Yasawas

I'm reading the appalingly-titled Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman which is an easy one for the commute, and interesting enough so far, but it doesn't half read a bit like that book Alan Partridge put out in the second series. There's an infuriating smugness about him. I'm going to read that actual Alan Partridge book that exists next.

I did! It was probably my favourite puzzle to be honest, very Layton. I'm thinking about it now and have absolutely no recollection of the working behind it less than a week later

Grim Fandango Remastered (PS4) - I never had a PC growing up, I went straight from a Spectrum to the 16-bit consoles and never looked back so the entire point and click genre passed me by completely. The only one I had ever played prior to this was the Monkey Island remake on the 360 from about 2009 which I enjoyed and completed and having heard so much about this over the years I was eager to finally play it in a convenient fashion. I thought it was mostly excellent bar a few wee niggles. The tank controls are shite, not that tank controls always are, but in this the analog stick is waaaay too sensitive and Manny frequently freaks out and turns 180 degrees for no reason if you try to run everywhere. Objects sometimes turn invisible which is understandably inconvenient. The music is pretty overbearing in places (sorry) and I found it difficult to navigate the bigger areas sometimes as it wasn't entirely clear there was an exit at certain points, and when the screen flipped it could sometimes place you somewhere that was seemingly at odds with where you'd come from. I found the cat race stadium in Rubacava to be bad for this and there were a couple of puzzles I got stuck on that when I looked up I simply hadn't found the screen the item needed to progress was on. That's maybe me though. Also there were a few puzzles towards the end that were a bit weak and some more that I solved by accident and didn't understand even after I'd done them which was a bit weird. Personality goes a long way though as we know and the humour and style of this is still pretty amazing so many years later, there are very few games I would ever exhaust all dialogue options on and listen to the VO rather than skip through and read the subs but I did that here as the writing and voicework are phenomenal. Graphically it looks pretty swell too (I played in original mode as it gels better with the backgrounds) and the times I did work out a puzzle I thought was hard like the cat race ticket stub one I felt like a genius and got a belated glimpse of why people liked these games. Very much enjoyed it and will go back and play through again with the commentary as the few bits I heard made it sound well done. Now Broken Age and then if I'm not utterly sick of adventure games by then I'd like to go back and play Monkey Island 2 which I've started 3 or 4 times and never got past the first island of.

Wind-Up Bird was great I thought for about 95% of its length then I realised it wasn't going to end in a satisfying way and indeed it didn't. I read somewhere that the English publisher insisted on a page limit with it which makes it read badly but having read more of his books since, a lot of them end up going nowhere so it might just be his thing. I've enjoyed a few for the first two-thirds but Colourless Tsukuru was the only one I've genuinely enjoyed from beginning to end. This week I ran out of money to buy new books and so have started The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet which I bought in a Kindle sale over four years ago and have never really fancied starting despite loving Cloud Atlas. It's brilliant and I am a fool.

Yusss. I backed this but I only managed to play 20 minutes of it, I just don't like playing games on my laptop. Will buy the PS4 version as I liked what I saw although it means waiting a whole 48 hours more.

Yes. Nintendo do this quite well when they bother to put the effort in and I'd include both 3DS Zelda remakes too. You lose the big screen but you gain about four times the framerate, better controls and sharper graphics. Okami HD and Shadow of the Colossus are up there too. Higher resolution and true widescreen in the first instance, vastly improved framerate in the second. I can't remember if Ico is as much of an improvement over the PS2 version though.

Go the tonsil stone route and save the chalice dungeons for post-game if you ever want to do them at all, they ramp up in difficulty significantly very quickly anyway. Yesterday I went back and fought the four bosses I'd completely missed on my first run - The first of those was pretty terrible but made me laugh at least, the last I was just blindly slashing until I won but the middle two were cool albeit not very challenging if you can parry/have some patience. The only trophies I have left now require a bit of chalice dungeoning and I'm not sure I can be bothered as procedurally-generated dungeon crawling is not my thing at all, but I've had my £50 worth at this point I think. I was a little disappointed when I first completed this on Monday as it doesn't seem to have the replay potential of any of the Souls games but they've given me the best 40 hours of gameplay my PS4 has seen in the year I've had it so I can't really fault them for that I suppose.

Demon's Souls - False King Allant Dark Souls - Gwyn Dark Souls 2 - Looking Glass Knight Bloodborne - Of those I think False King is still my favourite, dude is brutal. Gwyn is there as I can't parry and he took me 40+ attempts (I could tell by all the upgrade stones I had when I finished as I killed the knights on the way there every time for some reason ) rather than for being a great boss, it was just a great feeling.

