Your 2025 Gaming Diary

[nekunando]

 

[BowserBasher]

Right, finally finished the first game of my pledge. Mixed feeling through this one.

Overall a good game but shows its age in how we have become accustomed to so much in games today. I'll get to these in a bit. The game starts off with the usual training level, all characters present (you get to play as 6 in total, one being in a team environment and not solely alone) and each one gets a short introduction into what they can do. Apart from Willow all characters use their fists and feat to attack, along with getting weapons along the way. Willow uses magic.

Once the training level is over the main game starts and you are playing as Buffy. The main part of each level will see you just kicking vampire butt. over and over. This is then padded out with some puzzles, though not lengthy one, that task you to either move on to the next part of the level or activate something in the level. From the first main level you start to see the issues that I started to hate. First up, fighting can be OK when it's 1v1, punch punch kick stake! However later on you'll get a vamp and his friend attack you. No worries it's just two, ah but there is no way to target one and stick on them. the best thing you can do is line up to one and then go in fighting, and hope the other one doesn't get too close. kill that guy, then you can focus on the other. Again though just focusing on a bad guy was a pain as you don't always face them head on and punching will not auto focus to them, so again you have to kind run away a bit, turn, then go attack. Like I said, when there are two guys this makes fighting a bit of a pain, especially when they are both together and you can't really just focus on one guy. first 20 minutes or so when there was more than one guy I found myself being killed a lot until I started getting used to things. This is where another small factor comes in. the Y button. It's a do all button nearly. It acts as the button to pick up items, button to open doors, interact with objects, and the final stake to kill enemy button. Whilst it doesn't cause too many issues I feel it did when I wanted to pick something up off the floor and others where around me.

Sticking with the Y Button. OK, so this all joins into my next gripe about the game. Length of levels. Oh dear lord they take ages, and I mean ages. Now maybe it was cause I've never played it but the average time to complete a level was probably 50 minutes. this comes down to a number of factors. Not knowing what I was doing is of course one, but your objectives just aren't clear. You get the main objective and maybe parts in-between, so you may not know what you need to do to get somewhere. Whilst the first few levels weren't too bad, I started to resort to a guide as some things just weren't clear on what to do. Example: High School level. You are having to ward off a spell by placing bunnies on a number of pentagrams around school. in the library there is one of these locked behind a door. Xander says, "now where was the key kept". That's it, no more info, no clues as to what or where it is. Where was it, it was in a safe in the principals office. Easy enough. Well first you have to find a computer that gives you the code. Now you may have already come across that computer and it did nothing, but you wouldn't think to to go back to it. So I spent ages to walking around, going to the guide, I found which computer it is (and yes it was a previous one I'd checked which did nothing at the time) so got it. Headed to the office and just couldn't see any safe. Well it was a tiny square on the wall that is so easy to miss. Which adds that these parts you interact with, there is no button prompt like we are used to today. You just have to hope you are in the right place in front of it and press Y. A lot of the time later in the game when I was stuck, I'd just go around walls pressing Y incase it did something. there were a number of other situations like this that I came across. Anyway because of all that my time on that level was over an hour.

Well over an hour!

After that level I decided that I'd play blind up to where I just couldn't see what to do, and this happened on each level after a number of times. From where to go next to what something opened or operated. It just wasn't always clear.

Each level gies you plenty of weapons along with stakes to kill but I found myself just kicking and punching then staking. On occasions using a hell fire or holy water item to clear a few enemies at once, but these items are just not seen enough to waste. As such most were never used. Oh an on the fighting, there a "handbook" in game that shows you a list of all the moves you can pull of when fighting. The simple AAB or BBA combo, to others that you do by aiming towards the enemy then BBA or something. But when it comes to it, you just end up using the easy AAB, ABA, BBA types and it seems to do the trick.

