Hero-of-Time

How so?

Played a couple of games today that reminded me of Christmas. Played through Jak again even though I just played through it the other week and so I wont harp on about it again. It was originally released December 2001 and it reminds of Christmas due to me playing it around that time. I finished off the DKL trilogy. DKC3 reminds me of Christmas 1996. Like Jak, it was released in December. I never got it (no way we could afford new SNES game prices) but my best mate did. We spent all the Christmas holidays playing the game. Seeing as I have played DKC3 too many times to count, this was the next best thing. It's a decent version of the game, although it is pretty stripped down when compared to the original. There's no Banana Birds to find and no overworld to walk around. On the plus side, Ellie is no longer scared of rodents and can fire unlimited amounts of water out of here trunk. Sweet. If you find all the bonus barrels and coins you will unlock some time trials. These are 13 stages from the game in which you have to beat certain times. It was a neat addition and is needed to get 103% completion. So that's the trilogy done. It's a shame there are no more DK games that have been added to NSO recently. Would have been great to play DK64 over the Christmas break. Yeah, I'm still bitter.

You're only level 95 though. Must try harder. See me after class.

Merry Christmas!

This time last year I sat and played Streets of Rage 4, so it's fitting that I've once again sat and played another scrolling beat em up during the festive season. Sadly, Asterix is nowhere near the quality of that game. I was a big fan of Asterix as a kid. I have fond memories of playing the classic Konami arcade game while on holiday at Blackpool, as well as renting the Asterix books from my local library. I was hoping this game would match the quality of the Konami game but it wasn't even close. The game is a looker, for sure, but the gameplay is really lacking. For one, a lot of the stages go on for far too long. These types of games are best when the levels are short, snappy and varied. The later stages really start taking liberties with how long they are and how many enemies they throw at you on screen. This can be brutal on the hardest difficulty (needed to play through it on this setting for platium) because you can only take a couple of hits and then you are done. No lives and no continues, which means back to the start of the very long level you go. You can switch to the second character to give yourself a second life pool but it's difficult to do when you get swamped by enemies. A lot of the scenery gets repeated in the game, as do some of the bosses. There's a pirate boss named Red Beard which constantly pops up, as does the Roman Centurion. This is baffling because the books have such a rich enemy roster to choose from and yet they felt the need to repeat the same ones over and over again. It's not a bad game, just very boring. If the levels had been shorter, the areas more varied and the bosses changed up a bit then it would have been a far better game. Despite all of this, I still wouldn't mind giving the sequel a whirl to see if any improvements have been made. Playing the game did get me all nostalgic for the franchise and I went searching for the 80s animated movies. My two favourites were Asterix in Britain and Asterix and the Big fight. I found the latter on YouTube (proper UK dub instead of the US one) and I was sat watching it while I was doing my grinding on Various Daylife. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ5uTeuVuiE

Mario 64 has been added to the service.

