After first playing through FF7 Rebirth earlier this year, I had intended to go back to it and complete a lot of the side content I originally missed.
This didn't happen, however, and my PS5 was stuffed back into its box and vanished into the loft for the next several months.

Just recently, I finally purchased another game for this system, allowing it to return from its exile.

Several years ago, I saw the short release trailer to this game, and it immediately got me interested. Back then, the game was still using its original, and far superior, name of Project Eve.

It took way, way too long for this thing to come out. I mean, why bother announcing games that are still several years away from release? It took so long that they even removed its original PS4 compatibility.
Oh well, I digress.

After all the wait, including letting a few months pass so the damn thing wouldn't be so expensive, I finally got to play it.

So these are the chronicles of my adventures through the wastelands, as I tackled Stellar Blade.

Firstly, I needed a console update to even play the game. But then, after updating, it wouldn't even let me use my controller if I didn't update its software as well.
Seriously, the controller software needs updating? What the hell is going on with consoles these days if that shit needs to happen? And what kind of software could possibly be in a controller anyway? I mean, you press a button, and the controller sends the signal to the console. It's not hard. Figure your shit out Sony, for fuck's sake.

Anyway, I was finally into the actual game, which is a third person action game, much like many others, I guess. In it, you play as Eve, a soldier who was a part of the latest expedition to retake Earth from hostile creatures. While on the planet, Eve gains allies, and does quests for, a bunch of people in the last human city, Xion. There's also a couple of large, open zones, with a myriad of secrets and collectibles to find.

Sound familiar? Because it is. There's no doubt that this game is massively influenced by Nier Automata, that I played last year.

Like that other game, this one puts a stunningly beautiful and very competent female warrior front and centre. And there's no doubt about it, her inclusion is one of the reasons why I wanted to play this. Having a bunch of weirdos hate on the game because of her also gave me fuel.

So how does our leading lady measure up in the character department?

Now, there's a big problem with this game in my opinion, and unfortunately Eve is part of it. Yes, she is gorgeous and kicks total ass, and it's a pleasure to follow her around while she does her thing. But just like all of the other characters in the game, and indeed, the entire story itself, she's just so bland. And as a fan of games that have great stories and characters, this was a massive let down.

In fact, when the barber first sees her, he looks her up and down and calls her dull. Now, at the time, he's commenting purely on the way she looks, and is therefore an idiot.
But the truth is, as a character, she is dull. Dull as fuck in fact. The entire cast is the same way. They have little in the way of personality, and while the sound of the voice actors suits their characters, their lines are delivered with such boredom and disinterest that the characters suffer even more because of it.
At times, Eve can even come off as quite rude to some of the other people in the city, whereas most of the time she's quite sweet and good-natured. It's just weird how she goes off on some people, especially if they comment on how good she looks. I mean, she wears all those crazy outfits, but doesn't think people will notice?

What's even worse is, she's seemingly as dumb as a used, soggy tea bag. How the hell does she not know what a guitar is? Or a piano? Or even a drink can? But somehow she knows what a matryoshka doll is? So strange.

She simply doesn't even enter the conversation when it comes to great female characters, like Tifa from FF7, or indeed 2B from Nier. And it's such a shame, because if the personality matched her looks, she could easily be up there with my other favourites.

While the game has plenty of exploration and sometimes frustrating platforming, the main meat and potatoes here is the combat. However, it's not the kind of combat you would normally think a game like this would have.

It's not the silly button-mashing mayhem of a hack'n'slash, or even the fast-paced counter attack style of something like the Arkham games. Rather, it's very tactical and precise, much like some of the boss fights in the FF7 remake games, but just for the entire game.

Most people would say this combat style is very much like Dark Souls, but as I have not played any of those games yet, I can't really comment. In fact, the only game I've played that I think could be described as even slightly Souls-like would be Jedi: Fallen Order, and there are definitely some similarities to that game here.

I can't really say that it's one of my favourite combat styles, by any means. And if anything, it's made even more frustrating because of the weird timing required for the parrying.

