We’re back with our weekly round-up of what we hope to fire up and play this weekend. Well, most of us are. Due to my son being in his school’s musical this weekend, I don’t think I’ll have time for anything other than keeping up with my Through the Ages and Galaxy Trucker games on my phone. Not to worry, however, as next weekend is the weekend when I head up to the forests of northern Wisconsin and game with my friends for four glorious days. There will be post-game reports. We also don’t have Nick this week, but that’s my fault. I know it’s hard to believe but I screwed up and forgot to tell Nick that Scrying was on this week. Yes, people, the incompetence that damned editor is always ripping me for isn’t an act, it’s a real thing. [you bet your ass it is -ed.] I’m pretty sure my lackadaisical attitude toward Scrying also left Tanner out in the wilds. So, it’s a shorter Scrying than usual.
[Go ahead, say it. -ed.] And it’s all my fault. [it’s a start -ed.]
I’m starting to hate that guy.
Bloodborne
I don’t know about this, man. Trepidation. But, what the heck: Bloodborne is free with PS+, so I’m going to try stepping outside my comfort zone. Also outside my zone of competence and away from my stylistic preferences. I’ll probably also get in some more Cinco Paus, which I thought was just a cool 868-HACK with some inference, but now appears to have some other stuff going on the nature of which isn’t wholly clear to me. And I picked up the Pennsylvania map for Ticket to Ride, because it has Rochester. Also, I thought maybe the stock thing would incentivize earlier route claiming and shorter routes. Whether it does enough in that line bears further investigation.
-Kelsey Rinella
- Bloodborne for PlayStation4, $20
- Cinco Paus for iOS Universal, $5
- Ticket to Ride for iOS Universal, $9
- Ticket to Ride for Android, $10
- Ticket to Ride for PC/Mac/Linux via Steam, $10
- Ticket to Ride for Kindle, $10
Warhammer: Vermintide II
Oh God. Scrying deadline. There’s a reason it’s beyond the witching hour where I sit, an hour deep into the darkness of Saturday’s ante meridiem. It’s a rat problem.
Warhammer: Vermintide II is here! The brutal co-op cleave-and-chop-and-cream-and-carve simulator from Fatshark is exactly what the doctor ordered to staunch the woes of a long week. Things are immediately looking even better than the dark horse original, with an upgraded loot and character development table in place of the infernal dice-rolling guff of OG Vermintide. There are classes, too, so if you’re keen to twist your hero in a few different ways, you can.
I’m going to hand this off to the Stately Raven and tell you I better hit the hay, but the truth is? There is a horde to rend. The night is young, and full of horrors.
-Alex Connolly
Crabitron
iOS 11 is closing in on me. I can feel it’s hot breath on the nape of my neck. [one of us, one of us, gobba! gobba! -ed.] Civ was bad enough, but now I can’t get Read-Only Memories Type M, and I’m not sure if my iOS 10 New Zealand soft-launch version of Armello will be multiplayer compatible with the worldwide iOS 11 version. Curse you, Tim Cook!
I’ve been holding out because I still have 32 bit iOS games I want to play. In particular, I’ve been hanging on for Crabitron, which is still the killer app for multi-touch gaming. My kids *both* love Crabitron, and it’s 32-bit. I resisted the lure of Civilization 6 on iPad for Crabitron. I mean, it’s a game where you control the massive claws of a giant space crab, cracking open spaceships and sweeping the tender humans within into your craw.
It’s not often that I feel represented in videogames: it’s pretty much Crabitron, Octodad, and I Fell in Love With the Majesty of Colors, which is the other game I’ll be playing this weekend. At least Majesty of Colors is iOS 10 compatible… for now.
