Jamie John

I attempted to replay Resi 4 recently, but the advancements and refinements that have been made to the over-the-shoulder shooter genre that the game pioneered have sadly made it very unenjoyable for me. I think the representation of women in certain older games is now more obviously problematic in this day and age as well. I've recently started Okami on the Switch, for example, and within the first ten minutes you meet a geisha goddess character who has an extremely low cut top and her arse hanging out for no particular reason (she literally has a big hole in her skirt). To top it off, the first time you meet her she jiggles and giggles about with the camera lingering on her tits while she tries to shake a bug free from her kimono. This in a game which centres on the deities and legends of polytheistic feudal Japan. It's all a bit odd and has put me right off it.

4. Hyper Light Drifter (Switch) As soon as I started playing this, from the aesthetic, the obscure secret hunting, the lack of exposition and handholding, the lonely atmosphere, and from the soundtrack (which, as well as being fantastic, is also by Disasterpiece), I was immediately and repeatedly throughout reminded of Fez, which I've no problem with as Fez is one of my favourite ever games. This isn't quite as mind-meltingly brilliant as Fez, but I still enjoyed the 11 or so hours I spent with it a lot. There's less of a focus on combat than I was expecting (I thought it was going to be like a 2D brawler), but what combat there is is punchy, brutal and very satisfying, reminding a lot me of Hotline Miami, another one of my favourite titles. The boss fights, especially, are challenging and thrilling. The best thing about the game, however, is how it continually makes you feel so gosh-darned clever when you manage to discover one of its many devilishly-hidden secrets. Most of the time there's next to nothing on screen to indicate their presence, a tiny pattern on the floor that seems out of place, for example, or a pixel-wide alcove in a wall that indicates a hidden path. The result is that, collectively, you spend hours poring over every single screen, and it's always a 'Eureka!' moment when you do find something. Unfortunately, however, and frustratingly, the rubbish map and the relative lack of shortcuts discourages the backtracking needed in the endgame to find all the secrets you missed on the first run through, so unless you manage to find all of them on your initial journey through an area, going back necessitates fighting through all the same (often quite difficult) set piece battles you fought the first time through, and with the exits to many of the rooms only unlocking once you've defeated all the respawning enemies, it's not like you can just skip through them. Consequently, while I went back and found all the secrets I'd missed in two of the game's four areas without using a guide, by the time it came to the third I couldn't really be arsed anymore and felt like I was just going through the motions. It doesn't help, either, that the willfully opaque storyline didn't particularly motivate me to track them all down. A more comprehensive, Metroid-style map, with dots or question marks in the rooms where secrets remained, or some sort of completion percentage indicator, would have kept me playing, but as it was I just deferred further exploration and went on to defeat the final boss. Still, even if it doesn't achieve true greatness, it's still a very good game and well worth the price of entry. 8/10 Playing next: I'm going to attempt to give Ikaruga a go in earnest, but if it's too hard for me (which I expect it will be) then I'm going straight on to Okami, which I've only ever played briefly. Played previously:

Yep, it's great. Getting all the secrets is good fun as well. I've got the second one on my (virtual) pile of games to play.

I've read good things about Dragon's Dogma but have never played it. Is it like Monster Hunter? I've always been put off by the ridiculous title.

As others have said, ports are fine; ports at the expense of other things, however, are not. Too expensive ports (RE4 and 0, recently, for example) can also GTFO.

Please fix the thread title. My pedantry can't cope.

Is this as good as Bayo 2?

I'm currently playing, and enjoying, Hyper Light Drifter, and aesthetically and themetically this looks pretty similar. Plus the score sounds very Disasterpiece-esque. One to watch!

Cheers! Seems they've changed the title of it, which is why I couldn't find it in the app. It was called 'High Scores', but now it's just '6 Music's History of Video Game Music'.

I missed the 2nd episode on Sunday and it's not BBC sounds, annoyingly. Anyone have a download? @Lyrical Donut

You can pet the dog*: *Cat, eagle, griffin, dog thing.

3. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Switch) As @BabelRich says above, the Adventure mode definitely drags a fair bit, but overall I thought this was the best Smash game I've played, and, although I don't really play many of them, the best fighting game I've spent a decent amount of time with since SFIV, over ten years ago now. The campaign gave me a reason to keep coming back and lent the whole single-player experience a strong sense of direction that the earlier games lacked, and which led to me abandoning them after a dozen hours or so of taking each character through the linear 'Classic' mode and getting bored. Here, the variety afforded by both the surprisingly nuanced Spirit system and also the sheer quantity of content kept things consistently interesting and provided a sense of novelty and nostalgia right up until the end of the 30 hour campaign, where I was still amazed to be coming across stages that I hadn't fought on and items I hadn't used before. Ultimately, however (no pun intended), the core Smash gameplay and its fantastic risk/reward mechanic is still what drives the game, and it's perhaps telling that the best bouts I had were often those where everything was stripped back and it was just me against one other fighter on an unadorned stage. Conversely, the battles that were gimmick-heavy with lots of fighters I often found were won based more on luck than skill, and, on higher difficulties, were sometimes hugely, thigh-batteringly frustrating, especially when circumstances conspired against you to make things feel horribly unfair. However, I think the game's biggest flaw, or perhaps its biggest missed opportunity, is the way that it doesn't really encourage you to try playing with different characters; I just stuck with Donkey Kong from the moment I unlocked him early on, all the way up to the end. I had the choice of using any one of the 72 other characters I picked up along the way, of course, but I saw no reason to when I was able to win every fight as DK after I'd mastered his move set. At no point did the game stop me from using him or tell me that I had to use a different fighter, and while I know that, to some people, the game dictating that they aren't allowed to use their go-to character is unthinkable, I really think the developers missed a trick here by not occasionally making you fight using the different characters you unlocked as part of the campaign. Admittedly, in Classic mode you have to play as each different character, but after seeing through the campaign to 100% completion, I can't say I have a great urge to play through the Classic mode 73 times with each fighter. It would have been better if you had to play as different characters in Adventure mode from time to time, maybe in place of some of the encounters that seemed to have been copied and pasted from elsewhere (and after 615 battles, you do notice when the repeat once start to crop up). Still, on the whole, having never really been into Smash and not understanding at all the massive hype for it that built up over most of last year, I was swept away by this and enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. If, like me, you're on the fence about picking it up, I can definitely recommend it - even if you're not planning on playing it multi-player, the single-player campaign is more than robust enough to make it worth a look. I may even keep playing it for a while. 9/10 Playing next: a bit more of this, perhaps, and then Hyper Light Drifter Previous:

Thanks for the recommendation. Enjoyed listening to this a lot on the way to and from work.

What's a Mayflash NS and Dogface adapter?

Not really. I quite enjoy it. I was getting fed up with feeling obliged to play third tier rubbish. So far I've had a lot of success with it as well; all of the highly-rated games I've enjoyed.