The rapidly approaching arrival of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth gave me a bit of a dilemma earlier this year. You see, in order to play it, I was either going to have to buy a PS5, which I didn't want to do, or wait quite a while and buy a DRM-infested version on PC, which I didn't want to do.

While the only real reason I bought the PS4 was for FF7 Remake, at least on that console there were a bunch of other games that I was happy enough to buy and play. On the PS5 there are literally zero other games I have any interest in, so potentially I would be buying it for just a single game.

That would be a very expensive game.

The only other game that has my attention is an upcoming game called Stellar Blade, which looks like a fun 3rd person action game much like Bayonetta, only with an actually attractive protagonist. Yet the jury's still out on it, as Sony have recently gotten more involved in its creation, and may have some unwanted input.

I mean, how dare any developers these days have the audacity to put a sexy female character in their game? I can't imagine Sony are on board with that at all. Not one bit.

Back to the point, at the start of October, I saw the PS5 was on sale, with a whole £80 off its original price, and also bundled with the Crisis Core remaster. Now I've never had much interest in playing Crisis Core, as from what I've heard it's got ridiculous characters and a ridiculous plot.
Add in that the other expanded FF7 media I've had experience with, namely Advent Children and Dirge Of Cerberus, were both massively disappointing as well, and I just didn't want FF7's legacy to be spoiled for me any more than it already had been.

Still, my weak will crumbled, and I bought the console, just to make sure I was Rebirth-ready. Besides, maybe I'll actually fancy trying Crisis Core out at some point. Who knows? Stranger things have happened.

In typical Stebloke fashion, the console has sat up a corner these last couple of months just waiting for a chance to do something. And alas, the day finally came.

I grabbed the free PS5 upgrade for FF7 Remake, so that I could play the Yuffie DLC at long last. This little expansion only ended up costing me £5 instead of £16, as there was already £11 in my account from somewhere. Really not sure from where, as I thought I'd used it all up to buy FF6 and FF9 way back in the day. But whatever.

After some hassle having to update both consoles so I could send my PS4 save data to Sony (or Square?), so that they could convert it to the PS5 version of the game, I was finally in and playing.

I remember that on the PS4 there were some really dodgy graphics bugs that rightly got called out, but Square came up with some bull excuse that they were PS4 limitations, and the updated PS5/PC version of the game would fix them. So the first thing I did was load the base game at several points throughout the story where these shitty graphics were present. And as far as I can tell, they look no better at all. So what the hell, Square?

Into the DLC, which is called Episode INTERmission, and I was finally getting my chance to see what this ninja girl from Wutai was capable of. However, before I could get stuck into much combat, I was drawn into the little mini game called Fort Condor, which in the game's universe seems to be represented as some kind of board game.
Pretty cool idea, I thought.

Unfortunately, Fort Condor doesn't seem to be a very balanced game at all, as characters more experienced with the game seem to possess much stronger units and setups than characters who are just starting out. Didn't really strike me as particularly fair that better players also have better gear. I mean, how are new players ever supposed to win against veterans if that is the case?

That being said, poor AI allowed me to smash the tutorial and all three level 1 opponents on the first try. I also beat Jessie, my first level 2 opponent, first time. Roche handed me my first loss, but I shuffled some units around and beat him handily on the second attempt.

The one and only level 3 opponent, Wedge, was a frustrating fight. My first two times I played him I took him to sudden death, but couldn't quite manage the win. It was here I saw a possible strat that I was quite confident about, which I hoped was going to make the rest of this mini-game easy. I dumped in all of my facility units so they would pump out lots of cheap but weak troops. This strat worked first time, and very convincingly, against Wedge.
But then I went up against the final Fort Condor challenge in the form of Chadley.

You see, Chadley, the little shit, was using the same tactic I'd just settled on, only he had a better setup that let him kick out units faster. I played this guy five or six times, sometimes using "unbeatable" strats off the internet, and got soundly thrashed each time. I figured I'd spent enough time bashing my head against this brick wall, and wanted to get on with the story, so I just carried on.
A finished game was long overdue, after all.

