Some of those later dungeons are REALLY long, and have tedious environmental puzzles that involve a lot of backtracking. I really wish the game was a little more forgiving from a time management perspective, and there was no time penalty for doing a dungeon in multiple trips.

Resident Evil 7 just released some free new DLC, so it’s time to put the ol’ VR helmet back on and jump back into my pick for VR watershed moment of 2017, and GOTY!

So let’s see.. Not A Hero. Finished it last night, and it was... drumroll please......... fine. The caves were the least interesting part of the original…

Nier: Automata is also in my pile of shame, although if you’ve genuinely given a game a good try and not taken to it I think ‘shame’ is a bit strong. I played a fair bit, but it just didn’t click. When I got to the bit with the robots living in the forest and found there was a womanising (robotising?) robot called ‘Mr…

I might be back with a longer post after my brain manages to process the word “tedious” being attached to the word “combat” in regards to Nier: Automata. Right now I’m just getting a bunch of error messages.

(Dis)Honourable mention goes to Kinja.

Without spoiling anything, Act 2 tells a very thematically different story from what people thought it was going to tell.

The Art Museum heist in Persona 5 is an absolute masterpiece of design and gameplay from beginning to end. Can’t express how much that level has stuck with me over pretty much anything else I’ve played this year.

I note a curious absence of the cult robot factory in Nier: Automata. Looks like someone won’t be as gods.

This is a pretty comprehensive list, and I’m struggling to add to it. I would like to give a nod to Breath of the Wild’s Great Plateau, which is an all-time great tutorial level and one that eases you into a massive game with a confidence that few tutorials manage.

My favourite mission of the year has got to be the bank heist in Persona 5 which unleashed Makoto’s Persona.

I have just done into PUB. It’s a lot of fun. The tension you feel when you exploring a house and all of a sudden hear footsteps that are not yours is crazy. Almost rivaled by that frantic feeling when you are parachuting down to the island with a group of buildings in site to loot, only to see a parachute open…

This was fantastic fun! As always, an incredible job with original music, laugh out loud moments (Gene was on fire tonight), they nailed the pacing too with the full hour - perfect use of every character ... OMG, Tina doing her moan as a song beat!

I’m pretty sure kojima just keeps throwing darts at a wall until he has enough plot elements to make the gameplay have a purpose. Then he makes two hour cutscenes that don’t make sense

On Easy mode, at least, a big part of the winning strategy was building up enough shields, cloaking, engine capacity (for dodge & fast FTL charge) and piloting (for dodge) that I could just survive long enough to run away from a lot of the later fights and get on to the boss fight. The big problem with Normal…

I totally agree that MGSV doesn’t respect the player’s time at all. It assumes you want to spend hours on the non-mission parts of the game, and does not offer any shortcuts for those who don’t. I suppose there’s an argument to make that a well-planned mission involves calling your air support in well before you…

Happy December, everybody (aw dip, I forgot to spend my My Nintendo coins last month, womp-womp)!

I’d like to begin this week’s post by talking about Poison Counters.

Er, he only uses first person...

Not going to be playing a lot of games this weekend, although with Iconic Masters being released I’m probably going to get in a couple of drafts. I will, however, be watching quite a lot of people playing one specific game: Desert Bus.

I’ve been making a huge push for getting a Switch, so much so that my wife asked what specifically it does that my Wii-U and PS4 can’t do (what doesn’t it do???). Then she asked me how much they cost, I think I’m getting through! Just took 4+ months of making comments, I also like to believe my unborn soon is helping…