Oh. Well I’ve heard a lot of good about it, and I know at least it’ll have a competent modern control scheme, instead of an un-re-bindable “mash X button to run”
Idk I’ve got faith.
RDR graphically looked pretty old, though the dedication to the western vibes and style felt very accurate. But again, maybe I just don’t gel with that right now.
HZD should be more accessible I hope. I don’t remember it getting reviews for being bland tho, neither did RDR? 
I have no idea what Khaki is on about, Zero Dawn is plenty of fun to play even if it fits well into a formulaic type of game. If you didn’t like how slow and clunky RDR was (I have to say it is weird to hear it. I do agree it is clunky though but in the way all old games are) then you don’t need to worry because Zero Dawn tends to focus on being more precise and reflexive in open combat and more deliberate and precise in stealth. Story is alright and the world can be fleshed out well if you obsessively scan datapoints.
I think my brother compared to the Monster Hunter series (I haven’t played those but I reckon you might have)
It has a modern control scheme, you don’t need to do that stupid mash to sprint.
I played through Fort Rifugio over the weekend and it’s definitely been the most enjoyable mission of the campaign so far. Haven’t continued since then (got distracted by three other games lol), so I’ll try to play a bit this weekend.
Yeah I have a feeling I’ll enjoy that one more. SE3 definitely has its fair share of avenues of approach, but I don’t find myself too compelled (or rather tempted) to experiment the same way I do in Hitman, Dishonored or MGSV. I expect that to change when I get around to SE4.
As a guy who has played HZD and plays a unhealthy amount of Monster Hunter, aside from the basic premise of a game where you can hunt big monsters, and being third person, HZD and MH don’t have much in common.
I think HZD is fun if you are willing to deal with open world formulas. IMO it’s pretty comparable to Days Gone, the only truly unique thing about it is the combat (well, combat against the robots) and it’s not the kind of game where that unique combat is the meatiest thing in the world, but if you want a third person open world action adventure game, it’s fine enough.
IMO the main reasons Horizon is remembered and got a sequel compared to Days Gone is 1. Robot dinosaurs were way more eye-catching than “look at this zombie horde rendering”, and 2. the story is much better executed with one particular part towards the end of HZD that nearly everyone cites as the best part of the game
My Assassin Creed Odyssey is almost at mid game (level 42), really enjoying the storyline and Kassandra’s performance - voice and facial expression (it was a 2018 game). There are NPCs which I read in History books - Socrates, Pythagorus, etc. Huh, the famous pythagoras theorem in Mathematics. There are a lot of side quest and Socrates’ quest of taking descisions was one of a kind. The best part is the navel battle, it is better than the Black Flag.
Honestly, I didnot like History and my marks in History was always bad. But playing Assassin Creed, History is interesting (well some of the story has fiction).
After this, is it wise to try Assassin Creed Valhalla ? Keeping an eye on amazon about the price he he.
There are mixed reaction about Valhalla compared with Odyssey.
Or can I play Horizon Forbidden West without playing Horizon Zero Dawn ? Is the story connected ? Same with Resident Evil Villiage and Dark Souls 3 (havent played their previous installment).
I haven’t played Valhalla personally, but to my understanding it’s essentially Far Cry 3-4-5 repeating itself with Origins-Odyssey-Valhalla, there are some differences across the games (eg. Odyssey’s writing was definitely much less grounded and more comedic) but the main source of the backlash is the games feeling samey and people getting tired of it. That, and the microtransaction stuff which, if you could enjoy Odyssey despite those elements, probably wouldn’t be an obstacle for you in Valhalla.
Horizon Forbidden West has a story connected to Zero Dawn. Pretty sure you could follow what’s going on quite easily without needing to play ZD though.
Resident Evil Village is very much a sequel to 7 and a lot of parts of the story/gameplay will probably fall more flat if you didn’t play 7 first, so I highly recommend doing that. If you want a more newcomer friendly RE experience you should probably look to 2 Remake or 7.
While there are a lot of things that will fly over your head in Dark Souls 3 due to not playing previous games, a lot of players don’t understand the series’ lore anyway even after playing the games, so as far as a newcomer needs to be concerned all three Dark Souls games are effectively standalone.
Many Thanks for your valuable information. 
I’ve been playing Stellaris, and recently achieved what might just be my best run ever.
As a megacorporation, I’ve managed to united, and otherwise subjugate the entire Galaxy around me.
