Be Excellent To Each Other

24. Bubble Tale: 2D platformer for Android with shades of Bubble Bobble. Good fun with just enough challenge and optional exploration to keep your interest up.

15) Ori & The Will of the Wisps (Xbox) - 10/10

My favourite game of this year. 14 hours to fin with 94% complete. That last boss was pretty fantastic but the last 1/3 of the fight was ridiculous - they just take away the sodding floor meaning you need to juggle yourself in the air during the whole final battle. Insane, and I fucking loved it.

Moon Studios are AAA Tier.

25: Colorblind - An Eye For An Eye: puzzle-platformer for Android which challenges you to progress through it's levels while switching certain elements (platforms, enemies, environmental hazards) on by hitting painbrushes of the relevant colour, or washing everything off in waterfalls. It's a nice idea and often very challenging, but the standout aspect is definitely the presentation because the art-style is lovely and there's something beautifully high definition about the entire piece. And being a Nitrome game everything is just polished to a ridiculous level in general.

Oh

12. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Turtles in Time - There's my 12th game for this year! Some low hanging fruit in the list but, I did it.

13. Far Cry New Dawn - We did this in Coop. Good fun but lots of bugs.

1. Trine 4 (PC)
2. The Witness (PC)
3. Sunless Skies (PC)
4. Turmoil (PC)
5. Demon Crawl (PC)
6. Resident Evil 6 (PC)
7. Nier: Automata (PC)
8. Sekiro (PS4)
9. God of War (PS4)

Suffered quite a bit from the "Game I played after Sekiro" problem. Probably would've thought more of it had I not played it immediately after that.

S'ok, I guess. Felt very samey throughout though, and certainly by the end I was willing it to end because I was tired of fighting the same things in samey spaces.

26. Pikuniku: puzzle-platformer with soft-ish physics set in a fairly odd cartoon world which is being exploited by an evil corporation for resources and needs your help. Despite that bleak sounding setup it's all very whimsical and silly and even the movement of the main character is brilliant in it's ridiculousness. The puzzles are rarely challenging because it's more about exploring the world and talking to all the weird and wonderful NPCs that make it up. There's a decent amount of variety with stuff like basketball and rhythm mini-games to play and some optional content to reward your exploration. Overall it's just a really good time and I enjoyed more than a lot of other stuff I played recently. It's out on Windows, the Xbox and the Switch (which is where I got it for fucking 89p!) so it should be available to pretty much everyone and if you want a bit of joyfully light-hearted to brighten up your apocalypse it comes highly recommended.

That's a great game, it's delightfully silly

16) Dark Souls: Remastered (PS4) - 9/10

One of the best games ever made gets an improvement in FPS (BIG plus) but some ridiculous brightness settings which means you’ll need to turn the in-game options and your TV settings to max (Stupid AF).

It’s still amazing but a shame the remaster doesn’t fix any bothersome bugs (infinite backstabs in PvP, yawn), or even attempt to nice-en up some of the rougher areas. Strictly no frills, as perhaps can be expected.

Plus there’s no option to revert Izalith to the pre-Patch mode which actually makes it challenging to walkthrough. Only the pros have ever done this.

Just admit it, you enjoyed being molested by walking butts

17) Flashback (Switch) - 2/10

Let’s be fair, by today’s standards it’s a fucking irritating game. Most of the game is absolutely fine - I really enjoyed Death Tower - but those aliens in the final level? Oh boy, they should never have passed playtesting. Completely unfair and annoying. I’ll be honest with you, I basically cheated my way through them with the rewind feature since it gives you a moment of invulnerability every time you use it. Get hit, rewind a second, shoot, get hit, repeat etc. If you’re happy to just play the first level for 89pence then it’s worth it. Just pretend like it was a classic game, but let’s be fair, this has not aged well in all but the looks (mainly cause some indie games are still ripping off the old Delphine games). And the controls are horrible and I swear there’s some lag in there too. Nah, I can’t say I enjoyed it much at all and probably won’t speak fondly of it anymore. Dare I say I even prefer Another World now? Shudder.

“Mark” Winstanley awarded Flashback 92% in one of the worst reviews he’s done.

At the time it was well worth that score, though.

You doing Fade to Black next, Sat?

If you thought Flashback was hard...

I suppose I should join in really

1) God of War - An enjoyable hack em up
2) Rogue Legacy - My ‘Quick go’ game I’ve been dipping into for ages. Love everything about it.
3) Uncharted 1 remaster thingy - Good!
4) Uncharted 2 remaster thingy - Better!
5) Uncharted 3 remaster thingy - Same!

I clocked it on a “PC” when I was a yoof and my only memory is something about tiles that kill you and annoying tank controls.

It was, as I recall, gash. But got a lot of play time alongside the undoubtedly average High Octane.

1. Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune Remastered (PS4)
2. Star Wars: Battlefront II (PC)
3. Resident Evil 6 (PC) - completed Leon, Chris, Jake and Ada campaigns
4. Halo: Reach (PC) - completed campaign on Mostly Heroic

I don’t remember this game being as shit ten years ago. It’s Halo trying to be CoD, and suffers for it. Still fun in 4-player coop even if a berk tries to hoard all the good weapons for himself.

We started on Normal and then upped it to Heroic after a couple of missions because it was too easy.

Also it turns out if you boot someone for TKing you can’t get them back in without restarting the mission.

1) God of War - An enjoyable hack em up
2) Rogue Legacy - My ‘Quick go’ game I’ve been dipping into for ages. Love everything about it.
3) Uncharted 1 remaster thingy - Good!
4) Uncharted 2 remaster thingy - Better!
5) Uncharted 3 remaster thingy - Same!
6) Shadow of the Colossus remake - Still a fantastic game, clunky and swear inducing at times though. Didn’t quite remember the end being like that.

18) Gradius/Nemesis: The Gradius Collection (PS4) -

The father of the Konami code. And man, the tunes! The tooons! I mainly remember the C64 version of this which I loved. I thought I’d try and 1CC it but it turns out it’s a real cheap cunt at times filling the screen with unavoidable projectiles. 3CC was as good as I got and I’m never going to get any better.

4. Stories Untold (PC)

Oh dear, my "completing games" slowed down a bit, didn't it? Anyway, Stories Untold is a four-part game and can be knocked off in a few hours. It's not expensive (£7 on Steam, and there's a free demo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5584 ... es_Untold/ ), the first chapter lasts about 30 minutes and it's incredible. The other three chapters aren't as good as the first one but they're still fun. I even got all the cheevos, which just goes to show they aren't hard.

I don't want to say too much about it, it's a perfect game to go into blind. The demo is apparently the first chapter so give that a shot. Try your best not to read anything about it before you download and play. Don't even look at the Steam page if you can help it

Don't read this spoiler unless you 100% aren't going to play it (or if you've completed the demo / first chapter):

I also fucking loved this when I played it a while back and completely agree that the first chapter is the strongest.

And the demo is only 99meg? That's the most surprising thing of all

The demo is the first level of the game and it's an almost completely static screen the entire time because it's a 'simulation' of someone playing a text adventure; so it would be more surprising if it was some multi-GB download. It's still somehow got buckets of atmosphere which is an incredible achievement in itself.

I'm 10 minutes in. Nearly soiled myself once

I enjoyed it. A nice creepy 20 minutes.

Back for one post only: TOYST

20 minutes? Unlikely.

I’ve had the credits run on Dead Cells after...



...so does that count? I know there’s much much more to do game wise.

27. Sherlock Holmes and the Devil's Daughter: the most recent (2016) of Frogware's games based on Sherlock and very much in the same vein as their last effort Crimes & Punishments. So you get a number of stand-alone cases in which you question witnesses and explore related locations in order to find enough evidence to decide who exactly dunnit. This is all stitched together with a load of mini-games with a fairly impressive level of variety. You get short general experience like picking a lock balanced with longer challenges unique to each case (e.g. winning a game of lawn bowls, solving an environmental puzzle to break into a steel foundry, evading a gunman through a swamp or stealthily infiltrating a crook-packed graveyard).

The presentation is pretty clunky as it's very much a 'double A' experience but that in itself brings a bit of charm and amusement to proceedings. Most of the character models and voice acting is decent with only a couple of immersion breaking exceptions (both the recurring female characters, weirdly) but you settle into it all quickly enough.

My only real complain is with the final aspect of each case which has you creating a mind-map of sorts in order to decide who you're going to bang up for the crime. This comes down to certain nodes on the map being binary choices ('Character X was just an innocent bystander' vs 'Character X was directly involved in the heist' sort of stuff) with the entire thing reflowing and characters becoming suspected/acquitted when some of these choices change. In most cases I felt that I could make these choices with reasonable certainty, but in at least on case I ended up switching things around just so I could accuse a certain character; rather than having my choice of suspect be driven from the supporting conclusions. It's a minor annoyance--and possibly I'd just missed something rather than the game being off--and has less impact on the enjoyment of the game than you'd think given the subject and all.

Whether I'd recommend it is a harder question to answer. It would depend largely on how much someone is prepared to meet it half-way in it's clunky presentation, and certainly the core game mechanics are somewhat repetitive and unchallenging, but as a low stress game that's certainly different from most stuff you're likely to play I'd say it's worth giving it a shot.

First game of the year completed.

