Be Excellent To Each Other

That's cleared it up

Also note the Devs themselves tweeted that people should stop asking for free review download codes because it requires PS+ and is free with PS+. So basically people are confused.

I done Carrion twice yesterday. Fun game if short. Also I wish I'd';v'v'e've checked that Game Pass had it first before buying it through Humble. I am a silly sausage.

FALL GUYS really is the worst game in the world for saying, 'One more round'.

I've been saying it for the last three hours now.

Still haven't had a first, was a gnat's cock away from getting to the crown in the final round but was pipped to the post by a wilier jelly bean, so that was 2/60.

Alien Isolation is very stressful, and I'm not very good at it. I find redoing the same bit over and over a little disheartening. Boy does it look good though and the Alien is scary. I'm not sure I'm going to see this all the way through.

Metal Gear Solid 5 seems like it could be fun. More sneaking about, like in Alien Isolation but at least this time I can cap some punks when I feel like it. Ground Zeroes was a nice intro and it felt good running round the base and taking out all the guards... although fuck the story and shit. Then I started the main game and the main game made me spend about an hour crawling around on a fucking hospital floor. While it was atmospheric, it was not a particularly fun way to get into a game and WHY DIDN'T THE SOLDIERS SEE OUR LEGS STICKING OUT FROM UNDER THE BEDS

The first level of MSGV is the worst introduction to a game in recent memory. When you get to the map proper and get to balloon men and sheep, it's great.

indeed indeed, I've had a lot of fun - especially now I've worked out how to be a bit of a sneaky sneakster and have got myself some better equipment (I'm not very good at stealth games and make very slow progress).

For the price I paid, this is super brill.

Been playing http://shapez.io (although the steam version)

It's like factorio. But chilled.

Sunless Sea - Tim the Philosopher is about to run out of food on his way to pick up a parcel for some shady fella who has said "don't come back without it!". As I have decided Tim is a flimsy sort, so he won't return without it, and would rather die at sea, alone, than risk a confrontation.

I finished the main campaign on Ghost of Tsushima last night, the game is toweringly, wonderfully, delightfully magnificent.

It actually got to the point where Mrs Hearthy and Jnr were watching as I played, to the extent that Jnr asked me not to play while she wasn't in the room if something significant was coming up story wise, and Mrs Hearthly would plant herself on the couch next to me just to watch, and has been asking about skill levels and controls and stuff, as she's not confident with a pad at all (watching her play Fall Guys was...... interesting) but really wants to give the game a go herself.

It's genuinely one of the best games I've ever played. Literally ever, on any platform. The combat loop remains incredibly satisfying right the way through the game, with your character getting stronger in all sorts of ways without ever feeling wildly over-powered.

That 'early hump' I mentioned a few pages back definitely exists, and indeed not long after I posted that the developers added in a LOW INTENSITY mode that makes the game easier than EASY mode to address that issue, but I managed to get through it on NORMAL and before LOW INTENSITY was added.

There are loads of reviews out there that you can look at so I won't bang on about it here too much, except to say I absolutely cannot recommend this one enough, it's properly fucking brilliant.

EDIT - Once you finish the main campaign and it does the ending cinematic and credits, you're put back into the game world with an epilogue and can carry on to mop up all the open world stuff you missed, and I've already decided I'm going to go for a 100%, which is really, really rare for me these days. Even the way it does this is nifty, it reveals all the Mongol camps/strongholds you missed in each area of the map, and once you beat all those, it then reveals all the other stuff for that area of the map, which is a super friendly way of doing things.

Spent all night last night in 'sweep up' mode on Ghost of Tsushima. I've now eliminated every single Mongol encampment/base in all three main game areas so the entire map has been revealed and each point of interest has a question mark assigned to it.

Starting to knock down quite a few achievements for doing endgame type stuff, including fully maxing out my Ghost/Resolve level meters to achieve the actual title (and named achievement) of GHOST OF TSUSHIMA.

