Did I reinstall Death Stranding today just so I could see Mads Mikkelsen wish me a happy birthday?
Maybe.
Gosh I love Kojima’s 4th Wall weirdness
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I properly 100%'ed Jedi Fallen Order a few days ago, since I was close anyway and wanted to complete that save file just in case I could use it later for a NG+ run on a next-gen version.
Man, that game has a terrible open-world/metroid-vania type map. The 3D map is hard to understand and read, it frequently bottlenecks you in the worst places, and often only has one maybe two routes to get to a far-off position away from your ship.
To get to a specific area to find one missing collectible, I couldn’t take the easier way I used to escape that area back in the story, no, I had to take a massive across-the-map detour through that same story-based area I already cleared just to get to it.
The environments and map make sense in the scripted sequences of the story, from what I remember. But, when it comes to exploring it at your own pace and finishing their checklist of upgrades and cosmetics, navigating it is so tedious, confusing, & overly long.
I also finished Astro’s Playroom. The main stuff, not all the collectibles.
Ohhh gosh Team Asobi is really passionate about Playstation. Not only was it a really cool tech demo for the controller (the haptics amaze me with how many diverse inputs it can do), but it was a huge showcase of legacy Playstation tech. I’m not their biggest follower, so there’s obviously things I’ve never heard of, but a lot of it felt like some deep cuts to me. The heck is a Multi-Tap? The PS1 had an attachable monitor? The PSP had a GPS Accessory? It’s some really fascinating stuff that is cool they dove deep to reference, alongside the multitude of other PS Game references with the little Astro Bots in each level.
There’s also an epic final boss sequence, also referencing something from PS I’ve never heard of, but if you know it I guess it’s even cooler. (They do have plenty of references to “it” in the rest of the game to set it up, so I kind of understood the hype factor behind it).
I didn’t totally like the whole “die in one hit” mechanic, but it never stopped the action for long…
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The Multi-tap was used to increase the number of controllers and memory cards the PS1 ad PS2 could take.
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Congrats, good work!
I had such a passionate hatred for parts of that game that I couldn’t stomach finishing it, let alone 100%'ing it. I definitely agree with what you’ve said about level design: the planets feel like they were only made with the story in mind, and not returning to them afterwards.
On the combat side of things, maybe I just sucked, but I found it horribly clunky. I thought I was gonna get Sekiro (the best example of a deflection/parrying based game I can think of, definitely a competitor with Fallen Order given that it was released earlier that year) but with cool Star Wars shit, but it just didn’t flow well. The abilities I did get in my half of a playthrough were fun, but not interesting enough to keep me playing.
I honestly wasn’t a fan of Cal or the side characters either, but BD-1 has to be one of the cutest droids I’ve ever seen, so there was a plus in there somewhere.
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God, you’re making me feel old with that comment. As Accidental says, it was used to increase the controller count for the PS1 and PS2, since those consoles only had two controller ports. If you wanted to play 3/4 player splitscreen, you’d need to plug in a multitap into a controller port, then put all the controllers into the ports on the multitap. I believe it was possible to put 2 multitaps into both ports on the console for up to 8 players in one game, but very few games ever utilised such a feature.
My childhood memory was my afterschool club’s PS2, and using the multitap to play 4 player splitscreen of James Bond Nightfire. Nowadays thanks to wireless controllers such a device isn’t really neccesary. Game Boys also used a connecting wires, and I believe the GBA had a 4 way wire to connect 4 GBAs together for stuff like Pokemon features.
Mind you, by the PS2, it was a bit of a downside a multi-tap was needed, considering the N64, Gamecube, Dreamcast, and the OG Xbox all had 4 controller ports built into the console. But ofcourse back then, controllers themselves and the multi-tap were far cheaper than today’s modern controllers.
Anyway, I’ve beaten Sonic Frontiers, may or may not 100% complete the game, I think I’m already like 70% of the way there. I had a lot of fun, it is a very good game, I recommend it to anyone who likes their platformers. It does have alot of minor problems, but I think it is fun regardless. Really hope Sonic Team makes a sequel and just improves upon the foundation this game lays. Also, there is alot I like about the plot and the implications it has for the Sonic game canon, and the potential future of the series. I might write a proper review later when I get some time.
