This week saw a new-found commitment to gaming, and indeed to TSA, as I took my Wii U away with me to finish an article as I spent the night in a hotel. Now admittedly, portable gaming is hardly a new thing – my 3DS and Vita have accompanied me on many train journeys, holidays and nights away – but arguably the Wii U allows you to take your home console experience away with you, and, best of all, play it for hours without fear of waking up with hands that have forgotten how to function.
It doesn’t rely on hotel internet connections, nor the hope that you can access the HDMI connections of the TV in your room, it just works, and the majority of games play merrily on its 6.2″ screen. Again, the whole thing simply reminded me just why the Wii U is such a special console, and how much of a shame it is that more people aren’t likely to experience it.
Anyhoo, I was playing the heck out of Pokkén, the Pokémon fighter from the Tekken team, and thus far I’ve had a lot of fun with it. Beyond that, I’ve also been playing Project X Zone 2 on 3DS, Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD on Wii U, Action Henk and SFV on PS4, as well as ARK: Survival Evolved on Xbox One.
I probably wouldn’t have returned to ARK so soon if it wasn’t for the fact that my son Noah adores it, and every session becomes a story that he’ll recount to his Mum when she gets home. He also knows more of the dinosaur names than I do so it’s clearly an educational experience for me, and I still need those every once in a while!
Dave has been mostly focussing on Street Fighter V, which he gave a glowing review, and then proceeding to beat the hell out of me when I got it yesterday. I wasn’t going to say anything different happened but he took a picture just to be sure. Trust eh? He also found the time for some end-game boss battling on Bravely Second, which must mean it’s really good!
Meanwhile, Jim has been busying himself with a select handful of games this week, most of which you’ve probably read about. First up, he reviewed Gemini, a video game adaptation looking to bridge the gap between one of his favourite TV shows, Heroes, and its less-than-stellar reboot. Despite not taking his fancy, he jumped back in long enough to secure a very ease platinum trophy, taking his total count to the mid sixties. Next to that, he’s had fun playing Dreii as well as Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth – a game that had Jim reminiscing on some of his earliest gaming moments. Looking to clear that dreaded backlog, he’s also spent a fair amount of time with Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
Miguel dropped in to tell me he hadn’t played anything – which was nice. He has been “preparing his body” for Fire Emblem, Street Fighter V and The Division beta. I’m not sure what preparations your body needs for that – a healthy amount of Red Bull or Mountain Dew perhaps, and maybe a packet of biscuits. Either way, he’s ready!
Tef‘s gaming this week has continued to feature Dying Light’s new expansion, The Following, which he’s now been playing on PS4. Though it’s still a lot of fun to play with others, especially since he’s played the opening several times now, he has found the frame rate to chug on console when the screen gets overly busy. Beyond that, he briefly returned to Destiny for the Crimson Doubles, and has been playing in the snow of Cities: Skylines – Snowfall.
Somebody who’s been sticking with his chosen discipline is Tuffcub who remains addicted to that gym. By this point he is definitely levelling up – repeatedly saying OWWWWWW is levelling up right? He has also played an actual game type game too, taking the time to scare the hell out of himself with Layers Of Fear, and he’s also been getting more of his tattoo done. I’m not sure if all these activities are separate things as it wasn’t made clear, and in fact the idea of somehow doing bicep curls whilst getting a tattoo and playing Layers Of Fear is clearly within his grasp – and what a time saver!
But what about you? What have you been playing? And most importantly – has your body been ready?
R1MJAW
More Borderlands Pre-Sequel with Forrest and Pixel.
Lots more Diablo, trying out various things.
More Raman Legends daily/weekly challenges.
Finished off collecting stuff and doing the no death runs in Unavel and got the platinum.
MrYd
Raman Legends? Must resist temptation to take the piss out of typos via the medium of obscure physics jokes nobody will understand. ;)
R1MJAW
Typo caused by bloody auto correct splitting up ray and man and me deleting too many spaces.
I also forgot I’ve played about 10 hours of EDF 4.1 too.
DividSmythe
Haha also new game Unavel to lol
MrYd
Again this week it was Disgaea 5 getting my attention. Finally finished it.
And by “finished” I mean “got through the story and on to the real game with all the grinding”.
At least it means I won’t have any more Terrible Trophy Screenshots from it for a while.
DividSmythe
I bought and got the platinum out of Snoopy’s adventure time. Yes come on call me a trophy whore but it is a good old fashioned platformer. I’ve also been playing Street Fighter V. Which is great even with the lack of content at launch. Also I’ve been playing FIFA, Diablo and Unravel. I’ve also picked up from Canada store the GTA collection which works out at around £8.75 which is a bargain as it’s the better version compared to the one on EU store.
Pixel_nme
Well the usual Borderlands as mentioned by R1MJAW with Forrest Monday night followed by that Crimson thingymibob on Destiny with Forrest,lots of Black Ops 3 to reach prestige 2 some EDF an The Following with R1MJAW,more Borderlands Thursday night and Streetfighter V at varying times of the week which i got rid of today due to lack of content mostly on the offline side,good solid Streetfighter plays well but longgg loading times especially online will most probably pick it up again when it’s a bit more full fat.
