Category: Nintendo Switch

Top 5 Gaming Experiences: 2022 Edition

For reals this time…

It’s good to be blogging again. Sorry, but it’s tough to write a look back over the year without reflecting a little. The best bit is not feeling guilty about not keeping a schedule; posts happen when they happen and sometimes blogging needs to step aside for other stuff to take its place. I’ve also really committed to drawing terrible webcomics about donkeys playing games. Sure nobody really asked for them, and I’m at least 90% sure that I’m the only person who laughs at them. But if something is worth blogging about then it’s also probably worth doodling a 4 panel webcomic involving goofy donkeys and a terrible ‘joke’ about too. Trust me, 2023 is the year that the Gaming Donks rise to influence and notoriety in the gaming community.

2022 was also a year that was pretty rough personally (understatement, definition: the preceding sentence). Gaming has always helped me with some of the tough stuff; given me space to regroup, and makes me smile. By extension, so does blogging about gaming… and by extension so do you. So Thank-You for reading the first two paragraphs of this meandering post.

Gaming in 2022 has been all over the place. I started the year very much on the Switch, but have since moved away because… well, I’ve kind of played everything I want to play on it. Sure, I’ve got a wishlist stuffed full of B-team offerings, but they never seem to get reduced enough for me to give them a punt. I finally carved out a small corner in the house to be my retro-gaming-nook which means I get to have retro consoles setup and connected and playable at a moment’s notice.

If I’m honest this has been a pretty big highpoint of the year.

Since then I’ve been tackling a few ‘always wanted to plays’, ‘never heard of’s, and ‘it was cheap’s off the list of retro offerings. In celebration I also picked up a GameCube which is a console that I’ve wanted to own for a long time. Nintendo make such cute consoles. Mixed in with that was a sudden lurch towards ticking a few more Jurassic Park games off the list, something that I’ve been chipping away at for some time. Special retro mention has to go to Kim & Pete from LaterLevels for their company at the London Gaming Market a few months ago. Looking forward to the next one already!

There’s also Monday evenings that have become a mainstay fixture for weekly online gaming. A small group of us have been embarking on a few different co-op experiences usually some kind of zombie/monster shooting (championed by me), or a more gentle building/crafting thing… which I’m not going to lie, I enjoy mostly for the company rather than the game.

Anyway, I came here to do a job, so here it is. The official “Hundstrasse Top 5 Gaming Experiences of 2022” … as decided by me…

5. Core Keeper (PC)

Core keeper definitely falls in to that category I mentioned earlier; I enjoyed it mostly for the company rather than the game. That’s not to say the game was bad, but it was the online hangout activity it provided that really won me over. That caveat being said, it’s a pretty cute mining/crafting/exploring type of thing that avoids some of the pitfalls of the genre that I’m less fond of. First up, the player retains the items on their toolbelt post fatal injury… to which I breathed a huge sigh of relief. One of my big annoyances with crafting games is the repetition of basic things, so at least being able to hold on to your key items softens the edges there. It also has some clear goals which mostly revolve around ‘find big monster’ and ‘attack big monster’. Then there’s a handful of neat quality of life things that just make the whole crafting thing feel less grind-like. I even leapt into the role of gardener and had some mighty underground crop fields on the go by the time we stopped playing.

Unfortunately we HAD to stop playing because we ran out of stuff to do. Turns out the developer is still making this one, so there’s a good chance that we’ll revisit at some point to mop up the rest of it.

4. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (Switch)

Next up is another non-typical Hundstrasse game, KotOR. Despite being a name that I’d heard, I can’t say that I knew much about this going in, so I was disappointed to discover essentially turn-based combat. My first ten minutes with the game weren’t positive, I felt like a passenger in the combat and quickly switched the game off, but some part of the game must’ve caught my attention as I picked it up again the evening after and actually started to become absorbed in this novel take on the Star Wars Universe.

What won me over ultimately was that it felt open-world, but manageable (something that I wrote about at the time). The story was engaging, but not convoluted, and the gameplay loop quite satisfying. In some ways this became the ideal commute game; both interesting, but easy to pick up and put down .

