So much for this being a year of completing games, as it's been nearly 3 months since I finished The Somnium Files. This is partly to blame on me getting back into painting again, and partly down to me being in DIY hell these last few weeks.

Still, even though the DIY is not finished yet, a game really needed to be played. So played one I did.

I chose a fairly short PS4 game, in the form of Stray. This game came out last year and was quite well received.

In it, you play as a cat in the far future, long after humanity has become extinct. After you fall into an underground city populated by robots, you gain their assistance and start your journey back to the surface.

There's some light puzzle elements, and some light action sections where you have to avoid or fight some strange little bacteria creatures that want to eat you. Other than that, the game is mainly exploration as you try and find your way back to your other cat friends.

Your main companion in the game is B-12, a little floating drone who hitches a ride on your back. This little dude comes in handy for all kinds of little tasks, like hacking and using a UV light on the bugs. He's pretty cool.

Other than that, it's a pretty straight forward little game, that is harmless and quite charming. It was quite expensive for what it is though, even buying it several months after launch as I did.

But overall, I'm glad I played it.

I'm supposed to be getting through my list of games this year, but after a good start I've not touched one since The Somnium Files. Instead, I've been taken over by a little bit of a painting frenzy.

Up first, I pushed on with the 6mm Androids and finally managed to get them finished. I tried something different this time and sealed over the top of the flock with thinned PVA to try and protect it a little more. This seems to have worked, except the other type of flock that I mixed in at different points ended up going really dark. It was cheap stuff, but I wasn't expecting it to do that. Kinda ruins the look. But oh well.

As I was in the mood, I decided to bite the bullet and pick up a bunch of new paints from Vallejo's range. They arrived too late for the Androids, which is a shame as there are a lot of metallics in there. But it looks like there are a bunch of good colours for the Blood Axes and Slaanesh forces I've got to get around to at some point.

After that, I finished the Stompas I started a year ago. Then I decided that the models I need to paint first are the models that can't be used until they're painted, as they can't be glued together beforehand. This means there's lots of disassembled Epic scale cavalry and bikes to get to next. After rattling off some Evil Sunz Bikeboyz, I'm now part way through the Imperial Guard Rough Riders, which shouldn't take too long to finish. This is the first time I've painted 6mm Guard since 2010.

Because I'm a bit of a saddo, I recently counted up how many wargaming models I've got and how far through painting them I am. The results are not encouraging.

I own over 2600 models, and this does not include everything from Super Dungeon as I currently have no plans to paint those.
Of these 2600, over 760 are painted. Nearly 400 others are painted, but they were done years ago, and I am no longer happy with them. This means they will need to be revisited at some point.
All in all, I calculate I'm about 40% through all the painting I need to do.
If there's any good news to come out of this at all, then it's the fact that most of this painting has come in the last few years. So if I keep this up, I may actually get through this monumental task.

---

So here it is. The 6mm Android army I was hoping to finish in 6 days before Christmas has actually taken another two months. Which is very typical of my painting speed.

So, AI: The Somnium Files is a game I've recently played through. I'm not really sure how in the world I'm going to write about it though, as it was freakin' nuts. Oh well, here goes...

A few years back, I was watching a gaming podcast where this somewhat fascinating game got mentioned. It seemed like something I would like to play, being a murder mystery where the main character has a fake eye which contains an artificial intelligence. This AI helps the protagonist investigate crime scenes by offering suggestions and bestowing different vision modes such as heat and x-ray.

So when I saw it cheap-ish a couple of years back, I picked it up, only for it to promptly get lost somewhere in my mountain of other games.

After that, maybe about a year ago now, I watched a couple of different streamers play a game called 999. This game was also bonkers, with strange puzzles and a host of alternate timeline wibbly-wobbliness. It seemed like a game that would be hell to play, but as something to put on in the background while doing other things, it was quite fun to experience through someone else's eyes.

Something I didn't know going into this, was that AI is made by the same devs that made 999. There was a slightly painful realisation, when I heard some familiar sound effects, and saw that there was a flowchart that was going to keep track of the alternate timelines. I really didn't want to play a game where I had to finish it multiple times to get the true ending. But I sighed, and plodded on.

And plodded on is an accurate way to describe my actions in this game. I simply can not understand how it was such a drag to play a game where so much crazy shit happens.

