Pool Blitz. It’s free to play but has micro transactions. You don’t need to buy anything if you’re good though. The game is super fun. It’s got 8 and 9 ball and some crazy thing called blitz that is not possible in real life.
Anyway if you like billiards I highly recommend. I just wish* it had 10 ball as an option.
I got Wolfenstein 2 and Battlefield V from Playstation store. I will start with Battlefield V first.
Wolfenstein is a classic fps I played somewhere near the time of Hitman C47 - Return to Castle Wolfenstein. And The New Order was the last one I played.
Busy day playing Yakuza: Like A Dragon, I became Yokohama’s smartest and wealthiest person thanks to my impeccable business acumen and nearly boundless knowledge of random sundry.
Ah, yes, how I love turning whichever Yakuza protagonist into a successful and extremely wealthy businessman in nearly every game, only for the next game to dump me back on the street with 30,000 yen in my pocket… (essentially just reminding me of my actual real-life situation)
Also, for extra stonks and Bubble vibes, there´s this thing: STONKS-9800: Stock Market Simulator on Steam
Assassins Creed 2 has been very fun so far.
The environment is much more varied and interesting compared to the first entry.
Florence has tons of 3-or-more story buildings, verticality to take advantage of, and fun routes to plan out with all of that. Already way better than AC1 where most of the 3 main locations felt very similar to each other in design and scope.
The variety of side-content is immense compared to the first game.
There’s multiple races to compete in that really challenge your parkour and routing
There’s lots of Assassination missions to kill one/a few specific NPCs,
There are even Courier missions where you have to deliver something to a person under a time limit, plus Beat Up missions (basically Interrogation from the last game) where you have to rough someone up with your fists for info/confession.
What’s nice is that some of that is also still present in the Main Missions, (though they often have exclusive types like Tailing, Chasing, and lots of complex assassination targets.
There’s even a few Assassin Tombs you can find that serve as parkour challenges, testing your jump accuracy and how to best move around the level. The only downside is that the route to get to the goal is usually very linear, but it is challenging.
Also. Wow. Great. Tools are added to the game like Smoke Bombs and NPCs you can pay to follow you/do certain tasks.
There’s even a meta-game about building up your family mansion by buying armour sets and weapons for yourself and various works of art to display.
Plus, thankfully, they reduced the amount of collectibles from the last game (over 200/300 something flags) to just 100 Feathers to find… But it’s still tedious and a hassle honestly. (and I’ve heard there’s a reward this time but it serves no gameplay benefit)
Ooh! And Finally, they reduced the amount of Modern Day levels where you’re forced to walk around slowly to talk to people. The first game had you do that after every new set of Targets were assassinated, but this one just keeps going and going. I finished Memory Block 6 and they only just now put me back in the Modern Day. Thank you.
They cut it down even more to a stately ten feathers in Brotherhood.
A cape that triggers the fight-or-flight response of everyone in northern Italy. Oh joy, it will be so worth the effort.
RIP to the Assassin tombs, practically ghosted after III with a brief return in Valhalla. RIP to The Truth’s puzzles, nothing they have done since has been as interesting or as good since then.
Yeah but did you hug Leonardo da Vinci or not?
I’m assuming they replaced it with a different super-high collectible set anyways? -_-
Damn. A cape that makes you always hostile. Fun.
I did. Though I admit I’ve failed quite a few other QTE cutscenes like that because I put my controller down and unexpectedly get a random “PRESS X”.
It’s silly, but honestly one of the best inclusions of a QTE system in a game that doesn’t need it. Just bonus actions to have Ezio perform during a cutscene.
Ah fuck I forgot about the Borgia flags, then again there is waaaaaay less flags in Brotherhood. Oh and the Truth Puzzles I guess but they appear in super obvious places like in II and there is less of them as well.
Did you play II’s DLCs? The Siege of Forli and the Bonfire of the Vanities ones?
I’m not done AC2 yet! I only just finished Chapter 6 (got on the ship to Venice) and was thrust into the Modern Day, hopefully to see Desmond start doing parkour tricks of his own.
Also AC2 had DLC’s? Huh. Honestly DLC missions don’t come to me as something the AC series is known for or is consistent with. But what do I know lol
Oh yeah that is right, I forgot you said that.
I think it is the only time Assassin’s Creed ever did that sickening thing companies did back then when they cut out parts of the game to sell as DLC. Most of the time it was and still is just small shit you don’t miss because it is side content but in II they cut out two whole chapters one of which pertains to one of the most important events of the Renaissance.
It´s a cool cape though. Useless outside of Monteriggioni, but cool (good thing they realised it and made it useful in Brotherhood).
