2 games:
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC (PSP)
- LittleBigPlanet Karting

I tried to create a new game last night - Dungeon Master for the Atari 2600 but it got folded into a different cam called by the same name. The description for the Atari game is “ Toman is deep inside a dungeon laden with incredible treasures - and guarded by terrible monsters. Equipped with only a bow and arrow, he seeks the treasure as the monsters close in. Guide him through the dungeon chambers... but don't stop to count your treasure until you're through!” it was published in 1992 by Otto Versand and Home Entertainment Suppliers.

I’m currently playing Breath of the Wild. I bounced off it about 30 hours in a couple of years ago but got back into it off the hype of Tears of the Kingdom.

With my owned games backlog currently sitting at 248 games across 13 different consoles, once I finish BoTW I am going to entrust my game choices to random selection. I reckon that’ll lead me in interesting directions.

This month I completed 3 games and 1 DLC:

Horizon Chase Turbo (Switch) - 9/10
Horizon Chase Turbo - Senna Forever (Switch) - 9/10
Disco Elysium (Switch) - 7/10
Bioshock 2 (Switch) - 7/10

My favourite game this month was Disco Elysium. The dialogue throughout it is brilliant and it is a 9/10 game, but the Switch port got points deducted for choppy performance and poor controls.

Horizon Chase Turbo is pure fun and a great nostalgia trip.

I started playing Bioshock 2 on Switch a couple of days ago.

It's a reasonable game, but not as good as the first. Issues I see with it are the lack of gyro controls is a massive oversight, the default controller sensitivity is glacial, and the difficulty balance is completely out of whack - normal mode is pretty bloody hard and easy mode ridiculously easy. And some things just don't make sense - like a elderly granny splicer can basically knock you dead from full health with a couple of taps of her wrench, which is about the same damage as a big daddy. The intro and general story is pretty derivative as well, and lacks the tension of the original.

That said, I am enjoying the gameplay, and the graphics are a step up from the first game. It's pretty short, so I imagine I'll be done with it in a week or so. I can see that if Bioshock 1 was an 8 or 9, this would be more like a 7, but the lack of gyro leans me towards a 6 on Switch.

I play until I get sick of the game - most games I beat, but I've retired games after half an hour or so and others I've got 30 hours into a long RPG and suddenly realised I hate it.

Plenty of games with good story - it just depends on what kind of story you are into and how you like it to be told (i.e. through exposition, experience or allegory). A few I can think of are:
- Disco Elysium (exposition and experience)
- Witcher 3 (exposition and experience)
- The Last Of Us (exposition and experience)
- Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice (experience and allegory)
- Valiant Hearts: The Great War (exposition and experience)
- Journey (allegory)
- Inside (experience and allegory)
- Gris (allegory)

- Witcher 3 Complete Edition inc. Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine expansions (Switch - 8/10 - 125 hours
- Gris (Switch - 8/10 - 4 h 25 m)
- Super Mario Odyssey (Switch - 6/10 - 10 h 05 m)

By far the best game this month was the Witcher, with Hearts of Stone being the best expansion.

The worst game was Super Mario Odyssey - what an overrated pile of boredom. Looking at the reviews on HLTB, you'd think it was the best game ever made. The boss battles are repetitive, the core platforming is average, many of the levels are fillers, the story is garbage even by Mario standards and the only real hook for me was the exploration, which once you realise you are just searching for extra moons, it loses its shine unless you are a 100%er.

I don't have any hard and fast rules, but I do have this generally in my mind:
- I like to follow up a big game (>30 hours) with a short game (<5 hours) as a palate cleanser
- I don't like playing games in a series in succession, unless they absolutely amazing (Mass Effect 2 and 3, I'm looking at you!)
- I don't like playing multiple games from a single genre in succession unless they are short and sweet, or significantly different in approach.

Beyond that, it is very much on what I feel like at the time. And the only games I have in my backlog are ones that I own but have not yet played.

