I mentioned in the last part that my memory was playing me up, whether it’s because I only really played the DLC once as opposed to multiple runs through the main game… but it kicks in when I travel to Jakobs Cove…

The Zombie Island of Dr Ned

I know that there is an Achievement for collecting Brains for good old TK Baha… so as soon as I start killing Zombies I start collecting them… I forget that for these to matter I need to start the hidden quests to collect them… and I don’t start this till near the end, so instead of working on the 5 separate Brains quests while doing everything else… I end up doing them on their own.

Not a fun night.

It’s nice though that I forgot that when a boss kills you, they don’t recover all their health by the time you get back there, and if you find the right spot they won’t come after you either so I just pick them off from distance or an inaccessible spot till they die… including the final boss.

Overall though, the whole DLC is just too dark, not in tone, but the brightness setting seems broken, and I’m struggling to find where I’m going half the time.

I do hit Level 62 by the end, more Golden Keys used and more cash banked… onto the next one.

The Secret Armory of General Knoxx

I forgot that a lot of this takes place along roadways connecting the locations, and that traversing those is not fun… at all… I also forgot that one area includes “Drifters” which are huge creatures that fire corrosive junk at you that can take out your vehicle in just a few hits.

I know it includes Crawmerax as a raid boss… just need to find a specific rocket launcher by the time it comes to take it out… at least I remember the name of the thing… Leviathan.

After several missions I find my first Claptrap in need of assistance… hoping for the final Inventory upgrade I need for an Achievement, I’m disappointed to find it just gives me another bomb modifier… bugger!

Now here I made an error (or maybe I didn’t) in that I accidentally travelled here when I started the second run through the main game, so it pegged the first mission as Level 51… by the time I arrived I was Level 62 after Zombie killing, so throughout the entire story I was hitting low 50s Level enemies… not much XP earned from killing them, but it made running through the story easier.

Maybe I should have done that, with hindsight, on all of the DLC… I later tried Moxxi’s and even though it says the first Mission is only Level 15 all the enemies I face are levelled at my Level and slightly above… so that’s my only foray into that… didn’t really bother with it before, won’t bother with it now.

As such though, the story was a breeze… all the stuff after that became a nightmare.

I’m not a good First Person Shooter player, so when evenly matched with enemies of a higher level, I’m screwed… so the post story missions are a pass from me… nor do I have Leviathan to kill Crawmerax so that can be skipped as well.

Basically… I’m almost in clean up mode.

Claptrap Revolution

I switch my game to “Playthrough 1” and start this… so I’m facing enemies in the ranks of Level 34, 35 or 36 max… which is fine, I won’t increase my Level, but I just want to get this whole package finished now… Borderlands burnout is real.

The story is simple enough, even the final boss battle is a cake walk… and all I’m left with now is the collectible grind… the 4 Achievements associated with random drop items from killing Claptraps… I have unlocked the 3D Glasses one, I have enough Pink Panties and Clapfish… but the 3 real grinds are the Bobbleheads, the Oil Cans and the Pizza Slices.

So, it’s rinse and repeat… load saved game, clear out the Hyperion Dump where there are lots of Claptraps, quit game, repeat… in 20 run batch yesterday, the game dropped 37 random items of which 13 were of use to me… I need another 27 combined items to unlock the 3 remaining Achievements.

To stave off the boredom I completed the Hunter play as far as I needed to unlock the specific Achievement for that character type… just the Berzerker and Siren to go… I’ll keep working on the random drops this week as a time filler, run the two other character types and then move on… the grind for the drops has killed the thrill of the game… I knew it would happen, which I why I left this to the end.

July 25^th

After a couple of surprisingly generous drop filled runs, I arrive at the point where I have no more time to play, but only need 1 item so I was forced to call it a day.

I go back the next day and the very first run provides the items needed and I can delete the game from my 2 consoles… 68 Achievements for 1,445 Gamerscore in total… I was tempted to try and finish on 69 Achievements, which would have been nice, but the only realistic option was to hunt down 2 midgets from Dumpsters and Fridges in General Knoxx’s expansion and I just hadn’t got the heart to do that… too much like hard work.

That’s something I should really have done when I was playing the expansion story content, I generally don’t open fridges as they only really offer ammo (and my character has a “regenerate ammo” perk) and secondly, they just don’t appear as often in this DLC as they do in the main game.

I’m now all burnt out on Borderlands… the 3 Achievements on offer for killing enemies using the other 3 character types special moves were done to break up the monotony of clearing out Claptraps over and over and over… in the absence of any official word on a 4^th game, or even a Tiny Tina’s Wonderland sequel, my next port of call for this is the Pre-Sequel… but I need a break before I go there.

