Topic: Pure Xbox Game Club - Halo 2 (Nov)

Started playing A Plague Tale: Innocence on my PS5 yesterday. I played a decent amount of it on my Xbox One X a year or so ago, but never finished it. It's been an enjoyable return so far, and while I know this is an Xbox forum, they did a pretty nice job implementing DualSense features into the game given that it's just an upgrade and not a whole new game.

As for voting, I will pass this time around. While obviously I'm participating this month thanks to the PS5/Series X version releasing, none of the games on the list will be on my play list for September. I'll be knee deep in Tales of Arise and Kena.

@K1LLEGAL Yeah, Yakuza 5 was a bit all over the place and longer than it should've been. But I guess it was during a time when the series wasn't that popular and the devs didn't know where to go next with the series. Luckily, Yakuza 6 brought it back around and is a much more enjoyable Yakuza game. I'm very curious to see what I'm going to think of Judgment once I get around to that game.

@K1LLEGAL myst is a good shout, I've always been curious about that game but never played it!

@KilloWertz it's good to compare differences between platforms. I'm quite interested actually, how does the sling feel with adaptive triggers. I'm sort of imagining the trigger moving up and down by itself under your index finger but to be fair, I've never played on a ps5 so I might be overestimating the dualsenses capabilities 😅. What other sorts of things does it do?

@ralphdibny It's actually refreshing that they didn't go the cliche route so to speak and just do what some shooters have done where it just makes it hard to press the trigger because it's trying to simulate how it would be to pull a trigger. Here in A Plague Tale, they combined the adaptive triggers and the haptic feedback so it basically pulsates under the trigger whenever you pull the trigger to start your shot.

It also does that when you are running, which was a bit of an odd feeling at first, but cool. It's different than most games because the couple I've experienced where it tries to simulate walking and running (Control and even Astro's Playroom) using just uses the haptic feedback only and not combine it so it actually vibrates underneath the trigger. It's probably because this is one of the rare games that uses the RT for more than just shooting.

@KilloWertz ahhh sounds really cool actually! I need to have a go on a ps5 at some point. My mate has one but yeah, covid. He seems to really like it though.

I've always kind of thought that if you don't notice things like rumble or other controller gimmicks like sound etc. then they have been done right. The gimmick doesn't even have to be subtle but if it matches up with whatever is on screen to the point where it just becomes part of the experience then it's perfect. I love rumble in controllers, id never play without rumble because I'd feel like I was missing some of the intended experience!

@ralphdibny Good luck on getting one someday then.

Obviously you notice it in the game, but it's not obnoxious and works well in the game, so it's basically what you said.

I'm at Chapter 15 now. I'm likely going to finish it at some point today as there's 17 total chapters. A few frustrating parts here and there so far, but almost every game has those.

Not really a spoiler, but there is one chapter (I think Chapter 14) where you play as Hugo and you can't be detected. I give them credit for getting fairly creative with ways that you have to go in order to make it past guards and such.

@KilloWertz cheers, yeah it will be some time far on the future to be honest. I'm not desperate for a next gen machine (a new metal gear solid would change that though! 😅). I've got a lot of real world stuff going on at the moment too as my partner and I are planning to move in together so I actually have to spend my earnings on adult stuff like rent and food from now on 😭. Gotta do it at some point though haven't I, I'm in my early 30s now 😂

My game time has been really slow this week because of work and sorting all that stuff out. I think I'm still only on chapter 10 or 11. Hopefully I'll get some game time in but I suspect all the lettings agents will be phoning me up today for feedback on their properties so we'll see.

Looking forward to polishing this one off though and moving on to the next game!

Finished the game tonight. Pretty good for 15 chapters.... And then Chapter 16 came, which almost ruined the game for me with it's absurd difficulty spike. Two parts specifically that is, which was made all the more annoying when you had to sit through the dialogue and re-do parts of it that you easily could get through just to get back to the point that kept tripping me up both times. It was unfortunate too as I ended up finishing the game to get it over with because I didn't want the time I sank into it to go to waste rather than being into it enough to want to finish it..

With that said, I still am impressed with what a small studio could do, and what they could do with a PS5 upgrade of a game. I'm still interested in playing the sequel as it was a pretty solid game for 15 of the 16 story chapters (Chapter 17 is after the story is over). I just hope they learned from this game that there's nothing wrong with keeping the game balanced from beginning to end. Ramping up the difficulty and frustration just because it's the final chapter is entirely unnecessary.

@KilloWertz nice one! Well done on sticking it out.

I'm hoping to get some time in on it tonight. I have to say that my interest is waning with the long (few days) breaks I've had to take due to real life plans/work. Gonna stick it out and try and get to the end in the next couple of nights though

Started up Psychonauts 2 and played through the first level. This game is seriously so much fun! The controls feel great compared to the first game and the mechanics feel more natural to use, especially in combat. I don't know how other people played the first game, but I just used the shooting ability all the time there because punching was risky as you could get hit by the enemies. Now there's more strategy to the mechanics, for example shooting down flying enemies, stunning censors with objects before punching them and using pyrokinesis to burn certain enemies. In other words, the combat is much more varied and involved compared to the first game.

I also really like how they brought back so many characters from the previous game. It just feels more fleshed-out when you have all the characters you've come to know instead of starting over from the beginning with only new characters.

So yeah, the game is a lot of fun to play thus far. I'm so glad that we played through the first one and are playing through the second one now. This is going to be one awesome game!

