Old_Man_Harper

I’ve put some hours into it over the weekend. I now have my own ant to ride around on (I’ve called him Mortimer) and successfully defended my base against an attack by a mysterious insect force. In all that time I’ve barely ventured more than a metre from the snack bar area where you start. I’m having a great time! 🙂

Grounded 2 - after co-oping with a couple of friends last week, I’m back to soloing, which takes a lot more preparation and scouting. Hopefully I’ll be able to obtain and train a steed tomorrow!

I wonder if this would have happened if Concord had not been a failure? Either way, I’m saving up my reward points and looking forward to trying it - it’s a reasonable price too. I thought about buying it on PS5 , but my friends are all on Xbox and I didn’t fancy soloing it or playing with randoms.

@BacklogBrad Same here. I wanted to like E33, but the static turn based aspect seems so anaemic in comparison with something like BG3 that I found it boring.

I’m surprised Abiotic Factor isn’t getting more love. It’s a terrific game but hasn’t even had enough reviews to get a Metascore. 🤷‍♂️ Perhaps the old-fashioned graphic style puts people off, but they are missing a treat!

It’s not all that good. The bike is quite fun, but having to ride right across the map for a mission that was nothing more than a 1-minute cutscene was the last straw and I gave up on it. Also, in my experience members of motorcycle gangs tend not to be very nice guys.

Played a bit of Grounded 2 this morning - looks good - but mostly I’ve been on with Abiotic Factor, which I’m really enjoying.

@Ricky-Spanish Honey I Shrunk the Kids if it was flat-out terrifying! I never left my base after dark when the wolf spiders prowl…

I was going to jump straight in, but Abiotic Factor is totally scratching the survival itch at the moment and likely for some time to come.

I’m playing Abiotic Factor, which is really good - sort of Half-Life with crafting. Every item you pick up will give you an idea for something it could potentially be used for. Think about it (a mini game) and you get a list of items you’d need to craft it. Really engrossing once you get to grips with it, I can see this one eating up hours.

I waited for the 1.0 version of Grounded before playing, but I think I’ll be there from the start for this one. Hopefully the early access period won’t be as long as the first game, which was clearly lengthened by the pandemic, and we’ll get 1.0 quite soon.

I wanted to like the first one, but all I seemed to be able to do was survive on a day-to-day basis and never even got close to building the big submarines and underwater bases it promised, so eventually I lost interest and gave up on it.

Yes, a definite buy - in fact all my regular Horde crew are planning to pick this up. Looking forward to it - I would have bought it on PS5 but all my friends are on Xbox.

At 57 and with a presumably pretty lucrative career behind him… I’d have an eye on the ‘retirement’ door. I’m the same age as him and I’m definitely thinking about it!

If ‘The Initiative’ hadn’t managed to produce anything worthwhile in seven years then the writing was on the wall. I can feel sympathy when people get laid off if a game isn’t a success, but seven years and no result? There’s the door.

Looking forward to Grounded 2, I had a lot of fun with the first one.

1 KCD2 - a truly great game if you are willing to give it the time it needs.

2 Lost Records: Bloom & Rage - the second part didn’t live up to the first, but it more than made up for last year’s slightly disappointing LiS game.

3 The Precinct - good fun.

I’m enjoying it. Oddly, I prefer the nuts and bolts policing stuff - fining graffiti vandals, running license plate checks, pulling over drivers with outstanding warrants and such - to car chases and shoot outs, although there are plenty of those too.

It would be nice if it could be included on a free play day - I’d be interested to give it a go and make my own mind up.

I’ve been doing some law enforcing on Series X - The Precinct and Police Simulator. I’d say the former is more polished and makes it simpler to make decisions around arrests etc. whereas in the latter it’s quite easy to make mistakes like arresting the wrong person after a traffic accident, or wrecking my patrol car on the day I got it. 😳

Both let you do the deeply satisfying thing where you blip the lights and siren to get a car to pull over. 😁

I’m down to the last few missions in Crime Scene Cleaner which I’m finding very relaxing. I wish I took such satisfaction in tidying up my own place!

After that, I think I’ll have a look at The Alters. Hope everyone has a good weekend. 🙂

Obviously they should really try and get things in as good a state as possible before releasing, but I hate to see the sort of pile-on that it is getting and hope they can sort it out.

It was the developer’s choice to release on Game Pass. Nobody compelled them to do so.

The Alters looks interesting. It occurs to me that the last football game I played (apart from FM) was Match Day on the Spectrum, which came out 41 years ago, so maybe I should see if things have advanced since then! 😄

Grounded 2 was the nicest surprise.