There’s something about Borderlands that I love, whether it’s the fountain of numbers that come flying off an enemy as they take damage, the cell-shaded graphical style that works way better than it really should, or the anticipation when you find a weapons chest… even if the story is a little suspect (looking at you Borderlands 3 here) I’ll play through the game and enjoy the process.

Hell… I even enjoyed “Tiny Tina’s Wonderland” where they dabbled with more Dungeons and Dragons type mechanics and a weird Overworld layout between locations.

The game just clicks with me… the whole package, revamped for the Xbox One, with all the DLC added and a price tag under £10 was something I was always going to pick up… and when I hit a bit of a gaming slump around not long after finishing Banishers… it became the ideal solution to my problems.

April 16^th

So… there’s a lot I’d forgotten about this… such as how slow the first game is when you’re on foot running from one place to the next, or killing a Skag by jumping on him for a Mario related Achievement… but it’s still a great shooter to play.

I’ve reached New Haven, the second hub you come across after Fyrestone, and I’m around Level 23… thus follows the usual routine of getting yourself a decent shield, a couple of quality weapons, and slowly working through all the side missions until the difficulty of the next main mission makes it appear manageable.

My main weapon is due for an overhaul… I grabbed it from the Golden Key chest at around Level 15 and it will still do a job, but sooner or later it won’t be fit for purpose and I’ll have to try and find a worthy replacement.

As usual, I’m carrying around a variety of weapons, have a modifier on my character that regenerates ammunition constantly and a turret which also heals me if I’m within a certain radius when it’s on the battlefield… basically everything I used to do when I played this back in the Xbox 360 era.

July 7^th

Well… what with illness and Hellblade 2, the amount of time I’ve spent on Pandora had been fairly limited… until July kicked in and I found myself working from home with a renewed urge to game.

Now ignoring an indie or two that were completed, and an initial spell in Baldur’s Gate 3, this has been my main game for the last week… to the point where I’m now on my second run.

I’d forgotten so much, such as being able to carry health kits, or expanding your storage through helping Claptraps in various levels, and somewhere I missed one as, if you help them all, you expand your storage to 42 slots (and unlock an Achievement) and I’m still at 39… annoyingly having helped the first one I found in my second run didn’t give me the 3 slots I’m missing.

I remembered the Guardians in the final couple of levels watching over the Vault, and I remembered the creature that comes out the Vault… but I also remembered that this battle was much harder, whereas this time I didn’t need to use a single health item, hide once to recharge my shield or panic that I was so close to killing it and then failing just short of victory.

Granted I have a seriously high powered Repeater Pistol, with a magazine capacity of 97 or so at the time, so I just unloaded the full clip into it 3 or 4 times and it never had the chance to really attack me, let alone kill me.

I had remembered that, to access the DLC, you use the Fast Travel system to go to new locations… but had forgotten that you really need to be Level 51 to have a chance of succeeding, and I was only level 36 having killed the final boss, so a second play through is required.

Looking at the Achievement guides, a second pad will have to be brought into the fold to unlock a few co-op Achievements… not something I’m usually keen on doing, but these can be done easily enough in the first area you reach, so I may go there this time.

July 18^th

My memory is really playing me up… more of that in the second part as it generally refers to stuff about the DLC that I’d forgotten that really kicked in this last week.

When I booted the game up I found that, due to obsessing over Twitter and Facebook in the days of Borderlands 2 and 3, when it came to starting this again I had rather a lot of Golden Keys to open the shiny Loot Chest in New Haven and Fyrestone… 147 to be precise.

I started using 3 every time I levelled up, and then upped this to 5 when I believed the Level Cap to be 61 from the DLCs… as someone now working towards Level 63 this clearly wasn’t the case.

It hasn’t provided many weapons, bomb types or shields that I’ve actually used… cash wise I don’t need to worry any more.

I work through the second run and hit Level 51 as I reach Old Haven, so I could just switch to the DLCs then, but the idea of running into those over levelled appeals and I work through to the end of the game again and finish close to Level 54.

I do spend some time trying to help Claptraps in various locations as, instead of giving me a slot upgrade so I can carry more loot, one gave me a bomb modifier so I’m stuck with 39 slots and can’t pop the Achievement for reaching 42 through repairing the annoying, wheeled noise boxes.

Even the one I’ve stumbled across on the DLC gave me a bomb mod… do I need to start a 3^rd run through for this to pop?

I did hook up a second controller for a few multiplayer Achievements, and I’ve popped enough to pass the usual 1,000 on offer for a retail release… shame this one tops out at 1,750 and includes even more multiplayer stuff and the annoying Moxxi’s Arena stuff that I just never bothered with previously… anyway… onto the DLCs.

Of all the games I’ve picked up over the last year or so that will form part of Indie Fest 2024, which will eventually culminate in my Indie game of the year being decided upon, Beasts of Maravilla Island is one that has the biggest tinge of “Crap Fest” about it.