3. Alien Isolation (Switch)

Alien Isolation is easily the best film tie-in game I can think of. A combined love letter to the Scott and Cameron films, it captures the atmosphere perfectly. Having said that, it wasn’t until my 2022 visit that I finally watched the end credits roll. Anyone who’s played this will probably agree that it could stood to have been a shorted offering; not that any of it is notably weak, but the constant tension makes it exhausting to play. Crossing the finish line felt like a real achievement.

For this successful attempt I decided to take a more ‘fortune favors the brave’ approach to moving and taking the chances where they came. This definitely paid off and I quickly developed a no-lockers-policy of play as getting in to a locker tends to mean getting stuck there for several minutes until you finally decide that it might be safe to leave. If you’re a horror fan, or a fan of the original films and haven’t checked this out then you really should take a look. Plus the Switch port is excellent!

2. Silent Hill 3 (PS2)

I’ve been having a real Silent Hill few months; revisiting the original, finally acquiring a copy and playing 3, and recently playing through Shattered Memories. I’ve got designs on trying to get hold of 4 too, a game that I did once own, but never completed.

Silent Hill 3 was my star purchase at the London Gaming Market, and I’m pleased to say that it was well worth it. I’d always heard that it was well regarded in the original games, and whilst I would still rate it third in that trilogy, it is still a standout game that delivers a solid Silent Hill experience. Rounding out some plot elements along with revisiting some familiar locations, 3 is really one for fans. It also packs a good whallop of that late 90’s/early00’s survival horror vibe that I crave so much…

1. Tormented Souls (Switch)

… which brings me neatly on to my number 1 gaming experience of the year. The unassuming ‘Tormented Souls’ which I had pre-ordered a physical Switch copy for waaaay back in 2021. Yes, it surprised me too, but looking back on the games I’ve played over the year I couldn’t pick out a better experience that the one I had with this love letter to early survival horror. Taking inspiration from both Resident Evil and Silent Hill, Tormented Souls really delivers on capturing that era of survival horror. There’s a balance between building tension, but also unraveling mystery with combat being functional, but not prohibitive.

.. and without spoilering, there is at least one puzzle that I loved because of how much only people who lived through the 90’s will get.

If you like early survival horror then I thoroughly recommend giving it a go.

Hundstrasse Top 5 Gaming Experiences… 2021?

Two things might strike you as strange about the title. The first is that I’ve gone with ‘Gaming Experiences‘. Not ‘Top 5 of the Year‘, not ‘Best Releases of the Year’, but my own personal best experiences. In recent years I’ve really leant in to my pre-existing predilection to retro gaming and with that comes both old games and crucially revisits of old games. The list I keep of all the games that I’ve played during the year (for this exact blog post) contains more and more asterix’ed entries indicating that I’ve technically played the game before. So this year I decided to say that anything from the list of games I’ve played during the year can make the cut: new title, old title, first playthrough, revisit, or just a comfy run through of a much loved classic.

The second curiosity probably had you rolling your eyes at another classic patented Hundstrasse typo, but no, that’s correct, this is my 2021 list because I never actually got around to posting my top 5 last year and posting the top 5 from this year felt somehow dishonest before I’d even had the decency to wash my hands of my 2021 blogging obligations. So I dug out last years list and decided to finally compile the top 5 gaming experiences I had back when … heck, I can’t think of anything particularly memorable about 2021. Let’s face it, it just felt like the director’s cut version of 2020. Whatever, here is the official ‘Top 5 Hundstrasse Gaming Experiences of 2021’:

Continue reading “Hundstrasse Top 5 Gaming Experiences… 2021?”

5 Best Switch Ports… According to Me…

Addressing the elephant in the room; yes, I’m one of those people who mostly plays their Switch in docked mode. So much, that the idea of a ‘Switch Home’ non-portable version, which started as a Twitter joke, to compliment the Switch Lite ‘portable only’ console is starting to sound pretty good. Especially if ol’Ninty offered seamless sync between Switch devices and a highly compact home console design…

Hang on… I need to get a pen and write this all down. If the giant ‘N’ can release the 2DS as a legitimate console then I could be on to marketing gold here…

I’d also be the first to admit that a combination of circumstances over the past few years have shifted my gaming allegiances from the realm of PC way more toward the Switch. Whether it’s being able to muster the effort to grab the pro-controller whilst collapsing in to the couch after a long day, catching a sneaky few minutes handheld gaming whilst the TV is otherwise engaged, or quickly bundling the whole thing up in to a backpack when travelling for a weekend; the Switch just seems to be working for me at the moment.