The entire galaxy (excluding falling empires) is either one of my subjects or is in my federation.
I’ve steered the galactic community (literally the space-UN) into making me their permanent custodian (basically a first among equals with executive powers).
The entire galaxy is in my Federation.
The amount of territory that I directly control is actually really tiny, this is called playing “tall” , where you settle with a small amount of systems and focus on developing your few planets, as opposed to playing “wide” which means trying to grab as many systems as possible.
I have so many subjects it literally broke the UI.
How’d this happen?
For a long time, megacorps used to be kind of bad for a variety of reasons that I won’t get into. However, since recent updates, they have the potential for such a ridiculously high economic output it’s not even funny, it’s so broken I’m actually surprised that I’m not cheating.
So, a usual Stellaris game lasts from the year 2200-2500
Already by the year 2300, I was out-teching everyone else.
In Stellaris, once the end game starts (set to the years 2400-2500 by default) a “crisis” befalls the galaxy, which basically acts as a sort of final boss, it’s basically a really strong enemy that tries to destroy every empire in the entire galaxy, and as such every nation must stop it.
The crisis that befell my galaxy is “The Contingency”
Which is an AI that was seeded by an ancient empire to act as a (as the name implies) contingency protocol to prevent a “Class-30 Singularity” from happening (it’s actually unknown what exactly this is, but apparently it could potentially destabilize the entire universe)
However, the AI didn’t awake because this “Class-30 Singularity” is imminent to happening, it simply activated itself because it became bored of waiting, and as such decided to instead of waiting for a species to be advanced enough, to simply prevent it from being possible from ever occuring (by eradicating everyone)
So, now there’s an ancient AI attempting to systematically eradicate all sapient live in the galaxy, so obviously I must try my best to immediately stop this, yes?
Wrong, here’s how I manged to subjugate the entire galaxy.
I actually waited for a good 60 years before I made any major moves to fight the Contingency, I was fortunate enough that they spawned on the opposite side of the galaxy, so I let them ravage a good half of the galaxy before starting to fight back, this made all the empires that weren’t already in my federation scared shitless and they all asked to be my subject, and eventually this ended with every empire being either subjected to me or be in my federation.
great write up. stellaris is the best.
Never heard of it until these posts. Looking at it, it looks like a more advanced version of the Space stage in Spore. Is that an accurate assessment?
i’ve not played spore, so can’t say yah or nay on that.
it’s a real time sci-fi strategy game. kind of like star wars: supremacy and civilisation, though a bit more economics focused than the former and more story focused than the latter.
except for chess, im not much for strategy games, but stellaris is hideously engrossing. you can play as just about any kind of science fiction empire you can imagine: borg, imperium of man, xenomorphs, star fleet, the empire, the culture, etc. or anything you can make up. there’s war, diplomacy, spying, economics, roleplay elements, trade - loads of stuff.
good shit.
Woo! Capitalism!
I need to get into Stellaris, I own the base game on Steam. It sounds fun and amusing, especially when seemingly every meme and story I hear about it involves intergalatic genocide of some sort.
Kinda but not really? Spore’s space age was you being basically the space age equivalent of a great explorer or something, you had some control over your civ’s space empire (Soren Johnson brought over that Civ 4 DNA into Spore) but it wasn’t a dedicated strategy game.
Stellaris is a full 4X grand strategy game and as usual for Paradox it has a lot of ability to micro-focus all kinds of tiny details about your empire, like deciding when to start giving your robots rights, planet terraforming, manipulating elections, reforming the Galactic Republic into the first Galactic Empire for a safer and securer society, ecetera. Then they release a bunch of DLCs that microfocus each part of the game into even more detail.
It’s unrivaled in terms of roleplay potential for 4X games. It’s a great selling point because IMHO 4X grand strategy isn’t really very fun when you’re constantly needing to strategise or die, and more fun when you can steadily build your own roleplayed civilisation powerfantasy. Only caveat is that it’s waaay harder to get into than a game of Civ.
Finished Little Nightmares 2 and all I gotta say is
Fuuuuuuuuuuuck…
This is a great series that I think plays its horror very subtle-like, and more of a slow burn, which is thankfully something I can handle more than other horror tropes.
This second entry really raises the scope of the world, puzzles, and freaky uncanny monsters to hide from. It definitely feels like Tarsier Studios have refined their art style, engine, and gameplay, even if the gameplay hasn’t had a huge leap in innovation.
