danielpholt

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 I'm about 90 minutes into this and I think I might be hooked. I'm not normally a videogame story or cutscene guy, frankly I just don't care and don't really have the time to do so. That said, the games first hour was some of the finest storytelling I've ever seen in a game and damn near drew a tear out of my tired old eyes. As others have no doubt said, the game's combat is where it makes it's money, and whilst I suck at it, I can see that; I usually run away from turn-based combat, but this does so much around that core idea that it barely feels like a turn based thing at all. I'll be sticking with it for the foreseeable, and if it does become a bit too hard I might just knock the difficulty down to get through the game and enjoy the story; not something I usually bother with.

DOOM: The Dark Ages This one is fun eh? So for context I really enjoyed my time with DOOM (2016), and then bounced off Eternal so quickly that I damn near gave myself whip-lash. I went into this expecting very little, and leave it with DOOM TDA being some of the most fun I've had with a shooter in quite some time. 4/5 - A must play. Deep Duck Trouble (Staring Donald Duck) I'm not going to assign a score to this one, because, well I'm not sure it's fair to the game given I'm playing it some 30 years after it originally launched. DDT is was Sega Master System game (that I believe was also pushed out on the Game Gear). It's one of the first games I've got memories of playing (and sucking at) with as a kid and I wanted a big ol' spoon of nostalgia shoved down my throat. I had a brief but fun time with the game, although as you may expect, time hasn't been kind to it. It's got some pretty horrific slow downs, the platforming is mediocre at best and the enemies aren't exactly difficult. That being said, it looks gorgeous for a SMS game, it's got some real cute animation and sprite work and the soundtrack is kinda catchy. Took me around an hour to beat (using save states) and I'll likely come back to it again and again in the future.

I wonder if there's any merit to the idea that given this new game doesn't have the Pokemon IP behind it, they might actually have to put the work in to make it a success. Rightly or wrongly, those Pokemon games sell regardless of quality.

Big fan of Guacamelee here, and whilst Nobody Saves The World was fun, I can't wait to see more of Blighted. I have no idea what to expect from Felt That Boxing, but .....just look at how cool it looks.

I just don't have time for all of these action-RPG's. Dark Souls 3 and Khazan took over my life for what feels like three months, and now you're telling me Lies of P DLC is out in the wild, and there's another Chinese one coming in a few weeks and then I've got to find the time to play Code Vein before I do CVII. Imma sell the kids. Yeah. That'll do it.

https://www.goretroid.com/en-gb/products/retroid-pocket-classic?srsltid=AfmBOoqh6Ya9lV4emlFm9LptbhuocIXPOpXtscYsh6J6Z-ejaDoLoTXY I've heard Android emulation can be a bit difficult, but damn if I'm not super interested in adding one of these to my collection.

A Game About Digging A Hole Silly little game about (you guessed it) digging a whole. Only took me like three hours, but those three hours completely flew by and I had a really good time with it. So if you've got an evening to kill, or enjoy the dig>loot>upgrade sort of thing, give it a look. 4/5

I have finally finished Khazan. And yikes. Ultimately I ended up knocking it down to 'easy' and yet even with that extra help, I'd argue that's the hardest soulslike I've ever played. The final boss was all sorts of ridiculous and both exhilarating and frustrating in equal measure. It's done. I can spend time with my children once again, finally start a new book and maybe even start a new videogame. What a time to be alive. If I had to give it a rating (using my own system) I'd give it a 4/5, which is 'Great', although I'd add that for the sort of person who enjoys these games, I think it's basically a must play; just maybe knock it down to 'easy' where it feels much closer to a traditional From game in terms of raw difficulty, although even then, I'd argue it's harder than anything From has produced, even Sekiro.

So over the last year or so I've lost about 23kg in weight. Most of that has come through improvements to my diet, but I've also been moving a little more. Over the last month or two I've been working out. Not much mind you, I don't have much time nor do I have much space, so it's mainly weights and some basic calisthenics; 30-40 minutes a day, 5 days a week. I'm doing this before work, and then going to work (a manual job) so I'm a little tired, but it's worth it. Been using 5kg weights so far and my arms and chest are already feeling a little tighter, more toned. This purchase is the next part of this. They should carry me through the rest of the 'fitness journey'. I can't see myself wanting to lift heavier than 22kg, and if I do, then I imagine it's time to get a gym membership. Sorry kids. So yeah. £229. Money well spent.

