Be Excellent To Each Other

104! 104! 104!

OBJECTION: there are 60 levels to 3-star.

What? I've never had a star rating. Have you been smoking the crack?

It's how you unlock the other characters. I'm stuck on level 50 I think.

Really? Cripes. I've been ignoring the challenges largely and I've only unlocked a single character.

Elsewhere, here's Bug Princess - this may be a sequel or a final boss in the last mode after maniac. Frankly, I don't think my phone or nerve could handle it.

Yay! That dude is called Paz!

Are you sure it's a dude? Paz is traditionally a Girls name.

Spanish for 'peace', too.

Only as a first name. And girls can be dudes too, dude.

101. Renegade Ops
102. Mystery of the Ancients: Three Guardians
103. X-Men: Days of Future Past
104. The Typing of the Dead: Overkill
105. Tales from the Borderlands
106. And Yet It Moves: an indie PC (and iOS) platformer that's been around for years, I can't even remember when I first played it through. The USPs are a very pretty, if slightly sparse, 'torn paper' aesthetic and a control scheme that sees you not only controlling your character but also rotating the entire world around him in order to traverse the levels. Really good fun, if immensely frustrating in the odd part, and full of decent ideas.

101. Renegade Ops
102. Mystery of the Ancients: Three Guardians
103. X-Men: Days of Future Past
104. The Typing of the Dead: Overkill
105. Tales from the Borderlands
106. And Yet It Moves
107. Spooky's House of Jumpscares: a weird little indie game that Jim Sterling showed the first part of which piqued my interest. It's ten levels divided into 100 rooms, most of which only take a couple of seconds to sprint through and which are procedurally generated, albeit from a very limited set of templates. And if you're thinking that would be incredibly repetitive you'd be right, which is sort of the hook because it means you notice instantly whenever something new is added. A little bit like PT actually now I come to think of it. Anyway, there are monsters and some stuff chucked in to keep you on your toes and although it starts out all cutesy it does get a bit darker as it goes. Level 700 onwards is where it actually starts adding stuff with real objectives and whatnot, albeit nothing very complex. Overall it's just a bit too repetitive to carry the idea and I ended up finishing it purely because I'd already ploughed time into it and wanted to see the end. It would be massively more effective if they made each level maybe 50 rather than 100 rooms, did away with the mostly pointless stamina meter for sprinting and start ramping up the actual game content much sooner as I imagine most people get bored and never see the meat of it. Also, the ending was an anti-climax. I think there's more going on there though because of certain objects you can interact with that aren't explained properly so I'm going to read up on it to see if there's some depth hidden in there I never noticed.

101. Renegade Ops
102. Mystery of the Ancients: Three Guardians
103. X-Men: Days of Future Past
104. The Typing of the Dead: Overkill
105. Tales from the Borderlands
106. And Yet It Moves
107. Spooky's House of Jumpscares
108. Incredible Jack: the sort of generic cartoony 2D platformer that would've gone down a storm in the Amiga days but is a bit boring now. Nothing particularly wrong with it but nothing amazing either.

46. Wolfenstein: The New Order (PS4).

I fancied something dumb and shooty and since I can't be arsed to pick up BLOPS3 I thought I'd give this a punt.

And it's great! For about 4 hours, then it's boring.

I suppose I should have seen it coming really but it's an overly long CoD Campaign. Although admittedly it has some decent ideas going for it that makes it more fun than your average CoD Campaign. I must say for starters that it has a reet nice introduction and first few levels. Like, really nice. I absolutely loved the giant castle in the first level - it's a behemoth! You stand next to it and look up and goddamn near touches the sky, it's striking and fabulous and it follows some of the stupidest plane to plane jumps in the sky and even some storming the beach nonsense whilst mechanised dog chew at your fleshy balls. I was totally committed at this point and really enjoying myself when an early twist came and the scenery changes to a mental asylum. It doesn't stop there either as the Nazi's come in and start murdering folks. It's a little shocking (but not shocking, because, y'know, Nazis) but it all plays out rather well. I'm still enjoying myself. Then we do a mad dash across country and it's fab and then it's time to break out the prisoners and it's fab. I've been playing a few hours now and I'm thinking it's about done...

