Be Excellent To Each Other

'Easy' is a bit of a difficult thing to judge, but in terms of good ones I always enjoyed Fire Maple's stuff (https://play.google.com/store/apps/deve ... aple+Games) and the Cryptic X series (https://play.google.com/store/apps/deve ... 3D+Methods).

I have purchased this! I have built mines and farms on all the planets in Sol. But how do I get a new weapon or pick up those indestrucyible things floating around space? I'm stuck with the machine gun.

"More than 15 hours" says my Switch. I'm pretty happy with what I got for a tenner.

Are you all sitting down. I finished Horizon: Zero Dawn a week or so ago. 130+ hours including the expansion. Loved it.

Now playing Prey, which is also very nicely done.

Prey is glorious.

Yes, it appears very good so far. I’ve just saved having reached the crew quarters, come across some mahoosive enemy that insta-killed me, but I had to stop playing. Hoping to get on it later this afternoon for a couple of hours, so will decide what needs doing then,

1. Super Mario Odyssey (Switch) - finished story + Pink Floyd level + over 500 power moons
2. SUPERHOT VR (Rift/PC) - finished story mode
3. Human: Fall Flat (PC) - finished all levels
4. Golf Story (Switch) - finished story mode
5. Vib Ribbon (PS1) - finished silver and bronze modes
6. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Arcade) - finished game
7. There is no Game (PC) - did not finish game as there is no game
8. Football Manager: the Human Match Engine - scored a goal and won the game
9. PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS (iOS) - winner winner chicken dinner

Now to see if I can do it on Android.

31. There is no Game
32. Papers, Please
33. INSIDE
34. Little Nightmares
35. GNOG
36. Here They Lie
37. Xon Episode Four
38. Escape Logan Estate
39. Bean Dreams: a puzzle-platformer for Android that has you control a Mexican jumping bean who literally never stops bouncing up and down, leaving you to control only his horizontal movement.

This relatively unique central mechanic turns everything into a timing puzzle as you navigate each level's hazards without inadvertently bouncing down a hole/into an enemy/onto spikes/etc. It also means that the usual mobile game 'three star objectives' trope is actually a really nice addition as finding hidden collectibles and attempting the level in a set number of bounces instantly transforms each level into a different puzzle.

Basically it's simple to pick-up, has a lot of depth, looks great and is brilliant fun to play. It's everything that a mobile game should be and people should give it a shot. Interestingly it's a sequel and the original game was very well received way back in the day but I tried it a few times and just completely bounced off it; while this one grabbed me instantly.

<long look to camera>

[quote="Bamba"]
31. There is no Game
32. Papers, Please
33. INSIDE
34. Little Nightmares
35. GNOG
36. Here They Lie
37. Xon Episode Four
38. Escape Logan Estate
39. Bean Dreams
40. Bean's Quest: I went back and played the original and enjoyed it this time round, which is kind of weird. The sequel is definitely the better game with much tighter level design and the collectibles intelligently placed to add value rather than just strewn around the place but this original one is still fun to blast through.
41. The Room: Old Sins: flat-out incredible stuff as always; lying in bed with my tablet working my way through their world of sinister, intricate, beautifully tactile puzzle boxes is a total joy. Am I really the only one here who plays these games? What the hell is wrong with you all?

No, you’re not, I’ve conpleted all four. They are, indeed, very good.

If you're ever looking for something in the same vein, The House of Da Vinci is basically a total rip-off of The Room games but produced with a similar level of quality.

1) Super Mario Odyssey (Switch)
2) I expect you to die (PC/VIVE)
3) We Were Here (PC)
4) We Were Here Too (PC)
5) Human: Fall Flat (PC)
6) Ratchet and Clank (PS4)
7) Persona 5 (PS4)
It's like Persona 4, but fiveier

42. Bluebird of Happiness: short well-presented puzzle game for Android with logical puzzles and an aesthetic that masks some sinister shit in that Undertale tradition.

6) Star Trek: Bridge Commander

It's not exactly long, but we took an extended break from it in protest to Myp not being able to join us, and went back and finished the campaign a couple of days ago.

There's hardly anything to it, it looks ropey, but the fun to be had with your friends in the playground it provides is excellent.