It took me way longer to get comfortable using Yuffie compared with the characters in the base game. I was getting smacked around so much, even in normal fights, that I started to get a little miffed. I don't know what happened, but maybe I wasn't paying attention to the tutorials or something.
All it took was for me to watch the first part of a combat guide, just going over the basics, and something clicked. From then on, I didn't lose a fight for the rest of the game, from beating Ramuh all the way through to the Nero fight. I was loving it, dashing around all over the place, parrying way more attacks, getting my synergies with Sonon pretty much nailed down. It was ace. Can't wait for Rebirth so I can get Yuffie and Tifa in the same party for some mental combat goodness.

In terms of story, there wasn't really much going on here. Essentially, Yuffie and another Wutaian named Sonon have been sent to Midgar to steal some materia from the Shinra building. There, they get discovered by Scarlet, and have to try and fight their way out as Scarlet sends all manner of Shinra robots and weapons at them.

This is all set during the events of the base game, and while I think it's a bit of a shame that they've inserted Yuffie into the Midgar section of the story, I guess there was no evidence that she wasn't in the area during the original.

Though she's fun to use, Yuffie herself can be a bit irritating at times, just like in the original game, while Sonon was just there to be the straight guy to balance out Yuffie's eccentricity. However, I loved every second Scarlet was on screen. She's the kind of woman you'd hate to meet in real life, but as a villain in a game she's just so devilishly entertaining.

The worst thing about the plot of this DLC was the inclusion of Deepground, who first rocked up in FF7 lore during the travesty that was Dirge Of Cerberus. To be honest, I would have much preferred the entire remake project to completely ignore all of the old expanded FF7 content, and make any new expanded content better, and fit the game's world better.

As I was nearing the end of the DLC I checked through all of the media I had captured so far. It was then I realised that for some reason the PS5 doesn't capture video the same way my PS4 was set up to do. Instead of capturing the next moments, it rather saves the previous moments. So I had a bunch of videos that led up to something I wanted to capture, but not the moment itself. Stupid fucking Sony changing things. At least I realised and was able to get some vids from the later fights.

So now I'm all up to speed, I've been having a think about what might possibly come next. Now I'm no real expert in making predictions, especially when Square's insane writing is involved, but I can see two basic ways things can go down.

My first assumption is that the main characters will go through a journey very similar, if not exactly the same, as the one they went on in the original game. Any new story beats and events can then come from whatever Zack is up to in his reality/timeline. This will allow the writers to do new things, while also keeping fans of the original happy, at least until the timelines merge or interact in some way.

The second way things can go down is to completely change things up, especially going forward into the third game. Unfortunately for me, if you think about it from this Sephiroth's perspective, the most logical thing I can see for him to do is to kill a different character instead of Aerith. See, Sephy knows that killing Aerith didn't get him what he wanted back during the original timeline of events. It just put her into the Lifestream where she could be a thorn in his side.

But who was it who was trying to look after Cloud the whole game, never doubting he was the real Cloud even in the face of all Sephiroth's lies?
Who was it who finally managed to help Cloud get his mental issues in check, so that he could become strong enough to take Sephiroth on?
Who was it, during Advent Children, when a very ill Cloud had essentially given up, who constantly tried to encourage him and help him find his will to fight again?
And who is it, in one of the Rebirth trailers, who Sephiroth is already trying to turn Cloud against, when he did no such thing in the original?

Man, I'd be pissed, but it makes way more sense for Sephiroth to kill Tifa this time. Sure, it's highly unlikely they would dare do it, but it would definitely make an impact just like Aerith's death did back in 97.

And if you think about it further, in order for there to be a "good" ending to this franchise, in contrast to the original game's "bad" ending, I think Aerith really needs to be alive in order to help the people of the world live in sync with the planet and nature again. At the very least, she needs to leave behind a different legacy, to inspire the people of the world, so the planet doesn't get so pissed off at them.