I just finished this kind of by accident, I didn't expect that to be the last boss and I'm a little annoyed as I wanted to do more exploring and thought I'd time for it. Anyway it was a good game. I don't want to go crazy about it yet as I'll need to let it stew for a bit and check out the wiki and all the delicious spoilers I've been avoiding for two weeks but my initial take on it is that it's a necessary departure from the old formula pulled off well and yet probably still not as good as Demon's Souls. It does a better job of avoiding the problems both Dark Souls games had with empty padding areas and some of the level design is staggering but I did feel a lot of the bosses just looked like angry big mops in comparison to the more varied designs from the other games.

Picked up the PS4 version of this the other day as I had skipped all the DLC and I fancied going for the platinum again. It's a difficult game to play in a post-Bloodborne world. I liked DS2 at the time despite its flaws and even though I think it's easily the weakest game in the series it was still my game of last year, I'm not sure how I feel about this version a few hours in. The opening section is pretty brutal. I'm not bad at these titles but I just ran past most of it as there are way too many trash enemies now on the run from Majula to the Last Giant. It's so easy to get mobbed and it makes this release initially feel like it was solely designed for people who had already played it before rather than being the definitive version of Dark Souls 2 it should be. In contrast if you go the other way at the start to the Tower of Flame they've made a number of great changes of which I totally approve - a number of Heide knights, different item placement, and a new big enemy to scare you off running up to the higher of the two bosses in that area from the start of the game. So it's a mixed bag three hours in then. I'll finish it and enjoy it I'm sure but playing it back to back with Bloodborne does highlight some weaknesses I was forgiving of the first time through, mainly with how predictable the enemies are. Every attack from them is a three-hit combo. Every single one. The hitboxes are still awful, projectiles still home in on you in defiance of physics and for the first time ever console players get to experience the equipment degradation bug as it's tied to framerate and is apparently so deeply ingrained in the engine they can't fix it.

It's ridiculous isn't it. I have Monster Hunter, Bloodborne and Persona Q (this is amazing!) on the go with Xenoblade 3D sitting here, PS4 Dark Souls II arriving today and a copy of Disgaea 5 currently somewhere between Osaka and my house. That's about 500 hours of games, just in time for summer!

I do! It's quite good now it's not hopelessly broken, I plan on getting the season pass which I never thought I'd say although you do get a ton of content without it. Even if we can't play simultaneously it's a lot of fun sending out challenges to friends too.

Is this meant to be good? I have a minty fresh copy of this inherited with a stack of PS2 games a friend was giving away and I've always been interested to try it but never got round to it. It just sits on my shelf depressing me with memories of when Capcom took risks as they had a glut of incredible games out during that time - Okami, God Hand, Killer 7, Resident Evil 4, Viewtiful Joe. I appreciate it's partly those same risks not paying off that has turned them into a Street Fighter/Monster Hunter/DLC factory these days but still, good times.

Is it my PS4 or does suspend mode not resume properly on Bloodborne if you're playing online due to the network connection briefly being lost and it kicking you back to the main menu? I have it set to maintain connection in rest mode so not sure what more I could do. Not that it really matters in a game where you can save at any point but it'd spare me one of those epic loads at least. I have ordered Disgaea 5 this morning! Excited. I am not going to see daylight for a while with that, both From games and Xenoblade out this week too. What a time to be alive.

This is ludicrously good. For background I'm one of those dicks who actually bought three versions of Demon's to get all the platinums and 100%ed both Dark Soulses on multiple formats so I am quite predisposed to these games generally but I did not enjoy my first few hours of Bloodborne at all. I had chosen that shitty cane because I thought it would be funny and with the setting and the different feel of the combat it reminded me of those awful recent Castlevania games, I was expecting Souls with top hats but it was all a bit further removed than I'd expected. And then when first boss crushed me literally 15+ times without me doing better than 25% of his bar, I went to bed angry on Thursday night and worried it might all be over. Friday morning though I manned up a bit and took him down with plentiful healing, started to make a bit of progress, found a new weapon, made a bit more sense of the new mechanics when it finally dawned on me the gun was a parry substitute and in the way of these games won me over with its grim charms. Three bosses down currently and if it can maintain the level of quality I've seen so far then I think it's going to be the best of these games, and I'm so pleased I was able to avoid all the previews for this as working things out is such a big part of the fun. Even if I was 12 hours in and two bosses down before I worked out how to repair and upgrade weapons - I was buying duplicates of weapons I had as I couldn't restore their durability.