Even with all the Mongol bases destroyed, the game still spawns random Mongol and bandit patrols here and there, so there's still a decent amount of combat available if you're in the mood.

At one point I saw a little island some distance off the coast and zooming in as much as I could with my longbow, it looked as if there was something on it, but there was no question mark on the map for it. I ended up spending a good 30 minutes getting to it, as it was off a mountainous section of the coast so I had to go the looooooong way round and then swim out to it. (I thought the game would throw up one of those 'invisible walls' but it let me make the swim.)

True enough there was the remains of a little camp there, along with a cache of goodies and a Sashimona Banner. The Sashimona Banners are one of the collectibles in the game, and for every ten you find you can hand them into a monk in one of the temples to get a new cosmetic appearance for your horse's saddle.

There is no campaign left to do now, and in honesty that's generally where I leave a game alone (Death Stranding and God of War are two that spring to mind that both offered an endgame of sorts, but I couldn't be bothered with), but Ghost of Tsushima is something quite special.

PUBG - Came 3rd on my second go, last survivor of my 4 man team.

SFV CE - Getting battered.

Not all the stuff, it turns out.

Yes, for clarity, (I've been experimenting with brevity and it's already gone horribly and demonstrably wrong), it reveals the entire map and puts a load of question marks all over it for the stuff you haven't yet found, once you've wiped out the last Mongol camp.

(Prior to completing the game and killing all the Mongols, it puts a question mark on the map when you get close to a point of interest, there are also multiple 'tells' in the environment to help you find them.)

The question marks relate specifically to 'objective' based stuff, for example a Mongol Camp, a Lighthouse, a Fox Den, a Friendly Camp, a Haiku spot, a Pillar of Wisdom, a Hot Spring, a Shrine, a Duel spot, and doubtless other stuff I've forgotten.

The Sashimona Banner in my above example didn't generate a question mark because it's just a collectible, not an objective. However, from looking at the island I was pretty sure there would be something on it, hence me taking the time to get out to it.

CHICKEN DINNER!!!

Congrats. You have beaten some bots

Green Hell. It's fucken miserable.

They successfully chose the images that contained crossings actually!!!

Touch it! Feel it!

Keep digging out dem worms.

I have tasted the forbidden flesh!

Don't catch the pretty frogs

It takes a year or two to cleanse the pallette, but it's always a pleasure to come back to a far cry game. Started FC5. It looks beautiful, and these are very much the people I need to be killing right now.

Apropos of nothing (or perhap remembering him talking about far cry) has anyone heard from sat? He's not been on in ages. Hope he's all right.

He’s fine. I talk to him most days.

That's good. Though I miss his epic diatribes against easy games.

He was here at some point yesterday according to the board stats.

Congrats. You have been talking to a bot.

Heh, just got Cruising with the Enemy trophy in PUBG for jumping in an enemies car Didn’t think I’d ever get that

Spent 90 mins on it last night: Star Wars Squadrons is mad pretty, and super intense. In VR it should be amazing.

I've got to have a play with the controls (annoyingly, pulling back to pitch up isn't default, like wtf?) And then I think I'll be better at it,as I was getting a bit frustrated with throttle control being very important.

Flying a TIE fighter through narrow, twisting spaces is great fun and the sounds are great with proper pew pew noises.

Just got this on PC to try. I wasn't sure it was worth £35 so I just got the EA Play thing for a month so I can play it for ten hours. Will report back on VR in a bit.

I don't know how you can play something for more than one second let alone 90 mins with the Y-axis the wrong way round.

It is on my list. I might order it this week

Is it on EA play already? That's going to be part of Game Pass later this month so this is an interesting development.

Sort of but you can only play it for ten hours.

That would do me, I only play games for a couple of hours these days anyway, then seemingly forget at all about it and move on...