In that it’s a game that wouldn’t look out of place bundled in with those titles played surely for points… unlike others that have made the list like “The Wanderer: Frankensteins Creature” and “The Innsmouth Case” there isn’t anything that makes this really stand out from the crud I exposed myself to in previous years.

Distraint 2 is included as, along with a couple of other games I played last year, when the previous game was played as part of Crap Fest, it turned out to be a very pleasant surprise, to the point where I want to play the new title because I really enjoyed the first game… see also “Ashina: The Red Witch” from the developer of “My Big Sister” and “Just Ignore Them”.

With a guide of just under an hour this is a single session game… hopefully… the perfect weekend completion.

July 11^th

Straight out the gates I’m going to mention here that the overall score has had 2 points deducted for a glitch that meant I had to complete the game twice for the full 1,000 points.

As I completed Level 2 one afternoon I saved the game, when I reloaded the next day it decided to start me maybe 1/3^rd of the way through Level 3, which messed up the order of the cutscenes, so some additional objectives didn’t appear and, even though I completed the photo objectives, because they hadn’t been added the associated Achievements didn’t pop… when I retried through Chapter Select, the objectives appeared, everything was in the right place and order, but the photos for the objectives didn’t register as I already had them taken.

So, I was forced to replay, and I couldn’t just run through to the final level as there’s an Achievement for taking all the pictures in a single run through.

Second time through I make sure that when I reached Level 3, I continued to a point where it couldn’t glitch on me again, I have all objectives, almost all the pictures needed save for 7 or 8 to be taken later.

The game itself is simple enough, possibly more for kids though as it’s all cutesy and the puzzles aren’t difficult… it looks okay, the music is fine in small doses, after 20 minutes it starts to grate something chronic though.

Story wise you’re a young girl visiting an island her grandfather always used to talk about that she had assumed was made up for story telling purposes, and you wander through 3 Levels taking photos of the wildlife, flowers and insects etc before discovering that the jewel on the front of your Grandfathers journal was stolen from a creature, and this theft has meant that parts of the island are slowly being killed off.

When you realise this, you set off to return the jewel at the top of a tower on the final Level, guided by a Spirit animal in the form of a Stag… you need to take 4 pictures of this in the game, and you need to be careful as, if you rush round the environment, you’ll miss your chance then its replay the whole Level later to grab it.

Now all this is fine, it doesn’t outstay it’s welcome (the guide is under an hour, and there are a good few minutes intro at the start and a lengthy cutscene at the end you can’t skip so it could be done, if you knew where everything was in maybe 55 minutes… my second run has been much quicker as I’ve been able to skip several miscellaneous Achievements… playing fetch 20 times with one creature springs to mind.

In the end it’s scored 58 points once I’d deducted a couple for forcing the second play… nothing special… but not wholly awful either.

Having stumbled over a couple of new quests as I wandered around the map… it seemed only right that I work through the other new quests they’ve added to the main game… so, having reached the point where you really need to make a hard save before you head down one of the paths to the end of the game, I really ought to be levelled up sufficiently to attempt these without much difficulty… lower level 40’s ought to be enough.

The added bonus here is that this will help me hit Level 50 before the end game missions and then move onto the DLC… it will also give my large settlement time to crawl towards 100% happiness.

May 8^th

Having completed the side-quest I was working on… I add some extra defences to Sanctuary and start the process of adding content in one of the buildings to increase the size of the settlement itself till it gets classed as a “large” settlement needed for the Trophy.

I have also decided to use these new quests to take a different character along on, which has the added bonus of completing another Miscellaneous objective which counts towards the 50 that I need to complete for yet another Trophy… I’m in the high 30’s for this, and make a mental note to check my counter next time I hand over some Technical Documents to a Brotherhood Scribe.

NOTE: Handing documents to the Scribe do not count as completing a Miscellaneous mission… I’m at 40 after a couple of side-quests that I’ve done each time I work through the game… nothing new to see here.

Working on the new missions… has mixed results, each of them seems to gift you a decent weapon at the end, or a new suit of Power Armour.

The 2 that I’d done before had gifted me some cool weapons… that I only ever used in those missions, a very powerful flame thrower and a suit of fireproof Power Armour from the Saugus Ironworks, and a Tesla Cannon from when I took down the Enclave base in The Glowing Sea.

The first new quest I took on leads to a question… in Starfield there is a quest where you discover a secret base of a quasi-superhero who strikes fear into the hearts of space pirates, the mere presence of their ship will occasionally send them running away, and you get a cool outfit with it… now… did Bethesda copy this idea from the community quest in Fallout 4.

It involves a character who strikes fear in the heart of Raiders with their presence, as they own a very unique set of Power Armour, which you stumble across after linking various broadcast towers and following the signal around… it’s a cool set of Armour and it now sits in my home base in Diamond City.