Finished a few games over the past several days. With the sequels dropping on Premium, I decided to play the first game again and in doing so nab another platinum. I played through it earlier in the year but figured I would cross it off my double platinum list. I played through the original game last year and it was a decent, chilled out experience. This dropped on PS+ and I gave it a whirl. It was pretty cool seeing a lot of the characters make a return to the coffee shop for a brew. I also can't believe they kept the trophy/achievement from the first game where you have to leave a latte sitting for an hour. Another Cotton game was on sale which meant I had to pick it up. There are two more available for me to buy but one of them has a broken trophy list which doesn't seem like it's ever getting fixed and so I won't be touching it. This verson of the game gives you multiple characters to control. You pick your team of fairies and witches and when one of them is defeated the other takes its place. You can also swap them on the fly, providing you have enough power ups to do so. You can use this to great effect when a shot is heading your way. By switching out at the right time your characters become invincible. They also play slightly differently, with each of them using a different style of firing projectiles. It was another fun and breezy adventure. This was a doozy and ended up really surprising me. I picked it up during the TGS sale on PSN and have been waiting for the right time to play it. Having plenty of time off over Christmas meant that time was now. There are so many systems to get to grips within the game that it can be very overwhelming to begin with. Levelling up is done by doing jobs and earning gold but you can only do jobs if you have enough stamina. To regain your stamina you need to use facilities, such as having a beer in the tavern or a soak in the hot springs. These things cost money though and so a delicate balance of doing jobs, relaxing and earning money needs to be struck. You can earn quests to tackle by talking to villagers. These play out very similar to Miitopia. Your team automatically walks through the level and then you take control when an enemy is encountered. From there it's a typical JRPG set up with a little twist in the battle system. Standard attacks are pretty much useless and you are really required to use your special moves. This is where the CCC system comes into play - CHANGE, CHAIN, CHANCE. You can change the status of the enemy by say using a fire attack, you can then cause a chain to happen by using a water attack. Finally, a chance is created once you get a chain higher than one. At any point you can end this chain but if you keep switching between attacks and getting the chain to 10, you will be doing some stupid damage. Another thing that features in the quest is a stamina system. You can load up with food before you set out but certain foods will spoil very quickly if they are in an area that they aren't meant to be in. For example, taking things meant for frozen maps to a volcano area ain't a good idea. The stamina needs to be managed well otherwise you will fail the quest. The game features a job system. Now, usually I don't care for these but I didn't mind how it was set up here. Each of your team members has a set job (2 sub jobs can be unlocked later) and there's only the main character who can switch between different ones. This makes it very manageable to create some very useful team compositions. Anyone who enjoys job systems in JRPGs will get a kick out of it. The platinum took some doing, with me needing to put 50 hours into the game to obtain it. The last couple of quests to get the real ending aren't for the faint hearted. I pretty much had to max out my perfect team and even then it was pretty difficult. It was hard to come be information, given that not many people seem to have played the game. There is very little out there in terms of best teams/characters to use. There were only a handful of Reddit posts that ended up being pretty helpful. I really enjoyed the game, far more than I thought I would. I will say though that there is a lot of grinding in it. Money is the key to levelling up and by doing various things and managing your time and jobs well, you will end up earning a lot of cash pretty fast. However, it still takes a lot of grinding, even when you do get to grips with every system the game throws at you. Luckily for me, I love repeatative actions in games that allow me to see my stats keep going up. It's very much a game made for me.

Nah. I'll just stick to firing it up when there are platinum points available for it.

Nine nine!!

Sounds about right for comic books. I keep checking out X-Men storylines and a lot of what Hickman set up with the Krakoa era seems to have been binned off now. You reading his Ultimate Spider-Man stuff? Apparently it's really good.

I was always intrigued with the Doomsday Clock storyline but never picked it up.

This thread is hilarious. Love it.

Love All-Star Superman. Great story.

Very happy you stuck with it, got to the end and really enjoyed it. Like you, I love the puzzles and it's one of the reasons why I dislike the original version of Resident Evil 4. That game went all action based and threw away one of the things I loved about the series. Resident Evil 2 is even better, IMO. It's one of my favourite games of all time and the remake does it justice. The second game has better characters, story and replay value. As much as I love the mansion, I like the police station even more. It's a different beast to the original game but it's where the series really found it's feet and took off. Yeah, I'm excited for you to play it. Well, at least the remake of it.

You enjoying GT7, @lostmario?

Yeah, we definitely got sloppy in the second half. Slot will be happy with the win but won't be pleased with those 3 goals. @killthenetcongrats on bearing City. Lovely stuff.

Cracking game v Spurs again. Obviously I was happy with the result but it was a great game for the neutrals. I gotta imagine Ange will be under a lot of pressure, given the recent performance/results of the club.

Fired this up today for the first time in who knows how long. There are so many things going on with it now. This is exactly why I don't bother with most GaaS stuff. If you don't keep up with it, when you do eventually get back to the game you get overwhelmed with different currencies, events, options etc.

You gonna go on to Resident Evil 2 after this? If you dont own it yourself, it leaves PS+ next month.

Decent Christmas sale on PSN at the moment. Kinda tempted with Dicey Dungeons for a couple of quid.

I played it last year on the Switch and loved it. It's a cracking 3D platformer.

I fell out of love with them after TLOU2. Not really excited by this at the moment. I'm hoping for a more light hearted adventure (Uncharted) over something moody and serious.

Did you enjoy that? I heard/read mixed things about it. Same goes for Fantasian.

No fancy for Echoes of Wisdom?