While I got more used to it as time went on, it felt almost like there's an input delay of sorts. At first, I could rarely get commands to register. I pressed block and she would just stand there and get smacked in the face.
It's like they made the game more challenging, not by making the enemies hard to beat, but by making the controls feel very sluggish. You almost have to anticipate everything rather than react with split second timing. I kept having these silly moments where I was spamming block, certain that an attack was about to come in, but it didn't.

And then there's the animation locks, which I've struggled with in other games. Why won't she dodge when I tell her? Oh, she's not finished swinging her sword around yet. Silly me.

My other issue with combat was the controls. As block/parry is on L1, I was absolutely miffed that the game does not come with rebindable buttons. That's such an odd choice.
I wanted block/parry on R1 to maintain parity with FF7 Rebirth, so I had to use the PS5's settings to swap L1 and R1. Though on a few of the very rare QTEs, this came with its own issues, as I had to remember the button prompts were the other way around. And navigating the menus sometimes made me feel like I was drunk.

There's also a weird thing that happens in regard to the power of the enemies. For example, the first Alpha Naytiba you fight is called Gigas. But then later on you fight another Gigas, only this time it's not an Alpha, but is twice as hard. What the hell was that all about?

This second Gigas fight was when I actually dropped the difficulty from normal to easy, as my old brain was having trouble and I was sick of trying. Typically, I did then go and beat it pretty quickly in the boss challenge mode on normal. Then I pressed the wrong button to exit and ended up fighting it again, managing another win. This little boost in confidence did not make me reconsider the drop in difficulty, though.

After all, I was not here for a challenge. With the story and characters not really gripping me, I was here purely for the ass kicking and the jiggly bits. Getting through the main game on easy, for speed purposes, then tackling the bosses on normal, to unlock the extra outfit, was my plan. However, this too changed, when I learned that multiple playthroughs would be needed to unlock all of the bosses in the challenge mode.

And I wasn't going to do that, even for a cool looking outfit.

Still, while elements of the combat frustrated me, it's kind-of odd to admit, but I also quite liked it in many ways. As some comments on the internet stated, it was probably too easy on easy mode, and while I may have eventually managed to trudge through it on normal, it would have taken a lot longer. It's a shame then, that there's not another difficulty between easy and normal, which would have probably been just about right for me.

Like the other Soulsy-kind of games, enemies respawn when you rest, and there are shortcuts you can open up while exploring, to make it easier to get back to places you've already been. Thing is in this game, most of these shortcuts are simple, thin metal gates that are locked from the other side. And you're telling me that this highly skilled and cybernetically enhanced warrior that can slice monsters and robots to ribbons can't just use her sword to cut through this old rusted metal? This definitely seemed odd.

In fact, there were several times where I thought the level design was a mess, mostly in the linear zones. For some reason, they don't give you a map during these areas, and finding anything without one is a chore. Gladly, the open zones do have maps, though there's no minimap for some bizarre reason. This would have been nice, so I wouldn't have to keep going into the menu to see where I'm going next.

Early on in my run, I was leaping back and forth between this game and Mad Max. I even stepped back from this game for a while to try and get that other one done. During that time, photo mode dropped, which may have been an influencing factor in my decision to dump that game and get back to this.

Absolutely love me a good photo mode.

I had read some comments that this new mode was only for selfies, but gladly that turned out to be false. And while it's not a patch on the amazing photo mode from Horizon, I think I managed to get some decent action shots.

The main problem is that the depth of field settings don't seem to work properly, but it's also that the menu doesn't remember your last used settings. T'was such a chore to keep changing everything again for every picture.

So after many hours, I finally came to the end. The late game story made me do little other than roll my eyes. There was no great reason why the big reveal couldn't have happened much earlier in the game, and there were characters that could have done way more good for the world if only they'd communicated about what they knew. It was so silly.

Despite its flaws, it's definitely a game I'm happy to have played, and I quite looked forward to booting it up every time.

