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Fallout 4 (PS4) by jp (Oct 26th, 2026 at 15:08:51) |
Made it to level 9, did a few more quests and...yeah, I think I'm tired now. Strangely, it feels like there isn't much/enough story for me to continue to want to play, and I got a bit tired of always being under-health? Well, that got a bit better because I "discovered" (figured out) the cooking part of the game - I was finally able to put all these animal/critter parts and learned that lots of the stuff you cook then gets rid of the rads (all the food items I had healed, but also added rads - and I didn't have a way to mitigate that, so it seemed like a negative downward spiral). The no-rads healing food was really a game changer in that way, so that was a big improvement.
Oh, every now and then there's a weird storm - and it was a super cool experience - it sounds and looks incredible and I was genuinely worried...rads going up, lightning noises and stuff. Great ambience!
Maybe I should have gotten to the city I was supposed to visit for the story...but Ilooked at the shelf of over games to play and though..meh.
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Persona 5 (PS4) by jp (Oct 26th, 2026 at 15:01:25) |
This is probably the lamest log I'll write for a game - but I just wanted to document my experience, even when it did not involve playing the game.
I out the disc in, it starts reading and then shows the name of the game in Japanese/Chinese. Huh, that's weird. It happens around the same time I see a little popup notification that an update has been downloaded. Weird, whatever, it should be fine.
I load the game, watch the intro - looks fun. And then I get a UI alert. It's in Japanese/Chinese... weird. I get past that...and get to the game's main menu. Everything is in English. Oh, nice! But I go into the config menu...and oops, it's all in Japanese/Chinese again...and I try toggling things to see if I can switch language to English. No luck.
I go online, "why did my game switch to another language". Everyone says to set the console region language to what I want, and that the game should change. It's already in English. No luck. I try a bunch of things...still no luck.
I look at the game case. Maybe this was a European version of the game and the language got borked somehow. Nope. ESRB rating, so it's US.
I pop the disc, to try a re-install and stuff. The disc is all in English..but it does say "MADE IN JAPAN FOR HOME USE ONLY". I wonder if the disc is Japanese? (in a US case, weird).
It also has a code.. PLAS 05251.
Online sleuthing reveals it's a Chinese disc.
Whut? Sigh. I guess someone duped Gamestop and now...me.
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Crime O'Clock (NSW) by jp (Oct 22nd, 2026 at 08:43:00) |
I'm putting this back no the shelf now - mostly because I started to get a little tired of it. As I think about it, it's abit of a tricky design space and I can see how the design team was trying to keep things fresh and mix things up. They've added a little mechanic where you can tap on some objects that get highlighted to see what's inside. THere's also a "follow the musical pattern" in which you click on things on the map in the right order...following a musical script.
It's all "ok" - not particularly compelling, but I've started to get tired because the also isn't much I find interesting in the story. Each mission feels like "oh, here's a thing that happened, let's fix it" but the characters and the world aren't that compelling, and while there are neat things in the images - they're not really woven into the storytelling. So, I don't feel like I'm learning cool things about this weird/interesting world from the missions themselves - at most I pick things up from the artwork. It's a weird "miss" - because the artwork is super fun and neat to explore, there's cool details and characters - but it falls flat after that.
Also, playing on the Switch is more annoying than it should - I feel the controls are really imprecise - I need to move the cursor to a specific location and I overshoot/undershoot tweak and adjust and it's just...annoying.
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Kill Knight (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 18th, 2026 at 15:28:37) |
Retiring this one too. It's a twin-stick shooter / bullet hell type of thing mixed with modern Doom. Slick, for sure, but I didn't know it would be so arcade-y. There's not much story to speak of, and it's basically a test of mastering the controls to beat, with additional motivation provided by leaderboards. It is fun, intense, for sure, but as with Civ 6 and Noita (although Kill Knight isn't long per se), I don't have the patience right now to commit to it. I might be at a point where I'm exhausted by more open-ended or twitch-based games. I could feel it with Drop Duchy (roguelite fatigue?), which I saw through to the end, but perhaps I should find something more story-heavy with a clearly defined ending for next.
Anyway, like I said, Kill Knight is slick. The controls gel really well. You use RT to shoot pistols, circle to melee attack, and LT to shoot like a shotgun spread. All the attacks synergize in different ways. You have to use melee to get shotgun ammo, for example, which incentivizes running up and slicing enemies. Each attack generates some kind of resource that you need for other attacks (or health, very important!), so you have to vary attacks. It really does feel like a twin stick shooter / bullet hell version of the newer Doom games. I think that's about it...
