help you with building things, but depending on their element they can also do things like cook food, water crops, plant seeds, power electric devices, and more. You can even make special equipment to use them in unique ways out on the field. I built a special harness for my fire fox that lets me carry him around and use him like a flamethrower. I made a harness for my deer pal so I could ride him around. I built my grass squirrel...well, an Uzi. I gave him an Uzi. Don't go to the Palpagos Islands tomorrow. Playing single player is fun, not to mention pretty challenging during boss battles, but I made a second character so I could join a friend's world and we had an absolute blast building up a base and hunting for new pals together. It's the most fun I've had in co-op in some time. While I didn't try it myself, you can also play on both official and fanmade dedicated servers that support up to 32 players. Maybe at some point I'll make a third character to give that a go. Some people out there are ripping on this game because they say they blatantly copied several Pokemon designs, and some of them do look really similar, but I kinda...don't care about that? Yeah, I don't care if they ripped off the biggest media franchise on the planet. Getting up in a tizzy about it stinks of some real "leave the multi billion dollar company alone" vibes to me. Besides, the gameplay is completely different in almost every way. Actual pal battles happen in real time and you're actively helping out with whatever weapons you have on hand. There's really no comparison. The other criticism I hear is that it's too edgy and I feel like this is really overblown. There's no blood or gore whatsoever and when you kill(?) wild pals they just ragdoll with spirals in their eyes. The supposed edginess comes from the fact that the game gives you total freedom to do horrible things if you choose to do so without forcing or even encouraging it, but the amount of freedom can lead to some fucked up implications. For example, I had a human poacher take a shot at me with a rifle so I caught him in a pal sphere. Yes, you can capture humans. I took him back to my camp, grabbed a meat cleaver, and chopped him up for parts (the butchering was censored with a mosaic). You can be as kind or cruel as you want to be and both approaches are valid. My personal style is to cherish my pals and keep them happy but also rain fire and death down on any humans who dare to cross me. It's a real hoot. I can't remember the last time I enjoyed an early access game this much and I can't wait to see where it goes in the future.

Custom difficulty settings. Palworld has easy, normal, and hard settings like any other game, but then it also has a custom setting where you can adjust sliders for practically everything. Look at this. There are a ton of settings you can change, and this screenshot is only around half of them. Think grinding takes too long? Just speed it up yourself. Want to make the game harder? You can adjust that too. I didn't touch most of these settings, at least not yet, because I want to experience the intended difficulty first. However, I did adjust the penalty upon death to just dropping your items instead of dropping items and equipment and now I'm having a lot more fun with it (you can also set it to no penalty, but I didn't want to make it too easy on myself).

Assassin's Creed Nexus I've been playing this off and on for the past couple months. It only takes about 15 hours to beat if you don't worry about the side stuff but I've just been busy/distracted by other games. If anything, this game manages to prove that the formula can work in VR. You can do pretty much everything you'd expect to be able to do in an Assassin's Creed game, and most of it works pretty well. Unsheathing your hidden blade by flicking your wrist is always a fun bit of immersion, and being able to throw your melee weapon directly into the face of a charging guard always feels badass. Obviously, the game is of a smaller scale than a traditional AC title, but the maps are still decently sized in each chapter and you have plenty of tools at your disposal to approach a situation in a multitude of ways. I only have two gripes to speak of. Firstly, the climbing can be a little finicky. The climbing part itself is fine, but pulling yourself up onto a ledge or jumping to a distant handhold doesn't always register the way it should, which can mean falling back down if you don't catch yourself in time. It mostly works, but the climbing in Asgard's Wrath 2 still felt a lot more responsive and tight. Speaking of Asgard's Wrath 2, the swordfighting in this game can't even begin to compare. It works fine, nothing is broken, but it's pretty slow paced like most VR swordfighting games are, giving you pretty wide windows to block and parry for the sake of not overwhelming the player. It may help to mitigate frustration, but it feels more like a rhythm game than a true sword battle. If anything, it feels a little too easy for a game that is supposed to be emphasizing stealth over brute force. The actual assassination mechanics are a lot more fun and feel more natural, though. As VR games go, I'd say this is still one of the better ones, maybe on the lower end of a top 10 list or just barely outside of it.

Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name There's not a whole lot to say. It's more Yakuza (although I guess I need to start calling it Like a Dragon now). It's a shorter game than the others, which is why it only cost 50, but it bridges the gap between Yakuza 6 and 7. If you like the series, you'll like this. If you don't, this one won't change your mind. One nice QoL improvement, however, is that random battles no longer require load times. If enemies see you on the street, the fight will start pretty much instantly with no need for a transition screen. That really helps to speed things up, which I appreciate. Aside from that, you get the Like a Dragon experience you'd expect. There's a gripping story, tons of side content and minigames, a delightful mix of drama and goofiness, and all the bone-crunching brawling you could ask for. It's definitely not accessible to newcomers, though. If you haven't played pretty much all the previous games in the series, don't bother. Now bring on Infinite Wealth. My body is ready.

Finally, I can use my Quest 3 for more than two hours. Not only does this stand hold your headset and controllers, but it uses magnets to charge both the internal battery and the external battery strap at the same time. The much more comfortable padding is also a nice bonus.

GAME OF THE YEAR Yeah this one really couldn't have been anything else. I've never really been one for CRPGs but this one finally managed to suck me in. It's just such an enormous game with so much player choice and such great and memorable party members along with such deep and tactical combat that I really had no choice but to pick the same game most other people out there are picking. This one won the game awards for a damn good reason and I'm itching to replay it in co-op sometime. You could probably replay this ten times and have ten different experiences. The next Dragon Age or Mass Effect game has a hell of a tough act to follow after this one. RUNNER-UP I was fully prepared to put Tears of the Kingdom as the runner-up, and in fact I did just that in the poll for the other GOTY thread, but then I played Asgard's Wrath II and it just blew me away. Is it as big or deep as Zelda? No, of course not, but the thing is that Tears of the Kingdom was basically Breath of the Wild except better while Asgard's Wrath II, despite being a sequel, gave me an experience unlike anything else I've played before, especially in VR. It felt more fresh than Tears of the Kingdom did, so I just have to give it bonus points for that. It will probably be a long time before I experience combat that is this much fun again. Lots of VR games let you swing a sword around, but somehow it just feels so much better doing it in this one, and that's not even getting into the other weapons you get to play with in your loadout. Wielding a blade, a whip, a shield, a ranged weapon, and magic all at the same time against enemies who don't pull their punches makes battles more satisfying than anything I've felt in a VR game before. That's not even getting into the creative puzzles that will have you utilizing your god form, your mortal form, and your animal powers all at once to get through dungeons. This is probably the closest thing to a Zelda game we're going to get in VR anytime soon. HONORABLE MENTION I normally try not to put three games in a post like this but man, 2023 was just such a kickass year for games, maybe the best year since 2017. While I could put Zelda here and I would definitely say Zelda was the superior game in comparison, a Zelda game hardly needs to be given special mention. Outside of Nioh 2, Lies of P is the best Soulslike game not made by From that I have played to date. The atmosphere, the story, the combat, it all just scratches that Bloodborne itch in me that has been going neglected for ages. I think I ended up completing it five times before I put it down. It was pretty punishingly inaccessible at launch, but it has since been patched to make it easier for new players to get into it without hitting a brick wall. I recommend it to anyone who liked Bloodborne and I can't wait for the sequel.

Real Yakuza don't wait for 2024.