-Tof Eklund
- Crabitron for iOS Universal (not iOS 11 compliant), $3
- Octodad for iOS Universal, $5
- (I fell in love with) Majesty of Colors for iOS Universal, $3
Bonfire: Forsaken Lands
[Dave can’t even get his mistakes right anymore. Contrary to the intro, Nick chimed in at the last minute -ed.] I won’t have a ton of time for PC gaming but will probably poke at Bonfire: The Forsaken Lands a bit more on my phone. It’s a side-scrolling city builder where you expand by day and fend off the things that go bump in the night. You have to balance resource gathering with defense and while it doesn’t exactly break new ground I’m enjoying all the ways to expand my burgeoning civilization for now.
-Nick Vigdahl
I’ll be making my usual moves - TS, TtA, Ascension, RftG, and my decathalon Agricola game. Also keeping my spaceships aflight in Hades Star, and just redownloaded Transistor after a reddit conversation made me realize I failed to finish it a while back.
@Nick - please keep me updated on Bonfire - it reminds me of Kingdom, but maybe with a bit more control over things?
Slightly ashamed, but I picked up FFXV on PC and will be giving it a whirl this weekend.
I quite enjoyed it on PS4. Final Fantasy fans are some of the most vocal critics about the series and no matter what SE does, they will whine. It isn’t a perfect game, but it is enjoyable. The story is weak but the bond between the characters is quite enjoyable. I also like the end game dungeons and hunts. At this point I think anything short of an HD remaster of FFVI or FFVII is going to be called “the worst Final Fantasy ever” by the vocal minority.
As for me, I’ll be playing Persona 5 when my kids aren’t around and probably Dirt 4 when they are.
I’m back to my baseball game (Blue Jays on a 5-game win streak and now only a game under .500!).
Will probably get some Onitama in as well as maybe getting back to WQ2?
I dunno.
Prey for me, hopefully all weekend, with little jaunts on Into The Breach, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, and Hitman.
Resistor_ is really good and I’ve added it to the stack of deserving 2P card games which will survive nuclear armageddon with me.
I haven’t played one since the first run of XII on the PS2, and I haven’t finished one since X, although after all this time I couldn’t tell you how it ended. I was drawn into getting this one by comments like yours, how the story was somewhat nonsensical but the minute to minute gameplay and character interactions were great, and how it was super goofy (cup noodles???) but worked overall in spite of itself.
I’m playing railway empire on Xbox. It’s not the deepest simulation or strategy game, but it still has a certain appeal. Laying track with the contour line mode switched on is strangely enjoyable, and has given me a few busy stations where I can just sit and watch all my trains come and go.
The signaling and switching is a little simplified meaning you can’t optimise things completely, but the train path finding logic works well to reduce the amount of micromanagement you have to do. It’s a fine balance between doing too much for you, or leaving you too much unenjoyable tweaking to do for every train. I think they’ve done a pretty good job getting that balance right, even it does lean to the side of making things a little easier for you.
Also worth a special mention is the effort put into the campaign to provide a historical context for the American railway revolution. I feel like I learnt a little, which is always welcome.
Tof ought to just set aside a dedicated iPad or something that stays pre-11 and splurge on another to be the new gaming device. A bit pricey but it keeps everything going. I just happened to re-up my phone around that time, and kept my old 6 to let me keep on with Wesnoth and Shining Force and the like.
Still playing Horizon: Zero Dawn man I have so much fun with this game it is unbelieveable.
I also bought FFXV this week, but bought it for PS4. Found a physical copy (new) rather cheap. Obvious impulse splurge… I still have to play FF12, FF 13, 13-1 and 13-2 first sniff
Regarding Comfort Zone: I also got Bloodborne free with PSN+. Won’t play it anytime soon…PS4 games are HDD hogs…1TB and it is nearly full already (the downside of going nearly 100% digital)
Also regarding out of the Comfort Zone…I got Far Cry Primal for PS4 as well…because…Mammoths? Oh and the magnificent Elias Toufexis (The voice behind Adam Jensen in the new Deus EX Games) grunting in Proto-Indo German is errmm… intense?