Next up a new Merchant has appeared in the Commonwealth, a store I had stumbled over but which wasn’t occupied by anyone so I largely ignored it… their partner in the store has vanished, shortly after a new store opens in a Raider base in an old shopping centre… guess who owns that.

Time to track them down and deliver the original Merchant plans for a new weapon, which is also your reward for completing the quest, a Grenade launcher gun… potentially useful, but a little heavy to carry around.

Finally for the day the last “new” quest… Kill Pyro… now I’m Level 45 at this point, but there are still enemies that I will avoid at all costs… any sign of a Deathclaw for example and I’m giving it a wide berth, if I can avoid it I will, but this quest…

Pyro is marked on your Map, and he’s in Power Armour (which, naturally, is your Reward for completion) and I wandered up to the location, fired one shot with my .44 Magnum… and the quest is done… maybe I missed something here, but that doesn’t feel worthy of adding to the main game.

Still… 2 more to look at over the weekend.

Hallows Eve… doesn’t kick in for me the way it should… it ought to be a messed-up radio transmission that evolves into a beacon which leads you to the Harbormaster Hotel, where a Halloween party took place that went a little awry.

A poisonous gas has been released into the building and all the attendees are now Feral Ghouls, you need to find the combination to the door at the end of a hall to shut the gas off and escape… the reward for this one is a different head for Power Armour… which is not worth it.

Finally, we have a Gunner faction quest in (or around) the Glowing Sea with yet another Tesla Cannon as a reward… due to the weight of these things, and that I tend to carry more weapons than I really use, both of them have been left behind.

Here you’ll bounce from location to location extracting data from PipBoy’s to eventually reach a crashed airplane where the boss is wearing Power Armour and wielding the cannon… half decent battle… but much like the other new quests you have to wonder why they’ve added these 7 in particular, surely there are better ones than these.

May 20^th

I’ve been ripping through the DLC… the Wasteland Workshop proves to be annoying as, to build all the cages, you need meat from a lot of creatures and some of this is as rare as rocking horse droppings in the shops and stores around the Commonwealth.

With the Vault Tec workshop DLC, rather than waster time creating the machines with which to test our new Vault resident, I skip all that… seems you can become Overseer quite quickly if you kill the current incumbent and just wear the outfit.

Far Harbor is obviously more-chunky in scope, a new play area… but I’m almost rushing and don’t take the time to complete a lot of the side quests, so sadly both DiMA, the head of the Synth Sanctuary, and the young women I’ve been sent to find, are both killed when the town of Far Harbor attacks the Sanctuary.

More time is spent wandering the island looking for creatures to kill to hit 30 new creature kills than anything else.

May 24^th

As with my Hellblade piece, this is being written considerably later than when I completed the game… it’s now early July and I finished this on May 24^th and it’s going to shorten the whole Nuka World DLC section as time has passed.

I really enjoyed the Nuka World DLC, it was a fitting finale to the whole game… from killing a whole host of new mutated creatures, to helping simpletons think they’re flying to a distant planet when in reality they’ve just been on a weird fairground ride… it’s an interesting location to explore and, eventually, rule.

The only downside is taking over settlements in the main Boston part of the map, sure it made Preston hate me (and thus the number of settlements asking for help dwindles) but it takes you out of the new world.

Collecting a variety of different Nuka Cola drinks with all new power boosts is a good idea, knowing that I needed to kill a set number of new wasteland creatures whilst under their effects meant I was drinking these from the off to the point where the Trophy for killing under Nuka Cola influence popped fairly early on.

While I had a blast every time I play through this DLC… I’ve never felt the need to collect the various new versions of Power Armour that litter the world, the Nuka Cola set on display looks great, and I’m also aware of a glitch that lets you pass through the case it’s housed in… but even in the main game I never really used Power Armour as much as many seem to, so why collect 40+ computer panels to unlock it?

The DLC is all a mixed bag here, some (Contraptions, Wasteland Workshop and the Vault Workshop) feels irrelevant to the game, Automatron has a feeling of Mehrunes Razor from Oblivion about it, in so much that it’s fairly short and set in the main game area… Far Harbour and Nuka World are the only two sizable chunks of content and really the only ones that should have been released… fun, but I can wait a while (and may have no choice in this matter) for the next Fallout title.

The original Hellblade is the game that first made me subscribe to Gamepass for a month, a whole £1 to replay a game I’d already completed on the PlayStation 4, a game I’ve partially replayed on PlayStation 5 with the Pulse 3D headset… something that everybody should do to really understand what Senua was going through as regards hearing voices.

The sequel has been a long time coming, and from reports is a shorter experience than the original… which may cause some people concern given that the original was a fairly short story to begin with… but it’s finally released, and being a full blown Gamepass subscriber now, it’s free to play.