I also think I did pretty much everything I wanted to do for a first playthrough, completing every side mission I found, collecting all the cans, and collecting almost all of the available outfits.
So if it's the case that this ends up being my only playthrough, at least I won't feel like I have unfinished business.

Show / hide photo mode gallery

The list of games I need to tackle is so long, I realised most of them are probably never going to get a look in. To even the playing field a little, I made myself a little script.

This script contains a list of the games I still need to complete, and I have decided that I'm occasionally going to use it to help me decide the next game to give a proper, good faith, go at.
Each time I run it, I will receive three random games from the list, from which I will then have to make my selection.

For this first use of the game chooser, it gave me the choice of Overcooked, Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice, or Mad Max.

As I'd already tried Overcooked, and it feels more like a multiplayer game anyway, I decided not to choose that one. I probably should have gone Hellblade, for its shorter run time, but I was liking the look of Mad Max, especially as it would be the first game of my MAXimum random game efforts.

This is a massive open world game where you drive around taking on the worst scum that the wasteland has to offer. Your buddy, Chumbucket, helps you out by upgrading and repairing your car.

There's also plenty of 3rd person brawling going on, with a similar style of combat to the Arkham games, though stripped down and without all of the gadgets.

There's a lot of good stuff going on with the game, and the basic mechanics are solid. If you're into typical open world games, you'd probably like this. Everything is here, such as towers to scout the area (in this case balloons), camps to take over, scrap to loot, enemy convoys to track down and disable. You name it.

But it was all of this extra filler that started getting me a little bit annoyed with the game. Now, it's not that the extra side content exists, but the fact that at many points in the main story, the game will not let you progress unless you have tackled enough of the side content.
So for the people that just like to straight-line the main story, this game is not for you.

It was also a problem in that there was just so much of this side content. It just became so repetitive. In addition, as you go through the zones, it becomes more and more difficult. For example, I was having to tackle armoured enemy vehicles long before I'd got the means to actually deal with them properly. Every battle became an exercise in escape, fix car, go back do some more chip damage, escape, fix car, etc...

The constant holding down of the button to loot, and to do nearly any other command, quickly became grating as well. Just like in Witcher 3, and having to hold down the button to use witcher senses. Why can all of these commands not just be press the button once?

There were also a bunch of sporadic bugs, like enemy cars disappearing right as I was about to ram them, or me seemingly hitting nothing on the road and getting smashed up into the air.

The end for this game came when it started making me race. I'd avoided all of the optional death races up to this point because I knew, with the sluggish handling of the car, that I wouldn't do very well.
So you can imagine how I felt when the main story demanded two races on the trot.

It didn't go well.

The first race was easy enough, and I nailed it on my second go after figuring out what was going on. But there was very little violence in that race.

The second one was a full-on combat track, where you have to kill a target with a missile launcher, while driving a very tight and twisty course, while avoiding a million traps, while all of the other cars are out to smash you up.

As you can imagine, after a bunch of attempts at this, I was absolutely sick of it. There was no way I was ever going to get passed this with a car that is just so unresponsive. There's simply no way to dodge traps like mines or flamethrowers unless I just stopped dead and let the target car get away from me.

So sadly, this is another game for the incomplete pile. It's highly unlikely that I'll ever come back to it, as because there's no manual saves, my autosave is right at the start of this race. So it's not like I can even back out, go do some other quests and beef the car up a bit. I'm pretty sure I would have to start the game all over again.
And screw that.

Over the last five years or so, I have visited ebay several times to check the availability of a specific PS3 game. But every time I looked, there were either no copies for sale, or the ones for sale seemed way overpriced.

It was never a big deal, as it's not a game I was ever desperate to play. However, I always thought it had the potential to be one of those "guilty pleasure" games.

Well, as luck would have it, a remaster of the game was released on PC recently, and DRM-free to boot! Bonus.

It was still a little too expensive for a 12 year old game in my opinion, but as it was nowhere near as costly as new games tend to be, I thought I'd give it a go.