Pew, Pew, Pew ... hang on, what's this weird fog that make everything blurry when you look down a corridor ... pew, pew, pew ... how come light armoured guys with shotguns are such bullet sponges ... pew, pew, pew ... hang on, this isn't going to end is it? ... checks gamefaqs ... level 5, ok, out of 16 levels? Forking hell... pew, pew, pew ... pew ... pew ... *yawn*

And so on. I kinda wanted it to be a CoD campaign that doesn't outstay its welcome but it does. By several hours. It does have some high moments littered throughout but as the game goes on and gets harder you find that everything other than the standard enemy is a giant bullet sponge which you will get smashed to pieces if you stand in front of them. There's an old school PC mechanic whereby you can lean around corners and it's set on the left bumper so it's supposed to be used all the time. Peeking around corners spraying bullets, peeking over boxes spraying bullets, peeking up skirts and so on. Only problem with that though is if you want to look down the sights of your weapon and shoot you're holding three buttons all at the same time: L1 for peek, L2 for sights and R2 for shooting and then you're aiming with the right stick as well. That's four fucking simultaneous actions to just shoot your gun as intended. Shooting: The one and only thing that you do that has an impact in the game.

Oh, and another bug bear of mine at the moment is picking stuff up off the floor. JUST DO IT AUTOMATICALLY. Why should I have to loot bullets and armour from the floor, ceiling and tables and shit especially in the middle of a fucking firefight?Pressing the square button becomes a fucking chore an' all since there is literally tens of objects on the floor at any one time. You shoot a guy and he drops some armour and some bullets (maybe 9 bullets, maybe 2) or you shoot a robot and they drop bits of their armour to pick up (so there might be 5 piles of +10 armour littered on the floor). And it's not even as though it's doing an overly long animation of the Far Cry variety like skinning a badger, no, you look at the bullets on the floor and press square and they jump into your pocket. So why not just make them jump in anyway rather than make me smash the square button while I'm crouching behind a box peeking out to shoot with my hands gripping the joypad like my fingers have been trained in the style of the mantis by a fucking Drunken Master?

Anyhoo, another gripe I have (other than that weird blurry effect for anything that's more than 5 foot from you. I thought it was the sort-of focus blur that modern games do when you stare down a weapons sights. Well it ain't that because everything is blurry. It's ridiculous.) is when a game has one idea and they make you do it again and again like it's the worlds worse puzzle game. Here we have a weapon that becomes your standard/default weapon within about 2 levels which has an alternative fire button that allows you to cut chains, thin metal and so on. It's a mobile laser cutter. So cut chains you must BUT NOT WITH BULLETS OR THE STANDARD LASER THAT IT SHOOTS TOO, oh no, because a bullet would never spring this chain despite being really effective at stripping the giant robots of all their armour moments earlier. So every now and again you reach an area where you have to use it to progress. It's boring. It's repeated every. Single. Level. Even in the end boss fight.

And while I'm at it, how come the default weapon is so fucking boring to use. If you must insist that I use a rechargeable gun, rechargeable from every power point that is littered throughout the game every 5 fucking feet (oh god, that never got old fast did it? Hmmm), then make that gun fun to play with. There's something about shooting a laser gun that goes "whooong-g-g-g-g" that is infinitely less satisfying than an assault rifle that goes "DUGGAGAGAGAGAGAGAGGA". Actually the sound of the assault rifle is pretty shit and sounds like an SMG but it feels better than this silly piece of crap. UNLESS! The effect of the laser is satisfying perhaps! Yes, so what if the laser gun EXPLODES PEOPLE! Yeah, like fucking FEAR, man. When you enter slow down time and get in a guys face with a shotty and BLAMMO the entire body explodes in crimson!!! That was Da Bomb! No. Whilst the laser gun can explode people it would rather you didn't. It can't do headshots either whilst the pistol can. The bloody pistol can one shot a guy in the face but a giant laser can't. Wow. It's deeply unsatisfying to play with and no mater how much you try and play with the other weapons the game will make you play with this fucking laser gun because it's much strong than all the others combined against the big enemies.

Big enemies who endlessly shoot you in the open without stopping no matter where you are. Walking tirelessly towards you. Shooting. Always shooting. Even when you're peeking around a corner they will shoot you. Until someone dies in an unsatisfying manner.

Actually, I remember reading that the AI was buggered but I think that must have been patched because whilst everyone was dumber than a really dumb thing, it wasn't any worse than your average game of CoD. I didn't hit any bad glitches either. Not one that I remember at all. Seemed really solid to me.

