Woderwick

@-wc-

Exactly the same here. I keep hoping for a release of Hit & Run but I think that ship has sailed.

@prw_88 @boxguy

@HeadPirate has it right. This is nothing to do with tech curves or the cost of game production. We're approaching financial year end and the annual shareholder reports and the simple fact is that the easiest way to make projections for next year's profit look better is by trimming some existing costs and, sadly, people are easier to get rid of than any other cost.
The law in the US states that a CEO's job is to maximise profit for shareholders. Supposedly this is to stop someone deliberately running a company into the ground and costing shareholders their investment but in reality it's used by the like of 'activist investors' (who could more accurately be described as 'whining entitled arseholes' ) to sue companies and force them into making layoffs to supposedly boost profit.
The key point is that investors demand better results than last year, regardless of how well a company may be doing. Only growth counts. Because growth means higher share prices and those shares can then be sold for more money.
The depressing thing is that this won't change until we find a better way to deal with people who've reached the end of their working life. The biggest investor groups are pension funds and they need the growth and the sale of shares to be able to pay out the ever-increasing pensions costs to their members.

There are several different ways this could be resolved but, knowing humans, the solution that gets put in place would probably look like a cross between Logan's Run and Soylent Green.

Turbo Kid is a fantastic film. Absolute love-letter to 80's kids and the trashy comics and cartoons of the era. Also, Michael Ironside.

I'll have to keep a look out for this when it releases on Switch.

EDIT: Just re-read the PR fluff and it mentions a Turbo Kid sequel! That's potentially very, very good news.

The Japanese one is terrible, and not just because of the CGI models, the composition is a total mess. And the American one appears to have used Ming the Merciless instead of Dracula. Or possibly it's the Mekon from Dan Dare.

I've been waiting on this one for a couple of years. Not having heard anything since the initial announcement I'd assumed the port had been quietly scrapped so I'm glad to see it's coming out.

I'll wait for the reviews, even though Saber were doing the port it looks like it could be pretty tough to get it running well on Switch. Assuming it does though, I look forward to spending many hours as a hilariously inept warrior in a gritty medieval peasant simulator.

"I have been quietly passing the baton"

Respect to that. If I ate an entire baton I'd probably make quite a lot of noise when passing it.

@Sikthvash

😂

Speak & Smell.

Featuring Commissar Karcher of the Emperor's 41st Hydro-Fusiliers.

@sikthvash

That's an insult to the fine sculptors of plastic tat at Fisher Price.

This looks like a phone case made out of Fimo by a well-meaning mum.

Is that supposed to be rope on the handle or spaghetti? Or worms?

Is it the resolution of my screen or does this look like very poorly sculpted plastic tat?

I can't believe they're charging that much with a straight face for something that looks so incredibly cheap.

Getting into endgame territory in Atom RPG. My group are now tooled up with some serious hardware and stacks of armour, although the section I've reached features enemies who almost exclusively use AP ammo, which is somewhat unsporting.
I also picked up Conglomerate 451: Overloaded on sale which looks janky but lots of fun. 1st person turn based cyberpunk dungeon crawler.
Once Woloderwick has made the post-Soviet wasteland safe from mutated mushrooms I'll fire up Conglomerate, hopefully before the weekend is out.

The new controls sound great and I played the original on the PlayStation so it's not just newcomers who will appreciate the change from tank controls.

Also, I strongly disagree about auto saves. They can be useful but manual saves are almost mandatory for a lot of games and I'd rather do away with auto saves I had to choose between the two.
One of the reasons I binned off Metro fairly early on was because the auto save had me dying then reloading at a point where I was moments away from dying again with no way to survive, effectively soft-locking me to lose about an hour of progress.

Edited to correct my sinful misuse of loose/lose. In my defence, my phone hates me.

After a couple of weekends of being horribly ill I'm hoping to get back to Atom RPG once the kids are in bed.
Woloderwick is now a force to be reckoned with in the post-Soviet wasteland with enough guns and ammo to mount a small-scale war. And also a car, which is pretty sweet.

I quite like some of the graphics on them, but they look about as ergonomic as a breadbin. Can't see them being very comfortable to hold for 5 minutes, let alone a lengthy session.

Looks pretty sweet, has a roguelike Astral Chains feel to it. And the way they talk about meta-progression sounds like it's more of a continuous process rather than big single steps which tends to keep my interest for longer.

The upgrade machine reminds me of the augmentation sequence from the original Syndicate which is no bad thing.

