Last game you finished, tell us about it

I just finished Jedi Fallen Order as well. I enjoyed it for what it was, but it felt like there was so much missing.

The story was written OK. I felt like I was reading/watching fan fiction rather than true SW. The story threads are tenuous at best and completely full of overblown tropes. IE. Life long festering hatred over an innocent mistake.

I'm glad they made a single player game, but theres so much that would have been better as an RPG. The references to credits made me want to buy things, all the items you find are 100% cosmetic that have zero effect on gameplay. Don't get me wrong, I wanted an indigo lightsaber. But all the 100 individual customizations that you do to the base of the lightsaber are virtually invisible unless you are zoomed in at the workshop. Really silly.

Got really tired of seeing the main characters dumb face and red hair

All in all a pretty good dumbed down action game with a SW theme. Dont' expect more.

Is it that similar to Dark Souls?

I read a lot a game critics saying it is, but I don't really trust those egomaniacs.

Winterfart said:

Is it that similar to Dark Souls?

I read a lot a game critics saying it is, but I don't really trust those egomaniacs.

Click to expand...

It shares some common features with Dark Souls, yes, but I'd say it's more of an action-adventure with metroidvania level design.

You can also choose your level of difficulty unlike Dark Souls.

Just finished Disco Elysium, in about 18 hours I think. I loved it. I didn't know much about it going in. I can't remember the last time I got so sucked into a game. I thought about it a lot even when I wasn't playing it, which is pretty rare these days. I don't know how much of it was illusory, but it really felt like my choices had weight. The very, very end of the game dipped a bit I thought, but overall it was brilliant.

Anyway, I need some straight up pew pew now so I'm going to fire up Jedi Academy for a bit.

Winterfart said:

Is it that similar to Dark Souls?

I read a lot a game critics saying it is, but I don't really trust those egomaniacs.

Click to expand...

No, not in any way that matters.

Wisdom said:

I just finished Jedi Fallen Order as well. I enjoyed it for what it was, but it felt like there was so much missing.

Click to expand...

I have played it twice at this point -and also replayed the entire Dark Forces/Jedi Knight and both KotOR games ... and I have said before that Jedi Fallen Order has ‘the best lightsaber combat since 2003’ - which also implies that 17 year old combat remains the pinnacle of Star Wars key lure to gamers.

My biggest critique of Jedi Fallen order is how GAMEY it all feels ... I just start to get comfortable in the world and then I encounter “INSERT GAME ELEMENT X HERE” items that I really hate. Especially since they are all console-centric genre elements.

Winterfart said:

Is it that similar to Dark Souls?

I read a lot a game critics saying it is, but I don't really trust those egomaniacs.

Click to expand...

Sorry, missed this.

To me it is not at all similar to DS. The only similarities to me are the : 'restoring of HP/XP' when you hit the enemy that killed you, and the virtual zero death penalty.

The higher the difficulty, the smaller the parry window is. I'm not much of a parry person anyway, I prefer to roll around and dodge like am acrobat maniac. My parry timing in most games is terrible. I played it on the hardest difficulty with the exception of a single boss fight (you can decrease it at any time).

I think every game in the next 5 years will be compared to DS in one way or another by random people. I wouldn't take it that seriously.

txa1265 said:

I have played it twice at this point -and also replayed the entire Dark Forces/Jedi Knight and both KotOR games … and I have said before that Jedi Fallen Order has ‘the best lightsaber combat since 2003’ - which also implies that 17 year old combat remains the pinnacle of Star Wars key lure to gamers.

My biggest critique of Jedi Fallen order is how GAMEY it all feels … I just start to get comfortable in the world and then I encounter “INSERT GAME ELEMENT X HERE” items that I really hate. Especially since they are all console-centric genre elements.

Click to expand...

I love the lightsaber combat. Good action game for a single playthrough.

I can't see a single reason to replay it tho unless I get a yearning for the lightsaber sounds and combat. There are no story choices, or dialogue choices, or really any choice to re explore the game for. Theres no alternate path etc.