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Sad but true.
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Ah. I enjoyed Cameron Monaghan’s performance, it was good. But I really enjoyed Debra Wilson as Cere, the ex-Jedi. She had a little sad backstory speech near the end of the game that I remember really liking.
BD-1 was a great companion, the animators and sound designers did a great job with it
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Picked up Slay The Spire because it finally came on sale on Steam the other day, it’s Tom Francis’ favourite game and I’m a Tom Francis fanboy.
Never played this previously, but I’ve been absolutely hammering it since first load. It’s fucking dangerous, the temptation to play just one more round is crack fucking cocaine. My name is scat1620 and I’m an addict.
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I finished Sonic Frontiers. I had fun, I had a very good time with this. While I bought the game for just under full price (£48 for the PS5 version), I think I got my money’s worth. But I think the divisive array of opinions is to be expected, this game has alot of minor problems, and depending on who you are, those problems can be far more detrimental to your enjoyment than it was for me. I do recommend this game, but for those feeling unsure, I’d probably wait for a sale first.
Anyway, I have a lot to talk about. Buckle up kids.
This will have full gameplay spoilers for Sonic Frontiers. I’ll be spoiler tagging the section when I give my thoughts on the plot of Frontiers, and the impact it has on the lore.
Frontiers’s big selling point is its open world, the first time Sonic has ever truly done such a concept. The games have flirted with the idea, Sonic Adventure and Sonic '06 had small “Adventure Fields” which let you freely run around, and Sonic Adventure 2 even had an unlockable Green Hill Zone which was just a big open space to muck around in. Also Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric kindof/sortof had an openish design, but that was made by a third party developer, not Sonic Team.
Frontiers did seem like a neccesary step forward. Sonic Team has been utilising the boost formula, first introduced in 2D game Sonic Rush by Dimps, in 3D since Sonic Unleashed in 2008. I mean, it meant we got Sonic Colours and Generations, good to great games depending on who you ask. But after the failure of Sonic Lost World, a game that for lack of a better description was Sonic’s take on Super Mario Galaxy, and then Sonic Forces, a game we now know started life as a direct sequel to Generations, and was made in something like 18 months with a lot of inexperienced staff at the helm because alot of the veterans left work for companies like Nintendo, something needed to be done. Forces was the 4th 3D boost title, and while boost gameplay can be fun, it is perhaps a somewhat shallow gamemode, and Forces seemed to have few ideas on how to add depth to it. The avatar idea was fun, but with Forces being a failure, I’m guessing there’s a good chance that feature will be binned for a long time.
It has been 5 years since Forces, with very few Sonic game releases since then. With no dedicated handheld consoles since the 3DS was retired, it seems that Sonic doesn’t have many outlets to release new games outside of Sonic Team’s main titles. If the Colours re-release and Origins collection are anything to go by, it looks like the future for Sonic for the foreseeable future will be mainline games every few years, and re-releases and the occasional spin-off title to fill in the gaps.
Sonic going open world seemed like an obvious move in hindsight. Surely it had to happen at some point? Yes, open world titles are over saturated in the market, but alot of them sell well, and even if you want to point and laugh at the open world features Frontiers adopts, really why shouldn’t Sonic go open world? It makes sense for a speedster like him, open world can really suit platformers especially well and its been on the fan’s wishlists for years.
Does Frontiers achieve this? It depends on a number of things. But for me, I had fun. I liked roaming the environment, I liked going fast. I think the combat encounters are infrequent enough and simple enough but aren’t too brain dead. I like collectable hunting, I like trying to earn various items for story progression or to improve Sonic’s stats. If you like open world games like this, you should probably have a good time here.
Granted, there are some issues. There are basically no momentum based physics in the game, Sonic will not get faster if he rolls down a hill for example. Really I expected this, Sonic Team has had no interest in this element of Sonic, instead designing him to really be more like a typical platform mascot who happens to have high speed. Still feels like a shame when you provide an environment that could allow the player to reach very high speeds and heights. Instead we get a boost function that sends Sonic at top speed from a standstill almost instantaneously.