And sure, whilst I’m happy to fly the flag for this brave li’l teapot of a console, I would be the first to admit that the system under the hood is no heavyweight… or even middleweight compared to its contemporaries, which kind of brings me around to the topic of ports. The Switch is home to a heck of a lot of ports of older games, and even some ambitious ports of more recent games, but one thing tends to universal; whenever I check out reviews of a Switch port it often ends with the characteristic tagline of “.. this is the least good way to play this title”. It’s a phrase that is sometimes entirely justified, but almost as often only ‘technically’ justified as it may not take in to account the other benefits that Switch owners enjoy such as portability, smaller electricity bills, teenytiny terrible tasting cartridges, and the joy of snapping their fingers along with every Nintendo Direct.

With this in mind I decided to break my blogging silence and pull together a list of the ‘5 Best Ports I’ve Played on the Switch’ from my own experience (i.e. I’m not saying these are the best on the console, just the ones that I’ve played).

5. Overwatch

It’s not the prettiest, and it’s not the smoothest, but Overwatch on Switch gets the job done; especially compared to other fast-paced shooters on the system (oh, I’m looking at you Apex Legends). Back in the heady days of lockdown 1.0 I sunk a good number of hours in to this version of the game, which is solid praise as I’ve more than once been known to drop a game for bugs of port issues. Not only is it all ‘there’, Overwatch on Switch feels like a game that the developers took some time over to really get the most of out Ninty’s little trooper of a console. There’s a sense that they tweaked the sliders to within an inch of their life to maximise the visuals whilst holding performance. Of course you could sit and study the polygon count of each ingame model and suck the air in through your teeth, but in the midst of a skirmish it holds framerate, feels smooth, and doesn’t look like someone is puppeting a box full of badly cut-out magazine clippings infront of the TV.

4. Hard West

Small disclaimer here, I’ve been looking for an excuse to mention Hard West in a blog post for some time, and have leapt on this as my opportunity. That being said, I’ve played this game through on the PC and the Switch, and would be hard pressed (get it? Hard West? Hard Pressed….) to choose between them. The Switch version comes with the bonus scenario bundled along with the full game and does an admirable job of maintaining the look and feel of the PC release. What’s more it also manages to pull together a control scheme which keeps things about as fluid as possible for a game clearly design my a mouse interface in mind (that being said there is a bit of a learning curve to remember what each button does). If you like your west a little on the supernatural side, turn based, and tactical, then this is a great way to soak it up.

3. Sniper Elite 3

It was a tough shout to pick between Sniper Elite 3 or 4 for this list but, whilst the more open landscapes of the latter are an impressive achievement on Switch, I probably had more fun with 3… plus 4 had an annoying bug where the auto-save stopped working correctly midway through a mission. I’ve said it before, but the Sniper Elite games aren’t sophisticated titles, but they are good guilty pleasure gaming. What’s more Snipey-snipey-3 looks and plays really well on the Switch demonstrating that a bit of system optimisation goes a long way and putting many other shooters to shame by comparison.

2. Bioshock Infinite

Whilst the undersea city Rapture remains for me one of the best game locations ever devised, the floating city of Columbia is nevertheless the more impressive visual spectacle which still looks amazing in the opening scenes of this port of Bioshock Infinite. All three Bioshock titles have very solid Switch ports, but the faster pace and detailed visuals of Infinite tips it above the others for me. You could argue that the stylised graphics help it keep its sheen, but regardless I’ve played this version through twice since picking it up on a whim some time ago. Not only that, but it comes complete with both halves of the Burial at Sea DLC which are essential playing if you’re a fan of the series.