Anyway, I'mma wrap this up with a summary:-

A) It's not a bad game.
B) It's on the wrong side of average.
C) There's some silly design flaws.
D) You'll have a blast.
E) Then you'll get bored.
F) You'll probably see it through to the end though, so it's doing something right.
G) It is very pretty when it wants to be.
H) I got it for a tenner, anything below that would be a steal I reckon.

If your game is about shooting you should ensure the following things:

1) The guns feel heavy, loud and fun.
2) The shooting is fun.
3) No one likes a bullet sponge.
4) Everyone likes precision shooting cause when we get it right we feel like bad asses.
5) Shooting people over and over and over can soon get boring. Don't outstay your welcome.
6) If your one thing is shooting then make the inputs for shooting as simple as pressing a button. Two at most.
7)) Shooting robots will never, NEVER, be as much fun as shooting people.

I'd pretty much agree with the entirety of that, especially the slide from 'this is excellent fun' to 'I'm bored with this shit'. And all the other little bugbears you picked out that I noticed but never bothered to write up. I think I even committed the cardinal sin of dropping it to easy later on in the game because I was bored and a couple of specific rooms frustrated the shit out of me. The whole experience was more than enough for me to unceremoniously dump the 'Old Blood' stand alone thing from my 'to get' list. It's such a shame because I adored the previous, and massively under-appreciated', Wolfenstein game and could've gone for just more of that shit.

Bonus bugbear: the main character was constantly fucking muttering to himself but it didn't seem to matter what he was saying and it was very rarely loud enough to actually hear which just made it seem like a glitch playing random sound files. A very odd design decision.

Now that was one of the things I kinda liked. I always think that people would mutter stuff to themselves if you spent the vast majority of the time by your lonesome. Did you ever sit in the car on, I think, the fourth level where he pretends to drive it and makes brum-brum noises? That was so jarringly stupid I couldn't help but laugh.

Additional bugbear: Sound files. They have no need to exist in this game but pop up during the latter half every 5 minutes for walking around a corridor. They don't automatically play themselves in-game and need to be accessed via the in game menu and if you leave the menu then they stop. So what's the point? No one in their right mind would want to play a bunch of sound files about some fictional character reading long lost letters in a shooting game outside of the game.

The utterly bizarre thing is though that they are so fabulously recorded that they probably deserved to be in the main game. They have this ace crackling oldie noise and the woman who voices them from the asylum is pretty great. Well, let's be fair they probably shouldn't even exist but they are so great they could have been used somewhere else than in a menu.

Oh, and talking of shit in the menu, did you play any of the records either from the many collectibles? Some are great, but WHY DO THEY EXIST EITHER!? it's just crackers.

As is the amount of stupid collectibles too. Fuck knows why they've in there except because, apparently, all gamers are OCD obsessed idiots that like nothing better than collecting pointless shit.

I don't mind the idea but you couldn't make out anything he ever said so it was just an annoyance as you strained to listen over all the other audio stuff that was happening.



Heh, yeah, I might even have got all of these and never listened to a single one as I didn't give a shit. It was just another pointless pop-up to ignore in the game.



Nope, never bothered with these either. I could listen to them all if I wanted as well because, bizarrely, my copy of the game came with an actual ye olde audio CD stuck to the front with the entire set of these alternative universe pop songs on it. Which is a whole lot of effort to go to only to do bugger all with them in game. I assumed before I played it that difference scenes would have a reason to play these songs in the background but nope; total waste.

1. Crysis (PC)
2. Octodad (PC)
3. Crysis Warhead (PC)
4. Tomb Raider: Anniversary (PC)
5. The Evil Within (PC)
6. Torchlight (PC)
7. Mass Effect (PC)
8. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (PC)
9. Tomb Raider: Underworld (PC)
10. Monument Valley (Android)
11. Impossible Mission (Commodore 64)
12. The Tender Cut (PC)
13. Far Cry 3 (PC)
14. LIMBO (PC)
15. Fallout 3 (PC)
16. Project Zero II (PlayStation 2)
17. 3D Out Run (Nintendo 3DS)
18. Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (Game Boy Advance)
19. Trine (PC)
20. The Talos Principle (PC)
21. God of War III (PS3)
22. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PlayStation)
23. The Last of Us: Left Behind (PS3)

2.5-3 hours of awesome, if you do not mind that something like an hour of that is cut scenes. This must be some of the finest story telling ever in a video game, and the cut scenes are done with some of the best motion capture and facial expressions I can remember seeing. Game wise it is the the original game boiled down to its best parts.

