Luseth

If you are into any sim city esque games do not give the jurassic world evolution games a miss, I played the first one and they are really well done 🙂

So I am going to try and get into the habit of doing little write ups when I complete a game, I really enjoy my single player games, particularly RPG's and though my gaming time has diminished in recent years and then a lot of that is absorbed by FG I am still trying to play a few games they just may take longer to complete. So I will start with the reason I play these games, the story - I really enjoyed the story, as I reached the end I could see that there are obviously options for different endings but I felt that the route I went down was more heroic, the sort of story to go down in legend (in game). There is betrayal, there is friendship, there is romance. It felt very old school Final Fantasy if I am being honest! Visually it is lovely, if you are into this style of game it looks great and the art style has a charm to it. The game really excelled with it's combat, battles could be challenging and you really had to think about how you approached some of them. If anyone grew up playing Final Fantasy Tactics on the GBA like I did, this will bring back those fond memories, it's not quite as slow as FF but it did have a steady pace to it. Turn based combat with a grid system but you were not punished in the way that Fire Emblem tends to where you lose characters when they die in a battle. Anyway definately one of the more charming games I have played recently and it definately left me wanting more. If anything I felt like it all came to a bit of an abrupt end and there was still some story left to be told which was a bit of a shame (maybe they had planned dlc?) But yeah out of 10, I would give it an 8 🙂

I see this kind of thinking, it will come down to profits for Microsoft, whichever route makes them the most money, at the end of the day they are a business. I suspect it will be a climbdown by the UK yet but they will find a way to get Microsoft to give some tiny concession i.e. a note at the end of the credits on each future call of duty game or something saft like that so we can go yeah we made them do this.

Had my first brief foray this afternoon, first impressions are positive. It has a decent pace to it, story has started off well and visually I think it looks great. could be entertaining with a few of us running round together! Do we have a clan set up?

There wasnt much shown by this clip other than a slimmer headset and some improved controllers (both key to vr mind), it was also announced that there would be a big software update to the quest 2 (the version I have) which should improve performance by 20% which I was pleased to hear about! I have been enjoying my VR for a variety of uses, recently doing some fitness things which are quite good (albeit not as good as going to a gym I am sure) but its easy to pick up and do 20 minutes or so, beat sabers great and I have just downloaded a FPS with a friend thats meant to be good fun. He also has plans to do some film nights with it. VR is obviously not mainstream yet but it has certainly found an audience enough to keep it going I feel.

So being a big Final Fantasy game, the first thing that jumps out at me is that this looks more Devil May Cry (not surprising as I think the design lead actually started and had a successful career with devil may cry). It's fine if that is what you want. It looks brilliant visually and has some of the aspects you would expect, summons etc. Controlling other players, you have only ever been able to control one person but you could historically give commands to others in your team even as late as FFXV I think from memory. So to remove that seems odd but then it looks more fast paced than previous games so you likely won't have the time to spend giving out orders. I think this is going to divide fans, those who like the old school combat systems (this includes myself) and those who aren't bothered by it. I think with this series they have spent a lot of time trying to appeal the modern games to more Western mainstream audiences and the series has lost some of it's character for it. If you compare this, XV and XIII to XII and previous there has been a big shift in the style of the games and it seems too big a shift for fans of earlier titles. I will play this (and likely buy it second hand as sales direct to Sony will only encourage their current style of FF games), but it need's to have a great story I think for me to enjoy it, the combat won't carry it for me. It's mad because if you look at their highest ranked games of the past 10 years, the recent Final Fantasy games don't even make a dent and yet they continue to push this direction. Games like Triangle Strategy, Dragon Quest XI, Octopath traveller and Bravely default go down extremely well with the fans.

Oh the other thing was the handheld drop, I think they were hoping that it would be a big deal and I really don't see much of a market for it. I am all for handhelds and heck my Switch get's played a lot but a handheld that is limited to your home where you typically have the option of playing on a big screen with a fancy audio set up just seems to have a bit of a niche market to me?

Now this actually did get my interest, in part because on tik tok the past week or so I have seen a lot of Starship troopers footage with there being a new game on pc (16 player co-op as well apparently if FG fancies giving it a go?) That said I thought this looked kind of cool, definitely a different style to the original game and it looks to have a bigger budget. The first game did quite well but it was partly due to PS Plus so can this sustain the success?

I watched this one and I couldn't help but feel like this will be about £5 around 3-4 months after launch, it's nice to see EA trying to create something new but just because it has fancy colours and lighting whizzing about the screen does not mean it will be a good game. Combat need's to be much more engaging in games like this these day's. I don't think it will be one I am buying unfortunately.