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Noita (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 18th, 2026 at 15:12:28) |
My first thought was "this is like Spelunky." And of course it is because it's another roguelike where you go down, down, down into the depths, and the only way you get better is to die a hundred times, learn what killed you and why, and just skill up. Also learning the wand system, which is one of the two things that make this stand apart. The other is the pixelated destructible environments.
There are huuuuuundreds of enemies, spells, and perks. I saw like 5% of stuff and made it to the third "biome" a few times. In my longer runs, I had cool wands and spells, like spells that made my projectiles home or explode or that covered a wide range. The way it works is that each wand you find has stats (which seem to just randomly vary), including some number of spell slots. You can find/purchase spells, and you can move them around between wands. This means you can load up your favorite wand with a variety of useful/synergistic spells that'll help you kill enemies, move around, and explore the biomes. Perks are also helpful, like ones that make you immune to certain elements or that give you a little ghost companion to augment your damage output.
The destructible environments are cool. Each pixel is categorized as a type of material (e.g., wood, water, coal, gunpowder...), and they have various interactions. Wood burns, for example, so if you shoot a lantern and it falls on wood, it'll light up and maybe collapse. If you're on fire, go find water to put yourself out. I don't know what "blood" does, but I saw that it ticks up to 100% as you stand in it. Acid poisons you. Occasionally stuff blew up and I wasn't sure why. I'm sure there are a lot more interactions. It reminded me of Divinity: Original Sin 2's elemental combat system.
Anyway, so what this looks like while playing is that you're zooming around (you have a jetpack and can float a bit; this replaces a typical game's jump), firing spells and getting fired at by enemies, blowing up the environment, trying to get gold (to purchase wands and spells), find secrets, do whatever, and ultimately get to the bottom of the biome, where you enter a portal and can buy upgrades and rearrange your spells, and then you go to the next biome. There is often a lot of fire/poison/projectiles/etc. on screen at once and it can feel pretty hectic.
I certainly appreciate the game and the ways that it makes something like Spelunky 2 feel traditional. There's a ton of customization with the wands, strategy in manipulating the environment, and so many things to discover. But having recently bashed my head against the Spelunky 2 roguelike wall for a while, I realize I have little interest in a similar head-bashing-against-the-wall experience playing Noita.
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they are currently playing. A GameLog is basically a record of a game you started playing. If it's open,
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if you got bored, frustrated,etc.) You can also attach short comments to each of your games or even maintain a diary (with more detailed entries)
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2323 registered gamers and 3394 games. 7934 GameLogs with 13449 journal entries. 5111 games are currently being played.
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Professor Layton and the Unwound Future (DS) by jp |
| It's exactly what you'd expect. Nothing more, nothing less. If you loved the earlier games, you'll be fine with this one. |
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most recent entry: Thursday 12 April, 2012
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There are so many reasons to want to hate this game. It's a sequel, it doesn't really innovate, it's all the same as the earlier games. And so on. But somehow, all those complaints seem both unfair as well as inappropriate.
I've been thinking about the "issue" of game sequels and the perceived lack of creativity and originality in the games industry. People like to complain that companies keep on pumping out the same old games all the time. Oftentimes, the games industry is compared to Hollywood. It's not a nice comparison and I think it's rather unfair.
Why do we have problems with movie sequels but, in other media, we seem ok with "continuations". Consider television for example. A show comes out, it's great, the seaon ends and then, there's a second season. Nobody complains about lack of creativity, sequelitis and so on. Why not? Well, it's a different model, right? Sure, at times people complain that a show was dragged out toooo long and that the writers ran out of ideas and that it would have been best if the whole thing had ended a season or to ago.
Why don't we view game sequels in the same way we view television seasons? Why not? Yes, games are neither movies for tv shows. I know. So, perhaps we should have a much broader view of what a "sequel" could or should mean. It doesn't have to mean the same as in film (and it could mean what it does in television).
This brings me back to Layton, which I've just finished. There's nothing particularly new about it other than the fact that it's an entirely new mystery that should take about 15 hrs to complete (assuming you're being pretty thorough in terms of finding and solving puzzles). The game is actually divided into chapters (13 of them). While they're not the same length - you could think of this as a 15 hr game broken down in 13 chunks or parts. And all of a sudden, it's about the same length as a TV show season!
I don't need or want a lot of innovation between Layton titles. The familiar is comfortable in this case. I want new puzzles, that's for sure. And a new story. But the characters should stay (mostly?) the same, it should connect to earlier games, it should be self-contained but also coherent with the broader universe the game's set in. In other words, I want to treat it like a TV show. At some point, "the show" will end, and no more games will come out. That'll be fine.
So, does this frame of mind work for all games? I guess not. I can probably think of a few games for which this lens wouldn't make sense... (Katamari?) However, there are a lot that really do. At least that's what I think!
So, what other games would benefit from this lens? Definitely the Phoenix Wright games...
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