Asgard's Wrath II This is it. This is the killer app, the system seller, the reason to buy a Quest. I'm sure a lot of people scoffed at Meta when they tried to enter the gaming space (and don't get me wrong, the Metaverse is still embarrassing), but if Oculus Studios keeps putting out titles of this caliber then Valve and Playstation had better step it up because this surpasses Half-Life: Alyx as the best VR game currently in existence. I don't know where to begin with how much I loved this game. I already thought the first one was really good, but this one is such a leap that it feels like the jump from Half-Life to Half-Life 2. Not only did they fix the few complaints I had with the first game, but they improved things that I didn't even think needed to be improved. Despite the name of the game, this time you're trekking through both the Norse and Egyptian pantheons, with the plot explaining it as Loki's machinations causing the threads of fate to unravel throughout the universe and it falls to you to fix it. The number of animal companions has been reduced to 5, but to make up for it each one can also be used as a mount to traverse the huge open maps. The developers claim this has a 60 hour campaign and yeah, that wasn't a lie. This game is enormous and stuffed with content. The one major complaint I had in the last game was the divine shield mechanic that required you to parry specific attacks to break the shields before you could do any damage. Divine shields still exist in this game, but they've been improved significantly. For starters, no enemy has more than one shield now, even bosses. Second, you can do chip damage to the shield with regular attacks. Third, there are multiple ways to open up enemy weak points, and if you hit those weak points then it not only does huge damage to their shield but it also refills your own. You never feel like you're just waiting for an opportunity to do damage anymore. Combat is fast, intense, challenging, and responsive. I can easily say this is the best melee combat I've ever experienced in a VR game, and since you're once again playing a god who possesses multiple mortal heroes, that means everyone has a different loadout to play with. Some of them are extremely creative and you would never be able to guess what kind of weapon some of them use. The puzzles are tricky but fair and boss battles are epic. The final boss battle is, once again, the best I've experienced in VR to date. As if a huge campaign that lasts dozens of hours wasn't enough, they also included a free roguelike mode where you traverse through a dungeon to compete for high scores, farm items for the single-player campaign, and complete challenges to unlock cosmetics for your godly avatar. Oh yeah, almost forgot, you can share your avatar throughout the campaign From Software style to show off your character or give hints to other players. They are also doing seasonal events for the roguelike mode so there will always be new things to unlock. This mode would be the full game for most VR titles and here they just threw it in as a side thing. It's fantastic. If I absolutely had to pick a negative point, and I am loath to do so, it's that it's not a graphical darling compared to the likes of Alyx. It doesn't look ugly, mind you, but as a native Quest game it has to work within the constraints of the hardware. The developers absolutely did the best they could with what they had to work with and what they managed to make is very impressive, but you still shouldn't put this on expecting Alyx level graphics. That's my only complaint, and it's not even really a complaint, more just me trying to be fair with my assessment. While the game also works on Quest 2, I am so glad I experienced it on the Quest 3, which not only got a graphics patch to take advantage of the extra power but the pancake lenses make it look so damn good. I can't go back to fresnel. Had I beaten this game when we were doing the game of the year poll this one absolutely would have made it onto the list, probably near the top.

I haven't finished it

The idea is that by using buttons instead of a stick you can get faster and more accurate inputs once you get used to it.

Five Nights at Freddy's: Help Wanted 2 I was always a casual enjoyer of the FNAF franchise at best, but the first Help Wanted was an excellent VR game with remakes of the first four games in the series along with a smattering of minigames to top it off. Well, this one is all minigames. Maybe around 20 or so? I didn't think to actually count them, but it took me 8 hours to beat them all and get both endings, which seems reasonable enough. A few of the minigames are new versions of the usual gameplay of the series where you have to watch cameras and close doors and vents, only this time they're harder because unlike the first game which just remade the originals and thus playing in VR gave you an advantage over the AI, these levels are designed from the ground up for VR, meaning you'll have to do things like look outside your office occasionally to see if anyone is lurking around the corner. The rest of the minigames, excluding things like the surprisingly creative shooting galleries, are typically based around performing complex tasks under the pressure of either a strict time limit or an animatronic hunting you in the background (or both). Some of these can get pretty frantic, especially on the hard mode. There are plenty of games where you have to take food orders, but putting together orders in VR while an impatient robot hovers over you so she can kill you if you get it wrong just hits different. This is one of those games that would be fun to watch other people play at a party or something. I tend to have nerves of steel but I bet it would be pretty amusing to watch a total wuss try to do arts and crafts while getting stalked in the dark.

Just in time for the sex update! Yes, really.

Playing Asgard's Wrath II right now and holy hot damn this game is amazing. This might surpass Half Life: Alyx as the best VR game for me. At the very least, it's neck and neck right now. Anyone who owns a Quest headset absolutely needs to play it.