You should play Dark Souls

You all should

Finished A Plague Tale: Requiem last night and had a pretty nice time with it. It was definitely a few hours long for my taste but it was worth it overall. Looks lovely and I actually found myself quite engaged with the story which is rare for me. This was in part down to some great voice acting from the cast. Just today they announced a 60fps mode for Series X and PS5. I guess I played it at 30fps then. Felt absolutley fine to me.

regmcfly wrote:

It kinda sucks

Heresy. Burn the witch.

Assassin’s Creed (Xbox 360 via Xbox Series X) - Completed 100% with all Achievements. Did 100%ing the game finally fill the void at the heart of my soul? No.

Although this is running off backwards compatibility, it has the full works in terms of enhancements - 4K, 60fps, HDR. Although it’s dated, it still looks pretty good - the enhancements really do make it look like a borderline remaster. It looks and sounds really nice and atmospheric in places. It’s very 360/PS3-era gritty but it uses an array of different muted colour schemes for each location so it comes across as significantly more sophisticated than just a ‘piss filter’ and has actually dated pretty well. The main thing that dates the graphics is a distinct modularity to the environments - you see the same bits of building over and over. Perhaps this was to fit the large open-world environments in RAM? Compared to, say Origins, it feels much more like video game environments than having a romp through actual real-world historical environments.

Even though the controls and combat are a bit less intuitive than the modern games, I actually liked them - there’s a kind of weightiness to it all. By going back to the beginning you can see the origins of mechanics in the later games that aren’t explained as well. For example, in Origins, people will freak out if they see you clambering over buildings with no explanation why - whereas this actually explains the whole system of socially acceptable and socially unacceptable actions.

While the world and mechanics are decent, there’s a lack of interesting content to fill it. There is a *lot* of flab in this. The core assassinations are OK but the content to unlock them gets quite repetitive and dull. The collectibles are the worst, especially since they can’t be tracked properly in the game. It was later revealed that they were added very quickly just before the game went to print and it shows. I had a disturbing bug where the last two Templars I needed for 100% completion didn’t appear due to a glitch. Fortunately going back later made them reappear but I still didn’t appreciate the bugginess.

I felt like the game ended on quite a duff note as well - a lot of uninteresting all-out combat sequences over and over and then the story just abruptly ends on quite an anti-climactic cliffhanger.

I quite liked it as an audiovisual mood piece and the core content is more fun than not but obviously a rough first attempt in a lot of ways. [6]

Humanity (PS5)

Much more of a genre mashup than I was maybe expecting, and it subverts the genres moderately inventively at points... but I basically didn't think it was very good? Like it was fine, but none of the sequences particularly shone, and it maybe peaked for me at like 3 of 7... and then didn't really build from there, instead meandering sideways via new mechanics with nothing building on top of what went before in any kind of satisfying manner.

I also found the UX not great - often failing a puzzle through a minor mixup that takes a while to rectify... even with unlocked stuff there's no rewind, and with the follow command in play you can't even rerun from exactly how things were. There's also randomness which annoys me in puzzle-likes.

Which I guess brings me onto the story which... yeah was basically pish. Added nothing to the game for me, no feels or depth, I don't even think it was trying to be overly pretentious or anything it was just dull and totally didn't resonate for me at all. Decidedly meh, and not an alibi for the gameplay bits I disliked.

I'm probably being a bit harsh. There weren't many bits that actively offended. But by making my failures be ones of execution not thought it didn't score philosophical points, it just left me feeling its own execution lacked, even if some argue that was its gameplay intention.

I could stretch to a generous [8] perhaps, but I'm not going to. [7] it is.

132 goldies our if 150 without too much effort, cba too see more, cos only about three levels actually stood out, and I've already forgotten what they were. Kudos for squeezing bosses out mind, even though they were particularly shit.

Could and I think should have been more.

I thought AC1 got a bit of an unfair dissing at the time - it wasn't amazing, but it wasn't that bad either. I guess vs the hype it maybe underwhelmed but there was plenty of fun to be had - and still some impressive stuff given tech at the time.

The Xbox 360 version got 81 on Metacritic and it got a lot of very warm reviews but the PS3 version was technically poor and it had a bit of a critical reassessment after the sequel came out. It’s also one of those games where the quality of the critical path is decent but drops off dramatically when you stray into the sub content, which might not have bothered the initial reviewers but probably impacted opinions among players.

The Edge [4] steered me sharply away from it iirc. I did play the second game, which seemed better received on the whole.

I'm either mixing it up with something else or accidentally made it up then.

Moot_Geeza wrote:

I'm either mixing it up with something else or accidentally made it up then.

It was GamesTM.

hylian_elf wrote:

AC? Pretty sure Edge gave it a 7.

Yup.

7 was generous. Odious game.

I wonder if this strong collective memory of Edge giving AC1 a bad score is a misremembering of when they gave AC1 spin-off Assassin’s Creed: Altair’s Chronicles for the Nintendo DS a [3].

Maybe it was Spanish Edge? I heard it's the Hit.

Moot_Geeza wrote:

I thought it was Mirror's Edge for a sec but it turned out that was a [5].

Upon reflection Moot realised he was mistaken