The art design is a little bit all over the place. The environments of the Starfall Islands are fairly realistic, combined with sleek enemy design. But the islands are also covered in Sonic obstacles like boosts, springs, grindrails, running walls etc, which don’t even have any supports, they all just float in the air like a typical Sonic level. It does feel a bit jarring, not helped by easily the game’s worst technical flaw, the pop-in. Like, this pop-in is just borderline inexcusable, the game does have some jank like seemingly every 3D Sonic game is required to have, but this is the only jank I’d say that really needs a patch in the future, if possible. When your collectable hunter, especially using the in-game map to guide yourself to the next one, it can be possible to see the collectable but for a few seconds not see the obstacle course you need to get it. I don’t know how much of a technical thing this is, but I don’t think it is acceptable for a released finish game.
The obstacle courses themselves can be contentious. For all intents and purposes, when you start one, the game tries to lock you into the course until you finish it or you fail it by missing a jump or something. It is possible to break out of them with force, which is mostly fine, but at the same time, it can be annoying exploring the island, only to wind up on an obstacle course to break your momentum. This can happen with the big enemies on the islands, the Guardians, as when you get near them, the camera will auto focus on them and assume you will fight them. You can run away but again, it can break your immersion and momentum and just the fun on exploring the islands yourself.
Finally the big other ingredient of Sonic Frontiers is the Cyberspace stages, 30 boost stages which usually range around from taking 1-2 minutes each to complete. I guess you could see Frontiers is the 5th 3D Sonic Boost game as well as being the first open world game. To me, the Cyberspace stages are inoffensive at best. It feels like these exist so that Sonic Team has some sortof fall back for the game incase the open world was seen as a failure, I guess in case perhaps younger fans thought they wern’t getting the “true” Sonic experience from more recent titles. But it also feels like an excuse for Sonic Team to do some asset reusual, evidence of which is already being dug up in the game’s PC version. Of the 30 levels, they only use 4 level aesthetics, 3 of which are from Generations, 2 from Forces, being Green Hill, Chemical Plant, and Sky Sanctuary. The “new” one is set on a highway, and I think is meant to be a fairly loose adaptation of Sonic Adventure 2’s Radical Highway, the key giveaway being that you fight GUN helicopters and tanks. It’s easily the best of the 4 zones since it seems like it was far more designed to fit the Cyberspace aesthetic, with stuff like the road signs looking deliberately non-sensical as if they were corrupted. The other zones honestly look like they were taken from Generations (and as players are finding out, some of the level design is literally recreated from there), and I dunno, just makes me want to replay Generations than these stages. At least when you beat the game you unlock an arcade mode on the main menu that lets you play these levels directly rather than having to go through the overworld to play them.
I want to talk about Frontier’s gameplay loop. So, there are four and half Starfall Islands. (I’ll talk about that half island later, don’t you worry.) On each main island, Sonic is tasked with retriving the 7 Chaos Emeralds. 4 Emeralds are locked in Vaults, 2 Emeralds are tied behind a series of small quests with that island’s character, and when you have those 6 Emeralds, you get to fight the boss of the island, the Titan, who has the final Emerald. This leads to 2 gameplay loops.
The first loop is getting the Emeralds for the Vaults. Each Vault requires a specific number of Keys. You get Keys by playing the Cyberspace and beating missions inside each Cyberspace. (Those missions always being simply finishing the stage, reaching the end of the stage with X number of rings, finding all 5 hidden Red Rings, and beating the S Rank time trial.) However, to gain access to the Cyberspace levels, you have to use Gears to unlock the Portals that house each Cyberspace level. You gain Gears by fighting the Guardians on the island, essentially mini bosses. It sounds complicated when I decribe it but really what it means is: Fight mini-bosses > unlock Cyberstage levels > beat missions in Cyberstage levels > unlock Vaults for Chaos Emeralds. I think this loop works well, most of the mini bosses are fun to fight (although a couple are annoying and outlast their welcome), and honestly, I think the Cyberstage levels are fine. They’re mostly inoffensive and often very short to outstay their welcome.