Khazan I feel like I've been playing this fucking thing since the dawn of time. And that isn't a good thing. I thought I was close to the end, I was not. I'm roughly half way through, and whilst I am still having fun, I find the entire game to be exhausting in a way that other Soulslikes just aren't. The world design is flat and the levels for the most part look kinda samey. The entire game has this bleak brown/grey look that does nothing to excite the player and the generic enemies are basically just complete fodder and yet they almost always come with a distance enemy to do nothing but annoy you... That said, I'm still enjoying the boss fights, although I will admit that I knocked it down to easy. I was taking 50-60 attempts per boss during the early-mid game and I just don't have that sort of time. So knocked it down to easy and honestly, I think that should be the 'normal' difficulty. It feels much less punishing and more on par with the rest of the sub-genre in terms of overall difficulty; still hard, but the balance has been levelled out. Honestly, the only issue I had with the harder 'normal' difficulty was that the enemies HP pool was ridiculous. I can take the bosses hitting harder than normal because ultimately, it's a game about learning the moveset and figuring out parrying and dodging. No problem with bosses that can fuck you up in one moment. I do think that extreme difficulty coupled with the fact that the bosses have such ridiculous pools of health takes it from a fun challenge into something almost unfair to the player. You have to be perfect (and I mean perfect) for a solid 7-8 minutes just to generate enough damage to get them down to 1/3 of their health and yeah, to me that's just a bit too much. I'm hoping to have this finished in the next week or two. It's starting to weigh on me a little and coming straight off of Dark Souls III I feel like all I've done with my free time since February is play super challenging and very time consuming games. Rhythm Tengoku Or more specifically, an English translation by the name of 'Rhythm Heaven Silver' I've been playing this on my Anbernic RG40XXV as something of a palet cleanser to Khazan and it's kind of delightful. Super cute, very charming and great to just pick up and put down, I'm actually wondering how I missed this game (and the franchise as a whole) for so long. I suck at it. Although, (and this may be wishful thinking) I've read that there may be an issue with regards to latency when emulating, which may explain why my timing is more miss than hit. That said, If I spend a little time tweaking I think I'll be able to sort that out. Super cute - 4/5

Bionic Bay is in the books! Limbo meets Super Meat Boy meets Tiny Wings meets The Swapper. Great platforming that'll make the hairs on your neck stand up that's elevated even higher by a truly memorable soundtrack and some very nice visuals make this something I wholeheartedly recommend for anyone who likes platformers with a bit of an atmosphere. Took me 11 hours (give or take) to get through the games campaign. It certainly gets a little demanding towards the end, but I never felt like giving up and only had to use a guide in one spot (which, as it turns out was because I wasn't looking at the screen well enough). 4/5 - Great

Bionic Bay I think it's doing the game a bit of a disservice to say that it's Limbo meets Meat Boy but....kinda that? I'm playing it on my Steamdeck. It runs fantastically, it looks beautiful and it's got some really nice sound design and music. It's not overly difficult (as of yet), although there's definitely a level of challenge here that requires one to have a decent understanding of ones controller, and whilst it does have a few tricky puzzles along the way, the games very respectful of your time in allowing almost instantaneous restarts at the very frequent checkpoints. Really enjoying it so far, and it's a nice change of pace from Khazan which is still tormenting me.

So I got a refund on Blue Prince, and then I used that refund to grab the following...

I've just hit another boss and once again I'm asking if it's worth it for me to continue on playing on 'normal'. Save yourself.

Blue Prince Bounced off this one super hard to the point where I was able to get a refund on Steam for it. Classic case of the game just not being for me. I'm interested in the puzzle stuff but the games reliance on RNG and (to a lesser extent) the run-based nature of it put me off almost immediately. It seems well made, and I'm sure it's fantastic for those that are into those things, but it just isn't for me. For what its worth, I'm also seeing a lot of conversation about the RNG aspects being a detriment towards the end of the game when you're so close to wrapping things up but just can't get the pieces to fall in the right order. That right there stinks of frustration and ultimately I wonder if that's not going to have a negative effect on the games appeal in the long run. Khazan Still plugging away at this. It hasn't grabbed me nearly as much as Dark Souls or Lies of P did, although in DS3 case that was largely down to the fact that I was playing it on my Steamdeck; having the ability to play without locking up the family TV is massive for me. The game itself is pretty fantastic. Without wishing to get caught up in the debate about difficulty I'll say this; bosses are beatable and the game isn't overly difficulty in what it asks you to do, for my money however most of the boss encounters are made significantly more difficult through the enemy in question having significantly more HP than I think is reasonable. You have to be so perfect for so long that at times it feels a bit unfair. That said, there's a few real nice QoL improvements that actively help the player progress; 'Souls' dropping just before the boss-gate, eliminating run-backs and allowing the player to collect souls for depending on how much damage they put into the boss before dying are frankly, kind of great and I hope we see more of that in the future. So yeah, going to keep going with it as when it hits, man does it hit good. I just wish the level design was a little more fleshed out (it's fairly linear) and that the bosses felt a little less like sponges. I'm enjoying this one more than I enjoyed Wukong last year, and that made my top 5 of the year so. As an aside, I've been eyeing up replaying Sekiro again for the first time since I beat it in 2022 and whilst that game absolutely pushed me to my limit, I can't help but feel that it'd be an absolute walk in the park compared to this thing. Both games deal in parry and stamina but holy fuck they feel worlds apart in how they demand the player get-gud.