I'll keep an eye out for this. Hopefully when it gets here I'll have cleared down some of the games in my backlog.

I still love a Capri Sun to this day. Always looking for an excuse to buy them for the kids so I can grab one for myself.

Cheery flavour is hands down the best though.

Damn. Now all I want is a Samurai Goroh Cherry flavour Capri Sun.

@MSaturn

Nice to see another fan of Mandy. Fantastic film. Like someone mixed a prog rock album with a pulp biker novel and crammed it into a VHS tape laced with hallucinogens. With added Nicholas Cage.
The cameo from Bill Duke was cool too.

@gcunit
I'm not sure why you think it's absurd. I like steak and I also like apple pie, but I don't want them mixed together.

As I said in my first comment, I disliked the lack of interactivity of choose your own adventure books so it's not like I'm going to prefer it on a screen with even less interaction.
As to the audio and images, that's not what I want to accompany written fiction. Part of what I enjoy about reading is having all of that plastered across the inside of my own skull, conjured up from the words I'm reading.

And that's not even addressing the fact that most writing in games is mediocre at best. You also don't appear to have considered that visual novels may not tell the sort of stories that I'm interested in reading.

@canaryfarmer

I know. I'm a bit gutted. The visuals give it the feel of a feverish neo noir pulp paperback and the throwback to full-screen pixel art games of my youth make me love the screenshots. But I just don't think the gameplay will hold my interest.

I've seen the previous 2 games on the eshop and thought they looked beautiful, Mothmen in particular. But I had assumed they were more akin to proper point and click style gmes. Not sure I'm interested in playing a visual novel.
I loved Fighting Fantasy books when I was a kid (I've still got about 20 originals somewhere round here) but by comparison the Choose Your Own Adventure line were weak, with very little interactivity.
I'm not at all convinced that transposing the limited interactions of CYOA to a video game is going to hold my interest, when I could just read a book if I feel like reading, or play a game if I feel like playing.
Shame because all 3 of these games look gorgeous but I just don't just think they're for me.

@Vaporeon_meme

I'm well aware that my sense of humour isn't for everyone so I'm not I'm not bothered.

And their comprehensive response to me made me smile anyway so it's all good.

@Ryu_Niiyama

It's somewhat unsporting of you to resort to using facts to prove your argument.

@Ryu_Niiyama @Vaporeon_meme

Maybe it's not a typo. The games industry can be a tough business.

I had to go with the EU one. It has that feel of a late 70's/early 80's pulp sci-fi novel. The kind of musty old paperback you find in a charity shop for a couple of quid. I've got stacks of those here and I've always loved them so there's no real contest for me.

Still plugging away at the post-Soviet wastelands in Atom RPG. Woloderwick now has a rusty AK and a crowbar. Also a vicious attack hound who is developing a taste for raiders. Cyka blyat!

@VoidofLight

It's a good game. I played it offline, single-player on Switch, after the recent-ish patch that completely rebuilt it from the ground up.

It was a lot of fun, and absolutely nailed that feeling of starting off with nothing and being scared of pretty much everything. The nights are also really, really dark (realistically so) which adds to the feeling of isolation and tension.

It scales up well, and when you start taming dinosaurs they add loads of cool utility functions. Also, the moment of locating, planning and executing the successful taming of your first heavy-hitter is an incredible feeling. Mine was a Spinosaurus I named Lothar.

The problems I ran into are sort of where I run out of steam with a lot of survival games. Once you hit a certain level of tech and comfort they lose some of the appeal.

ARK does have a huge end-game though, with some massive boss fights. But I found the caving aspect quite tedious, and that's required to be able to access the boss fights so I never quite pushed that far.

I also never did any of the other maps, but I may dip back into it at some point and try some of them out.

@VoidofLight

I enjoyed ARK a lot, which I suppose you could basically describe as Survival Pokemon + Dinosaurs.

Looks like it could be fairly interesting, regardless of what the inspiration was behind it.

What it reminds me of is Hogs of War, which was a cracking game on the PS1. It may have been knocked as a Worms ripoff when it came out but the gameplay was excellent. It also had a great sense of humour and the now-legendary Rik Mayall provided the battlefield commentary. That's a game I'd love to see make a triumphant comeback.

@Rambler

This was a design flaw I identified during my extensive testing of the product. If you roll the top down for maximum waterproofing, you then lose the functionality of the handles.

I did ask the vendor if there was a chance of a patch to address this issue but they were fairly noncommittal.