The second gameplay loop is simpler. To progress the character’s quest on each island, as well as view optional cutscenes with the characters, you require Memory Tokens. Memory Tokens are the central collectable item, each island having, well… alot. If I had to guess, the first island has at least 100 to collect, while the other 3 must have around the 200 mark to collect. A high number but, for reasons I will get into, not too hard to meet the memory token gates in the story or optional cutscenes.
On top of this, you have some other items and things to do. Challenges are areas marked with a question mark, where you have to do some kind of task which rewards with you unveiling part of your map. The tasks in question tend to be very easy or obvious, lots of basic stuff like tile puzzles, very easy dodge mini-games, or time trials that easily give you double the time neccesary to reach the goal. Just over 100 of these in the game. They’re mostly inoffensive, really the hardest part about some of them is just finding them. They’re not Ubisoft or Breath of the Wild towers, but just markers on the ground, and while that might be fine for some, it does often mean you’ll have to go hunting for the last few on any island. Saw what you will but the point of a tower is that you have a long distance goal to reach. I’m actually sad that trope seems to of died lately, I liked tower climbing.
There are other items for Sonic to collect. Some of these are related to Sonic’s stats. You can collect XP for Sonic’s skill tree. The skill tree is pretty basic, it only has 12 skills on it, and I got enough XP to maximise it by the end of the 2nd island, so it’s hard to really make any bad decisions on it. I just went for cheapest to costliest skills rather than any strategising to be honest.
Sonic also has 4 stats that start at Level 1 and can be raised to Level 99. Strength increases Sonic’s damage output when fighting enemies, whilst Defence, I think, reduces the number of rings Sonic loses when damaged by an enemy. I think different enemies do different damage outputs, its not like old Sonic when every enemy that damaged Sonic would make him lose all of his rings regardless of how many, Ring count actually does matter in this game, even without lives. You get red Strength Seeds to upgrade Strength and blue Defence Seeds to upgrade Defence. The number you require to upgrade the stat does start to increase, I know by the last levels you needed 4 of a Seed to upgrade the stat once.
Sonic’s other 2 stats are Ring Count and Speed. Unlike everything else in this game, these stats share currency, that being finding lost Koco. Koco aren’t dropped by enemies or item boxes, the only way to find them, I believe, is to simply to find the ones scattered in places across the island. As far as I know, they don’t respawn. Easily the hardest thing in this game to find and level up. Also, unlike Strength and Defence, that when you talk to the Hermit Koco to level up, he will just up those stats to their maximum numbers regardless of how many seeds you had. With Ring Count and Speed, you have to talk to the Elder Koco, and he will only increase each stat one at a time, even if you have enough Lost Koco to increase the stat multiple times. Which does mean to level up both stats to their max, which is needed for the game’s Platinum Trophy on PS5, you will have to talk to this guy 198 times. And believe, it is agonising. I really hope Sega can patch this, it is such a simple thing that should be able to be fixed. It seems like the only reason this is a thing is that you can swap your Ring Count stat with your Speed stat when talking to the Hermit Koco, I guess incase you really need the high Ring Count when fighting one of the Titans? Otherwise, a bit baffling.
So yeah, alot of stuff to collect, in the true tradition of any platformer collectathon. But I haven’t talked about how all of this stuff is effectively made redundant and exploitable by the game’s fishing minigame. It’s obvious Sonic Team/Sega want Sonic games accessible to kids. But whether a company like Nintendo seems to understand that kids can take and enjoy challenge, Sonic Team lately seems very worried that there games could be too hard. Sonic Colours was already the easiest 3D Sonic game, and when that got re-released Sonic Team felt the need to add in a super easy mode in it. Frontiers seems like it was made to have some challenge, and somebody at Sega/Sonic Team seemed to panic that the game’s collectable requirements maybe too much work.
