Be Excellent To Each Other

I played the demo and loved it.

Grow Home.

It starts off bad. The options screen seems utterly unresponsive to a single button press.

But when it really starts things start looking up. It initially looks bloody lovely. Nice colours, great vista.

Then you move your robot character and it falls apart. Does anyone remember that episode of Friends when Joey says "Come on, French it up." Grow Home is like someone at Ubisoft said "Come on, physics it up." The physics engine is pushing against you throughout and it's so frustrating that you want to smash the face off your little idiotic robot cunt.

I'm going to do it. I'll grow my big plant into the sky. But once it's done it will be instantly deleted.

Throughout it I was thinking if Nintendo got their hands on this they would make some awesome climbing, platformer akin a strange mash up of Mario and Pilotwings but as it stands it plays like a failed tech demo that needs a few more months of polish, and/or a second look by someone with an objective eye, before being tossed into the publics hands.

What is happening with this month's PS+? People were all like "meh, this is the worst month EVA" but I'm enjoying this month more than recent months.

Xeodrifter was great.
Gone Home was interesting (-ish). At least it didn't last long.

Now Teslagrad is acebest. I've never heard of it not was I going to play it; I just turned it on to see what it was even though the picture to start the game looked rubbish. Turns out it's another little fab indie game. I've enjoyed it so much I'm going to stick with it until the end. The utterly fab intro widens out into another Metroid-lite map.

Well worth turning on to see if you fancy it.

Liking teslagrad too. Although i wouldgetnsomething after defeatiting the forst boss but it just continued. I need recognition!

Has anyone been playing Super Time Force Team or whatever it's called? I love the concept, I love the style, but I can't shake this feeling I'm succeeding through blind luck rather than any kind of method or design. I gun and run, die, rewind, drop a new chap, maybe drop another, run and gun, die, rinse, repeat. I never feel like my 'ghosts' are particularly helping or if I should be thinking more strategically.

I will persevere, as I'm hoping the game just hasn't clicked for me yet.

October

http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2015/09/ ... ical-more/

Cor the Vita offerings this month were dire, weren't they?

Rabbit Kung Fu is budget rubbish that I couldn't stomach for more than 20 minutes before deleting it.

Kickbeat fared less well as it was pure gobshite and lasted about 10 minutes before meeting the same fate.

That reminds me - must download the PS4 games. I've not been impressed with many of the recent offerings.

It's a good job online Bezziage is having a renaissance or I'd be tempted to cancel.

Super Meat Boy / Broken Age are both Vita as well

SMB (it's just occured to me, is it designed to share the same initials with Super Mario Bros?) is as good as ever on Vita. In fact, I prefer the format, it's more of a pick-up-and-play/pick-up-and-chuck-the-Vita-against-the-bathroom-wall kind of a game.

Broken Age also seems nice - but I keep getting an error message kicking me out of the game after 10 minutes of playing. Anyone else having similar problems on the Vita?

Probably not. There was a Meat Boy before Super Meat Boy.

There was a Mario Bros before Super Mario Bros.

But how often is it referred to as MB? Not that I ever recall.

Not exclusively so (which was obviously what I was going for).

I don't think I'd recognise the SMB acronym unless there was a picture of a pudgy faced plumber next to it.

Acronyms are for losers.

Or AR4L, if you will.

We won't. Thanks though.

WWTT

ITYAD

OMG WTF STFU

I don't think Meat Boy is referred to as MB either. Look at the correlation!

Anyway, SMB will always be Super Mega Baseball to me.

Suck My Balls.

If you insist

Yes, the point I'm making is that they didn't pick the name of the character to match marios acronym.

Oh, I do.

Yeah, I can't get BA to work on Vita, I keep getting the cursor stuck in the bottom left and it is continually active as an input, so skips all cuts scenes, clicks buttons if they happen to coincide with the cursor location, etc.

How do you know this? Are you friends with the developer?

Heh, BA.