July 2^nd

So… I completed this around 4 weeks ago, but thanks to a horrendous episode of Pneumonia, with a side serving of Covid, my concentration levels have been a mess the last few weeks and I’ve only just gotten around to feeling ready to write about it.

In short… it was a massive disappointment.

While it works as a wonderful demonstration of the power of the Unreal 5 engine… as a game it’s lacking so much… weak combat, with what felt like a severe amount of lag whenever you try to parry, and a level of puzzles that was frankly embarrassing… it’s a 5/10 or a solid 6/10 if you liked the original.

It looks incredible, the level of detail and the lighting is stunning… with no cuts (a la God of War) and some passable boss fights (aside from the last one) it stands out from the crowd… but the passages between combat encounters are all rather lifeless.

I don’t consider a walk from one place to another listening to another characters story to be riveting gameplay, and the collectibles are rather bland (but offer the best the game comes to explaining lore and tales from the land you’re roaming) and there is little outside that.

The boss battles tend to follow a pattern, run from one place of cover to the next (in the first shielding from fireballs, the second huge waves) as you strive to reach the person you seek to end the encounter.

It’s all incredibly dull.

Puzzle wise it’s basic, which switch to throw to move the landscape to allow passage to the next item you need to complete a collection, or wandering around an area to find the exact piece of architecture to line up to form a symbol… and it never strays from these simple wanderfests to anything more complicated.

It’s a shame, the first game craps all over this big time, and that had considerably less time and resources spent to create it… the characters are fine, the lore fine… but the combat and the majority of the gameplay is so dull… if they can find a good mix of the two games for the inevitable 3^rd Senua title, then it has potential to be a truly next gen experience… which is what you were probably expecting from this one.A

Now here’s a thing… this game is better than the score at the end suggests… but unlike some of the other titles I’ve played as part of Indie Fest, this is actually trying to go for the dated, horrible look it creates, it aims to have minimal sound effects and dated gameplay… and I’ve allowed for this in the score… but while that’s the case, there’s no way this can score any higher.

The original Elena Temple game aimed to recreate a game from my youth, in my eyes at least it was a ZX Spectrum game… monochrome graphics, blocky platform graphics and everything else that came as part of gaming on that machine at that time.

It was also a relatively easy 1,000 Gamerscore… this game sets out to imitate on of those Nintendo, pre-Gameboy, handheld releases, so we have basic graphics, minimal animation and single tone sound effects… and it recreates the look of those perfectly.

The problem is that it does it too well.

It was cheap, really cheap considering I was given an Xbox gift card a week before, so the £2.49 they’re charging was easily avoided… and it’s another simple enough completion… and as seems to be the case nowadays, it starts with an update included so kicks off with 2,000 Gamerscore on offer.

The premise is simple, Elena has to collect all the coins on the level to open a door to the next level, and she does this by walking and jumping along platforms, avoiding spikes and using portals to teleport around the level.

One key aspect is that, if you collect a crystal, you can rewind the last 4 or 5 drops off platforms… so if you’re falling towards a spike, you can rewind and return to the platform you fell off.

The key is using this properly so that you don’t find yourself in a position where some coins are inaccessible, or you can’t reach the door… on one level I could only get so high on the screen and couldn’t avoid a portal on another platform so I couldn’t reach the door to finish the level.

There are 23 screens of this (at least) to progress through… 20 main and 3 bonus levels… which all have an Achievement linked to them… and that appears to be that.

Now I suck at logical thought in games like this, but managed to work through 6 levels in around 25 minutes when I first booted it up… there’s no animation, you just appear in the next block left or right when you move, if you jump you just move up one block briefly… you can’t jump from platform to platform, just fall… overall, it recreates a “game and watch” type experience… but really… why would you want to?

Maybe it’s because I’m in a retro phase at the moment (replaying the original Borderlands, the PS5 upgrade of Fallout 4, and I’ve purchased an original Xbox all in the last week) but even bumping the graphics, sound and gameplay up a little because they have achieved what they set out to do… it still lands at 51% here… and that’s Crapfest territory.

As the 23 levels progress it adds new mechanics… one way doors, one way passages, Spiders that will move horizontally or vertically if they see you… but at best these are annoying, and the monochrome graphics don’t help, near the end of one stage I had to restart as I hadn’t spotted the crumbling floor graphic under a ladder.

In the end it finishes with just 47% which is almost a little too high for the game… not one to recommend.

Full disclosure here… I am a big fan of Bethesda RPGs.

I know they aren’t for everybody, that they tend to be bug ridden, and have recently become over obsessed with crafting… but I enjoy playing (and replaying) them.

And, I can see why Starfield was considered a let down by some… and to me it was because it removed one key element to all their titles… the random side quest found whilst exploring a location that distracts you as you travel to whatever quest you were doing.