@KilloWertz I'm on this bit now, I'd say that probably was a bit of a spoiler in the end. Not a massive issue or anything, I just think the sequence might have been more of a surprise. Might be worth spoiler tagging any late game character swaps /story beats in future.

Normally I'll preface a spoiler tag with an episode/chapter/level number so people can choose to click it if they are either at that point or if they don't care about spoilers. I know people will have different thresholds on what constitutes a spoiler so may be better to err on the side of caution with these things.

@KilloWertz just to be clear, I'm not telling you off or anything and I wouldn't expect you to care even if I was telling you off 😂. It doesn't even sound like you were sure if it was a spoiler or not anyway, but yeah, probably better to drop some tags in if you're not sure!

I'm on chapter 15 now, I think I'll put it down for the eve and hopefully finish it off tomorrow.

I'm glad the rewards are lining up with our games a bit actually. 100 points for a game pass quest in a plague tale and 250 points punch card for an achievement in Psychonauts

@ralphdibny It's all good. I know you weren't telling me off or anything. I just genuinely didn't think it was much of a spoiler since you don't really know the reason why or what the actual portion of the game is outside of the bit I said. I will spoiler tag stuff like that in the future though.

As for Chapter 16, it's entirely possible you'll get through it a lot faster than I did. If I'm failing on something over and over again, I tend to bang my head up against the wall rather than look up help on YouTube until I've already done it for far too long. Still, I saw plenty of comments complaining about both sequences that really gave me trouble for the videos I watched, so it definitely seems to be an issue.

@KilloWertz cool cheers 👍 good stuff, yeah it was just a general thought but I wanted to clarify in case my post sounded stern or something. It's hard to convey intonation over text.

Hopefully yeah! It's one of the reasons I put it down for the evening actually. I didn't want to end up spending hours on a difficulty spike so I thought I'd just save it for tomorrow.

I tend to use guides/Vids on either stuff I care less about (such as Ace Combat 7) or stuff where I have literally no clue on in games I care more about. And that's usually after I've given my brain a long time to work it out, maybe even slept on it. Time is a factor too, if I need to finish something and I don't have time to sleep on it then I might resort to a guide. I also use them for collectibles.

Not sure if I'll bother with going back for collectibles in A Plagues Tale, I feel like I'm ready to move on. Between Streets of Rage 4 for PS GC and Psychonauts 2 for the PX GC, I really do have a busy schedule 😅😭

I just done the one chapter on A Plague Tale tonight in the end. Hopefully I finish work early-ish tomorrow and can do chapter 16

Just finished Plague…. Can see what folk mean about the difficulty spike, but in the end I really enjoyed it, was very invested by the end - definitely looking forward to Requiem. This is a game that’s going to tear my heart out, I can tell. Tomorrow, Raz and the gang!

Just finished the second major level in Psychonauts 2 and I'm absolutely loving the variety and creativity of the levels. It's always so exciting to see what the next level is going to be like. Not to mention that the second level in particular reminded me a lot of Super Mario Galaxy. Simply put, really enjoying the game a lot so far.

My only gripe right now is that there are way too many cut-scenes that break up the flow of the levels. Instead of walking a bit, then get interrupted by a cut-scene, the game should just let the characters talk in the background while you're going through the levels. That way both the gameplay and the narrative can keep going without anything being interrupted. But yeah, it's only a minor thing because I'm enjoying the story a lot but I wish it could just be presented a bit better.

Just polished off A Plague Tale. Not sure what to say really. I think the game is best played in one or two sittings. The few day breaks I was having due to work/other stuff were really breaking up the flow of the game too much for me.

I think my favourite part of the game is easily the music. I might have to look into downloading the soundtrack. It was all really good but I think the score to the dream sequence really stood out to me.

@antifyre nice one, yeah I had a bit of trouble with some of that last chapter. I do wonder if Rodric's Sean Bean-esque death would have had more impact had I not died like ten times in the sequence that leads up to it 😅

@LtSarge cool that you've made some progress! The Sacha Nein mental world in the first one really reminded me off Mario galaxy as well!

Looking forward to getting started on it. I think I'm going to crack on with the Push Square Game Club's Streets of Rage 4 first though. Or maybe at the same time, we'll see!

@ralphdibny I played through Streets of Rage 4 last year and it isn't that long of a game, maybe 2-3 hours per playthrough. I couldn't bother playing through it more than once though, it's just the same game but with different characters. It was good though!

One thing I've noticed with Psychonauts 2 so far is that DoubleFine is doing a much better job at presenting the characters compared to the first game. In that one, they just throw all of the characters at you and you barely know anything about them. I'm referring mostly to the campers in this case, of which there were so many. Then they don't even show up that much throughout the story and so they become instantly forgettable. However, in Psychonauts 2, there aren't that many students with you, only six of them. They show up pretty much everywhere and you even get to do side quests for them. Not to mention all the other major characters in this game, it's like the devs actually nailed this aspect of the game in contrast to the previous one.

I feel like this game could've turned out much differently if DoubleFine didn't take their time with it. I don't know how to explain it, but it just feels like a lot of things were added because they had the extra time. For example, more characters, more voice acting, more cut-scenes and so on. I often think about this when it comes to games, like how different could they have been if developers were given more time. I do wonder if Microsoft's other first-party studios are also taking their time with their games. For example, Ninja Theory has been so quiet about Hellblade 2 since they announced it in 2019 and it does feel like they're trying to make it the best game it could possibly be instead of rushing it out and given us a standard experience. Either that or they're having trouble with the game's development, lol.