I had fun when testing it out but I think it will be the only Far Cry game I will ever play…not interested in the “real” Far Cry games much…
I am actually on the lookout for more Far Cry games. I played Blood Dragon after getting it on Games With Gold, and loves it immensely. I doubt any others are quite that good (Rex Colt!), but the mechanics were still solid enough to intrigue me about th series as a whole.
Best thing I ever did with Primal is turn almost all of the UI off. Much more fun running around without everything signposted.
Welp, as expected, Bloodborne is NOT my jam. Stylistically, it almost hits the campy tone of Penny Dreadful, which gave me brief hope, but it was just too much “buckets of BLOOD!!!” and rather too little reflection on the horror of the prosaic. Mechanically, the difficulty rests partly in sparse check pointing, which means you master a section and then play it repeatedly until you master the section after it. There’s enough risk-vs.-reward in that mechanic that I don’t think it entirely without value, but it’s the sort of tiresome pattern I find puts me off a game I wasn’t especially keen on for other reasons.
For the life of me I couldn’t find another checkpoint after the center of town. Made it to sewers but didn’t find one, made it to the tall bridge and got slaughter by some massive Akira armed werewolf.
Unistalled it after that.
Vermintide II is hard. In a good way, mind. In a wading through an onslaught, steel and shot rending abominations back into the fetid embrace of the dark gods who spawned them-way. Wonderful stuff.
All PS4 games install to the HDD, digital or physical, so you’re screwed either way!
I wrote something about catching up with Dragon Quest V and Ghost Trick on my 3DS while visiting my parents before Dave misplaced it… but I ended up just playing through the entirety of Wario Land II instead. Funny how that works.
Curious thing tough. I was under the impression Physical games don’t install 100%? Why else does my Horizon - Zero Dawn or Uncharted 4 still require the disk to play?
Anyway finished H- ZD earlier this week and what a blast it was. Also in nearly 10 years of playing PS 3 and PS4 my first “real” Platinum trophy. The other ones were for Telltale’s Tale of the Borderlands and Heavy Rain which more or less are “en passant” platinums anyway.
I really have to say Horizon Zero Dawn is the best new Console IP I played in nearly a decade. Also the world building was top notch in my books.
If only Open World Games were all so much fun (and compelling) like this gem (looking at the GTA and Assassin Creed Franchise).
I think the next Open World game that will capture me like that one is far of…even with Red Dead Redemption 2 on the horizon.
Now this weekend I have the dreadful situation where I have to chose again in true first world problem-style again. What beast to tackle next? Fallout 4 is so massive that it is overhwelming… Far Cry Primal? Deus EX: Mankind Divided?
le sigh
Is there someone with experience with XCOM2 (and XCOM 2 WotC) on PS4?
Are the performance hits making it nearly unplayable or simple inconvenient?
I spent top dollar on the steam versions but for the life of me I cannot get it to run at all -.-
FWIW, I lost interest in Fallout 4 after about 8 hours. Keep meaning to give it another try, but of course, now I’m past the tutorial sections and must either give up my progress to start afresh or blunder about with no idea what I’m doing.
By contrast, Deus Ex was very good. Probably my favorite cover implementation, and with such a satisfying aesthetic. Lots of interesting writing, too. That would be my recommendation.
I’m playing Hob right now, and it’s a pretty sedate, mostly puzzle-based game with some light combat. I dig the look, and its level design does a lot to tie the world together in a way that I kind of like; visually clever and convenient.
Prey. Best Game of 2017.
It takes quite the special game for me to care about open world these days. It is a combination of overwhelming stuff (not necessarily depth, just more stuff) and lack of narrative structure. I’d much rather play a linear game that is over in 5 hours if it is an amazing experience. That’s one reason I loved the Uncharted series. Zelda was a masterpiece and sucked me in, and Horizon was likewise rather amazing, but games like Fallout and Skyrim don’t hold my attention any more.
That is my problem as well.