1. Alien Isolation

Sitting head an shoulders above the competition in Switch ports is Alien Isolation; it’s the inspiration for this post and the undoubted underdog story when it comes to what you can do with limited hardware. I played this port earlier in the year having originally undertaken the game several years ago on PC, but never quite making it to the credits. Back then I recall watching a video that was just panning shots of the various ingame locations and being amazed by the way this game’s visuals capture the look of the original movie. The Switch port once again makes the Sevastopol Space Station a place of dark beauty with some arguing that it outshines its contemporaries. Even if you don’t agree, it’s hard to deny that this game is a stunning achievement for a console that’s synonymous with graphical downgrades. The gloop on the top of the proverbial egg-sac is that it also includes both DLC packs with scenarios inspired by the original movie. My only complaint is that a physical version has never been released to grace my game collection shelf.

What do you think? Did I get this entirely wrong? Any favourite Switch Ports out there?

Hundstrasse Top 5 of 2020: Listmas Part 2 of 2

Having covered the best revisits of the year in my last post, it’s time for the main event…

As each year draws to a close myself and every other gaming blogger (I assume) fall under some strange late-December trance and are compelled to make a list detailing their top games of the year. In an attempt to simultaneously be a little different and hide the fact that I rarely play current releases, my own spin on this recipe is to whittle my top 5 list from the games that I’ve played for the first time this year (which is not even close to a list of games that were actually released this year)… and you know looking down the games I have to choose from (incidentally included at the end of the post), I really haven’t played any big releases of 2020, partially because I’m now seemingly a Switch gamer who doesn’t enjoy the big Switch releases, and also that there really hasn’t been much in the new release pile that’s interested me enough to go and sit in the other room and fire up my PC.

I’d even go as far as to say that the list of games that I’ve played for the first time this year is a very strange list – spattered with retro titles and bizarre things that I picked up on a whim or in a sale.

Anywho, I think that just about covers the pre-amble, so without further delay, here is the “Hundstrasse Top 5 Games of 2020 That I Played for the First Time This Year!”:

5. Minecraft

I built a floating castle… just because…

I didn’t talk about it here much, but 2020 was the year that I joined the scores of gamers out there who spend time putting blocks of stuff in specific places and going “Yay!”. Spending hours swinging that pickaxe just to find a few seams of gold or diamond … or whatever that blue one is has definitely been in my repertoire this year. I guess the issue I’m skirting around is that I’m still not sure that I like Minecraft, I have enjoyed the time I spent with it, but ‘like’ is a very strong word.

What Minecraft actually did this year was to provide a pretty good social conduit. I purposefully went out of my way to find a game that my group of more gaming friends could all play together regardless of which box-o-tricks they like to press buttons on. This was both very successful with one regular participant signing in to our ‘Realm’ on a lashed together kindle fire sporting wireless mouse and keyboard, and monumentally unsuccessful as despite sort of having cross-platform play, PS4 owners can’t join ‘Realms’… literally the official Minecraft persistent server solution… and this is without addressing the slew of issues that go with different releases of the game and Minecraft’s ultimate attempt to unify everything in the bedrock edition. I’m still in a state of bewilderment at how a game so synonymous with working with friends and exploring a shared world manages to be so convoluted when you get down to the details.

Setting all this aside, it still has to make the list because technical issues aside it’s been the game that I’ve spent the most time with this year and probably provided some of the best online gaming memories… assuming nobody brings up the time I summoned a Wither too close to our house…

4. Ringfit Adventure

Virtually gliding through verdant landscapes, seemingly with effortless strides, stopping to masterfully execute reps and reps of exercises, whilst I was in reality sweating in your lounge trying to burn enough calories to really enjoy another piece of cake may just be one of the lasting vibes of 2020 for me. During the first lockdown (am I the only one getting a bit nostalgic for lockdown 1.0?) WiiFit Ringventure kept me in shape and relatively sane, providing a regular hour of exercise daily for at least a few months. My lasting regret is that I took a break and never went back to it, I would have thighs like tree-trunks now if I’d kept up with all those squats… and knees incapable of bending past about 10 degrees….

Ringfit is probably the first product to get the gamification of exercise on a home console right. It just works well, and despite the sweaty mess I was after sessions, I really felt a sense of achievement and enjoyment travelling through the different worlds (and of course unlocking the costumes). Sure, it’s not the deepest of experiences and the exercises tend to focus on core strength along with teaching you every possible way to squeeze a slightly squashy ring whilst not really being that heavily cardio.