The boss of each level, well kind of a boss, as you are tasked to collect body parts of an accent demon or witch to help you get the final weapon to defeat the final boss. Each level boss has a part of the body. Most of these fights weren't too bad, one gave me a bit fair bit of bother but was done eventually. And the final boss, well a few attempts and he was done. Didn't put up much of a fight when you get used to it.

 

One good thing is the game is fully voiced acted by the cast (90% of them probably) it seems Willow is done by someone else and whilst she does a good job, you really can tell it's not Allyson Hannigan and it does get to you, lol. I believe everyone else was voiced by the actor who played them.

Also the game has small videos you unlock from beating the levels which show interviews and VO sessions with the actors, a nice touch which I think a few other games did but you just don't see any more.

So even with the downfalls or level length, poor fighting, and puzzles that shouldn't take that long just because you can't actually find what time you need to interact with, I think the game was good enough. Id love to see this game given a modern treatment making some aspects easier and generally making QOL changes to help the player. 

6/10

Right. Updated image for front page. Think I'll be playing a Switch game next. I did purchase Stray so may play that.

[bob]

 

I was forced to remember last night why I stopped playing PC games and switched to consoles. Due to me not getting a PS5 (as I could not justify the cost given how much time I generally spend gaming), I was extremely excited that Spider-man 2 was finally announced for PC!

 

I spent a while clearing out the space to download it (140GB hard drive requirement!)

 

Last night I finished downloading it, and tried playing it. I was using my PS4 controller on my laptop (which was surprisingly easy to set-up - bonus points there). Bear in mind that my laptop has a RTX 2060 graphics card, so it's firmly in the middle of the minimum and the recommended hardware requirements. It auto-selected the medium graphics settings, which looked ok to me, so i was happy with that (i'm not a graphics whore particularly, as long as i can see what's going on, i'm happy. I don't really give a shit about frame rate either to be honest. i can't really tell the difference between 30 and 60fps, as long as it isn't turning into a powerpoint, I reckon it's playable.)

 

The first cut-scene featured an invisible character, holding a clipboard. Bit of a weird start, but then i knew that Miles Morales can turn invisible, so not out of universe....however, the next character that turned up was also invisible...except he wasn't - he was represented by a small ball of hair floating at around head height, that buzzed everytime he spoke.

 

The next scene featured loads of floating heads and other strange glitches. Which was when i twigged that perhaps something wasn't quite right...

 

I read online that one way to fix it was to turn your settings to 'Very Low', save, restart your computer, and then load it up again. Once you're in, you can bump your settings back up again and Ben's your uncle. So I tried that, and sure enough, all the character models came back in (with horrendously low res hair - all the characters have dreads). 

 

I played again for a few more minutes, and actually got to web swing for a bit, until I realised that a couple of buttons on my PS4 controller weren't working, the 'jump' button being one of them. Now I don't know if anyone here has played a Spider-man game, or encountered the character before, but jumping is kind of his thing - I'm running down the streets of New York, trying to keep up with Miles, until I realise that this is silly. So it's another save, close, restart, load it up. Now my controller is working! Yay! I can jump! I can swing! I can save the city!

 

So I'm swinging downtown, looking for Sandman, and I see a huge sandstorm. Get a bit closer, and Miles is talking about how we've managed to find Sandman, but I'm looking around trying to see him amidst all this sandstorm, but I can't see him. And then it hit me. The giant invisible hand of Sandman hit me. Damn it! The Sandman model hasn't loaded in, because I forgot to turn my graphics settings down to Very Low before I quit the last time. While it was amusing to see Spider-man clinging onto an invisible giant, I knew I couldn't play this section if I couldn't see the enemy, so it meant another save, close, restart laptop. 

 

I finally get back into the game, Very Low graphics settings (which I leave on because I can't be arsed having anything else go wrong), and I complete the opening sequence of the game. The whole thing has taken maybe an hour and a half, at which point it's time to go to bed because the kids are going to be up in 5 hours.

 

Still, 10/10 fantastic game, no complaints.