So those progression items I talked about like the Gears, Keys, and Memory Tokens? Those can also drop from basic enemies or even be found in item boxes. In fact, sometimes you may find a blue icon you have to loop. Sometimes this gives you a spring to bounce you to the nearby obstacle courses, but other times, it will just give you 8 Memory Tokens. Like, each Obstacle Course only ever gives you 1 at a time, but then suddenly, the game just gives you 8 for doing nothing. Gears and Keys aren’t that generous but you can grind for them if you really wanted to. Or, you can also get all these items and more by fishing.
The fishing minigame is played by collecting Purple Coins. Purple Coins are fairly easy to get and really once you’re a few hours into the game you should never be running out of them. Fishing itself is extremely easy, like you press the X button twice, then press the X button when the white circle slowly enters range within the red circle. Whatever you fish out is rewarded with currency for Big the Cat’s shop. Big’s shop sells pretty much everything: Gears, Keys, Memory Tokens, Strength Seeds, Defence Seeds, Lost Koco, Rings, XP. If there is something you need or want, Big will sell it to you, and for cheap too. I think there is a limitation on how much you can buy, like Lost Koco, but when you reach the last fishing spot on the last island, that limitation is just gone.
The balance is kindof all over the place. Progression items can be bought but they can be easily gotten in the rest of the game anyway, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend anyone buy them from Big on their first run, just get them properly, don’t cheat yourself. XP is pretty plentiful and I got my skill tree maxed by the half way mark of the game. Seeds are a bit of a different story, I’m guessing you need 200-250 of each to max out Sonic’s Strength and Defence stats, and they tend to drop only 1 at a time, I did wind up buying a bunch near the end just to max out the stats, but it seems like it is possible to just grind enough through the open world. Lost Koco though, you need alot to max your stats and I seriously doubt there are enough on the open world to get enough to max them. I think maxing them through Big’s shop might be the only way to be able to have enough, will be interesting to see if anyone can prove or disprove that. Big also sells Egg Memos, audiologs by Eggman that go into his side of the plot. No idea why these are exclusive to Big’s shop, why not just make them a collectable on each island?
It doesn’t help that there are other signs of making the game easier. Those Cyberspace missions I talked about earlier are all pretty easy to accomplish, even the time trials. Out of the 30 so-called “S Rank” times, I think I beat 25 them with no effort, 4 of them with some effort, and 1 I still haven’t beaten, that last one being the only one I’d say truly deserves the “S Rank” monikor. Keep in mind, while I am Sonic fan, I am in no way the kindof guy good enough to do time trials. But it is very obvious most of these time trials are very easy, and require basic knowledge of Sonic’s moveset and level design to beat. I don’t know why they didn’t make the missions for “A Rank”, and then maybe make “S Rank” optional for true fans who want a challenge, but here we are, these missions are kindof a joke.
But then, unlike alot of platformers with collectables, Frontiers has seemingly no interest in having the player collect everything. There’s no kindof status screen, letting you know that you have 50% of the Memory Tokens, or that you’ve completed 70% of the Missions in Cyberspace. The only things you can really complete in game are beating the main story, viewing the optional side cutscenes, and maxing Sonic’s stats and skill tree. I’ve gotten the Platinum Trophy for this game, but really by the time you finish the story, it doesn’t take much to get the neccesary Trophies to achieve the Platinum. No asking you to get all the S Rank times or beat all the missions or collect all the Memory Tokens, the game seems quite fine with you just beating it and moving on with your life. I don’t believe there is any kind of reward for going out of your way for doing everything. Heck, the game doesn’t even have a post-ending, where you get to explore the island after you wrap up the story, you’re just forced to play with that final objective always available.
I have done everything except haven’t collected all the Memory Tokens on the 2nd and 3rd islands, and have one S-Rank time left to beat. But honestly, I just don’t have the enthusiasm to finish it when I know there is no kind of reward for me for finishing it all, even just a “100% Clear” screen. Ah well.
Titan fights are fun. They are big and bombastic and very memorable, and they each get their own J Metal track to go along with. The OST is definetly unique, very little “traditional” Sonic music. The overworlds get this nice orchestra to play over them, there is the J Metal like I said before, the fishing mini-game has some sortof lo-fi track, and alot of the Cyberspace stages are quite modern… I’m not really sure what genre you’d call them. It isn’t my favourite soundtrack, but there is alot to like here and I imagine some will really love it.