Maybe not a very traditional game, but no, this hasn’t been a traditional year…

3. Doom 64

Oh, nothing, just a game from 23 years ago making my top 5 of the year following its re-release on modern consoles!

Fans of old-school FPS action really need to check out Doom 64 if you haven’t already. ID dug through the archives and uncovered a buried classic, dusted it off, and it shines just as brightly today. Despite a slightly slow start, and a few misgivings I have about the final boss, Doom 64 is everything a Doom title should be; all the signature gameplay is there showcased across a range of superb maps. What’s more visually it’s so different from the other Doom titles of the era and despite my initial apprehension, even several months later, I stand by the sentiment that this is what Doom II should have been.

Doom 64 topped off a bit of a rediscovery and exploration of classic Doom titles for me and it certainly provided a suitable climax to that chapter of this year’s gaming.

2. Mario Golf: Advance Tour

Following a superb birthday gift, I risked hand cramps to play ‘Mario Golf: Advance Tour’ on my supercute Gameboy Micro. With echos of … or I guess… foreshadowings of? … Golf Story that I enjoyed so much last year, Advance Tour has that same fun blend of RPG and classic 16-bit-style golf game which packs a surprising amount of intricacy and tactics in to what is essentially a three-click-golf-game. I guess the strangest thing about this game is that it features very little of the actual cast of Mario during the single player campaign. Despite snagging top Nintendo property Mario and his golfing chums like… Bowser… feature as the final challengers with most of the game focusing on the player as an unknown climbing the ranks in some place where they decided to pack half-a-dozen golf clubs in super close vicinity to each other.

On paper it sounds like a strange mix, but the way this game comes together just works and I found myself pretty invested in ticking off all the course and challenges. It’s a game that I could just pick up and play in a year when even the simplest things could feel like hard work.

1. Return of the Obra Dinn

When the wait for Lucas Pope’s next offering after the superb Paper’s Please was finally over I didn’t pick it up straight away, and looking back, I’m glad that I waited for the right mood to finally step back in time and pick my way through the mysterious Obra Dinn. I remarked at the time that it’s probably the first ‘detective game’ that actually feels as though it got the deduction gameplay right…. and I do enjoy a good mystery. Pawing and puzzling over each diorama-like scene gives the sense of actually working something out and seeing the story come together, tracing characters between scenes, and watching the pieces fall in to place is very satisfying. My only regret is actually the (relatively few) times where I took an educated punt on a solution rather than finding the linchpin clue that gave it away, and I’m already looking forward to not remembering it enough to give it another shot.

Oh, and let’s not overlook the unique visual presentation reminiscent of an early apple game or the delightfully shanty-like soundtrack. Sure, it’s not going to be to everyone’s taste, but honestly a game that is to everyone’s tastes would probably be very bland indeed. As the standout title from this year it’s an unsurprising recommendation from me, but that does go with the caveat of ‘don’t rush it!’. If you do decide to step aboard then take your time and soak it up; that’s when you’ll get the most out of it.

So that’s it, those are my top 5 of 2020! Certainly an unconventional list for an unconventional year!.. and finally, here is the full list of new (to me) games that I played this year:

Revisiting Listmas: Part 1 of 2

It’s been a strange year… arguably the only constant has been the consistency with which myself and other bloggers seem to begin articles with the phrase “It’s been a strange year”… but you know, it has…

I’ve mentioned it before, but part of that strangeness has manifested with me turning to Nintendo’s little-console-that-could, the Switch, as my primary source of gaming. In some ways that in itself has been quite the adventure… not necessarily one I’m going to stick with long term, but for the moment at least it is mostly working for me. It’s been a year of inconsistent blogging; either due to the need to just retreat a little from the online world, or to give myself time to recover from what has been a remarkably busy (and at times stressful) working year in my day-job that shall not be named. So it’s around this time every year that I look back at the list of games that I first played this year and give a top 5 of 2020, and sure enough, I’m going to do this (maybe in a few days?), but before I get to that, I also realised that the list of games not on that list is also well-populated this year. These are the games that I’ve revisited this year, and for some reason revisiting seems to have been a bit of a theme. I’m not sure if that’s because the Switch has a healthy catalogue of ports and re-releases, or if deep down what I really wanted this year was some comfort gaming, but I do know that I’ve replayed lots of games this year that I really enjoyed.