Faaaaaaallout 76

I finished with Fallout 76 Wastelanders content last week sometime.
The biggest barrier was the bugs, but I drove on in a bloody minded fashion to see the resolution(s).

The good:

If you like Fallout 4, then I think there's a reasonable chance you'll get some enjoyment out of this. Alas, you'll probably have to churn through a bunch of less enjoyable stuff to get to most of the new content.

Despite having to be a pack-rat to gather resources so you can keep your armour/power-armour and weapons intact, I found that there's actually less construction elements. I built a base, added crafting stations I needed, and never touched again bar the few quests that need you to build something. I did way more construction in Fallout 4.

Some of the companion quests and characters you meet are quite enjoyable, but of course there is the usual filler (go here kill that because I need this, etc).


The bad:

Bugs. Holy shit, the bugs.
Whenever I spawn, actually - every time I spawn, I fall through the world. It's probably related to where I built my base, and it does fix itself the second attempt, but bloody hell… it's pretty symptomatic of the state of the game as a whole.

The quest sequence for the fallen astronaut chick was bugged to heck. It kept disabling itself. I followed advice to keep logging out and back in, in the hope that it's fixed. Sure that worked, but sometimes it took several attempts and it's a time-consuming process - especially when it tries to spawn you on a server where your base clashes with another player's base (and of course if you stay on that server you get none of the quests, because the quests rely on her being a resident in your base, which can't spawn).
One time I had to fetch something for her, and the item was somehow beneath the ground of the container it was meant to be in. I tried again (server hopped) and it was where it was meant to be, but picking it up did not register with the game, so the quest wasn't progressed. One time it did register, but then the quests disabled themselves while I was in transit back to base.

There were many many other bugs (e.g. companions having conversations with invisible people, or people stuck on the other side of a wall), but the recurring inability to progress quests was the biggie.

Luckily I only spent about $12 on the game. There was a glut of keys on the market due to a local PC parts supplier giving them away with purchases.
So, I definitely got my $12 worth. Don't think I'd pay full price for it, personally, but YMMV.

Avadon 3: The Warborn (2016) was the 'grand' finale to Jeff Vogel's 'One Man Productions' Avadon series. It was ok. For the first half of the game I was actually enjoying it a whole lot more than the first two games. Then a portal took me to Avadon Castle and then all the companions wanted their quests done and it got slightly more boring than the first two games. Upon completion there was no sense of having completed a gigantic epic trilogy, but at the same time there was a nice cosy feeling that it was nice to play in this nice cosy world just one more time and it is a kind of a shame it has to end, but not to the extent that I'd ever want to play a part 4.

7/10

I finished South Park: The Fractured But Whole last night. I've been playing it as my "change of pace" backup game while going through Kenshi and Bard's Tale 4. The game started slow (oh boy, another fart joke <sigh>) but it got good after about 10 hours.

The big surprise for me was the battle system. It sets your kids (typically 4 including your character) on a grid along with your opponents and each character gets a turn. It was a bit jarring at first because many powers only go east and west along the grid, not north and south, so your young hero might not be able to hurt somebody standing right next to him but can hurt an opponent 4 squares to the east. It actually requires some real tactical thinking if you play on the hardest difficulty. Don't expect anything in Hearts of Iron's league but it isn't all cotton candy, either.

The save system lets you save anywhere and there's also an auto-save system. I wouldn't count on using the latter, though. Sometimes you can get in a situation where you're going to have to go through a boss to get back to the rest of the game and, if all you've got are auto-saves, you could find yourself facing a really nasty fight with no way to get back out on the town to level up or buy more burritos.

There were some issues. The battles started locking up on me sometimes toward the end of the game. (Alt-tab out and back in fixed it every time.) Mouse/keyboard works but seemed kinda hacked-in sometimes. (When moving the fart-targeting pointer, I had to wave the mouse around a little before the GUI picked up on it.) Also, as I said at the start, the first hours were pretty slow and not very funny.

The two big DLCs (Bring the Crunch and From Dusk Till Casa Bonita) were good ones but I wouldn't bother with the others. Total playing time for me at hard difficulty was about 45 hours. Unlike the first South Park game, this one requires UPlay but it didn't cause any issues for me.