1. Streets of Rage 4

Considering I wasn't all that keen on what I saw from the trailer, the final game is a pleasant surprise and after a few levels clicks as a proper SOR game. There are some frustrating enemies and some of the levels are a little unremarkable but there are enough neat new touches to make it a decent part of the series. Probably wouldn't have paid full price for it though.

1. Trine 4 (PC)
2. The Witness (PC)
3. Sunless Skies (PC)
4. Turmoil (PC)
5. Demon Crawl (PC)
6. Resident Evil 6 (PC)
7. Nier: Automata (PC)
8. Sekiro (PS4)
9. God of War (PS4)
10. Celeste (PC)

A quite hard platformer. Some parts overstayed their welcome, but generally good.

19) Hyper Dot (Xbox) - 10/10

Came out of nowhere and now it’s my joint favourite game of this year.

You’re a dot on a circle. Don’t get hit. That’s it. 100 levels of awesome. There’s even a four player couch co-op where you jostle your mates to get the fuck out the way; custom modes and a level editor, Infinite survival and probably some other stuff. The music reminds me of an old chill out album from uni days and is super. And it’s on Game Pass.

Y’know, it doesn’t have any leaderboards, that’s a bit shit. Ah well. Can’t win them all.

20) Outrun (Switch) -

All courses complete. It’s a funny old game, you realise:

•that only Passing Breeze is a jam and it wasn’t until Outrun 2 when those tracks turned into glorious anthems.
• the traffic are the biggest cunts and no one fucking indicates.
• 3 lanes of traffic means you’re going to slam into something imminently.
• It’s so goddam hard.
• You don’t know what the difference between ‘new’ and ‘old’ versions are not what the difference is between ‘special’ and arcade’. Well, other than the track arrangements. Maybe the frame frames for the arcade recreation? Meh.
• That the map screen is technically incorrect and there’s TWO seas. TWO. Utter bullshit. 1/10.
• that the home computer conversions were abominations.

Yeah, it's still great though isn't it?

Damn right it is. For the £3 I paid, I’m very satisfied. For the current asking price, I wouldn’t be so chuffed.

G-LOC came out recently too. I never actually played the arcade version of that though, so I don't know well that one holds up.

I've bough it and had a quick go. The draw of the Arcade machine was clearly the spinney cabinet. It's basically just Afterburner so yeah, I like it so far and for only £6 it's nice to have.

I remember seeing the full gyroscopic version of GLOC in an arcade in.... it was either Whitby or Scarborough. It looked terrifying. Sadly it was broken and I never had a go.

I did try Full Scale Ridge Racer though. That was ace

1. Trine 4 (PC)
2. The Witness (PC)
3. Sunless Skies (PC)
4. Turmoil (PC)
5. Demon Crawl (PC)
6. Resident Evil 6 (PC)
7. Nier: Automata (PC)
8. Sekiro (PS4)
9. God of War (PS4)
10. Celeste (PC)
11. Hitman 2 (PC)

For reals this time.

Like Hitman 1. But Twoier.

Good game. Make careful plans to kill someone. Then find some goon you hadn't noticed appears and finds you stripping a dude.

14. Streets of Rage 4 — yeah, it's good. You know exactly what you're getting with a scrolling beat em up.

21) Remnant (Xbox) - 9/10

So called Dark Souls with guns. And it is! Sorta.

Thing is, DS has all these hidden mechanics that made it unique. This hasn’t got any of that. I reckon those mechanics are really what made DS what it is not just the punishing difficulty.

Anyway, Remnant, it’s tough and has some rage inducing hard bosses. The gunplay is absolutely solid and the guns are great. Shooting faces feels great. With a co-op ponta this is an absolute joy to play. It’s fresh, it looks good and it presents a unique challenge that other so-called DS clones don’t, but mainly cause it’s about shooting things.

So grab a partner and go play this because it’s great.

22) Monument Valley 2 (iOS) - meh

I mean, it looks good and sounds good but there’s no challenge here. I swept through the game with my brain largely switched off. It’s just not engaging, sorry.

5. FF7 Remake (PS4)

I've been waiting twenty years, and it's worth every second. It's sensational.

I started playing this tonight on this recommendation. It's great so far. I'm playing in co op and it's tough, the first boss took use several tries but I like it. How long did it take you to complete it?

I thought the Xbox App tracked time played but I can’t find it for this. I’m guessing about 20 hours-ish.

If you ever want to know how far through the game you are: You’ll reach an area called the Labyrinth about a third of the way through and from there you do 3 worlds (desert, swamp and jungle) before the end boss.

There’s plenty of replay value too (for people who like that) as some of the bosses are randomised and most areas end with one of two possibilities. I thought that was pretty cool for a game of this type.

29. Rise of the Tomb Raider: you spend more time in a smaller number of locations than I remember (as far as the 'open world' aspect goes) but the whole thing's still as brilliant fun as it was when I first played it.