With this all in mind, and in the traditional blogging spirit of listmas, I decided to prologue my ‘Top 5 of 2020’ with a quick look back at those revisits. So anywho, for your reading pleasure, here is the official Hundstrasse: “Top 5 Revisited Games of 2020″

5. Armello

Sylus… Sylus kicks butt!

Managing to bring all the fun of boardgaming to a videogame, without the tedium of manual bookkeeping phases, Armello is a superb experience that’s all wrapped up in some great themeing and lore. I originally played it on PC a few years ago and have since used it as a commuting distraction with the mobile version. The switch port was a great way to revisit the this troubled kingdom although gamepad controls aren’t necessarily the most beginner-friendly way to experience this type of game. For my revisiting I treated myself to the ultimate… erm.. complete… erm… definitive?… edition that came bundled with all the DLC packs including the ‘bandit clan’; a group of additional characters, each with their own perks to add a little more diversity to my playstyle. This includes Sylus, a badass otter and my new favourite character, who gets his kicks from slaying the King’s Guard.

It’s tricky to pin down exactly what makes a round of Armello so satisfying to play, could be the pleasing clatter of rolling a virtual handful of dice during combat, or spotting a fiendishly clever way to play cards, or maybe it’s just the interplay between the different win conditions. Whatever it comes down to I’ll be keeping it installed on the Switch ready for a round at a moment’s notice. There are even a few characters I’ve yet to try.

4. Hard West

As a rule, I don’t generally enjoy turn-based combat… if you like it then great, but it’s not really my kind of thing… but of course every rule has exceptions, and for me Hard West is one of those. It’s also one of those games that I’ve rarely heard anyone else mention. I first played it on PC (again, probably the better way to experience given that it’s really designed for a mouse) after being gifted it following a giveaway organised by the superb LaterLevels, and having spotted that it was on sale on the Switch eShop I decided that some lockdown Wild Westing was just what I needed.

Hard West’s core gameplay is (I imagine?) something similar to that X-Com thing that people keep talking about… only with Cowboys. The game takes place in turns, during which you get to spend a certain amount of action points on each of the characters you are controlling with the aim of … well, usually killing all the enemies or getting to a ‘thing’. On top of this there is the obligatory planning and loadout that allows you to best equip your team of ragtag desperadoes before they enter combat with items, equipment, weapons, buffs… heck, just preparing for a mission can take a good 15 mins of weighing up your options. The whole thing is set to a delightfully detailed WildWest theme with supernatural demonic overtones, gritty narration, and a series of chapters that come together to form one satisfying overarching plot. I guess my only complaint would be that the overworld sections which take the form of a kind of ‘pick-your-own-adventure’ sometimes drag on a little and I found myself quickly clicking through windows of exposition to get to the meat of the gameplay towards the end of my revisiting. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it to the point of completing the main game and the additional storyline, although I think the whole experience baffled my wife who would see me settling in for an evening of slowly manoeuvring outlaws through some abandoned ranch or similar over the course of a couple of hours. Definitely a game to take slowly, but the combination of a theme that I particularly like and solid gameplay made it well worth going back to.

3. Call of Juarez: GunSlinger

I just really like these quickdraw sections…

Oh, spotting a western theme are you? Sure, there’s nothing spectacular about Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, but there’s still a lot to like here. It’s wall-to-wall action fps fun that managed to hold my attention despite being a linear romp through every Wild West cliche going. With events unfolding as told by a grizzled old gun-for-hire, the plot plays fast and loose with reality, but the collectable ‘nuggets of truth’ manage to squeeze a little bit of *whispers*…educational content…*/whispers* to give a more accurate context to the larger than life comic-book portrayals of the notorious figures wheeled out for the player. It also contains a minigame that I would count amongst my favourites in the form of the quickdraw duels.

As far as I could see the Switch port is pretty much identical to the PC version that I first played a few years ago, and looks pretty good whilst holding a consistent, if not blistering, frame rate. I think I hit the sweet revisiting spot with this one with my original playthrough being long enough ago that I’d forgotten the details of the game, but had a good enough memory of it for it to feel like a comfortable hoodie at a time when we were all getting used to doing things very differently.

