First up an apology. It’s been far to long since I have blogged on here. I have no excuse, just been doing other things. Nothing too exciting either. Mostly boring grown up stuff, gardening, decorating (planning at least) and running off to Leeds to Ikea when I get the opportunity. (For those of you who have never been may I suggest the Lancashire Hotpots – I fear Ikea link)
Watching lots of films (usually bad Sci fi) and TV – most of which will probably become blog posts in the not too distant future. But please don’t hold your breath… I don’t want that on my conscience 😉
Anyway, the main point of this post. A bit of an update on the few PS4 games I’ve been playing lately.
PS4
So about a month or so ago Square-Enix released the PS4 version of Final Fantasy 14. With a rather silly/clever update offer of a free upgrade to the PS4 version if you have it on PS3. So I dutifully went and bought it cheap on PS3, fired up my account and payed about with it for a bit.
I was pretty impressed with it on the PS3 and my MMO game partner Phil bought it on the PC knowing it was cross platform and we could quest with each other (after having a laugh with Titan Quest, Diablo 3, and a quick drop back into WoW).
The PS4 version was released and I had a lay about with that until this month. Unfortunately the negatives outweighed the positives for me to keep up with the payments.
So, first of all, the positives. This is pretty. No, I mean really pretty.
Compared to my experience of MMO games this is something else. And it plays nicely with a good mix of quests, dungeons and the majority of the gameplay is fun and it is easy to get into a raid with a group of people you have never met before to delve deeper into the dungeons and quest lines. The story is true Final Fantasy fodder, we’ll delivered with a mixture of voice acted and On-screen text. All of which is well written and well acted.
Unfortunately, after this, things start to go downhill.
For an MMO, it feels very much like a single player game. There is no way to quest with a friend. Even if you both have the same quest and are in the same group. Well, no way we could work out. So it’s a bit like you are running about doing the same things, but not together.
And that is only if you can find where you need to be to undertake your quest. The mapping system is epically hard to navigate, with the areas being either huge and complicated or tiny and looking at the map to try and see where you need to go is really difficult, Kay places are marked, but waypoints are not, and unless you are on top of the quest location it’s a nightmare to find where you are supposed to be.
Overall these niggles, especially when the objective of an MMO is to allow you to have fun with people you know I decided to suspend my subscription, I may dive back in in a few months to see if they have fixed any of this in patches, but for now I have moved on.
More recently I have been playing a little indie game that was free with PS+ last month. Stick it to the man has a brilliant art style and the execution is very slick as well. Humour in games is notoriously hard to pull off, comedy is an intensely personal thing but this game has nailed it.
I don’t want to spoil the game for people so I will choose my words very carefully here. You play a protective headgear tester who is clinked on the head by something from the sky, when you wake up you have a giant pink hand that allows you to gather stickers and read minds.
The basic gameplay involves reading people’s minds and gathering the stickers required to solve the individual needs/problems. It plays very much like old school point and click adventures and the humour is very Tim Schafer. It is all played on a 2D plain and has platforming sections but nothing that should pose too many problems.
It involves clever use of the dualshock 4 speaker and light bar to draw you in and to break up the gameplay in clever ways.
In fact it’s been a long while since I finished a game like this so it’s about as ringing endorsement as I can give it to say I have completed this game, and in relatively short time. I really couldn’t put this game down until I had beaten it.
What else?
Apart from these games I have been catching up with Agents of SHIELD which I will do another post on in a week or so (after the season finale) and watching bad films (again I’ll do a post about The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai in the near future – once I’ve got my head around it)
So anyway, I’m off again. Hopefully I’ll be back sooner than usual I’m going to try and do almost at least once a month as a target and if I do more then that’s good.
I’d also like to apologise in advance as the screenshots I’ve used are not mine. The screenshot for Stick it to the man is from www.destructoid.com and the FF14 is from www.gamingphanatic.com. Credit where it’s due, I could get my own shots of FF14 as my sub has lapsed now and was too lazy to fire up Stick it to the man.
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