Berttheduck

I recently got myself an Anbernic, it’s the one which looks like the GBA, see through plastic and all. It’s a surprisingly competent little console. It even comes preloaded with a shed load of retro games. I’ve been enjoying playing games from systems I missed out on growing up.

My family had about 5 of these between us by the time we started getting into lites and 3d versions. I had the original chunky boy and a 3ds. We took them on holiday and played the brain training multiplayer games. Great fun, my parents even got into them for a bit and they said off video games a long time beforehand.

It’s very similar but nowhere near as good. I got it for free on playstation a while back and stopped playing it to go back and play the dead space remake again.

Tell me about it English is a bastardised language made up of so many different languages rules. Have you heard of Lee and Perrins Worcestershire sauce? It’s pronounced wuster-shere.

Great sauce btw, real umami flavour and great on cheese on toast.

To help my American lemmings with pronunciation: Red-ing and Bark-shere.

It’s a very good university too.

I don’t feel I’ve given them a pass. I feel like I’ve set boundaries where I can tolerate/ enjoy their presence without being subjected to their hateful or stupid beliefs. It was a difficult decision for me and I seriously considered not having a relationship with them at all for a long time. But I’d miss out on time with my baby nephew, my elderly gran and my siblings who all live near my parents (the main culprits) and I decided that the relationships were more important to me than winning an argument.

To continue your addict analogy, you might agree to hang out with your addict friend on the condition they come sober and don’t take drugs whilst you’re together. Rather than just saying you take drugs so we aren’t friends now.

The world is rarely black and white.

Yup this is where I got to with them. Either I compromise my values to continue having a relationship or we eventually stop talking entirely as I continue to argue with their bullshit. The arguing doesn’t work, even appeals to emotion didn’t make a difference. I struggled for a long time with how these people who I held in such high regard could fall so far. They are just people at the end of the day and fell for the hateful propaganda on social media.

I know where your coming from. My parents feel right down the racist conspiracy theory rabbit hole during Brexit and COVID. I was working in the hospital watching people and colleagues die regularly and my dad was telling me it’s just flu and all a hoax to scare people, they convinced my 90 year old grandma to not get the vaccine. We had a lot of fights. Eventually after a lot of reflecting I decided that having a relationship with my family was more important than winning an argument so now we just have a selection of topics I refuse to engage with, just say let’s move on and change the topic. I found it really hard to see the people who raised me fall into racist rhetoric and conspiracy theory thinking, these people taught me to be a good person and now have some glaring holes in their compassion for others. I struggled with that for a long time.

Have you tried the ps5 controller? Genuinely my favourite thing about the ps5. The adaptive triggers and the haptics are so good. The battery life feels better too. That was my biggest complaint about the 4s especially compared to the ps3s, those lasted for weeks.

I wanted to love Quantum Break so much but it was just a buggy mess on my pc, I spent hours messing with settings but it just wouldn’t run smoothly. I still managed to push through to mission 4 or so. Maybe I’ll give it another go.

I’m working my way through forbidden west as well. I’m really enjoying it. It’s always good to spend more time in an interesting game world. I really appreciate the more free form climbing system in this one, not quite breath of the wild climbing but way better than grab the yellow ledges only.

I love hearing about DF but it’s so dense that I was never able to get into it myself. Plus I struggled with the art, or lack of it on the earlier builds.

I can second all of these. Generation zero is the only one I didn’t enjoy much but I suspect it’s a lot better with friends.

The rest are fab, I’m currently playing Kena it’s like Pixar/ Disney meets dark souls. Beautiful game, has these little critters which follow you around called rot who are super cute and you can put hats on them.

Control is just excellent. The combat feels great and for me the whole game was worth playing just for the Ashtray maze sequence.

My wife was playing Ori around its release, we both got stuck on the first tree escape, where it floods. Absolutely massive difficulty spike for a relatively chill game to that point. Beautiful game though and I love the sound track.

The Wii brought gaming to the general public in a way nothing else had. Like most modern Nintendo consoles it was under powered and gimmicky but the gimmick worked so well for people new to gaming, point at the TV or wiggle the controller as you would to do the thing in real life was a huge step to making an abstract concept make sense to people. For longer gaming sessions or more “serious” games the Wii controls were generally lacking but damn if Wii sports wasn’t good fun.

Not sure it fits as it’s souls with guns, so missing the spectacle fighter element, but it’s definitely worth a look. They are both excellent games. I love the core loop they’ve got, the shooting feels excellent.

On this sort of line maybe Metal Gear Rising Revengence could be worth a look.

Check out Furi.

It’s a flashy boss rush style game. A bit bullet hell a bit brawler. Might scratch that itch for you.

You could also try Sifu, it’s got really slick skill based combat and interesting bosses.

So satisfying taking out a whole herd of the deer things with 5 or 6 shots to the exploding tanks on their backs.

I adore the walking dead games, they totally spoiled the TV show for me as the characters were soo much better. Lee and Clem at the end of the first game was such an emotional gut punch, one of the few times a game made me cry.