2. Resident Evil

Shocking twist! I put a Resident Evil game on this list! Not only A Resident Evil game, but the REMake, a game that managed to improve upon the original formula back on the Gamecube and still holds up in the HD remaster so many years later. I first played this on the PC some years ago, but remember a housemate playing it (much to my jealousy at the time) on his GameCube when it was first released. Strangely I hadn’t revisited it again until now but it was exactly the dose of classic fixed camera resi-gameplay that I wanted before everything got over-the-shoulder and weird.

With the Switch port reduced earlier this year (are you spotting a pattern to how I buy Switch games?) I couldn’t resist stepping back in to the Spencer Estate and picking my way through as both Chris and Jill. The port itself doesn’t add much but is mostly solid despite a couple of marginally awkward load times between certain areas. Going back now the rhythm of the route through the mansion did start to come back, although somewhat intermingled with my memories of playing the Director’s Cut of the original a few years ago. This is almost the definition of comfort gaming for me and if you haven’t gone back to it for a while I thoroughly recommend it… heck… even if you’ve never played it then I recommend it as a great way to experience the original resi-type gameplay without having to put up with PS1 era graphics.

1. Bioshock Infinite

So I got a hankering to play Infinite on an idle Friday evening a few weeks ago, picked it up on Switch, and by Sunday lunchtime I’d completed the main game and the Burial at Sea DLC… which is something that never happens with adult responsibilities. Infinite is just a good game and I can’t believe that I’d only completed it once previously back when it was first released. The only problem is that I now want to play the original Bioshock again. Visually the floating dystopia of Columbia is still spectacular and something that the Switch port admirably does justice too whilst holding a solid framerate throughout.

More than this though, the plot is intriguing and goes in some interesting sci-fi directions without losing the human connection or becoming inaccessibly complicated. On top of this the ‘Burial at Sea’ DLC is almost a stand-alone sequel which manages to flesh out the link between Infinite and the original game with some memorable moments that shouldn’t be missed if you enjoyed the main outing. My only disappointment is that now I’ve finished it and I still want more!

So what about you? Have you been revisiting anything this year? Feel free to let me know in comments below.

Overwatch: POTG Luck

I’d be lying if I said that my recent interest in Overwatch wasn’t a hankering for some of the ‘Good ol’ Days’ I spent hanging around TF2 servers. In recent years, my online FPS playing has been a gentle mix of squad based co-op and the unavoidable Battle Royale invasion, but those days of chipping away or digging in against the desert backdrop of Dustbowl have never really been matched in terms of smooth and direct team based combat. Enter the super-new and latest release of “Overwatch”… erm… ok, so I’m late to the party here, but in my defence it was only a few weeks ago that there was a free Overwatch event on Switch which meant that I finally decided to try Blizzard’s class based team shooter. The hours I spent with it that week, and the subsequent attractive sale price, coerced me in to dipping in to my PayPal funds to spring for it.

Continue reading “Overwatch: POTG Luck”

Sniper Elite III: Chewing Gum for the Thumbs

Step in to the shoes of Buck ‘Elite Sniper’ McSniper-Elite the most elite sniper in all of the sniping elite sniper division. Armed only with his elite sniping gun he must snipe more elite-ly then the other elite snipers to become the most elite sniper in all the sniping world of elites to prove once and for all who the most elite sniper is.

I mean, I assume that’s the general gist of the game. I wasn’t paying too much attention; oh, and you have to shoot nazis because it’s WW2 times, except in Africa which is slightly different to all the other WW2 times games that involve shooting nazis in mainland Europe. The problem is that, despite the amount of sarcasm that I’ve jam-packed in to that opening few sentences, I’ve sunk a fair few hours in to ‘Distance-Shooty-Number-3″ which probably says more about my current state of gaming than being a reflection on the game’s quality… and for the record, if spending all your ingame time crouched to the point that your back starts to sympathetically ache is something you enjoy, then knock yourself out because there’s kind of nothing seriously wrong with Sniper Elite III, it’s just that I’m struggling to tease out what qualities made it worthy of the hours I’ve personally played it for.