So how that looks over a few games would be:
- The Outer Worlds
- A Short Hike
- Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
- Bioshock
- Nino Kuni: Wrath of the White Which
- Child of Light
- The Witcher 3 Complete Edition.
- Gris

Currently playing through Witcher 3: Complete Edition on Nintendo Switch. About 80 odd hours into it so far and have loved most of it but I I'm a bit burnt out on sidequests and probably looking to stick to the main quest and maybe the treasure hunts from here on. Probably got about 40 hours to go to do the main game and the 2 expansions.

Just the one game this month as I’ve started Bravely Default 2 and grinding my way through that 😵‍💫

The game I beat was Child of Light on the Switch. Nice game and lovely to look at, but I wouldn’t play through it again.

Wait really? I thought that the Switch's crashing issues were patched out with update 1.0.2?

So did I! Apparently not, though. It was worse the further into the game I got.

I see people racking up huge numbers of completions each month and can’t help but look on in admiration, not least at the ability to complete those games but also to have the time to do it. It got me thinking:

how many hours a day do you play games?

As a dad with a full time job etc, I get about 1 1/2 hours or so on average. Don’t regret my time gaming, and don’t regret the time I can’t game because I’ve got other things to do either.

Really interested in other people’s thoughts and how gaming fits into their lives.

Only 1 game completed this month:

25/2 - Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. Switch (7/10)

IMO, the game itself is a 9/10. Lovely story, beautiful artwork, and somewhat unique gameplay mechanics. However, I deducted 2 points for the port. 1 point was lost due to stability issues I suffered, with about 10 crashes over my 55 odd hour playthrough, including a couple in the latter stages of dungeons which set me back 15-20 minutes - so frustrating! The other point was due to the awkwardness of the battle controls on the Switch's standard controllers. It wouldn't have been so bad if you could rebind but that's not possible. It is much easier to manage in docked mode with a pro controller.

All up, well worth picking up and playing if you are into jrpgs.

Currently playing through Child of Light on the Switch. Pretty game, not particularly hard and I’m kind of enjoying it so far.

Dante's Inferno - Lucifer (2nd phase) - I don't understand why this boss needed to be so much more difficult compared to all the previous bosses other than "because it's the final fight": while the first phase looks cool and plays out mostly fair, the 2nd starts tanking all of your combos you might have learned up to this point without flinching and the combos he starts dishing out are so frequent and brutal, you literally don't have the agility to dodge all of it, a piss-poor finale for one of the best hack'n slashers.

Dark Souls - Bed of Chaos - This one needs no explaining, I'm in the same camp as everybody else: the path to the arena itself wasn't among the best locations in the game and when you do get to the "big" fight, it's just bunch of random tentacle-swiping and the crumbling floor that you are guaranteed to fall through on your first attempt, it just feels cheap and unnecessary. This "fight" does not reset like all the others and is basically done in 2 hits, but that doesn't change the fact how poorly designed it is.

Dead to Rights - Rafshoon Diggs - A crappy console port of a mediocre game with god-awful keyboard / mouse controls is the perfect recipe to set you up for a ride full of anger and frustration, both of which kick in to full extent during that very fight: it's a 1on1 melee arena brawl where you both slap each other over a gasmask, you have to be able to chain a bunch of combos while trying to keep said mask on. The whole game is full to the brim with gimmicky bosses, but this one was so fucking bad, I still remember being super mad at it to this day.

GoldenEye 007: Reloaded - Alec - A stage-based arena fight with a bulletspongy boss that doesn't respond to being shot in any way, supported by an invincible chopper gunner circling outside. On higher difficulties, this fight is impossible without a certain exploit that involves hiding and fucking up AI pathfinding, but even on Normal it's anything but exciting. Besides, humanoid bosses with large HP is a relic of the 90s - early 2000s, this has no business being in a modern iteration of James Bond.

ObsCure II - Kenny (Final Fight) - This is mostly a case of the game itself being hot garbage, but it's where all the flaws come together: your AI partner can't shoot for shit, she eats up all the ammo and health-kits and while you too have to try and deal some serious damage, you also need to LOCKPICK A PANEL MID-FIGHT, obviously getting hurt in the process without being able to dodge. Who's idea was this?? If you don't have at least 5 full heals in your inventory for this travesty of a fight, you're pretty much softlocked and can't beat the game, because of how much forced damage you have to put up with, argh.