Additionally, we know from the Lifestream Black and Lifestream White stories, that Sephiroth is damn near unkillable while Cloud remembers him. This could lead to a situation in the third game where Cloud learns of this, and sacrifices himself for the good of the planet. We would then be in an inverted situation, where Aerith and Zack are alive, while Cloud and Tifa die.

Ultimately though, whatever differences they've got planned will probably depend on Zack, and it's hard to even imagine at this point where his new story is going to lead and how it's going to fold into the adventures that the main party are having.

All we can do at this point is wait, and hope that they don't mess it up.

Still working through my PS4 games, and the latest one to join the completed list is Guardians Of The Galaxy from a couple of years back.

The game sees Quill and the rest of the gang out to stop a powerful and malevolent entity that has been released from the soul stone.

Overall my experience with this game was very mixed. For probably two thirds of the game I was very frustrated with the gameplay, until my ancient brain finally started to catch up with the sheer amount of buttons and button combos that were required and I finally started to get into it a bit more.

Of course, it didn't help my anger levels by being a shooter game that I was having to use a controller for. Yes, I've had that whinge a million times, but it's never going to change. And what was worse in this game was the weird acceleration curve on the analogue sticks. The turn rate of the camera didn't seem to speed up while pushing the stick further, until getting nearly to maximum, when the turn speed would rocket right up. Irritating.

And the load times. Sheesh, the load times. What was all that about? I know I've not got an SSD in my PS4, but I don't think I've ever had to wait so long for a game to load since I used to play on my old ZX Spectrum back in the 80s. Even dying and restarting a fight, which should be fresh in the console's memory, would take just as long. I almost had time to go and make a coffee on each reload.

The QTEs also boggled my brain at times. When I've played a game with QTEs in the past, the idea is usually to hit that button as fast as possible when you see the prompt appear. But here, that would often see you fail the task. Instead, you have to wait until the exact moment. It just flew in the face of QTE mechanics I was used to.

The combat in the game can quickly get chaotic. I didn't find it too bad when fighting against one tough enemy like a boss, but when there were loads of weak to medium enemies all over the screen my brain and fingers really did struggle to keep up. Only later in the game when muscle memory had started to form did I begin to find it easier and more enjoyable.

I think my main issue was with my team mates, who don't really do anything unless you tell them what to do. It was also annoying that, whenever one of them is knocked down, the others will expect you to go and help them out rather than doing it themselves. And then when you get knocked down it's game over, with your team given no option to come and help you at all.
Definitely needed to be more like the Ghostbusters 2009 game, where the other Ghostbusters did their part helping out if someone got taken down.

As a last kick in the teeth, the penultimate boss fight against a guy called Raker even bugged out and wouldn't continue, so I had to do the whole thing all over again.

So what about the story? This is a game based on Marvel comics after all. Could the game excel in this area?

Well, unfortunately, I found it very middling here as well. While I really liked the characters, especially how they got better at working together as the game went on, I found the plot kind of "meh" and the villains very very weak indeed. I was not aware of the game's main villain, Magus, before this game, and hopefully I'll never encounter him again. He was just an angry mass of black swirling weirdness, who was using some dumb religious nutjobs to try and bring about an end to the universe.
Simply not that entertaining.

As to whether I would play this again, or recommend it to anyone else: probably not, unless you're a huge Marvel fan, or enjoy 3rd person shooters.

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Over the passed few months, a game we have attempted is ToeJam & Earl: Back In The Groove. I have very vague memories of playing an old game in this series on Scoob's Mega Drive way back in the day, and we were both up for re-visiting these weird characters.

In this game, which is essentially a remake of that old original one, you play as aliens who have crashed on Earth. You must then traverse floating islands to find all the pieces of your damaged space ship, so that you can get the hell off this weird rock.

I'm sure I'm not the only one to do this, but often I remember old things being better than they were. Unfortunately, this game turned out to be much the same.

It didn't help that the tutorial world kept bugging out on us, so we were forced to go into the full game without really knowing what we were doing. Sure, I could have scoured the internet for the manual (which I later ended up doing, not that it helped), but I didn't fancy doing that at first.