@Rambler

The open top means it's only mostly waterproof. I speak from experience.

@-wc-

Blue Plastic Carrier Bag (available from your local offie)
Cost: 40p (due to bag tax)
Pros: Reasonably capacious, minimalist design, lightweight, folds down for storage.
Cons: Flimsy construction, no padding, feels 'plasticky', only available in blue.
NL Rating: 5/10.*
*6/10 if you like blue. Please refer to the NL Scoring Policy.

Looks like a 40 quid bag with a hefty numpty tax.

Even if you're in the market for a 'premium rucksack' you could get something equally nice for about a third the cost of that.

And about a tenth the cost if you're happy with some rugged no-name thing that'll last for years.

I've started playing Atom RPG, basically the Russian version of Fallout, so when I can carve out some time Woloderwick will stalk the post-Soviet wastelands with a rusty Nagant and a broken bottle.

"Hello, my name is Mario Mario. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

The reason Mario doesn't feature on the Japanese cover is that he'd just signed a 450 million coin contract to go and play golf in the desert kingdom's breakaway league.

Both covers are pretty dire though. This is one of those times when you wouldn't mind buying the loose cart with no box.

I picked up PGA2K21 on sale with a voucher I got for Christmas because I have a strange love of golf games. It plays a pretty good game so Woderwick McGavin will be striding the links later like a colossus and dominating the ranks of professional golfists.
I also got Barony on sale because it reminds me heavily of the Ultima Underworld games which were excellent. Looking forward to giving it a spin later.

So, are all the players romancing the same set of NPC's? Because that's a bit, um, weird.

This is part of my problem with MMO games (aside from my natural antisocial tendencies), you start one up and get told you're the chosen one and the you walk into the local pub and find out it's bloody full of chosen ones.

The problem is that they're trying to fit a fundamentally single-player narrative where you are the main character into a setting where you've got hundreds or thousands of main characters.

If you're going to make a multiplayer game it needs to be built from the ground up as that, not just finding a way for a single player game to handle multiple clients.

@Poodlestargenerica

Agreed. I wish the actual game looked as inviting to me as that gorgeous artwork does.

@OldManHermit

I quite liked the feel of the hidden island stuff but thought the combat was only passable. More complex than Sands of Time but not necessarily more fun.
Being charitable I'd say it felt like a totally different game that some marketing type stuck the Prince of Persia brand onto late in development in order to boost sales. Which is part of why I didn't connect with it. Certainly didn't feel like a sequel to SoT.

@Vexx234

Totally agree. Sands of Time was an amazing amount of fun to play but the sequel was trying painfully hard to be edgy.

This new one looks pretty sweet though so I'll definitely look at picking it up at some point.

@chewytapeworm

A Lineker Between Worlds

It's stuff like this that gets Luigi labelled as sinister.

Sounds like Rockstar are wanting to get more closely acquainted with the Streisand Effect.

A fair few games on my Wish List of Jank have gone on sale lower than they have done before so I'll probably be picking up a few things.

I've just finished Outer Worlds so this is good timing, although I'm not sure about the direction they've taken the sequel. Adding in ship piloting is a good shout but it looks like they've dropped the companion system.

On a more serious note, this looks really good. I've deliberately stayed away from reading anything about it so didn't even realise piloting was part of the game. As someone who would crawl across broken glass to fly my own spaceship I'll almost certainly get this.

I loved TS2 and 3 so much, fantastic games. Second Sight was also highly underrated.

Dream result would be the team can buy the IP and keep going. Embracer do seem to be pretty hard up at the moment so could be open to a sale.

@Teksetter

That's odd, I tried using markdown previously and it didn't work for me. Although maybe I was trying to edit a post at the time.

@mlt

Stick [ b ] in front of the bit you want bolded and [ /b ] at the end. But take the spaces out.
i and /i do the same for italics.

Playing Mario Wonder and Mario Kart 8 with the kids during the day (in and around housework and other random dadmin tasks) but later on I'll be settling down to continue Outer Worlds. Picked it up on sale last week for 15 quid and I'm really enjoying it.

The only Ghostbusters games I've played are the original on the Spectrum (which was excellent for it's time and must have been substantially different to the NES port for the latter to be so reviled) and the Switch remaster of the 2009 which I thought was absolutely brilliant. Apart from finding the new proton pack variants a bit gimmicky and gamey it was really well done. Definitely made me feel like a Real Ghostbuster.