All in all, it was a fun game. A little pricey if it isn't on sale but the game out almost three years back so sales should be easy to find. Obviously, if you don't like South Park humor, don't even bother looking into the game.

P.S. Just go ahead and get some frozen tex-mex to have on hand while playing the game. It will make you hungry for it. Often.

About to finish DAO. I would write up but at this point everyone probably knows it. The best of the 3 IMO even if graphics have ages. Still love the party banter, companions, story, lore, quests, etc.

My Warden is brutal this time - much more harsh against those who aren't nice. No real second chances given. Very different play style for me as I am usually much nicer. Think its the real world influence. Still fun. Mainly completed with Alistair, Mabari, and Wynne.

Replaying all of them over the summer since right now, for me, it is a major dry spell for games. Not even sure when the next game I want to play will be out.

The Werewolf one, Wrath of the Righteous, and 2077 are the three main ones at the moment and only Wrath I am positive about.

Finished with The Last of Us Part 2.

Way too tired and emotionally drained to give a full blown review, so I'll leave it at a bullet-point list of my opinions on various subjects.

Graphics/Music/Atmosphere/World Building/Location Design:
- Absolutely top-notch. This has to be one of the best looking games I've ever played. And all locations are just fenomenal. And absolute blast to explore. That's one thing I could do forever in this game. Just explore every nook and cranny.
- Also, some of the abandoned/infested buildings/locations are just the most creepy I've seen by a long mile.
- The music is also pretty good, but somehow not as memorable as in Part 1. I was surprised the composer that did Mr. Robot also worked on this, alongside Gustavo Santaolalla, the composer from part 1.
- Sound design and sounds effects, also top-notch

Gameplay/Combat - very similar to Part 1, but quite a bit improved. Main characters move a whole lot smoother. Plus, I just love the addition of going prone, and being able to hide in grass. I abused the hell out of that one. I'm quite awful at aiming with controllers, so I had to make due with what I had.

Story/Narrative - this is the big contention point. The element that's most devisive about the game. Some like it, some love it, some hate it with a passion. The leaks that spoiled major plot points before the release also didn't help at all. The issue is, it is now very hard to differentiate who hates it because they've actually played it in full, and hate/dislike it. And who hates it because they absolutely oppose some of those spoiled plot points. The best thing you can do, I guess, is to try to take it all into full context, and try to be honest with yourself as to why/if you hate it. Personally, while the story is not perfect, I liked the idea it was going with. I liked the deconstruction of things that happened in Part 1. And while there are some plot points or decisions that characters make, that might not land perfectly, there are also some very very powerful moments. Either some rare moments of beauty, or more frequently moments of horror, dread, shock, fear, I guess everything on the negative spectrum? It was one hell of a ride, I must admit.

Another point about the story, and I'll end with this (as it seems, even though I began this post with the idea I would not write a wall of text, it somehow turned into that). I've heard opinions that they could have written a whole lot of other/better stories, with Joel and Ellie. And not this one. But personally, I've thought about that, and I'm not really sure where else they could have taken this story. The relationship between Joel and Ellie has pretty much reached full maturity, I would imagine, and I really don't see what else they could explore in that relationship, that would be equally interesting/impactful as this one. So, even if this isn't perfect, I think it's very good for what it was trying to do. It does have a couple of misteps, but most things arent't perfect. But I would agree, that overall, the story in Part 1 is a better one, and better implemented. But this one is so different, and ambitious, that I cannot not give it credit. In my opinion, whatever you think of the plot, it took balls of steel for them to take it in this direction. And I'd rather they take serious risks, and fail/not land perfectly, than to just phone it in with something too similar to Part 1.

Oh, another point to end on, I've also read complaints about some of the plot points that they are far fetched. That things happen too conveniently for the plot to go a certain direction. While I would agree with this, I find it hard to fault Part 2 for this, and not Part 1, which also had convenient plot points. I find it dubious to demand realistic/probable events in one, and not the other.