"All ahead full, Helm."
"All ahead full into the fucking great big asteroid?"
"Well you fly around the asteroid, don't you?"
"Why didn't you say that, then?"
"JUST DRIVE THE FUCKING WHIP!"

"Helm, why are we coming about?!"
"So we can shoot the other Warbird."
"We're heading for the anomaly, not shooting! Get back on course!"
"But we need to kill it!"
"How about you concentrate on the steering wheel and I concentrate on CAPTAINING THE FUCKING SHIP?"

"Engineering, why are our shields down?"
"Er..."
"Engineering, why is there no power to the shields?!"
"I thought the engines needed more power..."
"And not the shields? In a fight?!"
"Er..."

[Four Warbirds down, two to go]
Captain: Oh, wait...
[Red alert siren sounds]

There are randomly generated missions which step up the difficulty, but they seem a bit... Fiddly. Still, I can see myself getting back into the big chair several times yet.

To my mind, it's the perfect VR experience. The adaptive audio in particular really makes it feel like you're on the bridge of a ship.

The actual missions are so simple (not to play, but the amount that goes into them) that it's a real shame there aren't more of them.

I'd be happy to give it another try in multiplayer. Maybe one PS4 guy should test it with me first to see if we can get crossplay working.

We've finished it now

My proudest moment:

(flying through asteroid field)
<captain> Don't you scratch my ship, helm!
<helm> I'm not going to hit it!
<tactical> Captain, incoming hail from the USS Ron Howard.

And if you want another pc berk as well, I'd be able to get it.

15) Persona 5 (PS4)

A brilliant AAA JRPG. It only took 108 hours to finish the campaign but I did wobble near the end when I was being beaten by some grossly unfair enemy, however smashing the difficulty down saw me breeze through like a big old cheating cheater. It was either that or jack it in and I’m not averse to a bit of a cheat where my enjoyment was being ruined especially so close to the end.

I was less interested in the story and the fighting and more interested with hanging out with my in-game friends shooting the breeze, making them coffee, watching movies, reading comics and playing video games. And, best of all, pursuing the true love of my life Hifumi and, ultimately, having lovely anal with her. I’m seriously going to miss those guys. Well, until Persona 5 Dance Dance Dance Your Pants Off comes out which will probably be a nice rhymth action game where you time your rhythmic button presses into an ever increasing rapid pounding and ultimate crescendo where your fingers cramp up. Then Hifumi says thank you and finally gives up her cholocate.

10/10.

We could with another two really.

42. Bluebird of Happiness
43. Sally's Law: mechanically and thematically interesting puzzle-platformer for Android.

You play through each level twice: first with Sally and then again with her father. Sally always auto-rolls forward but can jump, whereas you have full control of father's movement but he can't jump. As you roll through the level with Sally all these gates automatically open as you reach them and obstacles disappear magically. As you subsequently play through with father, Sally is also moving through the level mirroring your earlier playthrough precisely. Your job as father is to flatten obstacles and hit buttons to clear the way for Sally, if she hits anything you restart. When you do need to jump as father your only option is to 'bounce' off of Sally, which means synchronising father with Sally as she inexorably rolls forward.

The narrative throughout looks at their relationship with each other in the years since mother died. Sally laments the growing distance between them and her father's unsupportive attitude to her ambition of moving to the city for a career. Father in turn spends his time fretting for Sally's safety and happiness because, having lost one loved one, he's desperate to protect the family he has left. As each level plays out you see situations from both points of view which demonstrates that both are trying to make the other happy, in spite of their misunderstandings between them. The mechanics of the game inform and reinforce the story in a really nice way. The only imbalance is that it's easy to read Sally as being a bit of a prick, given that she's rambling on about her father not being there for her while utterly oblivious to all his frantic background machinations just to make her path through life smooth and easy.

It's worth me saying that the game itself is incredibly easy and only in a couple of places is it not incredibly obvious what you (as father) need to do and then carry it out. The game does add some extra mechanics as you progress (portals that must be navigated, gates that you have to hold open, etc) but it never makes a lot of these. The story, the way it ties into the mechanics and the lovely aesthetics of the game itself are absolutely what's carrying the day here and if you're looking for a challenge this isn't it. Well worth your time as a mobile game; though I couldn't really recommend it on Steam or the Switch.

Sally is law. Correct.

