Be Excellent To Each Other

Let’s all remember Runcle who started this many years ago. Runcle, who once wrote:



God bless you, Runcle. Although he did mention that he plays FIFA. What a dick.

Anyhoo, I clocked:

1) Trepang2 (PS)

Do you like FEAR? Not the emotion, silly, the game. It’s like that but for the 2020’s. Lots of exploding, lots of enemy chatter, lots of sliding around waving your foot and activating slow mo and all that shit.

Except it’s not much like FEAR outside of how it plays (and that may or may not bother you) because it’s mission based, has side missions which are just arenas, is a bit fiddly in parts, and, shockingly, you can complete it and every single mission it has to offer within about 5 hours (again, that may or may not bother you). Well I did anyway, and that was on hard difficulty. I did try playing on normal and, frankly, it was taking the piss how easy it was. There’s another couple of difficulty levels above hard but I couldn’t be bothered to find out about them since hard was a decent sweet spot. Anyway, it’s only about twenty quid so it’s a reasonable deal I reckon.

I liked it, but not as much as I love FEAR. The game.

EDIT:- Oh, here’s some footage I captured running around with shotguns in one of the arena levels. Absolute carnage when you’re playing. I’ve forgot how good it was actually! https://youtu.be/GpEKxkmwXU8?si=C9z-h5wm1EVwHI3m

1) Trepang2 (PS)
2) River City Girls 2 (PS)

It’s a brilliant beat em up in the vein of the recent TMNT! 4 player online! RPG elements with stats and shit! The graphics are awesome! The story is genuinely funny in parts (albeit over written sometimes)! Plenty of game too at about 13 hours and haven’t even done all the side quests! And it’s not really a belt scroller either cause you choose your paths and there’s back tracking and fast travel! And shops! And upgrades! And combos! And plenty of new moves to buy and punch people with!

Yeah, not too much to complain about with this one.

3) Back 4 Blood (XB)

Like Left 4 Dead but with “decks”. It’s alright, I guess. I couldn’t be arsed with it after a hoard level where “Ace of Spades” plays raucously in the background. Nothing ever managed to surpass that.

1) Monster Hunter World (PC)
If you like being screamed at into stumbling around helplessly for a few seconds while monsters savage you, this is the game for you! Failing that, if you like things hitting the ground near you, making you stumble around helplessly for a few seconds while monsters savage you, this is the game for you! Failing that, if you like that bit in SF2 when your opponent hits you and then you get to stand still with stars around your head while your opponent gets to hit you for free, but wouldn't mind trading that opponent for a monster who wants to savage you, then this is the game for you!

Aside from that it's not bad.

1) Monster Hunter World (PC)
2) Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun (PC)

The game the devs who made shadow gambit did before the game they did before shadow gambit. The lineage is clear and it is a good steallthy tactics game, but having played them in this order... Oh boy, did I miss some of the quality of life changes, and the generally more refined design they had by that point.

1) Monster Hunter World (PC)
2) Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun (PC)
3) Unpacking (PS5)

You unpack boxes. And then you do it again.

1) Monster Hunter World (PC)
2) Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun (PC)
3) Unpacking (PS5)
4) Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart (PS5)
It's more Ratchet and clank. still fun mechanically, but felt less humourous than past entrys.

4) Far Cry 6 (XB)

Talk about a series that hasn’t progressed in, like what, a decade or some shit. It’s the same as before, but now with coop that actually works. It’s fun in coop to kick around, but solo? Fuck me, it’s boring. And talk about anti-climatic: the final mission has you fight up a skyscraper to the apartment on the top floor…

..well, it should but you come in, kill one guy and climb the stairs up 3 floors; then you fight about 5 guys (head shotting them all immediately) and climb one more floor where you enter a lift. Then it ends. And what annoyed me was that all the good stuff happens in the cutscenes and you don’t get to interact in ANY of them. Get here, interact with this closed door and watch what happens. Time and time again. It’s gone backwards for fucks sake. Yeah, it’s a series that seriously needs to either die or sort itself out.

Would you say it's a Far Cry from what it used to be?

5) Valheim (early access) (XB)

I was fucking loving this. It was like the Dark Souls of crafting, survival, thing that this game is. It was hard as balls, I didn’t understand what I was supposed to be doing, I didn’t understand what type of game it was and I could barely understand how the controls worked on a controller. But, man, the atmosphere and the meadows music…just beautiful. I couldn’t get enough of getting my head kicked in my boars and then suddenly it started to click! I’m crafting! I fucking hate crafting, but I’m chopping trees and collecting stuff; I’ve got a hammer and now I’ve got a rudimentary base; now I’m making excursions to other places and collecting more stuff and learning how the stamina and health works; I’m getting stronger on my self made missions, I’ve got a weapon, and another, now a bow! I’m dead. I’m making death runs, I’m widening my space on the map, I’ve got a shield; shit, I’ve got enough stuff to take a run at the boss! I’ve done it! Onto a new area! Instant death. I’m making limited excursions into new areas and mining and running away! I’ve been chased by trolls! Enemies are invading my camp. I’ve got a location for the next boss! I’ve zoomed out the map and , FUCK ME, this place is massive. Fuck how am to get there. Hang on, I can’t get to it. Hang on, I’m in an island. Many hours later…I’ve got a fucking boat! OMG this game is amazing. I’m in the ocean!

Essentially that’s how it all started. I was fully immersed for some reason, the game just hooking you in with the beautiful yet simple graphics. The weather effects are some of the best I’ve seen, for sure. The hook then becomes: go into a new biome, get your head kicked in while mining new resources so you can start a new crafting branch and then follow that until you’re just about strong enough to take on the denizens of that biome properly and either milk the resources or find the boss location. Beat the boss and then move onto the next zone. It’s simple but extremely challenging. Each boss defeat is like a reset that puts you back to square one where you’ll get your head kicked in immediately when you go to the next biome. And I was bloody loving it!

Until the fifth biome. I must have sailed to a dozen plains biomes, cleared the extremely difficult goblin villages and couldn’t find the location of the boss rune thing. I used a walkthrough and it said to look for Stonehenge like buildings - sometimes only one in a biome. So I find it in each area and there’s no rune. Apparently there’s only a small % chance it even turns up. So I’ve been playing for hours and hours and hours busting around on my ship and clearing areas and even though I’m resource rich I can’t move onto the next area cause I can’t find the boss.
So I look online again and apparently on Xbox I can cheat and get the dev commands so I can fly about. So I do this and I fly around for, like, over an hour looking around each plain biome for the Stonehenge structures. I must have done loads. Literally fucking LOADS. None of them has the rune. I’m not kidding when I must have cleared 12 areas normally and flew to, what must have been, like, 20 odd areas for an hour of flying around. Eventually I just stumble across the fucking boss location miles from everywhere I’d been! So I fly about getting my shit - I’d left my boat and items somewhere, basically cheating now, and fix a portal and fuck him up.

Then it’s onto the last biome available at the minute, The Mistlands. And aren’t they the most cunty area of all. Stupid insects that stun lock you to death. A few more hours of wandering around, doing some crafting, and barely finding any places to go and I’m sick of it. The plains fuck up and suddenly the emergency of cheat codes and I can’t be arsed. I find the boss location from an online resource turn on god mode and just sit whacking away at the final available boss until it finally dies and I can uninstall the game.

I swear that one experience of not being able to progress past the plains entirely ruined my experience. I was happy doing it vanilla, on my own and learning and farting about and save scumming…now, when I knew I could cheat, well, I had had enough. It felt like it was wasting my time suddenly.