Anyways, that's it. I think I'd like for Part 2 to also get some expansion, like Part 1 did. But I'm not sure how many would buy it. But a man can dream. I'd love a "remastered" version for PS5 like they did for the PS4 version. And what I'd love even more, is for them to remake all graphics assets from Part 1, at the level of quality from Part 2, and run the first game in the same graphics/game engine. And then launch a full blown version for PS5, with both Parts included. Now that would be a dream.

EDIT: I found this nice interview with the director, and two of the lead actors, and Druckmann goes into some details regarding some of the complaints. I like it. I recommend it if you have some time to kill.

I finished The Last of Us 2 yesterday, and being exposed to a lot of the discussion and criticism around the game makes me want to completely stop coming to places where people discuss games. (I do want to be clear that I am NOT talking about the things Danutz_plusplus has written here, as those have been imo objective and fair)

I didn't watch/read the leaks so I don't know exactly what they contained, but having played through the game, I can make a fair guess. For one thing judging a game based on a summary of plot points rather than the game itself is ludicrous to me. And it would seem that a lot of people still share this sense of… betrayal, I guess, now that they've played the actual game.

People who become big fans of things often feel a sense of ownership over the characters and story in those things. We've seen it with Star Wars, various superhero films, and a host of other things. I get that. I do. I was/am very attached to characters in The Last of Us also.

But what I do NOT get is acting like, as a fan, you're personally betrayed if the story, created by the people who sink hours and blood, sweat and tears into a game, doesn't follow your exact blueprint. There are possibly legitimate criticisms one could level at the story of the sequel, and as time distances me from my gut feelings about it, I can probably hear and maybe agree with some of those. But that's not what I see most people ciriticizing. They're not criticizing the story that's actually being told here, they're criticizing the fact that things happened in the story that they didn't want to happen, for emotional reasons. And they're lashing out, in some cases even sending hateful messages to one of the actresses in the game.

It's tiresome. It's the tantrums of infants. Again, I'm not saying that the game is perfect or that you have to even like the game, but the "it's a shit game" bullshit and the 6/10's from people like Joe Vargas, who apparently jsut couldn't wrap his big baby brain around a plot development, are pathetic. And like I said, make me not want to read anyone's opinion about a game I play or want to play ever again.

For my part, TLoU2 was, hands down, the most emotionally grueling experience I've ever had playing a videogame. There were points at which I physically didn't want to press buttons because I didn't want things to happen that seeemd to be about to happen. It has absolutely superlative storytelling, and more memorable moments than most other 3 games put together. Its animation, acting, lighting, environmental graphics, AI, and almost every other element that goes into creating a game were executed at the highest possible level of craft and artistry. I did actually hate the game at times because it's unrelenting and brutal and did things to character I care about that I didn't care for, but I also love it for the same reasons because I'm don't go into games hoping they fulfill my fan ficition dreams. Naughty Dog took chances, especially narratively, and in so doing, created one of the best games ever made.

Btw, Dantuz_plusplus, I agree with you about the music. It's literally the only thing that stood out to me as lesser than in the first game. The main theme and ending theme of the first game are so perfect and so memorable, and there's nothing like that here. Probably my favorite bit of music is the ominous sound that plays at a couple of points, louder and louder, as the action and intensity ramps up (like before you encounter Jessie, if you remember that moment)

Yes, it's the wild west of opinions regarding Last of Us 2. I'm quite amazed how some people hate it, others love it. While I liked it with this playthrough, I do plan on doing another full run through the first and second games, when they release on PS5. Hopefully I'll have forgotten most the debating and arguing. And I'll be able to give it a fresh pair of eyes.

Yeah, I also quite distinctly remember the crescendo tension building music. It was quite good. I was surprised to see that alongside the original composer, they also got Mac Quayle who did the soundtrack for Mr. Robot. He was fantastic with that. And if you think about it, maybe a bit similar to the one in TLOU2. The tension building music especially.