Many a time I’ve promised myself that I’d call it a night when I hit a town in Skyrim, only to find myself exploring a cave I found on the way, only to find myself 2 hours later on the far side of the map on a totally different quest, promising myself I’d save at the next town (not a chance this is the same next town as before) and so on.

With Starfield effectively making you fast-travel to every location by having them on different planets, the chances of stumbling over a quest are fairly slim… yes, they included random encounters such as a ship trying to sell you an extended warranty on your new spacecraft… but these are few and far between and won’t open any sort of wild goose chase quest that, say, entering into a drinking contest will in Whiterun.

In April 2024, Bethesda released a next gen patch for Fallout 4, and while this has no effect on the Achievements on the Xbox side of things, it did open up a new Trophy list on the PS5 and, fresh off the TV series, I jumped back into Fallout for a 3^rd run through.

At least I would once I remembered my PSN login for my US account which is what I bought the Game of the Year PS4 edition on when I wanted to play the DLC a few years ago.

It wouldn’t log me in on console using every variation of my password, and the email it’s linked to is my office email, and I’m not in the office for another week… so I can’t get a password reset email… and then, randomly… it logged me.

Now… I set out to play the game totally differently to how I have done before… and failed… I have immense respect for those who can totally change their play style for games like this… where they can go the full idiot route and play through the game using a character who can barely string a sentence together… I, personally, just can’t do it.

So instead, I’m playing the same game as I have every time (which I’m okay with) and, having played through it before, I know what to expect, what I need to do, which options to take in certain missions to allow me to collect all the Trophies with the minimal amount of save manipulation and so on.

I’m currently 44 hours in (being off work for a week through a combination of holidays, weekends and illness helped her) and I’ve reached the point where I need to make a save from which I can facilitate both main ending routes, one of which I will then use for starting on the DLC packs at some point in the future.

Yesterday I went hunting Giant creatures to kill for a Trophy, I then went and hunted down all but 1 of the bobbleheads (the final one being in the next main mission) and set up some stores in Sanctuary to have the “Maximum Happiness” Trophy working away in the back ground while I complete the end game… I also have 15 miscellaneous tasks to complete and level up a few more times to hit Level 50.

Original Text – “What I am impressed with… not by the next gen upgrade as the game is showing its age at this point… is that despite having run through the game several times before I’ve still stumbled over things that I haven’t seen before.

Now this maybe because I wasn’t following every mission through 100% correctly before… but in the Saurus Steelworks, previously I’d never noticed a smaller side quest to collect a special weapon, which required you to upgrade a suit of Power Armour to allow you to walk through the molten steel to reach it… this in turn meant I was being ambushed by a team of Brotherhood Knights angry that I had this weapon, which eventually lead me to try and take down a base they had in the Glowing Sea.”

Edit – So… seems this was a mis-step on my part… Bethesda have added 7 additional quests to the main game that had been created by the community since the game originally released.

And, it transpires, that I have completed 2 of these without realising they were even there, and had stumbled over them as I wandered around the map.

What replaying this game has achieved though, is making me want another Fallout or Elder Scrolls title, and caused me to resent that they spent years working on Starfield when they could have been working on either of the other series… there doesn’t seem to be the huge range of options or locations for Starfield to evolve into a huge franchise like either of the big two names Bethesda are associated with.

By all means keep the next “big” games for those in house, but they allowed Obsidian to create New Vegas, the London mod that’s been delayed thanks to the new upgrade looks incredible… how about bringing that in house and having them offer that as a standalone title on consoles?

Less than a week before my 54^th birthday… an age younger me thought I’d never reach… an age younger me thought would have you class as a relic of a different era… obviously, as that number rushes closer and closer by the second, I no longer see it as quite the dusty landmark number as I did before.

Especially as, among my circle of friends and golfing buddies, I’m the youngster.

I’m slowly coming out of a gaming slump brought on by the realisation that, whilst it’s a fun story, One Piece Odyssey was not the best game to jump into after a 60+ hour Banishers run… thanks to Borderlands and a couple of quick, relatively fun, completions to boost my pointless, meaningless Gamerscore total.

And… I’ve decided what I want to buy myself as a present… an original Xbox.

The VCR sized black box with the green Xbox inset in the top… and the chance to complete something I never managed to when I owned one before… Halo.

Ever since I started gaming in my early teens I’ve been a multi-system gamer… I owned both a ZX Spectrum and a Commodore 64 at school, when, after a hiatus, I got into console gaming I owned a PlayStation, then a Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 with some dabbling in Nintendo via the original Gameboy, and my daughters Nintendo 64 and Gamecube.

All of it has been driven by the fear of missing out on some epic games… Resident Evil, one of my favourite series on the grey slab PlayStation went Dreamcast exclusive and Code Veronica released, and by owning a Dreamcast I also got to play Virtua Tennis, Shenmue, Confidential Mission and others.