I patiently await the reveals of next week, I'm really keen to see what the roster is for this. I'm not sure why that Reddit post is so keen for there to be no defensive options either as that's what makes Street Fighter Street Fighter and not Marvel or Guilty Gear or something else I don't like but again we'll need to see full matches to know and that probably won't be until Capcom Cup. I get that focus attacks are a bit silly but there's always a place for a skilful defensive option that lets you turn quickly into attack if you read your opponent right with it. Q was pretty hype, don't make me fill this thread up with Kuroda videos. I genuinely liked him because he was enjoyably shite and looked like MF Doom in a trenchcoat and his dash punch into super was so slow it was about the only legit hit confirm I could pull off in 3S. He was a better bad character than Dan at any rate. I did see this! Capcom are never going to use it when they could sell more licensed MadCatz sticks instead though, it's a shame.

I don't care about Uncharted but there's been a lot of strong stuff in this presentation. Street Fighter! Shovel Knight (again)! Gang Beasts! Fucking YAKUZA! Oh, and free games!

Indeed. And years later still nobody knows what a "Hakan" is, only that it's terrifying and exciting whenever you see someone select it on purpose. All I want is four new characters minimum and the return of parries or something similar that negates all damage and can be used in the air. And for Oro, Q and Urien to come back. Maybe three selectable ultras for everyone would be nice. And a release date this side of summer pls Ono-San.

This year I kept track of stuff I finished so I could easily filter it down precisely for a thread like this and it turns out this was actually a fairly disappointing year for new games for me, but on the plus side I played a bunch of older stuff that was tremendous. Anyway, Mario Kart 8 wins with 3D World being my favourite non-2014 game. Those other five-star games in full: Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan Gyakuten Saiban 3 Demon's Souls The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D Super Mario 3D World Professor Layton & the Azran Legacy Disgaea D2: A Brighter Darkness Dark Souls 2 Mario Kart 8 Wolfenstein: The New Order The Swapper

This is the best! But also I need to drop three figures on a PS4 stick now because capitalism, I can't see them bothering to make PS3 ones compatible now. Presumably this was supposed to be released tomorrow at the Sony event but it's Capcom Cup next week too which if you're not a massive fucking nerd might be unaware is the culmination of a year-long Street Fighter tournament series Capcom have been doing for a couple of years now, meaning they must surely be planning some kind of side event at it since they'll already have all the top players there. Hype indeed. I want to see and know lots about this. Noooooo. Part of the reason IV is my favourite game of last generation by a mile is because they didn't do this and it allowed the community the time needed to eek every little bit of potential from every character there, that wouldn't happen if you change the roster every month.

Now announced for PS4 and XBone (and PC (again)) -http://www.polygon.com/2014/11/25/7278217/dark-souls-2-ps4-xbox-one-release-date I didn't buy the DLC because I could see this happening. What is surprising is how close it's coming out in relation to Bloodborne which seems a bit mad but at least it means by the time I'm finished with the proper Miyazaki game I can pick up the worst Souls for about £20 hopefully.

Nippon Yasan is probably my favourite import site to be honest, I've used them a few times now. Amiami are great if you can get a preorder in as they rarely restock anything and playasia vary wildly in price from utter bargain to colossal ripoff, they hit a nice middle ground between them. I paid £137 for a New 3DS with Mario Kart and Inazuma Eleven (console alone costs that on playasia right now), FedEx priority shipping was £18. No customs charge as they marked down without me asking. You can prepay customs if you really want to but I think you're as well going FedEx and taking the chance in most cases. They did take three days from me ordering to them dispatching which is the worst thing I can say about that, aside from that I recommend them highly.

I think I might, thanks, I saved exactly that amount on Pokemon today and that seems like a sign. Also it looks utterly delicious. My Japanese is OK so I'm not too worried about the text as long as it's big enough. I got a very cheap copy of in the post today. It's a sequel to an old Japan-only DS rhythm game that was pretty big in the import scene I remember, and also spawned a sequel which came out in Europe but not America. The main gimmicks are the user-generated content (tons of it) and that you can play online with up to 10 people with each of you taking one instrument in the song. I will never get to do this but the idea is pretty cool I think. This isn't text-heavy and could be quite the DLC machine, I don't get why Nintendo don't seem to want to localise this even as eShop only or something. Currently browsing the online archive as the in-game browser is not great, so much good stuff. I look forward to embarrassing myself on my commute with super serious faces of intense concentration as I tackle this lot next week. Dragon Roost Island Big Blue Professor Layton ICO theme oh Japan

Any love for Azure Striker Gunvolt? I know the name and that it got some buzz at launch but never came to Europe as far as I'm aware and I've just realised I can buy the Japanese version including a freebie (Mighty Gunvolt, whatever that is) if I buy before the end of the week. Worth £11?

Really tempted by this as Amazon sent me a code which brings the download version down to about £20 and Pokemon games are literally never available for under £30 here. I could be playing it now, hnngh. Disappointed to see that the slowdown is still present on a New 3DS though, there's no excuse for that at all.