Thursday Next

I'm currently playing through this myself. It's... weird... I think it's good as well.

This is revolutionary France stuff. They party in their palaces, while voting for kids to go without food, and leaving the poorest to freeze during a cost of living crisis. This is the sort of thing certain sections of the British public sneer at "third world countries" for.

Oh yeah! Forgot these two. It's going to be a great year.

Horizon: Forbidden West A brilliantly realised world, I hugely enjoyed the Zoid's and the ways to take different ones down. Apparently there are upgrades to human enemies which was really the only weak point in the game imo. Can't wait to see what comes next. God of War: Ragnorok Even if it is more of the same, I am hugely looking forward to taking down another pantheon. PSVR2 I thought PSVR was great in terms of accessibility, the only thing that let it down for me was the number of cables required and the fact that you had to sacrifice HDR (or 4K?) as the VR box didn't do pass-through. It sounds like the upgrade fixes all my issues with the original kit (especially the one usb c cable to connect), plus lots of extra upgrades like the controllers, inside out tracking, eye tracking make it sound amazing.

Returnal I like the core game loop, but I just wish it was easier. I don't have enough time that I want to fail at the same thing over and over again until I "git gud". If it had a Hades style "God Mode" where each time you fail you get tankier, I would stick with it. But as it is, I think I am out.

I kinda agree with you both, when I played through the first time, I thought it was quite long. NG+ went a lot quicker.

Oh yeah, I saw the advert on their site for CES, so expect something big is coming.

Let me know how that goes. I'm gonna be in the market for a new TV around the 55" mark in March next year.

Yeah, fiddy five is waaaaay too much. I'll wait for a sale.

Need to mix up the purple and black for that supervillain aesthetic.

I know you know, but to be clear... She didn't "fight for IS". She was groomed at the age of 15, lured to Syria, married to an IS fighter, bore several children all of whom died. She was a handy test case for the govt, especially when (in a camp of IS refugees/prisoners, surrounded by people who were still adherents to IS) she did not express the remorse/disdain that the general public wanted (I would question how vocal most Daily Mail readers would be in their opposition to IS in the same situation). I'm not remotely surprised that in classic "they came for" style that Shamima was the thin end of the wedge.

Ahhh, got you. Yeah, I'm not fussed about the expanded lore stuff personally, but I get that it would be nice to have some better ties between Dishonoured and Deathloop. Even if it was in the form of some external resource like a comic or whatever.

I also really enjoyed Deathloop, feel like Arkane perfected the formula. While I get the frustration of failing a loop, I remember going for a no-kills run in Dishonoured 2 I reached the end of a really long level only to find that a guard had at some point slid off a roof while unconscious and fallen to his death, I had the choice of restarting the entire level which was a few hours of gameplay or just playing through to the end. At least with Deathloop the loops are pretty short and it doesn't matter how hard you fuck up a loop it's all forgiven at the end of the day, so I don't mind it as much as I find the whole package more forgiving than Dishonoured. I agree it would have been fun if you could have multiple routes to a kill 'em all finale but I guess that is a significant amount of extra work. I wouldn't be surprised if multiple end-states had been in scope at one point, but they had to scale back to make a launchable product. I do feel that once I had seen the end credits, I was kinda done with the game anyway so multiple endings were not something I personally needed. What in the story were you left unsure about? I feel like a lot was covered in the found documents etc. and that it took a more From Software style of story telling being there to dig up if you wanted, while only the basics were fed to you in cutscenes etc.

Death Stranding Finished the story. It's suitably Kojima levels of nuttiness and will take me a while to unpack all the meaning. I'll probably not go back to it for a while though. Feel like I'm "done" with it. On to the next.

"Guns don't kill people, the parents of people who kill people with guns kill people."

Nah, didn't feel I was missing any essential context. It's not Foundation levels of complexity where if you don't know what a Seldon crisis is and go bowling in to book 3 you're in for a bad time.

It fills the rolls and toasts them?

I've read from Dune through to Sandworms of Dune (you have Hunters and Sandworms back to front btw), not the prequels. The rest of the series (Heretics - Sandworms) has a good overarching arc, and a satisfying resolution provided you can get over the tropey sex-nun and other female representation issues (women do not fare well in the Dune series).

I think it looks really nice. I like the occasional game-y elements, they don't overwhelm it, but still nice to see bits here and there, not sure if I could sneak that past the wife though, lol. I'm glad I'm not the only one with a necessity driven "odd" tree. This is from last year, you can see the reason for this type of tree sitting under the tree. We'll be decorating at the weekend I think. Annoyingly, they still contrive to get into the tree somehow... Life... uh... finds a way.

Yeah, book 5, "Heretics of Dune" and the next like 4 or 5 books up to the end of the Atreides arc.

I enjoyed GamesMaster, I think it knows itself and as a result gets away with being a bit cheesey/cringey.

It makes sense where you have encumbrance or other limitations on how much you can carry (much as I tend to dislike those mechanics). Also if collect affects the aesthetic, eg removing flowers from a field that you may want to remain flowery. But if it's e.g. a "wood" resource that pops up after you have chopped down a tree, yeah, that should be automagic.

It starts to jump the shark when the sex-nuns turn up imho, but there's enough good in the series to read through to the end.

Ok, so either post-game, or once you have unlocked all teleporters (not sure which) the teleporters link so you can fast travel a bit. I've finished the story and have been doing a few speedbooster puzzles, but I have to say, I'm really not enjoying them, so think I am done with the game. NG+ doesn't really interest me tbh.

I liked MD apart from a couple of issues. I agree that it desperately needed fast travel (even if it was a late game thing, and only available between certain room types), the controls are also horrible. To aim and fire a rocket you have to hold "L" to aim, "R" to select rockets, aim with the thumbstick, and press "Y" to fire. When certain bosses require you to aim a rocket at a specific point, while avoiding stuff, it's just ludicrous. I also would have liked to have play post game with the hyper-beam, rather than the old Ninty stalwart of rewinding to before the final boss.