1. Super Mario Odyssey (Switch) - finished story + Pink Floyd level + over 500 power moons
2. SUPERHOT VR (Rift/PC) - finished story mode
3. Human: Fall Flat (PC) - finished all levels
4. Golf Story (Switch) - finished story mode
5. Vib Ribbon (PS1) - finished silver and bronze modes
6. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Arcade) - finished game
7. There is no Game (PC) - did not finish game as there is no game
8. Football Manager: the Human Match Engine - scored a goal and won the game
9. PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS (iOS) - winner winner chicken dinner
10. Bloodborne (PS4) - completed main game (slug ending) + The Old Hunters DLC

Well. It took 78 hours, but I've finally done it. I would say I enjoyed 70% of the game and was frustrated with the rest, mainly the beginning and end. I had to call on Mr Dave to help me with the DLC and the final bosses, but other than that I pretty much did it on my own.

I'm relieved it's over, but I haven't ruled out playing Dark Souls in the future.

42. Bluebird of Happiness
43. Sally's Law
44. Stray Cat Doors: room escape game with a very Japanese cat-based theme to it. I'm not a fan of the aesthetic--though it looks good enough in general--but the puzzles were logical and it was fun while it lasted.

1) Super Mario Odyssey (Switch)
2) I expect you to die (PC/VIVE)
3) We Were Here (PC)
4) We Were Here Too (PC)
5) Human: Fall Flat (PC)
6) Ratchet and Clank (PS4)
7) Persona 5 (PS4)
The Sexy Brutale (PC)

A mansion where some people die on a partcicular dayand you have to figure out how to save them and figure out what's going on. all aided by the ability to return to the beginning of the day.

Really rather good, if fairly short.

16) Shadow of the Colossus (PS4)

Incredibly detailed, gorgeous and beautiful. My only
complaint is that I can’t ever experience it for the first time. I remembered almost everything and smashed through it and the baddies. I stopped to enjoy the fantastic visuals where I could though and found some sweet moments just finding an area I hadn’t been before or an old area reimagined with a fresh lick of paint.

What a lovely game. The best game ever but better yet somehow worse because I’ve played it several times before. Bittersweet.

17) I Expect You To Die (PSVR)

Well that was jolly bags of fun. It’s far too short and needed a good few more missions to be worthwhile but for the £7 I spent, I was happy with the purchase. VR is great.

By the way, this game is not a good introduction to VR for “normal folk”. Normos had a bad time getting used to pulling in/out objects (the button combination isn’t very intuitive) and often just couldn’t do it. It’s a bit fiddly on the move controllers too given the tiny buttons and placement.

Aye, it's the one thing that really sucks about the game because otherwise it would be an excellent thing to use as a demo to non-gamers. Even after playing it myself for hours I was still struggling with those specific actions. I feel they could've easily implemented some other way of accomplishing that e.g. hold a single button and move your hand up to push away/move your hand down to pull in (or similar).

I was thinking that it might have been improved by the Move Button switching between the two modes rather than having to hold down the move button.

And maybe a laser beam coming out instead of a circle crosshair.

42. Bluebird of Happiness
43. Sally's Law
44. Stray Cat Doors
45. Little Briar Rose: point and click game for Android that see you as a prince--or a succession of princes depending how badly you fuck up--solving the various problems of tribes of woodland folks in order to access the castle in which your sleeping beauty is, well, sleeping. It's not a massively long or difficult game, which is further helped by not having a whole load of locations to constantly revisit, but it's fun and has a beautiful stained glass art style to recommend it. And a pretty wry sense of humour underpinning the whole thing.

18) A Way Out (X1X)

It’s the two player only story game. Without spoilering anything, it’s ace. The story won’t win any awards but it’s still brilliant. Recommended.

Is that the one by the Brothers folk? Still one of my favourite moments in that game

‘tis that one.

Well worth a punt if you’ve got a friend to play with. Couch coop or online. If you’re online then only one of you needs to buy the game; the other just needs to download the trial (which is pretty fucking cool. I didn’t pay a penny).

Me and Grim... played through it. It was good fun, and longer than expected.

Title.

42. Bluebird of Happiness
43. Sally's Law
44. Stray Cat Doors
45. Little Briar Rose
46. Our Last Journey: block sliding puzzle game for Android that's vaguely reminiscent of the GO series. It looks nice enough and controls well but the difficulty is all over the shop and it's just not that interesting a game in the end.