I picked up a PlayStation 2 for Onimusha, and got to play Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City… the original Xbox gave me access to Halo, Deus Ex Invisible War and two epic RPGs in Knights of the Old Republic and the sequel… I grabbed a 360 because I wanted to play Oblivion… and so on.

The original Xbox was the first console to dispense with memory cards, that hideous “tax” on console gamers who wanted to save their progress… and, because game stores never bothered with stuff like this, my second-hand Xbox came with a host of game saves on the hard drive… naturally, as the “must have” title, Halo was there.

As the “must have” title I grabbed a copy of Halo as well, and enjoyed the experience immensely, until I hit a point where I couldn’t progress… I needed to destroy something but had no weapon ammo to do that, with no enemies left to kill there was no way I could change those weapons I had for ones with ammo or that recharged over time… I had no shield so I couldn’t use myself as a battering ram… so I stopped… I’ve since found out that the end was within reach had I been able to find my way out of the situation.

I’m watching them on Ebay, even bidding on a couple… I know how much I’m prepared to pay… and am loathe to go over that… mainly because there will be other costs involved.

I’ll need a HDMI adaptor to plug them into my monitor, and some of the games I want to play I’ll have to buy separately… I really want to play Deus Ex: Invisible War again, I never experienced the original Forza Motorsport, I yearn to replay Links Golf… and there are a couple of others I’d pick up if I see them… Knights of the Old Republic originals obviously.

My current Ebay spot doesn’t finish until the end of the week… and it looks a great buy if I can get it, but having seen other consoles sell for decent money I can see myself being priced out of this before it ends… but I’m determined to get one… it’s just a matter of time.

April 22^nd

As I expected, the console I’d been biding on went above what I’m prepared to pay, with over a week remaining… two others came and went for more than I was prepared to pay.

May 1^st

After a couple more failures on Ebay, my other half is starting to get annoyed… partly because if she’d known I wanted to get one she could have got me one for my recent birthday… and looks on Gumtree for a local seller.

There’s one, within 5 miles, console (working with all the cables) and 3 pads, complete with 12 games… £40

Turns out the original location is an error, as there is no option to put his real location, he went with something close… he’s a mile away near one of my favourite pubs.

All this is garnered through his message exchange with my other half (he ignored my contact message) and we eventually get proof it’s working through a Whatsapp video… next day we call round and it’s now all mine… of the 12 games there’s just 1 on my list of wants… the other 11 hit Ebay along with the memory card I won’t need.

Turns out one of the pads is wireless (but takes 4 batteries) so I’ll rig that up and give it a test… people are asking £40 for those on Ebay, so if I sell it as well as the games and card, I ought to be able to turn a profit.

Now the task of picking up the other games I want… one I find on Ebay for £3 so I order that, another has a copy in a local second-hand store for £1 so I’m off there soon to pick that up… the rest may take some time.

Sadly, 2 of those I’d like (and I included 1 of these when I sold the console) seem to be rather sought after and are selling for upwards of £20 and £30 respectively so these may be non-starters.

May 6^th

Shopping over… the console, a converter so I can hook the console up to a modern monitor and 10 selected titles… at this point has cost me £91.25 before any funds trickle in attempting to sell the games that came bundled with it.

I’ve managed to get hold of the following titles;

Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, Deus Ex: Invisible War, Forza Motorsport, Project Gotham Racing 2, Links, Fable, Jade Empire and both Knights of the Old Republic titles to go alongside Halo which came with the console… for the princely sum of just £41.65

All I’m waiting for now is a steady stream of 8 more packages to arrive in the post and I’m good to go.

Time to admit it… I made a terrible mistake… not by not playing this game sooner, but with what I played after I had finished my Ascend run of Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden.

Instead of taking some time out and playing something a little smaller, I jumped straight into a huge JRPG and while I’ve been enjoying my time with that… fatigue has become an issue… even harvesting some easy points on my Xbox has almost become a chore… granted the games in question (Neon Lore and Swordbreaker: Origins) weren’t the best of quality, but that doesn’t change that I’ve found myself in a bit of a slump.

I had intended to include Swordbreaker as part of Indie Fest… but in truth I never really paid much attention to what was happening, and I concentrated on unlocking the full 1,000 over the actual story.

So, I turned to Cocoon to be my April 24 game for milking the Achievement tasks on Gamepass… slightly perplexed by 11 of the 17 Achievements having the same description… if the developer’s previous games are anything to go by (a lot of the team here worked on Limbo and Inside) then it should be fun.

April 16^th

Well… what to say… it’s fine… I guess.

While I can appreciate the graphics, the incidental music and the puzzles… wonder at the inception like logic of diving into individual worlds and taking other worlds into other unique worlds… there is one thing missing.

An answer to the question… why?

Maybe I’ve missed something massive… but so far, and I estimate I’m around 75% through the game at this point, I haven’t seen anything as to why I’m doing everything.