Carrot381
Have been grinding the heck out of Zestiria in the hope that when I start NG+ I’ll have enough grade to carry over some equipment and stats. It takes bloody ages…
TSBonyman
Fallout 4, reached the Institute and was impressed by what i saw but disappointed at what i learned there.
Binding of Isaac, twice more died in the final battle.
Unravel, had a few tricky bits, particularly sections of levels 3 and 5 but i made it through and have just one level left to play, then a handful of secrets to go back and grab.
Driveclub, i took advantage of easy mode to hoover up many of the stars i missed earlier on.
I picked up a handgrip for my Vita and it must have been comfortable because i made it most of the way through Limbo in one sitting, just a handful of puzzles away from the end now.
So to summarise, i nearly completed many things this week. But as the saying goes, nearly never bulled a cow. ;)
CR8ZYH0RSE
Just finished TWD season 2 and it was just as good as the first,i’m hoping they bring out a season 3.Also going to jump into the 2nd beta of The Division,totally impressed with them so far i can’t wait for the release date to fully explore the game in depth.
Andrewww
Was a week in the Alps, so haven’t played much, rather watched some heart-warming films like World War Z and the re-remake of The Thing, which are both downloaded titles my PS3 for some reason doesn’t want to play (but any other player seems to do). (Just to remind you: downloading films is still legal in Switzerland, so no need to look at me that way…).
Apart from that, I finally continued Virtue’s last reward on my Vita, which is still awesome, and in my view an absolute must-play for everyone into gaming.
hazelam
been playing a lot of Xenoblade Chronicles X since christmas.
got the game and a Wii U as a present.
if there’s one word i can apply to my fifty plus,so far, hours, it’s WOW.
such scale and beauty.
the world is huge, and i mean HUUUUUGE.
vast areas and near limitless draw distance.
from the first reveal of the world shortly after you wake up in game , a definite wow moment, to the first time you get outside with the map and seeing the scale of the world, to realising this is truly one of those, if you can see it you can go there worlds.
literally, you can go anywhere you can see, depending on you abilities of course, there are places you can’t get to at first, but once you get your Skell, you can jump much higher and that opens up many new areas, and when you get the flight module for it, there shouldn’t be anywhere you can’t go.
you get to the coast and see the next landmass in the distance?
just swim there.
the variety of creature types is damn impressive too.
from creatures based on animals and dinosaurs, like big eared cat things, six limbed monkey things, GIANT diplodocus looking things that seem to spend most of their time drinking, loudly, and wouldn’t look out of place in a Godzilla movie. ^_^
to flying creatures with wings and others with gas bags, the, what describe as, giraffe unicorn dragon things, there’s giant insectoid creatures.
and it plays great too, which is nice. ^_^
similar to the Wii Xenoblade game, but expanded upon, to a confusing degree at first, there seem to be far too many systems at work when you first start playing, and the tutorials aren’t the best, but i soon picked it up, most of it anyway, and a bit of googling helped with the rest.
and there’s so much to do, the usual go there kill this type quest, some miranium deliveries, and a lot of item quests, the trouble with those is, they never tell you where the items are to be found, so those quest usually end up clogging your quest list until you randomly find the items you need and it goes away.
there are affinity missions where you do something for one of the NPCs you can put on your team, do a few of those and you get either a skill, which is like a passive perk, or an art, which is an activated ability that can either attack, heal, buff or debuff.
it took me nearly fifty hours to get my Skell license, but then i was doing a lot of the sidequests to level up before doing the story missions.
apparently you can get it after thirty hours if you plough straight through.
still waiting on getting the flight module though, there are places it seems like you need that to actually reach them.
and there’s loads of armour options.
loads of sets, and there is the cosmetic equip option, where you can equip one set of items to represent what you look like, so if the best armour is ugly, equip something in the cosmetic slot and that will override the look.
i haven’t really delved into the online side yet, seems like there’s a sort of MMO element to it, but so far i’ve been playing the single player mode.
you do get to add other players characters to your team for a while from the scout console though, similar to the pawn system from Dragon’s Dogma.
this is why i waited this long to actually say anything about the game, i knew it’d turn into a bleedin essay. ^_^
anyway, i also played a bit of The Division yesterday.
and, i actually liked it.
from all the stuff i’d seen of it before, i have to say, i wasn’t overly enthused.
but on playing it, it’s actually pretty fun.
reminds me of Mass Effect in it’s mix of TPS and RPG elements, and i really liked Mass Effect.
if the game can be played without being forced into PVP i could see me actually thinking about getting it.
the only real problem i had with the beta was the walls seeming a little too sticky for my liking.
i died a couple of times because the character wouldn’t move away from the bloody wall.
but it’s still in beta, and even with that, i still enjoyed it.
blast71
Blimey! Your post is larger than the article it’s posted to ;)
hazelam
i know right.
what’s the written equivalent of verbal diarrhoea? ^_^
blast71
I think it’s called “being a tabloid journalist” ;)
spartanstriker
I picked up Beach Buggy Racing and Riptide GP2 as they’re on offer – great pick up and play games especially for the little uns at half term. Also some Vita backlog on the tube with LBP and Super Stardust.