What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?

Recently I've been playing ex-PlayStation exclusives on my PC. I also just bought a new monitor, after using a cheap office monitor for ages, and the difference in how these games feel using it and HDR mode is massive. Plus the monitor doubles up as a nice external monitor for work when rotated.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake

Much like the Hobbit films, this isn't really a remake of Final Fantasy 7. It's part one of three separate games in lieu of a Final Fantasy 7 Remake. Again, much like the Hobbit films, it's immediately clear that they've tried to pad out the game and story in order to justify splitting it into three separate games. Despite that, I'd say that it's the fan game with the highest production values I've ever seen. But it still suffers from a lot of the issues that you'd expect from a fan game.

The story has been quite drastically changed, and in many places it seems to be for the worse, but there are also parts that are better. The Avalanche side characters have stronger backstories and relationships and I felt that these were mostly introduced well. The broader story changes, though, seem really forced and unnecessary.

The pseudo-real-time combat is actually pretty good. I'm not generally a fan of this type of action combat, but the mix between action and strategy was pretty good. I found that the difficulty of the combat spiked in a few areas in the story and then dropped again immediately afterwards, which was a little strange. Perhaps they didn't properly test the combat progression through the game. As we've learnt to expect from Final Fantasy games, the final boss (if you can call it that, because it's the final boss for the first of three parts of the story) was much easier than the earlier bosses.

I think that Square Enix should really revisit this game and change some of the direction and cuts, because if they expect to sell the second and third parts of this new trilogy, then they should understand that people will play the first game first. That will be used as a basis to decide whether they want to buy the later games. They could streamline the story a little bit, remove some of the padding, and remove all of the very poorly hidden loading screens that were clearly required for the ancient PlayStation 4 but wouldn't be required for modern consoles or computers and yet still detract from the experience.

There are also far too many side-quests in this game that you have to complete if you want to unlock skills that are very useful in combat. This was the weakest of the three games that I've played so far in the ex-PlayStation exclusive list.

Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered

Most of the time, I work building corporate software or being a dad to my two kids, but occasionally I'm Spider-Man. It's become a bit of a trope to say it because the majority of the journalists that reviewed this game said the same thing, but this game really makes you feel like Spider-Man.

Wow, this game is incredible. The quality of the cinematics, the story, the gameplay, the world, the exploration, the combat, the feeling of playing Spider-Man: across the board it's nearly perfect. I'm not usually experienced in action games, but I feel like this game helped me learn, and I've come away much more experienced. It's just so satisfying to play.

This was also the first game that I revisited once I got the new monitor to try out the HDR and path tracing and it makes the world feel new again. I don't have any criticisms of this game.

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart

I have not played any Ratchet and Clank games before, and I didn't know anything about the universe, but that didn't seem to matter. in the very beginning of the game, they give you a little bit of backstory on the characters and what's happened, but very quickly it becomes irrelevant as the setting of the game changes.

It took me a while to realise what this kind of game was and how to play it well. At first, it seemed like it would be an adventure game akin to Banjo-Kazooie or Mario. Like those games, it does have collectathon elements but it's more of a story driven shooter. in a typical fight, you would juggle through dozens of weapons. They run out of ammunition, and then you switch to other weapons. You keep juggling them based on what's appropriate for the enemy in front of you, or whether it's close combat, large numbers of enemies. As you progress through the story, you unlock more movement-based skills, and the fast-paced combat reflects that. You have an invincibility window when you dodge and you use this constantly.

The different worlds that you visit, the atmosphere around them, the storyline, and the combat all are really good. The game looks really beautiful in HDR with path tracing.