The protagonist of the game is Kaname Date (pronounced Kanarmay Dartay), a cop who lost his memory and left eye six years ago. Instead of a normal prosthetic, Date's eye socket instead houses an eyeball-shaped artificial intelligence named Aiba, who can telepathically talk to him and assist him on his missions.

Most of the game's narrative is told through very lengthy visual novel segments, while what little gameplay there is happens in sections called "psyncs". In a psync, Date and Aiba enter the mind of a suspect or witness in order to search for clues to the case. These sections involve wondering around the other person's subconscious in a dream-like landscape, where "puzzles" must be solved in order to progress. It is in these psync sections that different actions can be performed that will split the story off into its different timelines.

As I've alluded to above, I didn't really like playing this game. I would have much preferred to do something else while having footage of it from Youtube or Twitch playing in the background, like I did with 999.

The number one issue with it was that it is simply too long. If you want to do everything in the game, and also depending on how long you spend in the psync sections, the game can easily last 25-30 hours. And here's the thing - it could have easily been half that.

Because of the way the narrative is structured, a great deal of the dialogue and events are repeated in alternate timelines. In addition, many conversations contain at least one moment where a character will remind you of something that was said earlier. Then the game will flash back and show you when that earlier conversation happened. These recaps were happening all the time, and it was annoying. It was like talking to an elderly relative, who tells you the same story they've already told you a dozen times.

The gameplay itself didn't help. While it was always refreshing to get to freely move around an environment after listening to characters talk for an hour, the setting of the puzzle sections ruined them completely. This was because the puzzle sections are set in what are essentially people's dreams. And dreams don't make sense. This made the puzzles less about logic and more about trial and error, hit and hope, suck it and see. Key word here being suck.

While the basic idea of the game is an interesting one, I didn't find it was executed in a good enough way to really recommend the game to anyone else. Maybe they were rushed, or didn't have enough money, or whatever. But with more care and attention, and maybe if it was any other genre except visual novel, the game could have been really good.

There are a few things that I was more positive about, though. Yes, some of the characters are annoying as hell, this being an anime game after all. But some of the characters were actually pretty cool and fun. In typical fashion for me, I would say the best character was actually Aiba, the AI, who was quirky and an absolute sweetie pie.

The voice acting in the game varied quite wildly in both quality and volume, for some reason. While most of it was pretty good, there were a few really cringe moments, and the actress that voiced Hitomi should never do a crying scene again. Oh dear.

The humour in the game also helps it be less boring, but the constant tone shifting between really silly and really serious is enough to give you whiplash at times.

Overall, the basic plot of the game was quite interesting. However, take a step back and you will see a million and one plot holes and other things that don't make sense.

Minor spoiler here, but for example, there is a dead body hidden in a warehouse. This body has not only been there the entire game, it has actually been there for years. At the point of its discovery, we have already been to this warehouse several times earlier in the game. But because that the plot now demands it, Aiba can now somehow detect it with her fancy detecting skills, when she couldn't earlier. It was so dumb.

I think it's safe to say I won't be touching this ever again. I was hoping for so much more.

A few years ago I tried to get an old copy of Resident Evil 4 up and running, but couldn't get it to work the way I wanted it to, which was basically to have mouse support. For whatever reason, the mouse patch just wouldn't have it.

More recently, I'd been having plans to try and install an older Windows on one of my more modern machines, to see if the mouse patch would work on that, while still having enough grunt to run the game with the HD patch.

Luckily, before I started mucking around with all that, I learned that the HD version of the game from 2014 already has mouse support built in. Unfortunately, it meant having to buy it again on Steam. Again, I got some luck, as when I went to check how much it cost, a sale was in full effect and I swiped it for a few quid.

With the remake coming out soon, I thought it was about time I got through this at last, so I can at least see what is the same and what has changed about the new game.

Though it has to be stated, I'm pretty annoyed that Code: Veronica is not getting a remake, when it needs it the most.

Even though I could finally use my mouse to tackle this, I also used the re4_tweaks add on, which pumped the raw mouse input into the game, without any of that acceleration crap. As well as this, it allows the mouse to turn the character in addition to turning the camera, so it would feel like a much more modern game. The only thing that was missing was strafe, and it felt weird moving around with what are essentially still tank controls.