I ain't getting on no Vita, fool

The problem you're having sounds like it could be to do with the rear touchpad. Is that activated?

I've found that powering down my Vita (probably the first time in six months) and trying again has led to error-free Broken Ageage.

It's a really lovely little game, though would like a little more depth to the puzzles. Don't have the patience for anything as involved as something like Grim Fandango these days, but there's a happy medium to shoot for.

Bring on the Vita port of Day of the Tentacle.

The what now?!

The rear touchpad.

aka as a brilliantly pointless feature. Whatever usefulness it promised in finessed controls was eradicated by that fact one's fat fingers are always resting on it. What with it being a handheld device and everything.

I rest my fingers on the finger rests.

Do you? I don't even have big hands, but I feel like my fingers are constantly pawing the touchpad. The finger rests look like they want your fingertips in them, but that means one's hands are sticking too far out, like you're gingerly carrying a crab.

It is used to represent the goal in FIFA, so when you shoot, you touch (and hold for power) on the touch pad in the area of the goal you want to shoot. That soon trains you not to rest your fingers there!

That' was why I quickly turned off the touchpad. While I really liked that use-case in Fifa, I couldn't be bothered challenging my muscle memory in that way.

My hands are far too big

Yeah, I got FIFA as I bought the Vita so had no real issue with that. I still think slightly deeper finger rests would be better.

If you've got your index fingers resting on the shoulder buttons I can't imagine it being comfortable not having your fingertips on them...

Hmm. I'm going to investigate in the toilets.

Be careful - you never know what you might find.

I'll tell you what I found. I found that you're freaks. You must be balancing the Vita on your hands, all delicate, like. Whereas I prefer to clutch its round corners into the flesh of palms.

I agree with Findus. On everything. But especially holding a Vita in my boney claws.

Last night I tried playing Shadow of the Colossus. On PS Now.

Never played it before. 20 minutes later, I've still never played it.

Lots of lovely intro, horse riding across improbable bridges, putting some person on a slab who you could well have, for all I know, murdered down an alley. Some shadowy types appear, I'm informed I own an Ancient Sword (yeah but I just bought a faster PC than Sat), then PS Now cacks out.

No option but to start again.

A shame as I'd like to play SOTC. But I don't think my internet/PS Now is up to it yet.

Will cancel the trial will in a few days, no doubt.

I might try it over the weekend and see how my net connection fares with it. I don't think there's really any previous gen games I massively want to play so I'm not interested in paying for it, but I'm curious enough about the capabilities of the technology to give the free trial a go.

That's the thing, as a last-gen 360 chap (the great lost Avril Lasagana song), there's much for me to enjoy from the PS3 back catalogue. But with my oft-ropey Plusnet connection and the ticket price of £12.99 a month, I can't justify it. With a rock-solid internet connection and the addition of more Ps4 games in the future, it could be great.

I'd be very surprised if you ever get PS4 games on there; they're not going to want to cannibalise the hardware sales (at least until the PS5 comes out of course).

For the PS3 stuff you're better off just picking up a second hand PS3 and doing it properly; which is well worth doing as there were a lot of really good PS3 exclusives last gen.

Chances of Mrs Fop permitting another console into our lounge: 0

PS Plus continues to baffle and entertain me. A section of gamers with a shiny state of the art hyper powerful PS4 might think it'd be pointless to convert a mobile game to the big screen. And yet Unmechanical has made it and, yes, it's not exactly showing off the capabilities of your fancy new system. Yet I've sat down and completed the main story from beginning to end today because it was so charming and entertaining (and short, aye?) that it'd be rude not to. A mobile port it might be (I've never played the mobile version by the way but I've seen it about) but it was bloody lovely and it even has an extra campaign after the main campaign which I've just started because I want some more of it.

So even though there's no big release this month I still find PS Plus a massively worthwhile amount of pennies just because of the variety of stuff on offer.

So, yeah, Unmechanical is ace.