About Angry Joe's review, for some reason I just couldn't listen to it all. I listened to about 15mins from the start, and then jumped around it. But I'm not sure I can take their opinion very strongly. They were very much against what they heard in the leaks. No measured response. No "well, let's see how they contextualize it". Just "it fucking sucks, and I'm not gonna like it". And another thing which probably didn't help was that they usually review games in a group, with OJ and Alex, sometimes on stream-live and sometimes on their own. For one thing, I doubt you can be attentive with every detail. And for another thing, you can't really enjoy this game if you have a group of people constantly joking around and talking smack about the game. Plus, the peer pressure of having the same reaction as your friends. I'm not saying their opinion would be drasticatlly different, but I would be curious to see them review the game after having played it on their own and not on stream. That's one thing I'll never understand. How can you play a story-driven game on stream, with an audience backseating you, and while trying to constantly entertain them. But ultimately, everybody is entitled to their opinion. And I'd rather have a very divisive game, than one where people's opinion is "meh".

Instead of Angry Joe, I rather resonated with Noah Gervais's review/analysis/critique:

danutz_plusplus said:

That's one thing I'll never understand. How can you play a story-driven game on stream, with an audience backseating you, and while trying to constantly entertain them.

Click to expand...

YES. There's a streamer named CohhCarnage, and I watched him play a few key points of the story and he's looking at his chat, looking at his phone, donation alerts are popping up and he's thanking them, etc. And then he has cricitisms to share? I don't want to hear them, good or bad, at that point. I don't trust anyone who's devoting half their attention to something to be a full, objective evaluator of that thing.

I should have seen it coming with AJ and crew when I saw that he posted a clip of him walking out on a pivotal early scene. He was also complaining that the game "didn't give him agency" at that moment. It's like....what? So you could avoid the plot point that the entire game hinges on? It was an ignorant, petulant statement and that and his review was my personal final straw in watching his channel (I've gotten tired of his schtick in general over the last year or so)

Sword Legacy: Omen (2018)

I remember reading about this Arthurian Legend Prequel RPG being developed a few years back and thinking that it looked like it was going to be a cool game potentially, but by the time it was released I'd completely forgotten about it.

Well, I won it in the RPGWatch summer raffle and was instantly reminded of all those positive thoughts I'd had those few years ago. I was a bit surprised I was the only one asking for it though, I would have thought it would have been quite popular around these parts.

I just completed it today having spent, according to steam, 19 hours on it over the last two weeks. Some people are reporting only spending 8 hours on it, but I find that a bit optimistic and likely wont include time spent dithering in shops, reading all the tooltips for everything and replaying quests to complete them more satisfactorily, etc.

It's an RPG in the more jRPG sense of what constitutes an RPG, in that you are given pre-designed characters with fully scripted personalities who go through the plot as per script and the only real player input is in choosing which characters to go on which missions and how you use your choice of skills in combat. Loot is very much locked by character class with only a small number of special items stating they are equipable by everyone. Our main character, for example, has four equipment slots, three of which have to be a specific type of item and are unequipable unless replacing them with an upgraded version of the exact same thing.

However, the art style is extremely western, with adult looking party members, bloody combat, including gruesome death animations, and lots of swearing in the character dialogues. This isn't to say it's entirely adult, however, as there's also a very strong comic-book vibe to the design, where the characters are all exaggerated clichés and speak via speech bubbles when in the exploration and combat zones.

I'm afraid I can't tell you much about the story as I zoned out from it after the first few quests, it's really not very engaging in the slightest and mostly comes across as padding or gibberish. Basically, woman kidnapped by arch-villain, arch-villain invading people, plague in the lands, etc, now you go investigate and resolve. Actually listening to or reading any of the cut-scene narratives wont help your quest nor really enlighten you to anything interesting nor provide any interesting twists.

It doesn't help that the main quest cut-scenes are just one guy obviously putting on a gruff voice and reading script at you, regardless of who's supposed to be speaking. Whether it's the kidnapped woman speaking or the arch-villain or your hero, its this one guy just reading their lines in the exact same gruff voice.

The more interesting dialogue occurs when your companions natter and bicker during camp. Unfortunately, none of this is voice acted and, unfortunately even more, reading accents is extremely laborious and there's only so much "ach weal lassie, ya ken know wha tha blazes Ima talkin aboot if ya dunne listen see" you can take before simply giving up any pretence of trying to take an interest in what anyone is saying.