I recommend reading The Last of Us: American Dreams before playing, because it is pretty good and sets up the story and atmosphere very well.

1. Crysis (PC)
2. Octodad (PC)
3. Crysis Warhead (PC)
4. Tomb Raider: Anniversary (PC)
5. The Evil Within (PC)
6. Torchlight (PC)
7. Mass Effect (PC)
8. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (PC)
9. Tomb Raider: Underworld (PC)
10. Monument Valley (Android)
11. Impossible Mission (Commodore 64)
12. The Tender Cut (PC)
13. Far Cry 3 (PC)
14. LIMBO (PC)
15. Fallout 3 (PC)
16. Project Zero II (PlayStation 2)
17. 3D Out Run (Nintendo 3DS)
18. Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (Game Boy Advance)
19. Trine (PC)
20. The Talos Principle (PC)
21. God of War III (PS3)
22. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PlayStation)
23. The Last of Us: Left Behind (PS3)
24. LIMBO (Xbox 360)

Well, I had that old save game sitting there near the end, might as well finish it and get another one on the list, AMIRITE? Totally counts.

1. Danganronpa (PSV)
2. Unfinished swan (PS4)
3. Everybodys gone to the rapture (PS4)
4. Bloodborne (PS4)
5. GoneGrow Home (PS4)
6. Danganronpa 2 (PSV)
Like Danganronpa, but different. Bear makes disappointed noises less and/or fewer times, so I'm not accidentally making disappointed bear sounds this time. And the final chapter is absolute bobbins.

1. Proteus (Vita) - finished the game
2. Desert Golfing (iOS) - played 1,000 holes
3. Heavy Metal Thunder (iOS) - finished story
4. Driveclub (PS4) - finished Tour with 175/225 stars, finished free DLC trophies
5. Peggle Classic (iOS) - finished Adventure Mode with 18m points
6. OlliOlli 2: Welcome to Olliwood (PS4) - completed all stages on Amateur
7. Daytona Rush (iOS) - unlocked all tiers, top on friends leaderboards for all tiers
8. Super Mega Baseball (PS4) - won the League Championship
9. Please, Don't Touch Anything (Mac) - 17/21 endings
10. Rocket League (PS4) - platinum trophy & all DLC trophies, reached Pro (level 20), completed season on Amateur
11. The Way of Life (Mac) - completed the game
12. Everybody's Gone to the Rapture (PS4) - completed the game
13. Score! Hero (iOS) - completed four seasons
14. Sound Shapes (PS4) - completed campaign
15. Score! World Goals (iOS) - completed all four decades challenges on Amateur, Professional and Bonus with at least 40 stars for each difficulty
16. Lara Croft: GO (iOS) - completed campaign, collected all gems and treasure, Game Center max
17. Lifeline (iOS) - completed game
18. Destiny (PS4) - completed vanilla 'story' avec Mr Dave

Yeah, so paper-thin story. The shooting is as good as Halo in its pomp and the MMO stuff seems to be better than it used to be now. Solo this is a very dull endeavour but with mates it's much much better.

47. Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 (PS4).

Bloody hell I haven't finished a game in ages, I better get a move on if I'm going to reach 52. Anyway, CODBLOPS3...

It's the same shit again only this time slightly shitter but with a story that has a hidden twist. But let's get real here, I don't care if you have a magic twist in your story, as long as your story is interesting. It isn't. The big bad, isn't revealed until level 9 or so out of 12. The reason for travelling around the world and shooting people is tenuous and a lot of the time I was thinking who are these people that I'm shooting and why am I shooting them. As far as I could tell there were two main people I was shooting in the face: some Chinese and some Egyptian. I could not for the life of me tell you why I was shooting the Egyptian and the reason for continually having to shoot the Chinese was because I shot the brother of the leader. Cue a chase around the globe by the Chinese to kill me. It's stupid and I don't care for it. Plus, everyone has robots, so I'm shooting the exact same robots for both sides so it gets all the more confusing because I'm basically shooting the same people again and again in different locations. Then I'm fighting a robot AI who can control the same robots but now their eyes glow yellow. Yes, it's crap.