I am not all that much into the convoluted schemes in the Assassin Creed’s but much more into the history tourism in the depicted cities and timelines (yes they are only rose-tinted approximations of the real thing) so I could bear with some of the collection them all bs, and leave some behind.
But only to some degree. I am not an American who can marvel at GTA’s recreation of NY and LA (SF?) the story is not much to write home about so I had problems to beat GTA4 and Lost and Damned. Did abandon Ballad of Gay Tony… I yet have to delve into GTA5… the story isn’t my thing and I*'HATETHECAR*MECHANICS!
The thing is I am a sucker for lore and world building. Thats the reason I was interested in the Fallout-series to begin with…but then when I booted up FO3 and now FO4 it just some mutant brown horrible looking thing here and some disgustingly big insect there…and stuff to collect - lots of stuff…which collides with my "must collect everything even if I won’t need it ever ‘OCD’-alike mentality…even if I am interested in all the appocalyptic world and the schemes behind the dozens of vaults I cannot keep up with the mechanics…and art design.
At least Skyrim has nice wintery scenery and dragons…
And then the settlement building minigame…I am just 15 hours in FO4 and haven’t accomplished much more than unlocking the first three settlements and done 3 quests…
If I could play 24/7 and would live for 200 years well then maybe but so?
That’s the reason as well I liked the Uncharted Series. And wasn’t all that bothered with the Open World Shenanigans of the two new Tomb Raider Games. Because they are reasonably short and focussed.
But even so. Horizon Zero Dawn had some pretty interesting side quests which were meaningful and helped to flesh the world out pretty much. Also, the ethics of the dev need to be applauded. The game has loot boxes but you CAN NOT buy them with real money. Only as random drops or with in-game currency. This game has exactly ONE DLC and it is pretty massive in scope if you are bothering with doing it for real. Meaningful side story and impactful rewards (armor/weapons) as well. I believe if I was (never) a story rusher who never bothers with collectibles and sidequests at all this game would have changed me. So I felt engrossed with a game world and had so much fun which I hadn’t had in 4-5 years (since Mass Effect 1-3)
I probably should stop with the fanboy-nerdgasm now. Also should finally bite the bullet and play Witcher 2 and 3. Would probably have done already if they had released W2 on PS3 or PS4 already
I’d argue that Horizon’s DLC is an expansion pack in the traditional sense, which I have no problem with at all.
I want to like this particular bit SO HARD. I finally realized that this is the principle reason I hate GTA when I played Saints Row 4. Same structure, but the game takes place in a simulation, so you can hack it to develop superpowers, IIRC. Most importantly for my enjoyment, you can get super-speed so you just ignore cars from then on. I found its humor uneven, but successful often enough that it, ridiculous design, and the joy of not driving made it a lot of fun.
I’m really enjoying Fallout 4 when I can get to it. I think I’m about 30-40 hours in, but the play has been so disjointed that I can’t remember (family room TV, so I really only play when I’m home alone, which isn’t that often)
Just finished The Last of Us and the short expansion. I’m not much of a zombie guy but story was good (but nothing original). The game mechanics and shooting were very fun for a 3rd person game.
Not sure what ps game to play next. I have Prey, Dishonored 2 expansion, and Bloodborne. Looks like Bollox had fun with Prey so I’ll probably try that first.
On mobile, i got into the Fortnite Beta. Boy do I suck at that game. The controls are wonky, i suck at building stuff, i try to shoot but nothing happens, i don’t try to shoot and the gun goes off. I’ve gotten a few kills here and there but there are some good players all decked out in crazy suits so imagine they have a lot of experience
I still need to do the Last of Us DLC and the new Uncharted 4 (standalone) DLC.
Are they worth the asking price? I liked both games but if it is a mere 3 hours romp it has to wait…
The last of us dlc is very short. It came with the remastered version so it was free for me. I wouldn’t pay more than $5 for it. The uncharted dlc, the standalone with the 2 gals (i forget the name of it), was excellent and had a lot of content.