Luckily there are skip buttons for all this shite and although I never used them for the main quest gruff guy (who I just let drone on in the background while I refilled my vape or whatever), I quickly got in the routine of reading about three words of each camp conversation line and then pressing the skip-to-next-line button. It seemed to be mostly clichés anyway but I suspect it could have been amusing with decent voice actors hamming it up.

The quests themselves are pretty good though. You go from your camp screen into a zone by selecting to perform a quest. These zones allow yo to explore freely and hunt for loot and plot and what have you. When you inevitably bump into the enemy combat starts and it becomes a turn-based tactical combat affair. Which I have to say, it pretty much the best thing about the game.

Each zone isn't very big and will usually have a save-point half-way into it somewhere. Saving is automatic in the camp screen, but is based on the checkpoints while in zones. There are no save-slots at all. Which is a bit annoying when you've completed a quest but just want to try out that one quest again, for whatever reason, nope can't do that, have to replay the entire game again to get back to the beginning of that particular quest. Which is a real bummer when it's the last quest of the entire game that you want to try doing again slightly differently now that one knows everything that happens in it.

There isn't any choice and consequence anyway, so I've no idea what the deal is with limited saving. Well, there was one C&C, but I have no idea what it did and it was extremely banal. There are lots of options to restart quests while you're doing them or to stop for a break at check-points, so reloading isn't even frowned upon either, in fact the game actively encourages you to do this as a feature. But thou shalt not have save slots. Because.

However, as I said, the combat is kinda worth it. Going into the last quest I was absolutely loving the game really. The basic gameplay loop of gruff voice guy - start quest - find stuff and kill some baddies - buy skills, equipment - skim read camp chatter - move on - repeat was super-satisfying and worked out well for just playing a couple hours a session here and there without too much emotional investment.

And the combat itself is very interesting. I got the hang of it very quickly and all the skills each character can get access to make for some very interesting and unique encounters. Shoving things, poking things, bashing things, dashing, blocking, retreating and assaulting.

The game doesn't really tell you how to play the game and it's tutorial leaves more questions than answers, but as I got used to it I got used to it via not knowing how to do half the available stuff and still found myself creaming opponents with zero damage or near zero damage received. For example, I thought if a character died in a zone then they were dead, as their avatar vanished from the roster, so I'd just redo the quest if this happened, completely unaware that it just means they'll be injured in the camp screen once the quest was over.

Likewise I had no idea you could use your willpower to gain extra action points, but then I never needed to do that anyway. The game has quite a vast variety of consumables, from cure poison to bonus attack points, but I barely ever used a consumable other than the odd heal potion and the odd action point potion. I think I used one cure poison the entire game, maybe two. And I didn't even bother looking in the apothecary shops until literally the last zone, just to see if I'd missed anything interesting.

I was always in the blacksmith and black market shops though as the equipment is very interesting and the game has a very good variety of items and things to aim for even in such a short game. The loot-pacing I'd describe as being almost perfect.

This isn't to say that combat is a complete cakewalk. Even fully optimising my characters and totally crushing foes, one small lapse in concentration or miss-cued or miss-guessed positional play can and usually will result in the death of one of your characters. Which, if you're like me, will result in a reload for perfection's sake.

Its the kind of combat that's the perfect balance between thinking stuff out while not having to engage in Kasparov-level chess, of fast and vibrant action that doesn't feel snail paced from waiting for everyone to take their turn.

By the time I'd reached the final chapter I was fully into the combat and actually looking forward to playing the game some more. Raring to go. thinking about when I'll next be able to have some more of that sweet combat. I was thinking about giving the game an over-enthusiastic 8/10 regardless of all the crap aspects of the game. A game that was head and shoulders better than the sum of its parts.

Unfortunately, the very last zones in the very last quests are complete shit, either buggy or just downright facepalmingly bad. Which was a real shame.