After all, surely getting to play as a cheeleader who takes on hordes of the undead armed with a chainsaw could be nothing but fun, right?

Well, I was about to find out, as I tackled Lollipop Chainsaw.

This is a 3rd person action game where you play as Juliet, a cheerleader who just happens to be from a family of zombie hunters.

The main villain is some dweeby looking edgelord who is basically trying to open a way to a hellish alternate world, by using a combination of dark magic and explosives.

So when the zombie plague is unleashed upon the town, who better than Juliet, armed with her trusty chainsaw, to take out all of the undead fools?

Along the way, she is aided by her sisters and father, who help her take out the zombies in a variety of silly ways.

Also along for the ride is her boyfriend Nick, who she saves from a zombie bite by decapitating him before the disease can reach his brain. He then hangs around when she uses magic to keep his head alive.

Yes, it's weird. That's the whole point.

The first thing that became very evident was that the camera controls were jank as fuck. I thought it was enormous mouse acceleration at first, but then I tried the controller and it turned out to be no better. It's like there's a really weird acceleration curve even when the analogue stick is fully engaged.
I get that the original release back in 2012 may have been this bad, but you'd have thought they could have at least taken a look at that shit for a PC release.

As both control methods were just as bad as each other, I went back to old faithful, and took up the keyboard and mouse.

What was also annoying about the controls was the dodge mechanic, at least early in the game. This is because she would never dodge the way I wanted her to dodge, and she would often leap clear over a zombie's head right into the middle of a huge group of other zombies, when I'd actually been trying to dodge to the side or back.
Eventually, I just stopped trying to dodge, and instead just kept fighting my way out of trouble.

In terms of combat, there were some things to like, and others not so much. The moveset was crazy, with loads of different attacks and unlockable combos available.
The problem here was that I quickly honed in on the moves I liked and pretty much used them exclusively. This is because many of the chainsaw attacks are either very slow, or end with a slight pause before Juliet can move again. So ultimately I just stuck with the basic melee attacks and my two favourite chainsaw attacks, that were both very fast and hit multiple enemies.

The other major annoyance was the sheer amount of load screens and mini cutscenes. Very often, as one fight ends, and before you have the chance to loot the area, another cutscene takes control away from you, and then you get thrown straight into another fight. It was breakneck speed.
I'm well aware that this little bugbear is due to the original game and the original hardware, and it would have been difficult to fix for a remaster, but it was still annoying.

Ultimately, the cheese and silliness of the game helped me get through it, even when the camera and clunky chainsaw combat threatened to derail my enjoyment. And yes, it's definitely too expensive for an old game, especially for the length of it. But if it's on sale, and you fancy some silly zombie-choppin' fun, it's probably worth a few hours of your time.

Show / hide some cheeky bonus pics

A strange curiosity came over me recently, when I wondered about my earliest "digital download" game that I have not yet attempted.

While there are physical games that I have owned longer and still need to have a crack at, it turns out the oldest downloaded games I own are the ones from Humble Indie Bundle 5, which I bought all the way back in 2012.

Amnesia, Bastion, Psychonauts and Limbo have already been tackled, but that still left four other games that have been ignored all these years.

I noticed one of the games was a light horror game called Lone Survivor. With Halloween coming up, and me still really not fancying the monotony of Resident Evil 0, I thought I'd give this one a bash.

Boy, I wish I'd gone with Resident Evil 0.

This is a very pixelated side scrolling survival game, with some light action elements here and there. The emphasis here is on the survival, with finding food and ammo of most importance.

There are three main zones to the game, being the apartment block, the basement, and the city streets. By the time I got through the basement, I was ready to call it quits. Only the desperation of needing to finish a game steeled me to keep going.

The combat was sluggish, the exploration and navigation a constant headache, and I was checking the map all the time.

I didn't like that there were no checkpoints or autosaves. The only way to save is manually, and only in one spot in the entire game, which is the bed in your apartment.