And it's so dark as well, no wonder that the game has that crap new tactical HUD, otherwise you'd never see anyone. So you flick on your HUD and it shows you everyone nearby. Wow, way to reduce the challenge by showing me exactly where to shoot. It might as well run on rails which, coincidentally, is what it actually does at times without you even having to press a finger on the trigger. Yup, you've probably already seen the clips of the game playing itself. Maybe it's because I was playing on my lonesome that the AI wants to just get involved with everything that's going on to show what it could be like if I had friends in the world. Personally, I think it's just a bad game.

A bad game of "duck and shoot" because that's all you do through the whole game. Now, I'm sure I said this about COD:AW but had someone somewhere wanted to truly reboot COD all they need to do is move towards a Halo style of gameplay in the campaign - and not much either because I can see, behind the scenes, the basics of these things working. Halo is built on the staple of
(a) different enemy types
(b) wide arenas
(c) different combinations of enemies
(d) in different scenarios

COD does have the different enemy types a) basic grunt with rifle b) shotgun guy and c) sniper. Interestingly for BLOPS3 there is also introduced a variant of the d) Juggernaut and e) Melee robot. The problem is, everyone behaves the same: they see you, they shoot you, you shoot them they fall over or they shoot you and you hide behind a box for a minute while the red spray disappears.

I can fully see that with some tweaking you could have a scenario where you have less armies of grunts endlessly shooting away and move to the Halo way of play. And it would work in the future setting too. They could change it in these ways:

a) the way in which damage is inflicted on you and your opponents. You died too quickly and so do you enemies - so give everyone higher health;
b) in lieu of a) you thin the amount of baddies who stand in front of you at any one time;
c) then you give them some AI so they don't just stand next to an exploding barrel waiting to die;
d) REMOVE THE EXPLOSIVE BARRELS: IT'S 2015 NOT FUCKING 1995.
e) Stop enemies shooting all the time; pace off their shots.

I think it would be awesome. Enemies vaulting around, spreading out into groups, grunts covered by a Juggernaut; flanked by shotgun guy; jetpacking and swooshing around in a future/modern setting playing with proper punchy guns rather than silly laser beams. Anyway, you may disagree but it hurts so bad to see CoD release the same shit time and time again for their campaign that they almost have the makings of a great campaign again if they reboot it up the arsehole. Course they'll never do it because multiplayer, but you'd think with the vast amounts of cash they make each year that someone somewhere would say "Let's not pay some fucking celeb to be the face and voice of our new protagonist but save that money to concentrate on blowing the socks off the loyal gamers that actually play the campaign each year." Nope. It's all a dream like the campaign.

Couple more moans, I hated COD:AW's campaign but at least it tried to graft a straight forward enough story together about future wars and people with jetpacks and crazy gadgets whereas this fucking game doesn't let you even use a jetpack that you have in the multiplayer. Tch. The setting is entirely ancillary to this daft story about a sentient AI. I was bored of sentient AI's years ago and I'm just as bored of hacking stuff too.

They do say "reverse the polarity" on level 2, as well. *swirls eyes*

And why must an NPC character follow you around again? That's right to narrate everything that you do at every time and every where. I'm sick to fucking death of this in games. At one point a load of pipes explode and the voice from above in the ear piece shouts "RUN the pipes have exploded." I KNOW, I WAS FUCKING THERE. IT WAS HAPPENING IN MY FACE. Less is more and these games don't seem to realise this. Oh and it's all done under the guise of someone who is miles away in a safe place who can see underground, in buildings and could probably lead you to pick up a cup of tea in a kitchen from a drone overhead. Lazy story telling and the lazy and overegged hand holding was annoying the tits outta me, I can tells ya.

Lastly, I can see a lot of people saying online "WHY WON'T THEY DO WW2 AGAIN, I DONT LIKE THE FUTURE." Well, I can say that I don't particularly want the same type of game all over again in WW2. Why would you want the same shit set in the same shit that they have done before. It just more of the same in the same over the same same same same. SAME. The problem isn't that the future is rubbish, it's that the world building is rubbish. BLOPS3 is visually quite interesting but the lack of time that you spend in any one place means that you don't get an idea of this new future world that you're in. The time hopping and the location hopping between countries just doesn't help them build a coherent world for the player to associate with. I've read reviews where they've moaned that there are no discernible landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, London Bridge, Great Wall of China or whatever but in my opinion they don't need them; they need their own landmarks, future landmarks so we can imagine these places outside of the game. We need to spend some quality time there and be able to explore rather than being pushed along at breakneck speed by some hollow voice from our ear pieces to shoot the next load of incoming robot swarms. Pick a location in the future AND THEN FUCKING MAKE US LIVE THERE. That's all I want. Because a cohesive and clear vision of the future would take time for us to settle into, they should make their story exist in a single location. It's not hard to come up with a variety of interesting and varied places to go in a single town is it? Look at the briefing room that you have to go into between every mission - we never get to explore more than one room. We can't go outside. We can't look around. It was a prime opportunity for some world building but they shoved a shit load of menus in there to look at collectibles. Fuck those menus.