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Night Trap: Awww Grrrrrrr…

Spoiler Warning: This article contains plot spoilers for the game ‘Night Trap’

Call me childish, but there’s a small part of me still smirking at playing ‘Night Trap’ on Switch; a game that Nintendo’s North American President once said would “never appear on a Nintendo System”. Even stepping away from that, it’s clear that the game wears the controversy that surrounded its original release like some robe of state and that without the original drama it’s fairly questionable that it would have received a 25th anniversary re-release. Now, I know that it’s a title that has an unquestionably vast library of opinion pieces, critical breakdowns, and impact articles already associated with its name, but now that I’ve finally experienced the game myself, something that my eight year old self would have been super jealous of having seen those futuristic FMV graphics splashed across the pages of Mean Machines Sega, it’s a good moment to throw out my own views on the controversy surrounding it and how it actually stacks up as a game.

Night Trap is one of those titles where the events surrounding it are at least as (if not more so) interesting as the game itself. Graphics are mainly comprised of live action FMV video that is cut and changes depending on your actions as a player and represents that weird time when CD based games were young. With this new physical format developers were presented with a vast amount of storage space compared to the cartridges that they may have been used to, and like all new tech, they didn’t seem to quite know what to do with it. Thus games like ‘Night Trap’ were born, and for a brief instant were going to be the direction that all games were going; real actors in live action video where the player gently influences the actions in something more like an interactive movie than a traditional game. It was released on the MegaCD (or Sega CD), Sega’s CD drive add-on for that 16-bit blast-processing fuelled monster the Mega Drive (… sigh… or Genesis), in 1992 at arguably the height of Sega’s presence in the home console market on a system that was at the time one of the more widespread CD based platforms. This relatively high level of exposure to the general public arguably led to what happened next, but the twist is that this game was originally meant for a completely different (and more primitive) technology.

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Trüberbrook: Pointing, but not Clicking

Spoiler Warning: This article contains major plot spoilers for Trüberbrook

Point-n-clicks are one of those genres that has found a home in the arms of small and indie developers. Whilst mainstream triple-A releases focus on increasing levels of action and frame-rate, the humble PnC offers gamers something at a more sedate pace which I almost completely ignored growing up only to uncover their charms when I was a little older; and there’s a lot for me to like about PnC’s give my gaming tastes. One of the reasons I enjoy classic survival horror is that feeling of exploring, unravelling and gradually unlocking an area which a good PnC encapsulates. I also enjoy a good story and that certain brand of gaming where you don’t need to have twitch reflexes to play.

It was with this thirst for a story and world to explore that I picked up Trüberbrook, a PnC adventure that drops the player in to the scuffed shoes of a Quantum Physicist, Hans Tannhauser. Arriving in the small remote German village of Trüberbrook in the 1960’s, under the unquestioned circumstance of having won a competition that he didn’t enter, Tannhauser is drawn in to the mysterious local activities of the Millennium Corporation and ends up saving our reality. The visuals, made up of hand crafted model shots, are probably the most immediate draw with its intricate diorama-like presentation and an almost claymation quality to the onscreen cast of quirky characters. Regular readers will know that ‘small town mysterious events‘ and ‘diorama-like‘ are two of my triggers to an almost instant purchase, so it seemed like I was on to a winning formula already.

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Ringfit Adventure: Gamification Done Right

… or WiiFit RingVenture as I like to call it… 

TLDR: It’s pretty good at doing what it does

Longer Version: I’m a long time dabbler in the gamification of exercise so I really know what I’m talking about. My relationship with the world of physical exertion is a complex and haphazard affair, especially compared to some of my family, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate the gradual gains and progression that exercise can bring… it’s just that I want some flashing lights and numbers… ideally in graph form… to go with seemingly endless reps. So I’ve tried all sorts of things, I’ve logged exercise through fitocracy and given the Google.. erm.. fit/exercise/active/whatever app a shot during my last sustained gym going effort (over a year ago now), but really nothing has stuck. The common problem with these types of apps for me (and I appreciate that they work for many people) is that they don’t really get to the heart of gamification. They tend to revolve around the idea of the user being happy with a sense of knowing that they’re doing exercise without really providing any sort of structure to do that; goals are self imposed and the experience of ‘logging your hours’ is largely the same on day one as it is in day 100.

… and let’s face it, if there aren’t unlockable costumes involved then I’m just not invested.. 

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