The character you play as is constantly tired and begging for sleep. He's constantly hungry when there's no food around, or no way to cook the food you actually do find. Case in point, I had a massive, tasty ham in my inventory for the entire game because I never came across a cooking pot to cook it in. And I'm pretty sure I went everywhere.

It seems that this was all made by one dude, which is an impressive feat, so I'm not quite sure what I was expecting here. But I just got so annoyed by how all of the hunger and survival stuff is presented to the player. I mean, there is zero UI to go on. At no point was I aware of how hungry or tired the character was until he started whining about it. And when he starts whining about it, the player suffers because of the constant nagging popups.

The ending was also baffling and left me entirely confused. It seems that it's one of those games where you have to interpret the story of the game yourself, rather than having solid info to go on.

Ultimately, I think the character was descending into madness. Which I think is the road I started to walk down while going through this.

I think I'm really gonna need a palate cleanser.

For some reason, I still own my Mega Drive, even though the poor old thing barely even works any more. You have to switch it on and off several times for it to even boot, and the power LED is of no help as that doesn't work any more either. Even then, some of the games don't seem to work at all whereas some do, though they need a bit of cajoling.

Like all of the consoles I have owned over the years, I never bought many games for it, and several of those either went to a second hand shop or in the bin. Of the six I do still possess, two of them are unfinished, even though they are two of the games that I played the most of, behind WWF Raw.

As luck would have it, they are both silly racing games, so I thought I'd stick them together here and give them a damn good go. However, as my original hardware is not exactly a vision of health, I elected to emulate once more, which would also let me get content for this equally silly website.

Up first was Micro Machines Turbo Tournament '96. I may have tried a few times to play some single player in this, but like most games back then, I played the multiplayer far more. What was cool about the cartridge for this game was that it provided two more game ports, so we could play this with up to four players.

My first decision was to choose an avatar. There were some nerdy looking characters, but I went with Walter, the bald guy that looks like he's eaten too many KFCs. That's very much me.

Challenge

A ten race challange was up first, and to advance onto the next race, I had to finished first or second. I replayed every race a few times to learn the track, and this was usually enough to get first place. A few tracks required a few more attempts, but it was weird that these were spread out all through the challange, rather than having the harder ones near the end.

I found it strange after a few tracks that I couldn't really remember any of them.

League

The league saw me trying to climb through 3 leagues, each of 4 races each, with whoever has the most points being promoted.

Some of the races, especially in the top division, were a nightmare. The roads were tight, the cars slippery, and even the slightest touch with anything can send you flying off the edge. Plus, as is usual for these kind of games, any collision with a competitor will see you fly haywire across the screen, but barely have any effect on them.

Still, using copious save states and reloads, I was able to take the title.

Pro Challenge

Phew. Here's where things really ramped up. How the hell anyone completed this without save states I will never know. If anyone ever did, that is.

The pro challenge is the same competition as the normal challenge, but with 15 tracks instead of 10, and most of them were very hard.

It wasn't until the 6th race of the pro challenge that I actually remembered a track, or at least thought I did. This was quite a difficult "tree house" track, where you have to drop into the gutter at one point. We definitely used to play something like that in multiplayer. But I assure you, we never got this far through a pro challenge.

There was an odd run of races from the 9th to the 12th which were quite easy, taking just 2 or 3 attempts to get the win. But this confidence came back to bite me in the ass in race 13, which was a killer. I just couldn't get my head around the middle section with all of the mushrooms, and it was the only race so far where I couldn't get 1st place, so had to settle for 2nd.

After managing a win in the penultimate race I was up against it in the finale. I finished 2nd several times, but in the last race, 2nd was not enough to win the championship. The problem is, the blue car was faster on the straights and around the corners.
After what felt like at least two dozen attempts, I was able to drive a flawless 3 laps that included a few shortcuts, allowing me to just pip in front of them and take the championship.

Pro League

The lowest division in the pro league started with a few easy races, the second of which I even won on my first try. It was definitely nice to be immediately competitive again.

This did not last, however, and I was soon back to having to play each track multiple times in order to memorise them before being able to win.

