Jamie John

Has anyone who got the official Dock actually using it for playing games on the telly? Mine is just an expensive display stand and charging station at the moment. Anyway, I've picked up my Deck again to replay the remastered version Monkey Island 2. It works pretty well with the controller buttons, but I can't figure out what the command is to switch to and from the original and modern graphics.

Just took down the last Hateful. Hooo-eeee, whattacunt.

That looks pretty damn tasty, actually. I've forgotten how good the decapitation and dismemberment animations in The Witcher 3 are. This may well end being my Christmas game.

I've heard good things about this. How long is it, and how JRPG-like?

39. Mushihimesama (2021) - Switch (Well, I've not really 'completed' it - it's an arcade shooter; you can't complete it - but I did clear the easy mode without using a continue, which felt awesome.) I've posted about it more in the shmup thread, but I enjoyed this a great deal - it's the first game of its type I've ever really spent any time with, and once it gets its hooks into you and you figure out how to play it, the sheer amount of stuff happening at once combined with how alert you have to be for (what at least feels like) such extended periods of time, even on novice difficulty, is never anything less than thrilling. And going up against a screen-filling boss when you've only got one life left is incredibly tense, getting the heart pumping and the blood flowing in a way that (dare I say it) I found positively Souls-like. If, like me, you've never really played a bullet-hell game before, but they've always piqued your interest, then I'd recommend giving this a go. The novice difficulty is definitely still challenging, but isn't entirely impenetrable, and the game plays very nicely in handheld mode on the Switch - it still looks great for a port of an 18-year-old arcade game. The art, music and overall flow of the game combine beautifully, too. This is a classic for a reason. I'm not going to give this a score as it seems so reductive to do so, but if the screenshot above looks in anyway appealing to you, check this out. Played in 2022:

After a couple weeks of trying every morning, I at last beat Mushihimesama on novice mode with one credit earlier today! Thank Christ for that. In the end, the final boss didn't hit me once and I still had one life left and a couple of bombs as well. Feels good, man I've got a stack of other games I want to play, so I'm not going to jump straight into trying to 1cc another mode, but this was a lot more fun than I expected it to be, and it's the first game of it's type that I've ever stuck with for any length of time. I'm definitely interested in Gunvein now, posted about above, and I might redownload Danmaku 3 to see if I gel with it more. Maybe even Ikaruga again. I've been eyeing up Jamestown, too, which looks like good fun, and I had Deathsmiles on 360 back in the day, but never really understood it, so I could pick up the Steam version of that. Plus, I really want to play Geometry Wars 2, as it's supposed to be even better than the first game. It seems I've started down a slippery slope...

That "for some reason" speaks volumes. It's certainly a complusive game. I don't ever want to play one again in the same way I don't ever really want to play a Pokémon game again, in that it's the same game every few years with a new gimmick and a couple of new monsters bolted on.

Yeah, it does seem to have slipped under the radar a bit. The reviews have got me interested again, but not enough to rush out and buy it. It appears to have been priced at cheaper than full price, however; a couple of places are doing the console version for about £45. The PC version is £30 at CD Keys.

I thought we were getting Solar Ash this month as well. Any news on that?

Don't Look Now (1973) - UHD BD I hadn't seen this before and, after all the praise I'd read and heard for it - a seminal horror thriller, one of the best British films ever made, and so on - I thought it was quite disappointing. I never really found it thrilling, and certainly not scary. It was interesting, especially in its opening third, and atmospheric (again, to begin with), but I think a lot of its impact rides on how sold you are on the couple's grief after the loss of their daughter, and that never really landed for me; after the very beginning, when Sutherland's character fishes her out of the pond and is obviously distraught, we're suddenly in Venice (an unspecified amount of time later) and both husband and wife are all smiles. Consequently, the sex scene, which is supposed to be this cathartic release after they've spent a long time grieving, comes too early (no pun intended), and it just felt like they were two horny honeymooners, making the most of the fact that their other kid, the son, is conveniently shacked up in some boarding school back in England (if I'd lost a child then I imagine I'd want my other child with me more or less constantly, definitely not in another country, being cared for by strangers). And the ending was very Partridge.gif, too. I thought it was ridiculous, not disturbing at all. It annoyed me by how anti-climactic it was. I guess you could argue that part of this is due to the fact that this film is almost fifty years old now, but it came out in the same year as The Exorcist, which I also watched for the first time recently, and although I didn't think that was scary, either, parts of it were at least unsettling, whereas this I thought was just a bit silly. I don't know. Perhaps it's impossible to judge this film now, half a century on from the context in which it was originally released, but I've watched a handful of classics from this period over the last year or so, and many of them have had a lot more impact than this did. Julie Christie is pretty damn sexy in it, though. Not so much hairy Donald Sutherland, unfortunately. 3/5

Oh, really? It says that don't fit on the official website.

I keep flip flopping on whether to give Signalis a go or not. The atmosphere and premise sound great, but the fiddly inventory management stuff puts me off. Have they added additional item slots yet, from 6 to 8, so you don't have to backtrack quite as much?

I've just been reading the Eurogamer review of that. Certainly looks good! I might wait for the Switch version for the OLED, if it runs well. Speaking of the Switch OLED, does anyone have one of those knock-off Flip Grips that fit it which they'd recommend? The thing that lets you play vertically. There are a couple on Etsy, but they all look like 3D printed rubbish. Not that I'll notice that much when I'm actually playing, of course.

Motherfucker. Got to the last boss on Mushihimesama (novice mode) with one life left and no continues and the bastard got me with a quarter of his health left. I still had two bombs left, too Next time...

Monster Hunter is pure gaming crack, but it's also very opaque and overwhelming for new players; there are dozens of different systems within systems, very few of which are well or even adequately explained. I rinsed MH4 on the 3DS, World on the PS4, and even then, when I came to Rise on the Switch, it still took me a good five hours to figure out what the fuck I was doing. Play it, by all means, because once it clicks, boy, does it click. Just be prepared to teach yourself how to play it by asking on here and reading or watching guides.