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August 2024 Update – I Banish you!

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Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden - Wikipedia 

Playing Now

Banishers - Ghosts of New Eden

Continuing my quest to focus on games released this year, I picked up Banishers. Developed by Don't Nod who made Life is Strange (which I have still not played) but I did enjoy their first game Remember Me & climbing adventure Jusant.

Banishers has you playing the role of ghost busters (really needs a trailer with the theme music), you help out local villagers who have been haunted and then decide the outcome.These outcomes will effect the story and ending of the game. The combat is very satisfying and has a god of war feel but you can you do long range damage with the rifle or use some ghost powers. I like how everything is tied into the one overarching plot throughout the whole game & a great cast for the voice-acting. With every open-world game there are always gotta collect them all icons & combat challenges. Banishers is not different except the collect quests usually reward you with new equipment & challenges give you materials that are required to upgrade these equipment.

I am nearing the end game with only a few more haunted cases to complete but this is a game I'm enjoying very much. Way better than the 6/10 or 7/10 reviews.

Fortnite Chapter 5 Season 3

The season is nearly coming to an end & truthfully I will be glad to see the back of it, I did not enjoy the focus on vehicle combat and if it was not for the Reload or Pirates Mid-Season pass I would have stopped playing after getting the T60 skin.


The next season will be starting soon on 16th August and it will be time to get fed some Marvel content.

Playing Complete

Judgment

A different spin to the Yakuza formula with Yagami and co in a detective/lawyer game. Using the familiar location of Kamarucho the story delves deep into Yagami's life and explains how his short lived lawyer career turned him into a detective yet whilst still retaining his ability to get involved in street brawls :)

There is quite a bit of side missions and helping around the city to make friends that then later can help you in combat. You have the usual Sega Arcade (Space Harrier, Virtua Fighter, Motor Raid & Kamuro of the Dead), Dating, Crane Mini game etc

At some point I will play the follow-up Lost Judgment.

Playing Next

Sand Land, I have purchased the Akira Tomiya adaption of the 2000 Manga so this will be next on my list.

2024 releases I am keen to enjoy are Rise of the Ronin, Balatro, Star Wars Outlaws & The Plucky Squire. I expect Death Stranding 2 & Metal Gear Solid Delta will get delayed to 2025.

Older titles include Cyber Punk 2077, Spider-Man 2, Outer Wilds, Lost Judgment, Like A Dragon Ishin, Sea of Stars, Shadow Tactics, Baldurs Gate 3 & Shadow Gambit.

Enjoy your gaming & remember you are never too old to play video games.

August 2024 Update – I Banish you!

Posted on Written by

Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden - Wikipedia 

Playing Now

Banishers - Ghosts of New Eden

Continuing my quest to focus on games released this year, I picked up Banishers. Developed by Don't Nod who made Life is Strange (which I have still not played) but I did enjoy their first game Remember Me & climbing adventure Jusant.

Banishers has you playing the role of ghost busters (really needs a trailer with the theme music), you help out local villagers who have been haunted and then decide the outcome.These outcomes will effect the story and ending of the game. The combat is very satisfying and has a god of war feel but you can you do long range damage with the rifle or use some ghost powers. I like how everything is tied into the one overarching plot throughout the whole game & a great cast for the voice-acting. With every open-world game there are always gotta collect them all icons & combat challenges. Banishers is not different except the collect quests usually reward you with new equipment & challenges give you materials that are required to upgrade these equipment.

I am nearing the end game with only a few more haunted cases to complete but this is a game I'm enjoying very much. Way better than the 6/10 or 7/10 reviews.

Fortnite Chapter 5 Season 3

The season is nearly coming to an end & truthfully I will be glad to see the back of it, I did not enjoy the focus on vehicle combat and if it was not for the Reload or Pirates Mid-Season pass I would have stopped playing after getting the T60 skin.


The next season will be starting soon on 16th August and it will be time to get fed some Marvel content.

Playing Complete

Judgment

A different spin to the Yakuza formula with Yagami and co in a detective/lawyer game. Using the familiar location of Kamarucho the story delves deep into Yagami's life and explains how his short lived lawyer career turned him into a detective yet whilst still retaining his ability to get involved in street brawls :)

There is quite a bit of side missions and helping around the city to make friends that then later can help you in combat. You have the usual Sega Arcade (Space Harrier, Virtua Fighter, Motor Raid & Kamuro of the Dead), Dating, Crane Mini game etc

At some point I will play the follow-up Lost Judgment.

Playing Next

Sand Land, I have purchased the Akira Tomiya adaption of the 2000 Manga so this will be next on my list.