I was much more comfortable being able to aim this way, but there were still a few little weird issues with the control scheme. Firstly, whenever I went in and out of aim mode, the camera would point in a different direction. Though I found some options in re4_tweaks that were supposed to fix this, they only partially relieved the issue. And when using the rifle, the problem was worse than with any other gun. For example, if I wanted to target an enemy who was up on a ledge, or down on a lower level, I would point my camera roughly in that direction, then activate aim mode. Rather than already be pointing in the desired direction, the camera would always reset to point straight ahead, no matter what. Annoying, but this is what we have to put up with when a game that was never meant to have mouse support gets it added at a later date.

The other slight issue with the mouse is that the activation button, in this case E, would not work at all if there was even the slightest movement on the mouse. The amount of times I would have to press that button sometimes just to open a door or pick up an item. I quickly learned to just spam the damn thing any time I needed it.

Back in the day, this game marked a big change for the franchise. Not only did it switch from a fixed camera perspective to an over the shoulder one, it also switched the franchise away from a more tense, "scary" feel, to a more action oriented one. Whereas in the past, you could learn to slip by enemies and conserve ammo, here the game makes you fight. There are so many times where a door will lock and it's only possible to open it again if you kill everyone. I've not watched anyone speed run this, but I bet it pisses some runners off having to do this all the time.

This constant need to fight brought up another problem, and this was available ammo. In old games, if you hunted for it all, there was more than enough ammo to kill every enemy in the game and have tons to spare. And in those games, you didn't even need to fight most of the time. In this game, I always felt low on ammo. I never fully ran out entirely, but there were always moments where I only had ammo in a single gun and the others were empty. I even ended up with something like an 82% accuracy over the whole game, which is not great on a mouse, but would have been much worse on a controller. I just would not have had enough ammo to get through this if I had not been able to aim the way I did.

The prime example of this ammo issue was a boss fight against two giants, which I got through with a single shotgun shell remaining. And this was after dumping the first giant into a pit of molten steel. I don't know if the game is designed this way, to just about give you enough ammo to get through things, but I didn't like it.

It didn't help that I often saw items dropping while I was in the middle of a big fight. But when I'd killed everyone and turned around to look for the items, they had all disappeared. The fact that this happened so many times fucking sucked. What the hell, game?

The other main thing that made this so different from earlier games was the step away from zombies and Umbrella. I guess Capcom thought those games were getting old, but I really missed them here. This game, with all of its differences, just doesn't feel like Resident Evil to me, and that's at least partially why I found it so tiresome to get through.

Games in this series have always had really strange settings, but this one was the most bizarre of any I've played. The puzzles and locks in this game made no sense. For example, there's one point where a villain runs away from you out of the room and sets a trap. Then when you escape the trap and follow them, the next door is locked. But it's not locked from the other side. Instead there's a pad lock on this side that you have to shoot off. How the hell did they get out then put that lock on?

There are also multiple times where you have to go through a maze of rooms and enemies to find an item that will open a door somewhere else. But the villains, Ada, and the merchant for that matter, can seemingly just waltz through these doors whenever they want.

There's one point where you emerge from a castle, to see two little islands, each with their own buildings on them. You, as Leon, pick up some binoculars to see Ashley being led away into the building on the second island. Now, the method of crossing onto these islands is a swing bridge, which can pivot around from its anchor point on the first island to reach either the main castle or the second island. For some reason, even though the villains and Ashley must have just crossed the bridge from the first to second island, the bridge is now back pointing towards us as we emerge from the castle. That was very thoughtful of the bad guys, don't you think? I mean, if they'd not sent the bridge back to me, I wouldn't have been able to cross, and the game would be over.
What's doubly confusing is, going into the first island's building, we see that the villains have tried to stop us from using the bridge by jamming wood into all the gears that operate it. Can't lie. I face palmed. Nearly knocked my glasses off too.

And holy crap, the game was so long and tedious. I don't even think I spent as long making all those maps for Resident Evil 2 as I did just playing through this one a single time. Fair enough, if you're a fan of this game you'd probably be happy to keep playing it, but I was fed up with the constant cycle of saving Ashley, only for the next villain in line to capture her again, and so I would have to save her again, and so on...

Urgh.

I know I probably should have played this years ago, but I guess it makes sense that I'm so late when you think I didn't even fully complete the original game until 2011.

One thing's for sure: I won't be playing it again any time soon. Talk about a drag.