TheMightyEthan

Maneater As I said in the currently playing thread, this game is a lot of stupid fun, which is what I wanted. It's not quite as ridiculous as I was hoping, but it's close. It's not an amazing game by any means, and the objectives are extremely repetitive, but if you got it through PS+ or can get it cheap I recommend it for some brainless silliness. 3/5

https://www.funimation.com/blog/2021/03/06/the-devil-is-a-part-timer-season-2-officially-announced/ w00t!

Super Mario 3D World + Bowsers Fury I'd been trying to hold off on this, and had started playing Mario Odyssey again* to try to fill that niche, but all that accomplished was making me want this even more, so here we are. *Side note, Mario Odyssey is a much much better game than I gave it credit for the first time around. I always knew it was good, but for whatever reason it didn't strike me as top-tier Mario. Now though I think it has supplanted Mario Sunshine as my favorite 3D Mario, which is quite the achievement since Super Mario 3D All-Stars just proved to me that Sunshine really was as good as I remembered.

After I finished Maquette I was in the mood for something a little more mindless, and since I had Maneater from PS+ I decided to give that a try. It's definitely mindless, though maybe a tad less ridiculous than I was expecting (don't get me wrong, it's still ridiculous, just from what I had heard I was expecting more in the realm of super-powers, though there is a little bit of that). It's a lot of stupid fun, and squarely in the AA category that I wish there were more of.

Yeah, I liked that game way more than I expected to. Quite a lot of fun.

I found that game extremely frustrating (I played it years ago on PS4, but after performance patches so it was mostly fine), mostly for the reasons you say: often I would solve a puzzle, but wouldn't realize it, because I couldn't get Trico to do the thing I needed him to, so I would assume that wasn't what I was supposed to do. Other times I knew 100% what I was supposed to do but couldn't get him to do it anyway. Extremely frustrating. The reason I came in here: Sackboy: A Big Adventure I played this with my wife, and it was a lot of fun. Way better than any of the Little Big Planet games, and much less frustrating too. I've heard people compare it to Super Mario 3D world, and I wouldn't put it quite that high, there were a few too many times I died that I weren't because I messed up but because the game screwed me, but it's still really good overall. 4/5

The main problem is Joe Manchin. Fuck him.

Maquette This is a puzzle game with a really cool recursive area concept, that could have been used a little better. For the most part the puzzles were manageable to figure out, without being obvious, but there were a few where I got stuck and when I finally looked up the answer I though "I would literally never have figured that out", which isn't a great thing for a puzzle game. The concept mostly makes up for that though, because it really is cool, and makes you feel really smart when you do figure out a puzzle. 3/5

Well Breath of the Wild was developed with Wii U as its main platform, so it makes sense that it wouldn't have the Switch features super well-utilized.

I loved how you could feel what surface you were walking on through the controller. Hard surfaces felt tappy, soft surfaces felt cushy, it was nuts. And then the part where it's raining, and you can feel the raindrops and still feel the footsteps at the same time. Amazing. I will say with the Switch, Nintendo seems to remember the HD rumble, just nobody else does. It's not as advanced as the haptic feedback in the Dualsense, but I've recently started playing Mario Odyssey again and you can definitely get a feel for what's happening through the rumble. I think part of the problem there though is that due to the limited size of the joycons the mechanism has to be smaller, so you end up with more of a buzzing feeling than an actual rumbly feeling. I had completely forgotten the Xbox One even had anything special with the triggers. Looking it up, they're not adaptive the same way the Dualsense ones are, they don't provide variable resistance, it just has rumble motors built into them so you can feel them rumbling based on what's going on. According to Tech Radar though, now that PS5 has the adaptive triggers 3rd parties have started actually using the impulse triggers on the Xbox controllers.

Immortals Fenyx Rising: A New God Pretty good. A little light on story content, it's basically just an excuse to do a bunch more challenge trials, but the trials were well designed and I enjoyed doing it. 4/5

Macquette looks so awesome, I've been following that game, so it's great to get it included with +.

It doesn't do it every time, it's just occasionally, and it seems to do it more with some games than others. Like it's done it to me three times in the last two weeks on Sackboy: A Big Adventure, but hasn't done it at all on Immortals Fenyx Rising. Supposedly the last firmware update did fix it, but mine still does it from time to time.

Idk, I don't know the PS4/Xbone -> PS5/Series is really a big enough jump to justify remakes, just resolution and framerate bumps.

It's a lot better than it was at launch, now at least it says "PS4" after the title if you have that version selected, and pops up a warning (which you can disable) if you try to launch the PS4 version of a game that you also have the PS5 version, asking if you wanted to launch that instead. For a few weeks there were a lot of people playing PS4 versions of games thinking they were playing PS5 and being very underwhelmed with the new console. The thing that I find annoying is that when playing a PS5 upgrade off a PS4 disc, it sometimes randomly starts installing the PS4 version. Like no, I already have the PS5 version installed, leave it alone.

That keeps catching my eye, but I have bounced off 3 different soulslikes, so I'm not buying another one until I at least finish one of the others. I got Bloodborne through the PS+ collection, and since its combat is faster than any of the DS's I think that's probably the most likely one to stick with me. I played a few hours and quit, but that wasn't so much because I didn't like it as because Death Stranding kept calling me back to get the platinum on that. I'm also holding out slim hope they'll release a 4k60 patch for it, because damn does 1080p with no AA look rough.

I will say the tracking seems much much better than in was on PS3.

I've used them on PS5, but I never used them on PS4 so I can't comment on whether they're better or not.

Yeah, it's different. It's definitely in the "weird indie game" category, you know the kind that starts off making a fair amount of sense, but starts to get more and more surreal as it goes on.

Paper Beast This is a PSVR game, and I don't even really know how to explain it. You're going through these surreal, fantastical areas, populated by paper beasts, and doing some light puzzle solving, some involving reshaping the environment with sand/water/etc. It's amazing. It gave me more of a sense of place than I think any other PSVR game I've played. It also made me really really want a From Dust VR port. 5/5

Moss, for PSVR. After I finished Paper Beast the other day I played around in the creative mode a little, which lets you zoom out to where it looks like a little diorama. That really reminded me of the Moss demo, so I checked PSN and conveniently it was 60% off, the biggest sale it's ever had, so I bought it.

Maybe it will help that now the US has a president who wouldn't be cool with that...?

Yeah, there's no weapon breaking or anything like that.

Fourplexes should be a minimum size, not an "up to".