That's it, I'm done. I spent my time with BLOPS3, I had fun looking up stuff on the internet afterwards and I enjoyed punting people off the world in that Inception level but they have learned nothing at all about making a decent campaign. Not a single thing. It's the same old shit all over again but worse. If you like playing CoD's duck and shoot then you'll probably disagree and say something bland like "I liked it. It was a good blast" but to prevent any future arguments on the internet please assume that my response will be "Fack off ya daft cunt" and that I slapped my penis around your face. Thank you.

2/10

Too bad that wasn't the PC version, because it would be a hell of a steam review.

48. Rocketbirds (PC).

I got it for a dollar on that humble bumble and it was ok. 3 hours from finish to end; which was about right. I can't say it was the most fun I've had as there was far too many weak and basic box puzzles that required you to do the boring backtrack. I preferred it to Valiant Hearts though as it didn't outstay its welcome, it had short chapters and 80% of the puzzles were replaced with shooting. Mind you, the combat wasn't very satisfying either.

Ok, ok, it was a bit crap then and a bit of a tedious crawl but, goddamn, it looked nice.

3/10

101. Renegade Ops
102. Mystery of the Ancients: Three Guardians
103. X-Men: Days of Future Past
104. The Typing of the Dead: Overkill
105. Tales from the Borderlands
106. And Yet It Moves
107. Spooky's House of Jumpscares
108. Incredible Jack
109. Monzo: possibly stretching the definition of 'game' here but this is an app that gives you virtual versions of, essentially, a load of airfix model to build and then potentially decorate on your phone. There's no real challenge to it--though the 'expert' mode some models offer demands a bit of attention to detail--but it's very slickly put together and I found it incredibly relaxing to snap the various tanks, planes, bikes, ships, guns(!) and dinosaurs(!!) together. Amusingly the normal version of the game charges some hilarious amount of money for each model but this is the Amazon Underground version which gives you the >$100 of content for free.

1. Proteus (Vita) - finished the game
2. Desert Golfing (iOS) - played 1,000 holes
3. Heavy Metal Thunder (iOS) - finished story
4. Driveclub (PS4) - finished Tour with 175/225 stars, finished free DLC trophies
5. Peggle Classic (iOS) - finished Adventure Mode with 18m points
6. OlliOlli 2: Welcome to Olliwood (PS4) - completed all stages on Amateur
7. Daytona Rush (iOS) - unlocked all tiers, top on friends leaderboards for all tiers
8. Super Mega Baseball (PS4) - won the League Championship
9. Please, Don't Touch Anything (Mac) - 17/21 endings
10. Rocket League (PS4) - platinum trophy & all DLC trophies, reached Pro (level 20), completed season on Amateur
11. The Way of Life (Mac) - completed the game
12. Everybody's Gone to the Rapture (PS4) - completed the game
13. Score! Hero (iOS) - completed four seasons
14. Sound Shapes (PS4) - completed campaign
15. Score! World Goals (iOS) - completed all four decades challenges on Amateur, Professional and Bonus with at least 40 stars for each difficulty
16. Lara Croft: GO (iOS) - completed campaign, collected all gems and treasure, Game Center max
17. Lifeline (iOS) - completed game
18. Destiny (PS4) - completed vanilla 'story' avec Mr Dave
19. The Beginner's Guide (PC) - completed game

Holy shit, I don't even know where to start with this one. To even begin to explain it would spoil it somehow. It only took me 1.5 hours to get through but possibly one of the most thought-provoking experiences I'll ever have in gaming.

Ooh, I'll try and remember that when it gets a bit cheaper.

[quote="Mr Dave"]1. Danganronpa (PSV)
2. Unfinished swan (PS4)
3. Everybodys gone to the rapture (PS4)
4. Bloodborne (PS4)
5. GoneGrow Home (PS4)
6. Danganronpa 2 (PSV)
7. Limbo (PS4)
Rick Dangerous 3: The Dangerousing

Yeah, I didn't like this one.