In the top division, the second track was the first one that I was simply unable to finish first. This race involved aeroplanes, and they were so uncontrollable, and the track littered with choke points that were so hard to manoeuvre through, that the best I could do after a great many attempts was second. This put me on level points with the blue racer, who in this league was Jolene.

It didn't take long for me to win the third race, which I think was the first time I'd had to race in a dragster.

The final race was a nightmare, though partly of my own making. This was a very tight tree house track, with wind blowing so strong that it pushed your car off the track if you didn't account for it. It was a bit of a mind-bender at first, but when I got a little more used to it I soon won the race to win the league and complete the game as far as I wanted to.

Then I realised my immense mistake, as I had not taken a screenshot of the victory screen like I had for the other competitions. Oh well, I thought. I'd cracked this race now, so I could go straight out and win it again, right?

It took me nearly 30 minutes of trying to get that win again, compared to about 10 minutes it took for my first win. I was so angry at every little mistake, or bump from an opponent, that knocked me off my line or saw me falling to my doom. I got some joy at the end, as my victorious attempt saw me punt Jolene straight off the branch we were on, meaning she finished that race 3rd, and ended up with 1 point less than she did on my first win.

Boy, I'm glad this is over. I've been playing it on and off for 3 weeks, and a cheesy old game like this just shouldn't take that long to race through.
After playing this, and seeing how few tracks I remember, I'm guessing the game I played a lot with my mates back in the day was Micro Machines 2, which came out two years before this one. So I probably never really played this one much at all.
But this is the one I decided to buy back in the day, so this is the one I played here.

---

It was time to attempt my final Mega Drive game, so I could tick this platform off the "fully done with" list, to join the PS3 and the Spectrum.

The game in question is Street Racer, another silly racing game.

The jury's out on this game concerning whether or not I actually managed to beat it back in my teens. The only thing that makes me think I might have done is that the passwords for the second and third championships are written in my old instruction book. So at the very least, I did manage to get to the third and final challenge.

What makes me think I absolutely did not complete it back in the day is all the time I've spent with it recently. Let me tell you: I highly doubt I beat this thing.

And I still haven't.

I started with the Frank, the character I used to play as. After dabbling in the football, I got stuck into the first championship, but didn't do very well.

I changed up my tactics and switched to Helmut, who had a better car, but was simply not as cool. I managed to get through that championship with little difficulty, just replaying a race here or there to make sure I was still comfortably top of the table.

For the silver championship I switched again, and tried to use Sumo. He had a fast car with good handling to get around the corners, but I just couldn't get over his slow acceleration. So I started again with beach babe Surf Sister, for a better balanace of all the stats.

Using her made it possible for me to get through the silver championship, though I had to replay nearly all of the tracks several times. And by the time I'd finished it, I just couldn't take any more. This is just a shit game, and I don't care that I've not completed it by struggling through the gold championship.

The main issue here is the cornering. When you're driving around a corner, you simply can't see what's coming next, as the track goes completely off the side of the screen, sometimes to an almost 90^o angle. And then on most corners there are hazards like instant bombs, and dynamite that will explode if you don't pass it to another car.
And these hazards are impossible to miss because you don't see them coming.

Back in 2015 I played a game called FlatOut 2, and I wrote a list of four things that really annoyed me about the game. Well in some weird twist of fate, all four things also happen in this game.
Abbreviated, the list is here:

• The AI drivers often reacted dynamically to my speed, slowing down or speeding up to match me.
• AI drivers seemed to correct themselves much faster than I could after a crash.
• The results after I crossed the line were definitely randomised, and not simulated properly. And drivers at the back of the pack would often get the fastest lap.
• Debris was weird. You can hit a cone or wooden barrier and your car would grind to a halt rather than just smashing through it.

In addition to these, the minimap certainly does not match the actual track, often displaying the completely opposite direction for the corner you are currently going around, and sometimes missing corners out all together.

And if that wasn't enough, it's another racing game where you always start from the back. The cheek.

Yeah, this thing can go back in to its forgotten box where it belongs.