I’m hoping Frontiers might get some DLC down the line. I feel like this kind of game would benefit from it, but Sonic Team seems quite allergic to doing DLC for their games. Really the only DLC I can think of was stuff like adding challenge runs to existing stages in Sonic '06 and Unleashed. (Oh yes, '06 actually had paid DLC at the time, amazingly.) And Sonic Mania Plus which added a bit of content to justify a physical release. I think Frontiers could really use another island, or better yet, the idea of having other characters be able to do the islands themselves, just muck around with the obstacle courses and tailor the existing islands to their strengths, but Sonic Team seem very hesitant about letting anyone other than Sonic be playable.
Wow, that was alot. I like Frontiers, I hope a couple things can maybe get patched or fixed in the future, perhaps some kindof DLC will be fun. Sonic can wear cosmetic items but there are none to unlock in game and only like 4 costumes exist as various tie ins, like to Monsters Hunter, and apparently to a Japanese Youtuber and that is region locked to Japan?
Time to talk plot now, I’ll spoiler tag it as I talk full game spoilers:
I enjoyed the plot of Frontiers, even if it is perhaps a bit thin. Perhaps the problem you have when trying to give the plot to a game that easily takes 20+ hours to complete. There is definetly a bit of a Breath of the Wild vibe to this, alot of mystery as you investigate ruined islands that clearly got hit by some sort of devastation. I do like where this goes, I actually love Ian Flynn’s take on giving some more lore to the Chaos Emeralds, not to mention effectively giving an origin story to Chaos himself from Sonic Adventure and where he came from, and events that would lead to Tikal and the Echidna Empire. But I think BotW benefitted from also having a very central focus on stopping Calamity Ganon as Link’s goal, whereas here it takes a while until there really is a central goal, and I feel like it can make things feel a bit aimless.
Still, we get Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Dr Eggman, and even a cameo from Big the Cat, and they all feel wonderfully written. Frontiers was written by Ian Flynn. For those that don’t know, Flynn is the guy who took over the Archie comics after infamous writen Ken Penders left. After the Archie Comics were cancelled, Flynn and alot of Archie staff would go onto work on the IDW Sonic series. IDW would also see alot more oversight by Sonic Team in the process, issuing alot of mandates (some reasonable, some stupid, especially when relating to Shadow). Flynn has been writing Sonic for around 15 years now and with IDW, had constant contact with Sonic Team, with Sonic Team themselves often approving alot of the new characters and stories that IDW concocted. So perhaps this was the next step, to finally promote Flynn, and I think most Sonic fans are glad after so many past games have had very lacklustre writing. Flynn knows how to write these characters. Amy isn’t annoying and can be quite caring without obsessing over Sonic. Knuckles has a nice friendly rivalry dynamic with Sonic and reflects on his role as the last Echidna and his duty of guarding the Master Emerald. Tails actually brings up how badly written he was in Forces and states how much he wants to get out of Sonic’s shadow.
It feels nice and it does feel like that Flynn is setting the seeds for giving these characters future arcs. Indeed, combined with this, new lore, Sage, and the hint that the big bad of the game could return, its nice that Flynn wants to build upon the continuity of the Sonic franchise and set up seeds for the future. Sonic used to do this in the 3D era between Adventure and '06, but from Unleashed onwards, it seems like Sonic decided to do what Mario does and keep adventures fairly self contained and episodic. (I mean, I guess aside from Forces which decided to bring back a bunch of past villians, but then all of them turned out to be Infinite’s holograms and something and all the characters in the Resistance are useless and… god Forces is a mess.) So the notion that the Sonic continuity might stop being relatively static and start moving forward is very exciting, but it also depends on what Sonic Team’s next game is and whether Flynn gets to come back.