1) GTA V
2) Fallout New Vegas (360)
3) Pepper Panic Saga (FB)

...Completed the last level a week ago.

It was so Rick Dangerous... I haven't finished it yet because I'm getting annoyed with the random deaths.

Christ almighty...

I particularly liked the part with two squishing devices, one where you had to stand in the middle, one where you had to avoid the middle. Only way to find this out? Squishty squish.

I mainly completed it so that I could remove it from my hard drive, never to return.

Yeah, that was pretty much the nadir for me. It looks pretty but it's trial and error nonsense.

There are a lot of unavoidable deaths but seconds later you're put back to the bit right before you died and you don't die the second time because you know what to do. It's barely an inconvenience mechanically, and it just means you stop thinking of death as a failure state so much as a tutorial of sorts for what to do right. I played through twice on the Xbox and once on my phone and thoroughly enjoyed it in all cases without ever worrying about how often I died; and I say that as someone who often gets enormously frustrated with dying in game if I feel there was little I could've done.

I don't mind dying in a game due to lack of skill (see Spelunky et al), but dying because you can't anticipate what's coming up because it's totally random? No thanks.

I would agree if dying meant resetting a whole load of progress, nothing would get a game deleted faster for me. Due to the checkpointing though you rarely lose anything more than a few seconds so it's not much of a consequence. I dunno, in principle I understand the objections but in practise, with this particular game, the deaths just didn't carry any weight for me. I knew when approaching a particular section I was very probably about to die but that just became part of the game for me. The next hazard is demonstrated to you via the medium of killing you and then the subsequent goes were the 'real' ones where you actually had the information required to actively play the game. Like, when some games begin a level by having the camera pan through the stage showing you the route you're up against, but this time the preview mechanism is death. I realise that sounds like I'm just being an apologist for poor game design but it's genuinely how I felt when playing it. Something about the design and atmosphere and the almost inevitability of dying brought it all together in a way that I was quite happy with.

So what is the skill to it? It's just remembering to do the opposite of what you did last time. It's boring. Let's face it, if it didn't have the aesthetic it does, no one would have given a shit about it. It does look very pretty.

This guy plays the exact same trap sequence and dies twice.

It all starts at 7 mins 10 seconds.

He dies twice and completes the traps by 7 minutes 30 seconds.

20 seconds later. 20. Seconds.

So it's entirely trial and error, glad we agree.

That one section is. How many times did you die playing Super Meat Boy on the harder levels before figuring out the correct path?

I've got to agree with the Limbo supporters. Rick Dangerous killed you and it mattered, because you had eight live. Limbo kills you and you go "huh" and work out how to move on. It's a puzzle game, and dying is part of working out the puzzle.

The difference is that when I beat a hard Meat Level, I feel mighty (see also: Dark souls)

When I beat one of limbos trial and error puzzles, I just feel like they've wasted my time. Because there's no challenge to the solution.

Well I enjoyed it both times through. I hope this teaches you a lesson.

If the puzzles were the star of the show I might agree. Or I might not, because Thomas was Alone was simple as shit but that was vaguely enjoyable in spite of how simple it was. You want to play a puzzle game, play Mr Chips; you want a moody atmospheric platform-lite game, play LIMBO. If LIMBO's world doesn't pull you in then you won't want to see what's next for the lad and you won't enjoy it, and that's your prerogative of course (Nowt wrong with that), but complaining the puzzles aren't challenging is rather missing the point. Neither was ICO, Another World, Flashback, Thomas was Alone, Christ, loads of games these days are on the wrong side of piss easy. But if the world created through the unique (award winning) art style, the ambient soundtrack, the spooky characters and settings wasn't pulling you forwards such that you wanted to see the next screen in between a couple of seconds of death and a restart about two inches from where you were standing then you were never going to enjoy this.

*all the applause in the world*

The aesthetic was pleasant enough, but if the puzzles aren't the point of the game, what is? It doesn't have much else. It's a very thin, nice-looking game, but beneath the veneer is nothing much at all. Ok if you like that sort of thing, but I prefer more a bit more substance.

I'm sure you've said in the past that you enjoy 'walking simulator' games, couldn't the same be said about them?

If there's much variance away from monochrome and foggy, I didn't see it. Certainly didn't feel very explorey to me.

I love them precisely because you can explore and get lost. In this you just walk left to right.