Our adventures into the main game's "fixed" world started much brighter. Though we still didn't know what we were doing, we got to level 17 of 25 without actually losing any lives. However, somewhere around here, the game's difficulty spiked like crazy, and we were both dead by the time we got to level 19. As neither of us particularly fancied giving it another go, our adventures stopped there.

I can't speak for Scoob, but I got super frustrated by the end, just by how fast the enemies moved compared to the player characters. And by the later stages of the game, if any enemy touched you, they would take off a good 90% of your life bar.

The thing that definitely annoyed us both was the way the split-screen was implemented. Even when I switched the option to fixed, it would still work in this weird dynamic way where player 1 would sometimes be on top of the screen, and sometimes at the bottom, depending on where the two characters were in the level.

So this might not be a game that I ever finish, but that doesn't matter. It was just a freebie from Epic Games after all, and we used it solely to re-visit our childhoods for a few hours.

The 2017 game Nier: Automata was next on my list of PS4 games to clear. I didn't really know much about this game other than it was about androids, there were multiple endings, and a few years back everyone online was obsessed with 2B's ass.

Well, fair play I guess. I mean, it's certainly not one of the game's downsides.

But what about the actual game? Mostly, it's a hack'n'slash-style 3D fighter, though interestingly, the game also includes sections from plenty of other genres. At any point, you might find the camera switching to a different position, which is the signal that the game is about to switch to a side scrolling platformer, or top down shooter, for example. Some of these sections were pretty cool, but mostly I thought they would have been far better just sticking with an over-the-shoulder, 3D fighter-style camera.

When it comes to setting, the game takes place in the very distant future. You play as one of several different androids, who were made by the last few surviving humans who now reside in a secret base on the moon. Your job is to retake planet Earth from the machine army that was created by aliens who invaded many years prior.

Starting out, there was very little help from the game's tutorials. Because I wanted to hit the ground running, I had to get acquainted with the wikis to figure out what I was doing.

I knew going in that multiple playthroughs were going to be needed, which I was not looking forward to. Still, I went in with good intentions at first, aiming to do everything I could in the initial run, where I was playing as the game's poster-girl, 2B.
However, this desire soon faded as I got further into the game. Unfortunately, the game started to feel like a bit of a slog, and so I ended up doing far less that I probably should have done.

It wasn't until the end of the game when I unlocked the chapter select that I saw how many side missions I had missed. And I tell you now, I was nowhere near done. You could easily spend weeks polishing up this game.
After my experience though, I doubt I'll be going back to clear any of the others. The game just outstayed its welcome for me.

There were a number of reasons for this. Up first was having to replay large chunks of the game as another character, 9S, who I didn't like using as much. This was primarily because his speciality is hacking, upon where you have to play a weird little mini-game that I really wasn't into. As a character, I also found he became a little insufferable by the end of the game.
You don't really spend a great deal of time with the third character, A2, but some of her later fights are also annoying as the game constantly switches you between characters during the battles. It can just take you right out of the moment and really break your focus. At least it did with my aging brain.

I was also very disappointed that there was no photo mode. In the middle of so much chaos, I found it really difficult to get cool action shots, so it would have been preferable to have a way of getting much better images. Oh well.

The biggest faux pas the developers made while making this game was right at the end, which left me quite pissed off. You see, to get the final cut scene, you have to get all the way through the end credits. Not a problem, you may think?
But think again.

In this game, the end credit section is another stupid mini-game, and by far the hardest one in the whole game. I didn't know at first, as I keep my consoles disconnected from the internet by default, but this end section is made far harder when not connected. This is because help can come to you on behalf of other players, as long as they have offered up their save data to the nerd gods.

Absolutely pathetic and stupid decision by the devs to implement this idea in a single player game, and proves what I had read about the devs in that they are just massive trolls.

In conclusion, the game had some real potential, with its characters, setting and story. But its far too many frustrating sections and elements turned it into a game I didn't really enjoy playing. So while I did get some enjoyment out of it, I highly doubt I will ever want to play it again.

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.