Still, I did like Sage, look forward to her coming back (I presume), and the ending did make me cry, not going to lie. It’s nice to have a very friendly Sonic who actually cares about his friends and makes reference to them and past locations, although Flynn’s love of references can seem a bit silly at times, alot of humourous comparisons to Family Guy. “You think that’s bad, remember the time I got shot the Space Colony ARK?” Couple of very noteworthy references, Sticks is brought up by Amy. Sticks was a character exclusive to the Sonic Boom arm of the franchise, and aside from getting to appear in the last Olympics game, never near anything mainline. So that’s fun, and hopefully means she can reappear, rather than basically die with the rest of Sonic Boom. The very big one though, for me and for potential canon, is Tangle the Lemur. She is mentioned by Sonic in a passing reference, and lordy, that blew my mind. I mean, a comic exclusive character getting any kindof recognition is always special, like when the Sonic Forces mobile game included her and Whisper. This does bring up canon issues, like whether any of IDW will be canonised? What about her girlfriend, I mean, best friend Whisper, aka best girl who is my avatar? What about the new villians like Starline or Surge? I doubt they would just make the IDW run canon, especially when IDW is far less accessible to the Japanese fanbase and Sonic Team does seem to really care to cater for them, but who knows, it would be awesome for elements of IDW to appear in the games. Sonic hasn’t really had any new additions to his cast in the games since '06 introduced Silver, and it’s been other media that have been giving us bigger additions. I love Tangle and Whisper so the idea they are one step closer to being actual mainline Sonic characters does make me smile.
I look forward to the future and hope Sonic Team gets to build ontop of Frontiers, and could make a truly great sequel, and Flynn can further build upon the Sonic cast.
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yeah, that game was my lifeline when i took the kids to butlins. all those synergies and deck builds; it’s a beautiful bit of design.
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Got my refunds for Google Stadia purchases this week (£100-ish), so promptly re-sunk some of that into Pentiment (Obsidian medieval narrative game thing-y with shades of Disco Elysium, released this week), and the jobby Definitive Edition of Tekken 7 with all the DLC which was finally on sale at a reasonable price (£15 = 85% off) during a weekend deal on Steam.
Tekken has always been my favourite fighting game series since me and my brother knocked 7 bells out of each other on it when we were younger (Prototype Jack FTW!), but since the good old PS2 days the pricing to buy the full game has been absolutely outrageous. Glad to finally get my hands on a modern version without spending silly money on it.
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Worse if you’re in an area with slow internet connection.
A friend of mine that lives in Germany…
Whenever he’s impatient, he takes his PC / console to an old classmate of his that has better internet to leech off of him 
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The stars finally aligned and I picked up Superhot the other day. I absolutely love everything about it–the slow motion gunfights, the meta-narrative, the challenge of the new mechanics they throw at you–except, my god, words cannot describe how annoying I find the repeated, pulsing “Super. Hot. Super. Hot.” over and over after every single damn level. 
I also got Midnight Fight Express in the Black Friday sale. I’m pretty terrible at it. No matter how much I tell myself I’m not going to do it, I always end up getting a bit too button-mashy when playing fighting/brawling games, but it’s fast, has a lot of environmental interaction and a kick ass soundtrack. It’s really fun, especially when you can get into the rhythm of the combat.
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oh i adore it (the game, not the phrase). played it for hours on end with the pi soundtrack on.
here’s my favourite endless run, if you can be bothered (katanas ftw):
it opens up immensely once you unlock stuff.
i’ve got to the last mission and s ranked a few early ones, but haven’t tucked too deeply into it just yet (sifu’s master mode came out just after release and in my old age i can only concentrate on learning the ins-and-outs of one game at a time). glorious fun though. the animations are great and i love the way gunplay is handled; feels like john wick.
i do love games that let you choreograph combat scenarios like these and max payne. they’re just perfect for expressing yourself and experimenting.
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I can be bothered. I’m bothered all the time.
I didn’t realize there was an Endless mode, but it makes perfect sense. I look forward to trying it out.
Yeah, the first couple of skills I’ve unlocked have helped a lot. Sometimes I even manage to pull off a few moves intentionally.
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MIND IS SOFTWARE
BODIES ARE DISPOSABLE
THE SYSTEM WILL SET ME FREE
It’s the most innovative shooter I’ve played in years.
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I literally just got there an hour ago. 
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