The Playstation One: A Childhood in Polygons

Update: I wrote this before Playstation reversed their decision to close down the PSN store for PS3 and PS Vita!

In a long-running chain of events that rivals the beginning of a Simpsons episode for how long it takes to set up the topic at hand, what began as me scouring the Playstation 3 digital store for titles to grab before Jim Ryan heartlessly murders it snowballed into me creating a comprehensive Youtube playlist of every single Playstation One game I owned during childhood. Inhale. Exhale. The following blog post is the embedding of each one of the videos I found showcasing the gameplay of each, alongside a few words about memories that may have struck me while watching.

I plan on doing this for PS2, PSP, PS3, the DS and the Wii and some point in the future, and perhaps the 3DS too. The biggest hurdle will be the PS2, as I owned over a hundred games for that system back in the day. Life was good.

Crash Bandicoot 1, 2, 3

For the sake of brevity, I’ll condense trilogies into one video, although the full playlist has every game.

Crash Bandicoot 2 was the first game in the series I obtained, though I no longer remember getting it or playing it for the first time. What I can tell you is that I got the first game in the series for behaving at the doctor’s. Thanks, Dad.

What is there to say about Crash Bandicoot that hasn’t already been said? We were not a Nintendo household, so Crash was my Mario, my Sonic. He was the poster-child for videogames as a media. As a kid I don’t think I beat any of the original games, though I did polish them all off handily when they were re-released a few years ago as remakes. Personally, I find that 2 strikes the perfect balance, with the first game being slightly rougher around the edges and not as thematically varied, and 3 relying too heavily on vehicle levels which detracted from the overall platforming.

Crash Team Racing

To be perfectly honest, I think the most enjoyment I got out of this game was with its recent remake on PS4. The amount of care and additional content that was pumped into Nitro-Fuelled was second-to-none, in my opinion, overtaking the original game as the desirable version. But this is a nostalgia-based post, so I should probably focus on the original, which I still loved the heck out of.

My foremost memory of Crash Team Racing is of me playing the Hot Air Skyway level at around Christmas time while my family were putting up the Christmas Tree nearby. I also remember getting this game alongside several others for my birthday, assumedly earlier that same year, and feeling like I’d hit the motherlode. I love Kart Racers for their unique and varied environments as well as how the weapons demand more than just racing skill from you, and Crash Team Racing will always be among my absolute favourites in the genre.

Crash Bash

I never sank quite as much time into Crash Bash as I did Crash Team Racing, but I nevertheless enjoyed playing through the various minigames presented here. Usually I’d just be playing against the AI, but sometimes my dad or sister would join in, and those were obviously the times when Crash Bash was at its best; the only issue was that my playtime against AI opponents meant that I had more practice, and would easily beat them, probably being a bad sport about it while doing so. Ah, childhood, what can you say.

As a party game the fun mostly comes from playing with others, and therefore I feel like it’d have withstood the test of time a lot better than some of the other games in this list. I’d love to break it out and play with people again sometime, given that we had enough controllers.

Spyro the Dragon 1, 2, 3

Similarly to with Crash, I didn’t own the first Spyro game until after I’d played Spyro: Year of the Dragon to death. As such, I remember my first experiences with Spyro the Dragon being interesting as I noticed the absence of certain features, characters, and polish. All the same, I think Spyro’s brand of platforming – namely, collectathon – appealed to me just a little bit more than Crash Bandicoot’s, though I could never pick an outright favourite if you’d asked me all those years ago.

As a huge Ratchet and Clank fan, it’s a lot of fun to see these games through the lens of progenitors to a lot of Ratchet’s game design. Replace Sparx with Clank, urns of gems with boxes of bolts, and portals to realms with flying to planets and you can see where a lot of that DNA comes from. They even carried over the concept of gliding! Although Spyro never did get his paws on a RYNO.

Gex: Enter the Gecko / Gex: Deep Cover Gecko

I couldn’t find a long play with the European voice actor, so this is the American version.

I’m going to be completely upfront with you: These are not good platforming games. A couple of years ago I emulated Enter the Gecko, and found it abhorrent to control. Nonetheless, I spent a decent portion of my childhood with these two games, and it’s likely that I’ll spend £10 before the PS3 digital storefront closes down later this month for the privilege of downloading them and playing them once again.