@TheChicken The main “prize” is making Maria speak again. You also get an extra weapon for your collection when you collect 50 of them (alongside a little cutscene with a Mario).
The Borgia flags are a lot less tedious. And I think you can even buy maps for them?
Amen. Tombs were amazing, as were the Truth puzzles.
In the PC version, you play the DLC chapters automatically as part of the main story, right before the finale. Which also leads to the hilarious exchange of Desmond saying “I´ve always wanted to visit the Vatican” and Shaun responding “Good. Cause that´s exactly where you´re going”, after which you spend half a dozen hours defending Forli (you get to bang Catarina Sforza in the next game, so totally worth it) and assassinating lunatics in Florence, lol.
I guess it does look kinda cool but there are capes you can wear in the game that look cool and don’t make every Tomaso, Riccardo and Enrico in Italy want to murder you.
True but some of them are still hidden in the tombs and it seemed like @TheChicken had difficulty with the tomb platforming (You get better at it the more you play them and the more you play the older games, trust me.)
Yeah and it is a little weird but you do get to see the Bonfire which is cool. Even if most of the event is viciously recontextualised the event very poorly and even ignores Rodrigo Borgia’s own involvement in the events despite being the antagonist of the game.
The best thing about Xbox having seemingly given up on the exclusive market is it allows me to play a game I had my eye on for some time now.
I am glad to say that Pentiment has been an excellent experience so far. Everything from the lovely illumination-esque visual design to the delightful and well utilised music and the faithful recreation of HRE era Bavaria as well as the full realised characters and a monastic detective story that feels like a worthy successor to Eco’s The Name of the Rose.
I can’t recommend it enough.
So apparently my PS Plus subscription ends on the 13th, and I’ll lose access to the Extra catalog that includes the AC Ezio Collection that I’m currently working on (idk if I can finish AC2 before then)
I resisted the temptation to buy new games on sale, because I KNOW I have a backlog of stuff already bought but forgot/wasn’t in the mood for.
Once I’m “done” with AC2, what game should I focus on next?
I’m not gonna renew the sub until I can get a deal for it, since the prices are absolutely ridiculous with the increases they’ve done last year. (Hopefully Extra because I like the catalog, I just don’t use it enough.
disco elysium is great but if you like it, you’ve found one game you like. if you like dark souls, you’ve found a whole series
honestly, dark souls is best played alongside another game anyway. it’s really not good for long sessions, you’ll want something else to keep you occupied if you get stuck on some of the harder fights
Poor Kentucky Route Zero sitting there with no votes, almost makes me want to defect out of pity.
I need to return to Kentucy Route Zero at some point. I think I’m half way through the third episode. KR0 veers from “this is really interesting, weird, and insightful” to “this is dull, pretentious bullshit” from scene to scene. I need to find the inclination to finish it to see if the plot at least ends on a good note.
Funny, I never found it dull or pretentious. Anyway the game has as good an ending as you allow it to have both in terms of gameplay choices and how you interpret it.
No offence AK, but I’m probably less enlightened than you are. I mean, I will state, I think that when the game is good, it is very very good. I think my favourite scene is near the end of episode two when the gang breaks into the musem(?) which while you wander in real time, has the people there explaining to someone else in the future what they say of the gang and what they thought of them. That was really clever. Some of the text only encounters you can find off the beaten path are very interesting too, like little snippits of weirdness in the wild, I love that kind of thing.
But then other things test my patience. At the end of episode 2 the bar scene which lasts for so long. I will admit, it has a good pay off in episode 3 when the gang arrives and there is just the bar owner left, but it goes on for so long. And where I stopped in episode 3 where you find the bunch of people huddled around some giant computer setup, and there’s a woman there who goes on about her life writing erotic fiction and some other people, and that just really irritated me, in a “this wants to sound smart but this seems utterly tedious” way, if that makes any sense.
I need to go back and finish it. I will say though, I think the game is interesting enough that if anyone has any interest in the game, they should play it, I think it is clear a lot of effort went into it. But compared to Disco Elysium? No I’m afraid not.
Yeah that is probably it but even then there is new stuff I discover every time I go back to it, there was a stunning write up about a lot of the teeny tiny references buried everywhere in the visual design of the game.
I think The Chicken will appreciate that section a bit more since I am pretty sure he has a background in theatre. I actually really liked that interlude mostly because I am a sucker for Beckett so I appreciated the style.
Yes it does, Act III is probably the slowest one, most dialogue heavy and perhaps the most heady. You quit before it picks up again for “Here and There Along The Echo River” (I am forgetting the title), it goes back to being more about the characters you have been following after that.
True, Kentucky Route Zero is well written but none of the men and women on the team were brave enough to ask the most daring question of all time: Are women bourgeois?
