DS!!! Yay!!!

Jusant. Enjoyed it a lot. Good pacing. Stuck to its mechanics. Quick to finish. Lovely to look at.

Not re-inventing the wheel, and some rough edges, but worth a run through.

Road Avenger on the Mega CD.

Third run through of Steamworld Dig done. Just as good as the first couple times and perfect pairing with the deck.

And my second run through of Steamworld Dig 2 that adds enough systems to elevate game into a worthy sequel.

They are both solid 8’s or 9’s for me as both games have made me come back to them which is rare.

Now onto Heist, which I’ve only played an hour of.

Jusant (SeX)

So I think I only had one real issue with the game, and that was that I didn't enjoy playing it.

Alas, that's a somewhat fundamental one, and it basically grew as the game continued (though the lady two chapters were slightly better, and at least short). Looked pretty nice, nice audio particularly with the shell bits, but just not all that fun once you've done the first five minutes of climbing. Which kinda made the clunkiness less forgiveable than it might otherwise have been.

I'm very close to a harsh [6], but I guess it did what it intended, and felt legit indie, so I'll stretch to a generous [7] cos that's the kind of guy I am.

Heh

Best headshots ever.

Some shorter reviews:

The Making of Karateka (PS5) - This is an interactive documentary in the style of Atari 50 (by the same devs) but it’s about Jordan Mechner’s development career from the very beginning through the release of Karateka and up to the point that his ideas for Karateka 2 began to morph into Prince of Persia. There are numerous pre-release versions of Mechner’s unreleased game Deathbounce and Karateka to try, as well as a selection of final release versions of Karateka across some different platforms and modern remastered versions of both Deathbounce and Karateka. If Atari 50 has a flaw, it’s that it maybe spreads the documentary format a bit thin across too many games. This feels like a better fit for the format in some ways but is also not perfect - with only one, fairly slight, commercially released game in the collection, it’s a lot of documentary for not a lot of gameplay. Probably what would be ideal for this format is something like The Making of X-Com with a bunch of Julian Gollop’s early games - multiple final games but not so many that it inevitably turns from a documentary into a retro complication. This is good, important work and I’m glad I commercially supported it. [8]

Karateka (Apple II) - It’s OK! It’s interesting to see the first steps towards cinematic-style narratives in video games. The gameplay is quite shallow and button-mashy. It’s an admirable attempt at doing something given the massive technical constraints it was created under. [6]

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Nintendo Switch) - I’ve probably already covered Mario Kart 8 before but I replayed the main campaign in 200cc mode so I get to include it in the 52 games in a year thing. It’s Mario Kart! I think a big intrinsic issue in video games trying to simulate racing is that in real-life if you fall behind that’s, like, it and just on a purely physical level you can’t catch up if you fall behind. And that doesn’t make for a very fun videogame so you have videogame versions of racing doing various things to get around that. Forza has the rewind function. Mario Kart has power-ups and I guess what you might call negative rubber-banding on the CPU carts where they’re obviously slowing down to concoct a narrative that you’ve managed a dramatic turnaround. The problem with these workarounds is you end up with games where the moment to moment driving is great but the wider meta-gameplay of the complete race still doesn’t hang together that well. If you’re constantly rewinding in Forza to complete a race, did you actually complete a race or just cheat your way to victory by sticking a bunch of heavily stage managed moments together? Did you really win a race in Mario Kart 8 if the opposing CPU carts just gave up and let you win?

I think Mario Kart 8 Deluxe would sidestep a lot of these issues if it was just a bit more subtle in how it manipulated the player. I was frequently frustrated when the game attempted to implement a riches-to-rags-to-riches narrative by having the CPU carts appear out of nowhere to knock me to 5th place with the idea that I would stage a dramatic turnaround and get 1st place at the last minute. Instead what often happened was:
* The CPU realised it’s actions were beyond the pale and the CPUs carts very obviously slammed the brakes on to let me sail to my justified 1st place literally in the very final stretch before the finish line.
* The CPU would cheat me down to 5th place so extremely late in the 3rd lap that I had no chance to recover and I just lost a race through absolutely no fault of my own.
A incredibly fun game (and obviously one that has a huge MP focus) but I do think a bit more subtlety in the SP campaign would be great. [8]

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe: Booster Course Pass (Nintendo Switch) - More Mario Kart! I think this is generally on a par with the main game. The Wave 1 courses are clearly not quite on the same quality levels as the other ones and look a bit flat visually but it doesn’t meaningfully drag the expansion down as a whole. [8]

Star Wars Jedi Survivor - finished this off this evening (the story at least). I actually think this and the previous game are great Star Wars stories, got a few twists, good characters. Enjoyed seeing it through and finding out where it ends up.

Gameplay, if you liked the first you'll like this, simple as. There are a lot of collectables, most are cosmetics but there are some useful ones in there but I didn't bother getting all of them. Might go back and mop them up though.

I think this is one which will be lost due to all the other games coming out this year which are of higher profile, but feels like a shame to me. Deserves more attention.

b0r1s wrote:

I enjoyed the original so hoping this comes to Gamepass.

Yeah, decided to just wait for it to come out on Game Pass via EA Play. I think stuff comes on EA Play a year after launch?

The Talos Principle 2 (PS5)

I've written more in the thread, but basically it's a cracker that has a little bit of a quality dip in the middle before picking it back to at the end, including summer good optimal puzzles that really help the story.

At its peak it's absolutely superb, and it holds that calibre pretty well indeed. The story is more in your face than with the first game, but put that aside, enjoy it room by room, and it's little that you can't rate highly.

A pretty solid [9] in the end. My brain is fried, I'm a bit confused about what's just happened, but that was some good shit.

Moot-em-up, nice.

I'm not the jogging on kinda guy tho

Total play time?

It's basically "see how many buttons your new machine has"