In the penultimate fight, the enemy rogue uses 'infinite stab', a cool rogue ability. Its supposed to stop stabbing when the defender blocks a hit or if one of the hits misses. Alas, looking at the combat log, my character blocked loads of their stabs but the stabs just go on and on. It meant that it was literally impossible for my team to complete that zone with zero casualties. Even running away didn't help as that rogue was bugged to appear wherever you went regardless of its supposed Action Point limits. Two bugs for the price of one.

And then the final battle was just cinematic-spoiled shite as it auto-defeats all your characters apart from the main guy you were forced to play that quest with as soon as the end-boss gets to XYZ health. This wasn't the only cinematic-spoiled crap in this last fight, but you get the picture.

I'm not going to let this sour taste at the end prevent me from recommending the game though, I'm just going to have to tone down my enthusiasm from an 8/10 to a much more curb-your-enthusiasm 7/10.

The game has plenty of great moments hidden among the mediocrity and shitey bits and there's nothing like the feeling you'll get when you learn how to cream the combat and breeze through a quest with zero damage because of good use of party members and their unique skills and equipment that you chose for each character.

There's no shame in finding the game hard, there's only shame in not finding a way to make it easy via experience and basic brainpower. I say this because, interestingly, the game doesn't have a difficulty setting. And I approve of this in this instance, though, for some, this might also be a negative.

The music's shite as well by the way. The main menu sounds like a variation of the Psycho movie slashing sound, which is quite a hideous choice for a main menu screen and I don't remember anything else.

So yeah, I recommend everyone to have some fun mucking about with all the classes, class skills and equipment this game has to offer, it really IS worth it if you see it for sale in that 5-10 buck range. Much better than the sum of its parts, but has a lot of shite to laugh at or ignore 7/10.

I recently played through a few games:
1. Mass Effect 3
I really enjoyed the game. IT takes you through the ending of the trilogy and found it a very fun 3rd part. I had kept pushing back my playthrough as it was slammed in reviews and on most sites, but very happy I took the leap to play it.

Certainly recommend it if you enjoyed the first two in the series.

2. Renowned Explorers
This game had a lot of people raving about it when it came out. It's a rogue-lite turnbased tactics games. I think it's ok but after beating the game once, I did not see any point (for myself) to replay it again. The mechanics are interesting at first, but since it's all turnbased battles and CYOA type scenarios, I got bored of it at the end.

It might just be me, but I also got some serious slow down issues when running the game for over an hour or two.

I think it's a fun game if you can get it cheap - or as I did as part of the Origin basic access thing.

3. Tropico 6
Another one of the Basic Access games. I have always enjoyed playing these games. I think it's probably one of the better ones that has come out recently, with fun scenarios to play.
The main negative remains the feature of really selecting your leader's traits like in Tropico 1.

Finished The Outer Worlds on Nintendo Switch this weekend. This was my second run-through, and I actually took my time and really completed everything I could, taking about 60 hours.

Few thoughts:
- The Outer Worlds remains a favorite of mine for recent RPGs. I know it is smaller and less open than many ... don’t care. Love it. This second run will be my last for a while, but I am really glad I did a full ‘completionist’ run-through.
- Everything you have heard about the graphics of TOW on Switch is true - at best they are downgraded from the PC (even compared to trying it on my Surface Pro 7 it looked bad) ... and at worst they are blurry and awful. This is not a technically great port (and I have played Witcher 3 and now playing Crysis on Switch for comparisons of GOOD ports)
- Other issue (more of a problem IMO) is slow-spawning of enemies. Edgewater is the worst for this - you can run through a deserted area and have the enemies appear and ambush you when you are right in front or behind them. Annoying and the only way around it is to walk through known spawn-points.
- Once you get used to mediocre graphics and the respawn issue, the game plays wonderfully - controls work well, game itself is robust, loads are not too much longer, etc.

Overall I would not recommend buying a Switch just to play The Outer Worlds (never been big into that ‘system seller’ concept anyway), nor would I recommend buying the Switch version if you have a PC that will play it reasonably well. BUT, if you already have a Switch but don’t have a PC or console that will play it ... it is actually OK on Switch.