I am siding with Phil a little on this one, it was somewhat lacklustre and a lot of the games are all due to come to Xbox as well. Final Fantasy XVI, I am a big fan of the series but the one thing I never really asked for was devil may cry fantasy XVI. Yes it might have fantastic looking summons and skill trees and such but this dashing about, teleporting crap is just not for me. I will likely play it and it will have an opportunity to at least find a place on my Final Fantasy shelf but it will need to have a good story (which I feel the last couple have lacked somewhat). Spiderman 2 looked good but it did largely look more of the same with some new combat mechanics, that said it sounds like the story could be good with a potential fight between Miles and Peter at some point? I won't say too much more in here and save it for the individual game threads 🙂 But yeah I wasn't overly impressed with this showcase and I do think in part it is just the industry being somewhat stagnated, I did not really see many next gen looking games, where is the use of the processing power to create more intelligent ai or where is the use of all the fancy aspects of the PS5 controller we saw in Astrobot? I am finding a lot of my enjoyment of games at the moment relating to the PSP / PS Vita / PS3 / 360 era which is largely down to it's variety.

When this was announced I thought it really odd, it's a game no one has ever asked for. Gollum has never been a particularly exciting character and whilst sneaking games have a place if you are going to be in the lord of the rings world you want to be killing hundreds of orcs, knocking them off castle walls and all that stuff. That said I wouldn't be surprised if the two towers and return of the king games get remade at some point.

Would be up for giving this or any sort of co-op game a go, it's one type of mp game we don't really play here, in that most games we tend to play together are competitve but there are some great co-op games about (though obvious numbers become limited).

If anything a smaller player based, spending more money is better for them as they can warrant smaller servers and running costs ^_^

I had Revenge of Shinobi, at the age I was owning a mega drive I never got very far! I do still have the game at home somewhere though (unfortunately unboxed). Sonic was one of my go to games when I was younger, it was bright and colourful and happy (despite the fact some meglamaniac was stealing all the little animals!)

Ah anyone who is a fan of Final Fantasy is alright by me! 🙂 Welcome aboard!

Excuse the mess, having a bit of a sort out at home :D Anyway, I grew up being a big gameboy fan in my young years i.e. 5-10, used to love being able to play pokemon everywhere and the og games were quite long due to the amount of grinding required etc. Unfortunately none of these are my original gameboys as they got broken when I was younger (I did not appreciate the hardware like I do today), so back right is the og gameboy, that one is a bit yellowed these days and it was actually my wife's from when she was younger. The only game that one has ever really seen was tetris which I think came with it? Middle left is one of my jewels in the collection, these go for a tidy sum as it is but what makes this one a little bit special is I bought it for about £30 on ebay around 6 years ago, the value has shot up since then but it was probably my first real gaming bargain. I put a bid on ebay, it did not detail that it was boxed or anything so when it turned up complete (the box has seen better days) it was a bit of a score, the handheld itself is immaculate. Back right is GBA SP - Pearl Blue, I have no idea if it is a reshell but it's a lurvley looking handheld. At the front are the og DS which I bought recently for about £30 as I wanted something a bit more comfortable to hold when playing gba games, the white psp is also a recent purchase and I have gone a little mad on buying games for that with about 13-14 games for it already I think (probably part of the reason I am going to be broke for the next couple of months ^_^ ) The red console in the middle is a Vita, the coloured versions were only released in Japan, I have no idea why, I had a black OLED one originally and like a numpty I sold it. Then when I came to wanting one again the price was near enough the same for this as it was black UK equivalent so I picked this tidy thing up. Then I have my 3ds's, the DS is a brilliant console in itself, there are a huge number of games and such a variety. The right one is the pikachu version, again because it's pokemon related it's a nice little collectible and then the right one is a new 3ds, this is meant to sit in another box which I imagine would add some extra value to it but these are becoming quite sought after, you had to be some club nintendo member in order to be able to pick one up, you only became a member of this if you bought a 3ds before the original price drop in it's early days, so Nintendo's little way of saying sorry I imagine. Anyway the faceplates are a little scuffed but other than that it's a lurvly little thing ^_^

Ah lovely little collection @GazzaGarratt, 2 of those 4 are consoles I have never even played ^_^ I will post again in a moment with a photo and what each is ^_^

So I have put about 20 hours into this now, there are performance dips but I think it bothers me far less than most people it seems. So I will just talk about the game - It looks brilliant, you can see from some of my screenshots it is really pretty and there is an awful lot of detail. The storyline I think is better than the first game, the main story has me wanting to know more, see more and the characters are pretty good, those from the previous game feel more fleshed out and the new characters are decent too. The gameplay feels quite smooth, there have been a few new mechanics added in that I have just unlocked which make the combat a little more fun, the enemies are a bit more varied and some of the lightsaber duels look glorious and just feel right. The worlds, there seems to be some backtracking at the moment, I am hoping there are a couple more that I am yet to discover. That said the one's available to me are a good mix, you sort of have a main one that's all lush and green which feels a bit open world and then you have some others that feel like the first game where they are a little more linear. Each world is broken up into sections and as you move through a section you have some clever little shortcut that opens up between each section so you can move through them quickly. The music and audio, well it's Star wars, it is the one aspect that in every game, tv show or film comes out just right almost everytime and it is the same with this game.

I take reviews on Nintendo games with a pinch of salt, I find that a lot of the main reviewers review Nintendo stuff whilst wearing Nintendo tinted glasses ^_^ That said I have the first one to complete yet so I might pick it up in a years time when the price drop comes in, oh wait....