2024 releases I am keen to enjoy are Rise of the Ronin, Balatro, Star Wars Outlaws & The Plucky Squire. I expect Death Stranding 2 & Metal Gear Solid Delta will get delayed to 2025.

Older titles include Cyber Punk 2077, Spider-Man 2, Outer Wilds, Lost Judgment, Like A Dragon Ishin, Sea of Stars, Shadow Tactics, Baldurs Gate 3 & Shadow Gambit.

Enjoy your gaming & remember you are never too old to play video games.

Picross S4 (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Yes. It is another of Jupiter’s almost identical picross games. And yes, it is even longer than the previous ones I played. And yes, I will be buying Picross S5 when I see it on sale. What are you implying?

There’s nothing new in this one, apart from all the puzzles being new of course. What I mean is there’s no new modes or mechanics or anything. It does have some huuuuuuge bonus puzzles if you have save data from earlier games in the series, and a couple of those took me over an hour each!

85: My First Brand New Chainsaw

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Sneaking in just before the tail of the month like some sort of ninja in audio form, it’s time for Episode 85 of that podcast you subscribed to that time and you keep intending on listening to it but you’re a busy person and other podcasts keep filling your app and it’s OK, we know you love us anyway even without your ears.

This time, deKay, Kendrick and Toby tell each other, and you, our listener, about such things as Humble Games shutting down (or is it? (yes, it is)), why college football is so popular in the US, target audience Skibidi toilet news, dodgy Intel, and how in the olden days we had to perform Dark Arts in order to have a LAN party. What’s a LAN party? Oh my sweet summer child. Plus! Games!

  • Frog Detective
  • Shin-chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation – The Endless Seven-Day Journey
  • Another Code: Recollection
  • Wolfenstein Cyberpilot
  • Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle
  • Agents of Mayhem
  • Putt and Putter
  • Valkyria Revolution

And you thought you could escape the Olympics by listening to us instead? Hahaha, nope.

(Direct link here)

Intro music credits: The morning dance routine from Shin-chan

Don’t forget, if you want to contact us with questions or comments for or about the show, you can email podcast@ugvm.org.uk or publicly shame us https://mas.to/@ugvmpodcast on the Mastodons.

Shin-chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation – The Endless Seven-Day Journey (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Kaz Ayabe is known for making, well, the same summer holiday game over and over again. He has a series of titles called Boku no Natsu-yasumi (which means “my summer holiday”) which are quiet little games set in rural Japanese villages where you collect bugs and catch fish and run errands and, well, that’s it. You discover secrets and there are events and stuff but they’re like Animal Crossing on whatever the opposite of steroids are.

On the 3DS, Ayabe released a similar game called Attack of the Friday Monsters which is more of the same thing only with giant monsters and a not-Ultraman woven into the plot.

Anyway. This Shin-chan game, also by Ayabe, is the same game again. Only with characters from the Crayon Shin-chan series of manga and anime. I’ve no real knowledge of the series so that bit didn’t appeal to me, but an English translation of this game series is pretty unusual so has been on my wishlist waiting for a fat sale for a while.

As before, you catch bugs and pick plants, and talk to people – all of whom have weirdly deformed and badly drawn faces because that’s what they look like in Shin-chan – while you’re staying with some family friends in a rural Japanese village. Only this time, there’s a mad professor who wants to take over the world and he does this by summoning dinosaurs to wander the streets and forcing Shin-chan to relive the same week over and over – hence the “Endless Seven Day” from the title.

Despite this evil man and his dinosaurs, there’s literally no peril here. It’s still a relaxing tale where you explore the village, listen to cicadas, and chat to people. You can do collection quests for pocket money, submit all your adventures (like “I caught a new fish!”) to the local newspaper for more pocket money, and take part in a 1-on-1 miniature robot dinosaur fighting game like those beetle fighting games the Japanese love.

It’s a lovely little game, with two issues. One is that each area has a mostly fixed camera angles which causes problems for a few reasons. Firstly, sometimes you’re waaaaaay off in the distance which makes catching things tricky as they’re a pixel big. Secondly, the fixed camera isn’t the same orientation for every scene, so building the map of the village in your head is hard especially when it does that thing where you come off the right hand side of a scene and appear somewhere other than the left hand side of the next one. Very disorienting.

The other issue is that Shin-chan himself has a very disturbing voice. The noises he makes whenever he catches a bug or picks a plant or completes a task bring to mind the noises kids used to make to make fun of Joey Deacon, for those who know what that sounds like. Anyway, that’s what Shin-chan sounds like. It’s probably cute or endearing in Japan but it just sounds so wrong here. Especially since it’s every five seconds or so.

Those aside, it’s a nice little laid back game with a bonkers plot and ridiculous looking characters. Oh, and they do a silly dance every morning. What’s not to like?