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gospvg · 28/02/2025

Play

Cyberpunk 2077 (PS5)

I have gone past the 100 hour mark in this game now, I have fully decked our Gold Tier Cyber Implants and I still tend to default to using hacking skills and stealth combat, usually by hacking a camera and using that to take out nearby enemies preferably by explosive devices.

I am focusing on increasing my Solo & Shinobi skills so default to Shotgun/Assault Rifle when required, the other skills are nearly all maxed out. Truthfully combat with guns is way too easy with the Smart Assault Rifle.

I love exploring and finding side quests or an NPC mission, it is a huge open world.

I started the game at the beginning of the year so it is going to take me a long while yet before I complete it!

It Takes Two (PS5)

My daughter wanted to try this and it's an enjoyable co-op action platformer with some light puzzle sequences. We played for a few hours and hopefully I can convince her to get back to it so we can complete it.

Backlog

On the shelf

Annoyingly, I only lasted 5 weeks into the new year before purchasing a game!

Fist of the North Star (£3.99 in a PSN Sale) released by RGG Studio (Now you can understand my weakness!) for that price it was too good an offer to say no & RGG can do not wrong.

No idea when I am going to play it because Cyberpunk 2077 is eating up all my gaming time & I have not even got to the Phantom Liberty DLC!

PlayStation Plus (To Play)

Star Wars Jedi Survivor & Dragon Age Veilguard was recently added to PS+ so looking forward to enjoying those games.

Want

Nothing, nothing at all, I just need more time to enjoy gaming!

Bin

Starting a game, one annoying little gripe with Cyberpunk 2077 on the PS5 is having to press continue four times to load the game, I do wish there was a continue feature on the PS5 dashboard like Infinite Wealth that took me straight into the game from my latest save file. I do miss the Xbox Quick Resume feature.

Xexyz · 23/02/2025

Having got further than ever before in Populous the Beginning (including a couple more levels after I posted previously), I find myself strangely unwilling to finish the game. After the last level I played there was a cutscene which showed my shaman becoming a god and passing the mask on; the last level feels like it may be very different to the rest, and after so many years I don’t know if I want it to end. And so rather than play that, I went back to the original game, with my standard tactic of raising the land a few levels higher than my opponent, and then waiting until I could flood them and destroy the majority of their followers.

And it mostly worked.

I remember that on the Mega Drive I had a sheet of paper on which I wrote down level codes. One of the clever things about Populous was that, while there were 500 levels defined, you didn’t have to play them all on the way to the end. Instead, depending on how you did you would skip over several levels at a time. This also meant that two games, starting from GENESIS, would usually be different, and the tactics you needed to deploy would vary as well.

And so this time I found my standard tactics didn’t work so well on a few early levels. First, there were some mountainous levels where my opponent naturally built high themselves, so the floods didn’t destroy all their settlements. Second, there were some levels where my opponent also had the flood ability – in one case that was their only power – which again meant they were loath to settle too low (although there was one occasion when the enemy had exclusively built on the lowest level, and then used flood, almost wiping themselves out and not me). Third, there were a couple of levels where I didn’t have the flood power either, and so I had to use other abilities to overrun the enemy; mainly through the use of powerful knights.

One key tactic is to farm the large castles by raising a hill next to them, meaning their capacity drops and a new settler emerges to create a new village elsewhere, and then dropping the hill again to reinstate the castle

Reacting to events makes the game interesting, including repairing settlements after swamps have been cast, building around volcanoes, and watching the random rock monster or witch generate a straight line of stones or vegetation straight through both factions. But building high is still key, except on those levels where nobody can flood or use earthquakes …

deKay · 22/02/2025

Sadly not the full Metroidvania experience I was expecting (the reason it ended up on my wishlist in the first place, following a review), Momodora still feels like one. Creepy town with a creepy castle, a curse, a map to explore, and pixel graphics? It certainly has the look of one.

What’s missing is all the extra powers that open up new areas. Sure, there are some, but very few. That means it is more a standard explorey platformer, hence my disappointment, but luckily it was still good!

Apart from the ending. I got a bad ending after defeating the final boss, but there was no explanation why it happened and seemingly no exposition as I was playing that it was possible. After that, I returned to the game and found a couple of extra things I’d missed and that allowed me to get the good ending, but it took some extensive exploring without really knowing what I was looking for, or where to look.

Apparently this Momodora is the third game in a series of (currently) four games. The first two are mostly lost to the winds, and the fourth came out fairly recently. I might pick it up if it’s cheap.

deKay · 22/02/2025

My daughter and I were big fans of the original River City Girls so the sequel was sat on my wishlist for ages waiting for a bit sale. That came around, and we played it through together.

It’s more of the same, really. A side-scrolling, semi-open-world beat-em-up with RPG elements set in the world of Kunio-kun/River City Ransom and made by Wayforward, just like the first game. It has a great cartoon style, loads of in-jokes (with both River City adjacent links, like Double Dragon and Crash And The Boys, and Wayforward properties like Mighty Switch Force) and satisfying and upgradable combat.

As it’s set in the same city as the first game, many locations are back – like school and shopping centre) although they have been modified so aren’t a complete copy-and-paste. There are plenty of new areas though. Similarly, there are both returning and new characters, although I don’t think most of the new ones are as good as the ones in the original. Also returning is another soundtrack from Megan McDuffee, which is also excellent.

The plot is mostly concerned with revenge on the Girls taking down the bad guy in the last game, although there are a couple of twists.

Gameplay-wise there are a few tweaks to improve stuff from before. Shop purchases work slightly differently, and there’s seemingly a lot more money available with which to buy them. The game seems easier too, meaning less death (which causes both progress and money loss).

It’s not all improvements though, sadly. Loading times are particularly bad, but also there are a number of bugs like items getting stuck out of reach, sound cutting out, and a few full crashes. Nothing major because of frequent save points but annoying nonetheless. Some of the new areas, like the overdone game trope of the “forest maze”, aren’t great either, and I’m sure there’s more backtracking this time round too, hindered by the aforementioned loading times.

That said, the fun, humour and style of the game massively outweigh the issues. It’s maybe not quite as enjoyable as the original, but doesn’t miss it by much.

March 2025 – Yes I am still playing Cyberpunk 2077!

91: Slippers Go Under Defeat

Populous: being unable to flood

Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight (Switch): COMPLETED!

River City Girls 2 (Switch): COMPLETED!