Why was I so keen to get the Orange Orb which shows me hidden pathways? Why did I strive to get the Green Orb that allows me to change the solidity of other platforms? Why was I yearning for the Purple Orb that renews itself every time I pick another Orb from the ground? Why did all these combined allow me to get the White Orb that fires missiles at prisms?

Nothing I have seen explains why I’m doing all this at all.

And while we’re at it… why does my character have wings if I can’t jump let alone fly around the worlds?

Why, if I’ve got a massive pair of wings on my back, am I having to locate the switch for the path to the next area when I should be able to jump over and flap my way over.

Maybe all this will become clear and it turns out to be, which is my current guess, a sort of “right of passage” exodus or pilgrimage to become an adult… with wings.

In Limbo you were trying to get to safety… in Inside you were trying to rescue whatever that thing in the tank was… these story elements became clear as you progressed through the story… here… I’m lost, clueless as to why I’ve found myself in this land and why I took the time to collect the 3 Orbs, only to have them taken from me when I collected the 4^th Orb… and I’m now striving to get the first 3 back from the 4^th boss.

Right now, when it comes to scoring it’s up there with the best… until you take into account the near total lack of story which has hammered the overall score to the high 60’s… story score wise, it’s up there with the inane Quintus and the Absent Truth at 2/10.

It’s highly polished, the graphics look great, the puzzles always logical and even the boss battles are planned out and executed nicely… granted it’s a little on the long side, and some of what you’re doing does seem pointless repetition of what you’ve already done (see lack of story) but this may all make sense at the end.

April 21st

Well… without a guide I would have gotten nowhere with this… as I play along with the video, I just can’t help but wonder how you’d work through some of the sections without assistance… so much swapping of the Orbs to get inside one Orb whilst carrying another to open a portal to get another… my head just hurts thinking about it.

I’m near the end… and I’ll happily never go anywhere near the game after that… I still haven’t a clue as to why you’re doing all these things, and it’s running out of time to tell me why as well.

Score wise, it’s a rather average 65% from me… sure there’s a lot of polish to the game… but with so little in the way of story that I can see it becomes a chore at times… even Jusant explained the story to the player via the letters and notes you could find along the way.

Achievement wise so many of the 17 on offer being for awakening various Ancestors is all well and good… but it does, to me at least, signal a lack of imagination, especially as the description for each is identical.

April 22^nd

Credits have rolled… and I’m still more or less none the wiser as to the story.

I guess you become what was effectively the fourth boss of the game, and the cycle starts again when another winged creature appears and starts collecting the Orbs… but that is just a guess.

Looking at the time I spent with the game, it shows how important the story is for me in a game… I can appreciate the graphics, the puzzles and polish of Cocoon… but the fact that the story feels close to non-existent really affected my enjoyment level.

For all it’s strong points, that I finished the game and STILL couldn’t see why I was doing everything that I was doing is not something I expected when I started a game that has received near universal praise from critics.

For a while I was debating with myself whether or not a game that finds itself in Gamepass day one should qualify for Indie Fest… once that had been decided, would I actually play this game at all… and then the walkthrough guides appeared on YouTube and they clocked in at under 40 minutes.

Now the guides skip past as much of the dialogue as they can, hammered the A button to skip, which I didn’t do… if I’m playing what is essentially a walking simulator with a story bolted on you may as well follow the story.

It’s not a long game, even following the story it’s only around 70 minutes start to finish… and the story isn’t that good either, with the game being less than a week old as I write this, I’ll refrain from posting any spoilers, but the game ended up annoying me to hell.

The background graphics are pretty good, there’s a high level of detail that you’d expect to see of a modern-day game, although you move very slowly around it… but what really bugged me was the characters.

There are 2 and they appear as cartoon character models… and no effort has been made at all to synch their mouths up with the conversation… and by “no effort” what I mean is… for large portions of the conversation they don’t even open their mouths at all.

They stand there, lips pursed tightly together, while their voice actor reads the lines out.

And after an hour that really, really bugged me.

Horrible, bordering on the unforgivable!

Sound wise it was generic fair, gameplay is the usual walking simulator, first person at a snails pace looking and examining everything to find the item needed (usually a key) or the object required to trigger the next mini scene… it’s very predictable and very… sort of… meh!

Had this not been on Gamepass I wouldn’t have touched it, the review scores are hoovering around the 6/10 mark and I can see why… what it does, it does reasonably well… but what it does is really bland.

It has enough polish to look the part, there are a couple of nice Achievements to unlock that make you have to do something different than the norm… but the blandness of the story, and the characters being ventriloquists cost it when it comes to scoring.

In line with the reviews I’ve seen this ends up with an Indie Fest score of 65% which, quite aptly. Have this as this 4^th ranked game of the 7 that I’ve played to date… so it’s average… in every way.