Nowadays, mostly because I buy so few games, I seem to have a habit of actually FINISHING the damned things, which is a good thing right? Recently I polished off Cyberpunk 2077 after owning it for far too long and giving it far too little attention and then over the weekend I finally polished off Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart.
I came to the conclusion that I wouldn't play another R & C game unless there's some massive reinvention of those games. I got pretty fed up with Rift Apart towards the end, after some pretty horrible checkpointing (developers, no one - and I do mean NO ONE wants repeated audio / dialogue after a checkpoint and before a battle they're going to lose a lot, NO ONE!), those bloody horrible beam robots and a couple of boss fights that were purely frustrating and irritating. In fact the whole game was way too combat heavy and I'm getting sick and tired of that being the default in games. Whatever happened to folk using their brains rather than their trigger fingers? I would admit though that it was a heck of a looker and does show that Insomniac are one of those core developers who know how to wring amazing results out of the hardware, old or new.
The PS5 hasn't quite been the revolutionary revelation I was hoping for, and it could just be that a mere year and a bit into its lifespan it hasn't seen even a whiff of its potential being unlocked. So far, of the PS5 games I've played (Returnal - not my cup of tea, Deathloop - bloody awful and R & C - the best of the bunch so far) nothing's set my pants alight, and playing the PS5 version of recent PS Plus 'freebie' Dirt 5 just made me realise that even with a supposedly blindingly powerful bit of kit, you're still going to see frame drops and stutters unless folk really are building games for the PS5 only rather than just porting and prettying up old PS4 stuff (Dirt 5 was a bit too "dudebro" for me as well but a fun distraction for a wet saturday afternoon).
Elsewhere, I've been persevering with this monstrosity...
Love them or hate them (and most people are at the very least very disappointed with them) the GTA remasters are brutally tough, not just because you're now playing the games without the old framedrops you experienced on older machines, but because they're so raddled with bugs and a brutal level of difficulty that most missions are exercises in abject frustration.
I find that any mission either involving cops or other cartels will inevitably mean being pinballed from pillar to post if I'm stupid enough to be in a vehicle during said missions, or insta-death from gunfire if I'm on foot. Case in point: Doing the old mission where (hilariously) Tanner from the Driver series is 'cameoing' as an undercover cop. You're tasked with chasing him down and as soon as you make an attempt to stop his car, every single cop in Liberty City descends on you like a plague of locusts, meaning that it's actually impossible to progress. It doesn't seem to matter what vehicle you pick for this mission either, your car will be reduced to a smoking ruin in seconds (and anyone playing the remasters knows, you will have mere microseconds to get the hell out of there before being caught up in a nuclear explosion as the cars seem extremely weak and extremely explosive in this).
The other big issue I have with the games is the day to light cycle, and in fact the gamma levels in general are piss poor (and you don't get any chance to adjust them before the game begins, which again is very poor).
I've got fairly far into GTA3 and the thing that annoys me the most isn't how buggy / dreadful these remasters are, it's the pissed away potential to rebuild the game from the ground up (as I've said before, like VV did with the awesome Tony Hawks remasters) and properly use the GTA 4 / 5 game engines rather than shovelling something out that is adapted from the tablet versions of the games.
As the damned thing cost an arm and a leg I have that gritty determination to finish the trilogy off (slowly chipping away at GTA 3 and Vice City, waiting to play GTA San Andreas) but if there's one thing I've learned about getting back into gaming, it's to trust the opinions of my buddies on Twitter who said early on that these remasters were going to be awful (and they were right).
Kiddo is getting into her gaming big time now, though she's obsessed with Portal and Portal 2 - no bad thing but it's stopping her from playing other stuff. I would love her to have a crack at Bioshock but again I think the main issue with most games is that she too doesn't enjoy the shooty-banginess of most modern titles, and wants stuff to tax her strategic / puzzle solving brain rather than stuff that involves pinpointing something and killing it as quickly as possible.
Happy new Gaming Year everyone. Let's hope it's a good 'un!
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