The platforming and puzzling is fun. The chases feel more tense and nail-biting than ever, and the length of this game is very satisfying. A bit longer than the last one, with a few impressive scripted sequences, but doesn’t overstay its welcome.
really dark ending, and I’m sad Tarsier won’t (can’t because of Bandai Namco’s ownership?) make any more of these, even if I would be content for this series to take a break for a while.
on my last run, things took quite a turn.
i started the game as gentle and peaceful space elf hippies. we were beautiful pacifists hoping to unite the galaxy in magnanimous trading.
one diplomatic incident and a whole lot of years later, we ended up as deformed psionic jelly men. under the tyrannical rule of an immortal, all-knowing psychic god-emperor, whose empire was such an economic powerhouse, we had enough fleets to quell a rebellion, wipe out the only hive mind by using a planet-wide psionic death ray (there’s your genocide), and take on the endgame crisis, all at the same time.
it got hectic. it got out of hand. it was glorious.
Playing Sniper Elite 5.
Had to come here and say it that when you poison a target’s drink, Karl says the “it’s to die for” line 
I think I’m around half way into Resident Evil 4, I’ve started the Castle portion. It’s fun, obviously groundbreaking for the time, but there are nitpicks that are dragging it down for me. The fact you’re routed to the spot when aiming. The rifle’s in and out of zoom is very disorienting. And biggest and most obvious of all, protecting Ashley. I guess her AI is very good, but it also feels like a testament to how much escort quests suck at heart. Feel like half my game overs are due to Ashley in some manner.
I like the game but honestly? I’m actually more interested in the remake, as blaphemous as that maybe. If the remake plays like the RE2 Remake, and Ashley isn’t such a big nuisance, I get the feeling the remake will probably be more what I want.
Same. I loved it back in the day but I tried playing it recently and the camera alone just about killed it for me, especially after the much smoother modern experiences in the remakes (yes, both 2 AND 3) and 7. I forgot how awkward camera controls could be 15+ years ago…
I’ve been telling my brother for months that all I want is a 4 remake and next year I’ll have one. The only thing I’m nervous about is if they completely ditch the campy humor of the original; that alone just about made it a masterpiece.
I could definitely use a less awful Ashley though; once I wanted to see just how useless and detrimental she really was so I told her wait and turned around and shot her in the thumb with my weakest gun. I got a game over. I hoping they keep the unlockable knight outfit for her (she can’t be kidnapped or take damage while wearing it unless it’s scripted) or at least cut out her vocal cords like beagle and make her a mute.
I finished Alan Wake Remastered today. I like the IP and it’s got a good mystery/supernatural vibe, but
Oooh, oh man this game has not aged well. The story itself is captivating enough, but it is broken up by such repetitive, long, formulaic gameplay segments that make it such a bore to get through.
I was “lucky” enough to follow a 100% guide on the collectibles on this playthrough, just so I could get everything in one fell swoop. So, I was picking up new Manuscript pages every 5 minutes, and that at least broke up the pacing a little bit, so I could read along pages that teased future events or explained past events, or character things off-screen.
(Kinda reminded me of Control with how much lore-pages you’d pick up every few minutes)
But, yikes, the gameplay itself is just so shallow. The combat is extremely simple, the ways to dispatch enemies improves very little over the course of the game (burn away shield, shoot, rinse/repeat), and the amount of times the game finds a new way to force Alan to get lost in the dark woods, every episode, is agonizing.
The sections to get to the main objectives are just so long. Probably to keep some tension & mystery in where you go (hey, it worked when I was 12) – but honestly once you get stocked up, the game becomes such an action game it’s just tedious. But it’s not the kind of uber-powerful fun combat like Control uses so effectively.
The story itself is fun with some twists and turns in Alice’s disappearance and trouble Alan gets caught up in, but it doesn’t really get to the “hook” point until Episode 4 with Barry tagging along. Episode 2 & 3 are a series of ever-changing fetch quests (Go here. Oops, I lied! Go here!), and it’s annoying.
If I were to recommend this to someone else in the future, I’d probably find a nice recap of all the important story events, unfortunately.
This game needs a full modern remake. I feel like a lot of its pacing/environment issues are leftover from changing the game so drastically from its Open World design at the last minute.
Resident Evil 4 is shit and was the beginning of the downfall of RE as a whole. 
