Something For The Weekend – 10/12/16

The end of 2016 has brought to a close some of the most protracted development cycles I can think of. Sure, they’re not quite on the level of Duke Nukem Forever, but around a decade’s worth of work went into both Final Fantasy XV and The Last Guardian.

Thankfully, as our reviews for both rolled out this week and the games have hit the shelves, it seems like both of them were worth the wait, even if they have a handful of foibles.

Are you riding around with your best boy? Or riding on the back of a loveable giant cat-bird-griffin thing?

In the News This Week

• More than 50 million PS4s have now been sold
  One hell of a milestone to pass so quickly. Bunimomike put it quite succinctly: “Bloody hell… still chugging along at a fair old rate. Very impressed.” While JR. commented, “It’s got that Adele 21 momentum now where it just keeps selling and selling even though everyone on Earth already has like 5 copies.”
• Catch up on last weekend’s PlayStation Experience
  This time last week, Sony pulled out all the stops to get people excited for the future line up on PlayStation 4. Catch up on all the major announcements including a The Last of Us sequel.
• Square Enix plan to add and change Final Fantasy XV’s story
  Sammy commented, “It’s simple. They are perfectionists. Which is why the game took so long to come out and why even though they’ve “finished” making it, they can’t let it go and still want to push that envelope a little bit further because they know they can do better.”
• HTC founds Vive Studios to develop and publish new VR titles
  Starting with Arcade Saga, this is a good move to help sustain the VR dev community.
• More classic maps are coming to Modern Warfare Remastered next week
• There’s more Pokémon coming to Pokémon Go, with details coming next week
• Rumour has it that the Nintendo Switch with have GameCube Virtual Console support
  Our man Dave said, “If they just brought Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door to the Switch, I’d be a very happy man.”
• Super Mario Run requires an internet connection to play
  Because of piracy.
• Farming Simulator 17 got PS4 Pro and 4K support
• Have a bloody jolly time in Paris with Hitman this Christmas
  And support cancer research while you do.

Games in Review

The Last Guardian and Final Fantasy XV were the two biggest reviews of our week. How did they fare?

• Pinball FX2 VR – PSVR, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive – 9/10
• Final Fantasy XV – PS4, XBO – 8/10
• The Last Guardian – PS4 – 8/10
• Mekazoo – PS4, XBO, PC – 8/10
• Darkest Dungeon – PS4, PS Vita, PC – 8/10
• Steep – PS4, XBO, PC – 7/10
• The Dwarves – PS4, XBO, PC – 5/10

This Week’s Features

Elsewhere in this week’s features, we give you some good (and terrible, but amusing) ideas for gaming related Christmas gifts. There are “good” reasons to buy your friend a fake human head, I promise you.

I went hands on with two new and upcoming mobile games. First off, Nintendo look like they’re going to make a splash with Super Mario Run, while the developers best known for the CSR mobile drag racing games have taken a crack at the MMO strategy genre with the rather gorgeous Dawn of Titans.

Dave got in a quick preview of Dragon Quest VIII’s Nintendo 3DS remake, while Jim has been very much enjoying his hacking escapades in Watch Dogs 2’s unfairly overlooked multiplayer. Tuffcub donned his PSVR to play and stream the free VR Mission that was just added to Star Wars Battlefront this week.

Finally, as always, we relayed the games that we’ve been playing this past week in What We Played. This time around it features Pokémon Sun & Moon, Final Fantasy XV and Steep.

Trailer Park

What it’s like living with Trico
A bit like living with a certain big red dog…

Let the hype begin for The Last of Us: Part II 

Get a good look at the Crash Bandicoot remasters in action

Investigate The Coon Conspiracy in South Park: The Fractured But Whole

Fan the flames of resistance in Sniper Elite 4’s story trailer

Your Achievements

Perhaps encouraged by the recent patches, Pixel_nme grabbed the platinum trophy for No Man’s Sky, amidst his usual bevy of co-op gaming. TSBonyman has certainly been tempted back, setting up a base on “33° Burn, which can be found in A Star System in the Euclid Galaxy.”

DividSmythe has returned to Lara Croft’s new first adventure, earning himself the platinum trophy in Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition.

JR. has gone full Ubisoft – and you should never go full Ubisoft – completing every single thing in Watch Dogs 2, as well as hunting down all 100 feathers in Assassin’s Creed 2’s remaster.

The Week Ahead

All the big, huge games from major publishers are now out in the wild, but there’s still quite a few things to look forward to in the week ahead:

• Filthy Lucre – PC – 12/12
• Batman: The Telltale Series – Episode 5 – PS4, XBO, PS3, X360, PC, iOS, And – 13/12
• The Little Acre – PS4, XBO, PC – 13/12
• Feist – PS4 XBO – 13/12
• Stardew Valley – PS4, XBO – 14/12
• Space Hulk: Deathwing – PC – 14/12
• Super Mario Run – iOS – 15/12

Alright, that’s your lot. I hope you have a very enjoyable weekend, whatever it is you have planned.