Yeah, generally the same but it depends on the game, I'm 70 hours into flight simulator so far. But even if I did decide that I wanted to buy it then it would be 10% cheaper for having EA Play.

Ah cool... Just make sure you quit the game completely in this case otherwise the clock may continue to tick down while you're not playing.

This is brilliant in VR.

Ah, no you can't. It lets you play the prologue and then that's it for the story, the rest of the ten hours is just training and practice modes.

Turns out the trial lets you play multiplayer as well. Normally I hate competitive online shooting games of any type because I'm rubbish at them and so I usually die all the time and end up pissed off at my own ineptitude. But I gave this a go and I was a fucking killing machine, so I liked it. Either that or the game is horrifically unbalanced and I just got lucky to be on the rebel side.

So I'm a fair way into SOMA (safe mode activated) and the voice actor for the Simon character sounds so much like Matthew Broderick that I can't stop picturing Ferris Bueller floating around the Atlantic floor

I've been playing Hunt:Showdown a bit, it's pretty good.

It's like an objective based mini-battle-royale in a 1800's Louisiana swamp with zombies. It was only 13 quid in the PS4 halloween sale.

I played this last night.. was meant to play one mission and stop, but no, it was great, ended up going to bed at 1 am

Flying an x-wing skimming a star destroyer was epic.

Also, the dog fights are mad

As I can play my import PS2 games again, I dusted off Keyboardmania recently. Sadly, it's just as difficult as I remember.



Tried three of the easiest songs and failed them all. A friend of mine, who can actually play piano, struggled too, so at least I'm not the only one crap at it.

Tried out Tetris Effect Connected, but had to turn it off after 30 minutes. This is what single player mode looks like from my sofa:




After playing through the first two areas, my eyes were getting sore and my hand numb from the near constant vibration as the game gets going.

Shout out for SACKBOY:A BIG ADVENTURE which is currently on PS5/PS4 Pro/PS4.

(I'm playing on PS4 Pro but the game is identical on all three platforms in terms of features/levels and 60FPS, but with the last-gen versions losing some shinies and resolution to hit the target framerate.)

It's basically a 3D style platformer, think Super Mario 3D World as a decent comparison point, so obviously you need to enjoy the genre (and personally, I love platformers). Note that the camera is fixed though, so there's no camera style awkwardness and the camera movements happen automatically and are designed to work with the levels.

Things in particular to like about Sackboy are the gorgeous 'craft' style graphics, the sublime music, great sense of humour and voice acting (Dawn French, Richard E Grant amongst others), and most importantly of all some top-drawer platforming fun across loads of really inventive and fun levels.

As with many games in the genre, just getting to the end of the level isn't necessarily that difficult, but hitting the targets for collecting stuff, or completing in a certain time on timed levels etc are where you can really challenge yourself if you want. (I ran one of the timed levels 10+ times to get a gold medal.)

Utterly and completely charming, definitely one to look into if you're a fan of the genre.

This short IGN review probably sums it up better than I will:

I've been playing a lot of Spiritfarer on Xbox game pass.

You play as death as you guide your friends down the River Styx to the black land. I can't understand at the minute whether the world you inhabit is the real world or these are spirits trapped in limbo but either way you're soon putting these fuckers out of their misery and double tapping them in the back of the head as you pretend to give them one last hug goodbye and draw a hidden silenced 9mm out your pocket and press it to the back of the cranium. There's nothing like escorting an old willing hedgehog with early onset of dementia to their doom as their friends wave them off from the side of your boat of the damned.

Here's a trailer so you know what sick son of a bitch you'll be playing as.

The first time I got one of those I was so excited I couldn't sleep. It was made all the sweeter by the fact that our two best players died and I fired the last shot (Vector to the head). I literally jumped out of my chair and danced up and down.

I can't believe I used to make fun of what is actually a fucking brilliant game. So brilliant that for four months our squad plays at least 5 nights a week.

A long, long time ago (gosh, 12 years ago) I made a couple of those.