Unfortunately, the QA testing for this seems to have been cut short compared to the previous Insomniac game that I discussed, Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered, and this is reflected in a lot of bugs that I've encountered along the way:

1. In one particular part of the story, you have to turn off path-traced lighting. Otherwise, the game will consistently crash. Fortunately, this is only for about 5 minutes, and then you can turn it back on again.
2. I found one situation where, when I swapped from the main world to an optional side dimension (these are basically little bonus levels), I fell straight through. Reloading a save or visiting the game main menu didn't fix this, but closing the game and reopening it completely did.
3. Some scripted encounters that are required to progress in the game just didn't fire, but whenever this happened, you could just open up the menu and restart from the last checkpoint, and you wouldn't usually lose much time. This was annoying because it wasn't clear when it had bugged.

Other than the QA issues I rate this game very highly. It's a lot of fun to play.

What's next

I am still playing through Ratchet and Clank, and I'm playing through the DLC that's included in the remastered edition of Spider-Man. However, once I'm done with those, I have these ex-PlayStation exclusives purchased and ready to play:

1. God of War - I've heard really good things about this, but I'm going to go into it blind.
2. Final Fantasy 7 Remake Part 2 - I picked this up with the first part of the remake trilogy, and I plan to play it at some point, but considering the weaknesses in the first part of the trilogy, I'm postponing it until I'm done playing everything else.
3. Maybe I will purchase the later Spider-Man game in the future, after I've had a bit of a break from Spider-Man, because if it's anything like the first game, then I imagine it will be exceptional.

I have just started playing NFS Underground. What a nostalgia! When the main menu popped up and the music started, I was back in my teenage years! I picked Mazda MX-5 as my starter (as I always did) and now I'm 20 races in (from 111). I got tomplay thale game after watching some Fast & Furious. I play PS2 version on emulator on Steam Deck.

What a great combination that is - no hassle setting up controller, uses almost no power, goes into suspend/resume without a hitch and I can take it anywhere with me!

I have also set up NFS Underground 2 but that will wait until I get stuck in 1. And seeing myself play only on hard, I will get stuck eventually.

It's great to come back where it all started.

Antivirus Survivors 2003 Professional is a bullet heaven game heavily inspired by Vampire Survivors where you play as a cursor on a Windows XP inspired desktop fighting off hordes of viruses. It absolutely nails the Y2K computer aesthetic in every way, but there are some nitpicks I have with this game.

Firstly, movement feels clunky. While I understand that implementing mouse movement would be very difficult in a Survivors-like where you want to limit movespeed, instead we got a system where we can only move the cursor in 8 cardinal directions and need to use the left mouse button or Shift key to click. And when you have to double-click, it just feels unsatisfying.

Secondly, the levelling and progression systems, whilst good homages to the early 2000's, just drag the game's pacing down a lot, whether it's:

• Level-ups, which are very frequent.
• Installers for a new upgrade that consume keys (which are collected from, you guessed it, Keygens)
• Zip files which take about 30 seconds to open and may fail (spamming your screen with popups)
• Download More RAM applications, which have a very high chance to fail (more popup spam, I don't even know what they actually do because the success rate is so low.)
• The Limewire parody you need to stand within for a certain time to open.
• A uTorrent parody that opens a torrent client with random upgrades that have a significant chance to stall and ultimately fail to download.
• A Steam parody which wipes your screen of everything, including useful unopened files, which makes it more often than not counter-intuitive to use.

I've been playing the new DLC for Crusader Kings 3, By God Alone. It adds proper religious governments, including the Catholic Church, and broadly overhauls how religions, religious rites, and personal faith work in the game. If you like CK3, it's a great expansion to the game. It gives you a deeper level of personal faith that either does or does not line up with your religions orthodoxy, and finding the balance between personal belief and what your religion says is right gives a whole additional layer to play, on top of the expanded peacetime ability to puppet other rules and guide their choices.

There's definitely some balancing that needs to happen; at the moment any archbishop can wildly change the direction of the entire Roman Rite, leading to silly, wildly ahistorical situations where suddenly the majority of chalcedonians (pre-great schism christians) are polyamorous nudists who don't believe in marriage because the archbishop of Trier was a little too experimental in his doctrine. But even with that, I'm having a good time.