Silent Hill 2 - Double Pyramid Head Fight - This particular fight can be avoided by taking a different ending route, but you very likely won't get around it in your first playthrough and if you played on Hard mode from the start like I did, you'll have to endure some serious pain as the combination of slow, clunky combat and 2 bosses that keep perforating your ass with their poles and are too aggressive to be avoided efficiently. Combat in Silent Hill has never been appealing by design, though that doesn't excuse anything in my opinion, but I've been skipping that boss every time since we first met.

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth - Afterbirth+ - Delirium - There's been so much patchwork, so many updates and overhauls of all sorts, yet this boss remains the worst fucking thing in the whole game and I never looked forward to getting completion marks for beating him as, well, any character really. It goes without saying the glass-cannon chars have had it the worst, since the boss doesn't telegraph at least 50% of his attacks and can off-screen you at any point, there's way too much luck involved and it's what ruins an otherwise cool idea on paper.

Hands down the Lucifer battle in Dante’s Inferno is the worst I’ve experienced. Difficulty spike out of nowhere and it finishes with a feckin QTE! Utter garbage.

To anyone that's played Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Withc - you've probably either discovered or read about toko farming to quickly level up. What do you think about it - does it ruin the game?

For me, because I was doing a lot of the the side quests, by the time I got to Perdida I had already clocked about 40 odd hours and didn't fancy the thought of running around for many hours to get my familiars to a level that could enter the final stages of the game without being destroyed. So a little Toko farming helped get all my familiars to their final form plus a decent number of levels.

Huge Nintendo Direct. So many new RPGs to check out and a remaster of Chrono Cross is awesome. I am dismayed as I already have a big backlog of Switch games on my shelf!

I somehow managed to finish four games:

- Cupid Parasite (Switch) - Jan 9th
- Picross: Lord of the Nazarick (Switch) - Jan 14th
- Aviary Attorney (PC) - Jan 14th
- Five Nights at Freddy's (PC) - Jan 18th

Also, I'm using google sheets to document my monthly backlog progress! There's 2 more games in my backlog, but also 4 less hours on it, so I'll call that a win! Hopefully I can keep this up through the year :D

I like your method here! Celebrating the wins and still adding to the backlog.

My backlog has blown out to 263 games (just the games I own!) and 173 days to beat them all. On my current trajectory, I should be finished them in about 10 years! I've had to instill a discipline of targeting my Switch games for completion so I can justify buying more Switch games!

Do you ever just offload a game you've already bought before you have played it?

Just the 2 games this month:
- Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Switch)
- Bioshock Remastered (Switch)

Both are fantastic games, though it took me some time to get into Bioshock. It’s funny how a game like that can make 9 or so hours feel like a long time, but then in another game when you in a different frame of mind you can breeze through dozens of hours like it is nothing.

Hellblade was definitely my favourite this month. You can just feel the care and love that went into it. I’d recommend it for pretty much anyone.

Sheez, feeling my age here - my first was Wolfenstein 3D, then Doom. Probably wouldn’t start there given neither had y axis aiming.

For me, it has to be Alien Isolation, which I’m currently playing, it’s not just that it has the scares, but the vulnerability of your character and the sparseness of save points have you really invested in survival. When you see that xenomorphe drop out of a vent and you know if it sees you it’s instadeath and the loss of 15-20 mins of progress, you feel the fear! I can only play it from one save point to the next and then I need to put it down for a bit.

Damn, missed the sign up! I’ll get in next time.

I just started Alien Isolation. It seemed a fitting end to 2021 to play a horror survival game.

2 games and 1 dlc this month:
- Outer Worlds (Switch) - 5/10
- Peril on Gorgon dlc (Switch) - 7/10
- A short hike (Switch) - 8/10

Outer Worlds was a good game but not a great port on Switch, hence 5/10. The Peril on Gorgon Dlc did everything better than the main game and in my opinion should have been part of the game release. In particular, difficulty was higher than the main game, which I found too easy.

A short hike was a fun little experience. Just what I needed.