42. Bluebird of Happiness
43. Sally's Law
44. Stray Cat Doors
45. Little Briar Rose
46. Our Last Journey
47. My Brother Ate My Pudding: one of a series of deeply weird and silly Japanese room escape type games. Despite being fucking bonkers it has it's own internal logic which makes the puzzles 'logical' and the game pretty good fun.

42. Bluebird of Happiness
43. Sally's Law
44. Stray Cat Doors
45. Little Briar Rose
46. Our Last Journey
47. My Brother Ate My Pudding
48. The Sexy Brutale: time-bending murder-stopping puzzler.

The setup here is that you're one of the guests invited to a hotel/casino called The Sexy Brutale in which the employees are murdering all the guests in sometimes elaborate ways. You're gifted the power to rewind the day by a mysterious woman in red, and tasked with interfering with all the murders in order to save the guests. Not directly--because being seen by the guests or staff will 'kill' you--but by hiding to overhear conversations then moving/interacting with objects to sabotage the murders. Doing so gives you the masquerade mask of each guest you save which gives you a new ability (e.g. pick locks, better overhear conversations, talk to ghosts, etc). Each new ability in turn gets you access to other parts of the mansion or allows you to interact with objects you previously couldn't.

Aside from the mask abilities, and some key objects anything, you're holding is lost when the day is reset. This isn't a massive hardship because knowledge you learned (location of secret panels, door key codes, etc) is retained. In fact it's not a hardship at all because, although you can technically roam the entire mansion eventually, each guest's story plays out in a relatively small area and saving each of them typically only requires you to navigate a handful of screens. This generally makes the game relatively easy, though there was a couple of levels that left me frustrated because I hadn't managed to randomly stumble across the critical conversation I needed to overhear to progress.

Overall it's a good fun game, and certainly a unique idea, with a beautiful visual design and a good dollop of dark humour as you'd expect. It can be pretty clunky in places though and the levels seemed to veer between 'so easy that I accidentally solved a couple of them' and 'obtuse to the point of mild annoyance'. It's not a very long game though and absolutely worth the price of entry just for the experience of it all.

42. Bluebird of Happiness
43. Sally's Law
44. Stray Cat Doors
45. Little Briar Rose
46. Our Last Journey
47. My Brother Ate My Pudding
48. The Sexy Brutale
49. Sometimes You Die: a puzzle platformer for Android which it turns out I'd played through previously in 2015 and about which I said this:



I stand by that, but some Googling this time round turned up the required code in the last room which unlocks a sort of developer commentary playthrough of the game.

19) Streets of Red (Switch)

It’s a repetitive side scrolling beat em up with a bland art style that consists of lots of grey. Think Streets of Rage/Final Fight but with shitty pixel art and all the joy sucked out of it.

Sounds good.

Better than Mario then?

42. Bluebird of Happiness
43. Sally's Law
44. Stray Cat Doors
45. Little Briar Rose
46. Our Last Journey
47. My Brother Ate My Pudding
48. The Sexy Brutale
49. Sometimes You Die
50. Can You Escape - Fear House: the usual nonsense. Alright I suppose but nothing special, I only picked it up because it was free.

Was it scary?

Nope.

51. Murdered: Soul Suspect: you play as the ghost of police detective trying to track down the serial killer who murdered him using your various ghostly powers and the co-operation of a teenage psychic who can see and hear you.

It's an interesting setup and isn't entirely unfun, but it's a very easy game with no penalty for failure during your investigations. Investigations which boil down to looking around a scene for related clues and then 'solving' the crime once you've got them all by picking out the most relevant to your current question.

There are side-missions in the shape of other ghosts who need an answer to their own death before they can move on and the sort of open-world layout gives you a fucking avalanche of collectibles to hunt down but none of it really adds much. Oh, and there are some enforced sections where you need to kill some demons which is done by hiding in ghostly echo things before jumping out behind them to take them down; a process which is made mildly frustrating by the jittery movement of the demons themselves.

I did enjoy it to an extent during it's fairly short runtime, and it's good to see people try something new, but it feels like a bit of a wasted potential. The ghosts powers plus more interesting environments and an investigative method that was more engaging could've made this something properly special, but it somehow ends up feeling very 'by the numbers' despite being quite unique.

That sounds like Ghost Trick