Very excited to see that, I really enjoyed Grounded.

Unexpected, but happy about it because I enjoyed the first game.

I’ve been giving my PS5 at bit of love and replayed Last of Us 2 after watching the recent TV series. Still an all-timer, although I’m pretty familiar with it now. Might try and make inroads into my Game Pass backlog tomorrow with Atomfall, but I’ll see how I feel tomorrow.

Xbox Series X (with Game Pass) is the best console I’ve ever owned and I go back over 45 years to the Atari VCS and the ‘TV games’ before that. It’s fast, quiet, totally reliable and still going strong. Living alone in lockdown, winter 20-21, it was practically a life saver in terms of keeping me sane and occupied.

@themightyant incidentally, if you’ve got the complete edition of KCD, you get a series of ‘ancient maps’ which lead to treasure hidden in graves. They aren’t particularly cryptic and you get good cash and high level gear for the price of a spade. It does make the early game easier.

@themightyant Forging becomes quicker with practice and levelling up. I was ultimately able to produce a masterwork Toledo steel longsword in about 90 seconds. Likewise, potion making improves with experience - eventually you get four potions for every one you brew. Practice makes perfect!

Great, I’m there. I finished it recently (205 hours and I didn’t do a huge number of side quests!) and it’s the best game I’ve played in ages. Totally gripped by it.

When I read the headline I assumed it would be something like Dominos or Pizza Hut, not some micro-chain that doesn’t exist in Europe and isn’t even widespread in the US!

Good to hear that they are getting on with something new. I thought Hellblade 2 was superb in an art house sort of way. I liked the way that the ‘magic’ was drawn from the Icelandic landscape. It really does need to be played with headphones for the full effect.

I recently finished KCD2, which I thought struck just the right balance. It is largely open world with side quests etc. but when the story requires it, it becomes quite linear.

This just seems like an attempt to part PlayStation owners from their money for what is now a pretty old game. I mean it’s still good fun - but there are a lot of corridors and courtyards and everything that was new and wow about it back then has been done to death in other things since.

More KCD2 on Series X. I think I’m getting close to the end now - just had to do a glorious bit where a character, impersonating a Cardinal, has to adjudicate a dispute at a church council, whilst maintaining a sufficient level of drunkenness to speak Latin confidently.

KCD2 is a whopper of a game, but the length of time it’s taken means that I’ve now got a heck of a backlog of good Game Pass stuff, so frankly I can manage without GTAVI.

To paraphrase The Donald, I guess we’ll “have two games instead of 30 games”. 😄

It doesn’t bother me much, as the last first-party Xbox game I bought was Sea of Thieves, after which I got game pass, so the only games I buy now are 3rd party. However, I suppose they’ll go up too.

187 hours(!) into KCD2 and still plenty to do, so everything else is having to wait for a turn, although I did make an exception for the comparatively short Lost Records (very good, I thought).

More KCD2 - around 170 hours in and nearing the end of the story. Still having a great time with this and there are actually a ton of side quests I haven’t done.

I’m 170 hours into KCD2 and during that time an absolutely enormous backlog of games I want to play has developed on game pass alone! Frankly, even if they delay GTA 6 I’ve got more than enough to last the rest of the year.

@Valhura try Gears Tactics, Metal Slug Tactics or Wargroove 2, all on game pass

Some extra gaming days this weekend, so I played tape 2 of Lost Records. Not as good as tape 1, I thought - not as interactive - but I still enjoyed it and hope they make more.

Now back to KCD2.

I picked up the first KCD game with all dlc for less than a tenner. 🙂

Still on with KCD2 on Series X. It’s an immense game! I also a quick look at Blue Prince before adding it to the ever-growing backlog - seems interesting.

Whoah, they are actually promoting the console that they make? Radical thinking from the marketing department there - completely contradicting their previous strategy of ‘the odd tweet about it or nothing at all’!

Oooh, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 for me - 125 hours in and I’m not yet half way through! I really need to do some reading on that period of history, Wenceslas and Sigismund, Zizka and the Hussites.

Also a shout out for Lost Records - Bloom & Rage, which more than made up for last year’s slightly disappointing LiS game. Looking forward to Tape 2 next week and hope it does well enough that they can make this a series of games.

Heh heh. Always entertaining when audiences defy critics. 😁

I spent the entirety of March on KCD2 and will likely be the same in April, so I didn’t vote - I haven’t had the chance to play any of them yet.