Trivia time. When I was extremely young and still wrapping my head around the concept of location and countries, I wondered if travelling far enough into the air would get you to the underground of the next country, like France. I think this was due to the fact that in Enter the Gecko, you could sometimes fall out of a level and land back in the hub? This is on the very fringes of my earliest memories, so I could be entirely wrong, but I’ve always associated that game with me learning about location and basic geography.

Rayman

Oh god.

Okay, so as a child, I had no problem with Rayman. It was just another platforming game, it was fun! But for some reason, this game creeps me the hell out as an adult. The art style is all kinds of surreal, and the world is full of bright, bug-eyed creatures that look like they know too much, that look like they want to reach out of the screen and harm you in ways as of yet undocumented, un-invented, unheard of and unthinkable. It’s bright and colourful and dark and warped, and I couldn’t tell you why, but it’s about time we moved on to another game that doesn’t wig me out let’s goooooo!

RC Revenge

I’ve already talked about this game a lot, so to keep it brief: RC Revenge is one of my favourite games ever made. To somebody else playing it for the first time it probably wouldn’t register as anything more than a decent arcade racing game, but to me personally, it is the epitome of a nostalgic game experience. This is a game that I played so much as a kid, going so far as to try and unlock the last two racers by winning the hardest races perfectly, because I convinced myself that that’s what I needed to do (and surely not the time trials). It’s a game I know inside and out, and still revisit every now and then.

Micro Machines V3

I tend to find that a lot of the nostalgia I feel when watching these videos comes from the menu screens. The music, the way the buttons look, the scene transitions, all of it is pure nostalgia juice to me. The gameplay too, of course, but there’s something special about the in-between moments that we take for granted at the time. Micro Machines V3 in particular had a very characterised menu system, wherein a little cartoon car would drive to various options-as-garages and would change depending on the character you chose down the line. A small touch which the developers didn’t need to spend time on, but it stuck out in my memory as a super charming aspect of this game.

The gameplay itself was fast and incredibly chaotic, and was another family favourite. The weapons were bonkers, and the environments were super interesting given the rat-size perspective. I love everything about this game and I’d play it again in a heartbeat; I reckon it still holds up today. I tried many similar games in the years after this one, including Micro Machines sequels themselves, but they never quite achieved the charm of Micro Machines V3.

Rollcage Stage II

Rollcage Stage II is another one of those games where the menus just transport you back in time. They’re so goddamn cool. There’s no other way to put it. The music, the colours, the little pzshow pzshow sounds as you scroll from option to option, urghh. Inject it into my veins!

As for the actual gameplay itself, I never quite got the handling down; turning was snapshot fast and the nature of these cars meant that instead of crashing into a wall, you’d find yourself driving up it and often backwards before you got a handle on the inverted controls. That or your idiot seven-year old brain would decide to drive on the ceiling of a tunnel until the exit, where you’d inevitably lose control mid-air and barrel into the nearest obstacle.

Good times.

WipEout 2097

Another incredibly hard-to-handle futuristic racer from the 90’s, this series remains a favourite of my dad’s, who would go out of his way to purchase any new titles on PS2 as they came out. (He tells me that WipEout Pulse for PS2 is a rare one and he won’t sell it even if it does go for £50.) For my part, I mis-remembered which Wipeout game I owned as a kid and bought the very first one as a PS2 Classic for my PSP. And let me tell you right now, you don’t need to rush out and buy that before the PSP digital store closes down; if that game was hard to handle before, the PSP’s excuse for an analogue stick did not do it any favours!

Gran Turismo / Gran Turismo 2

Gran Turismo has been a steady graphical showcase of Playstation hardware over the years, and I’m happy to say that we’ve owned every single one along the way… bar 6, although I did play the pre-release demo for that one. Gran Turismo was my sister’s choice of game, and I never personally appreciated the series for its gameplay until many years later, and I bet you won’t guess which one, either. As for my sister, she’d play the game as a car collection simulator, opting to always drive the car she’d spend the least amount of mileage in as she earned her way up the Chevrolet Camaro chain.

She also kept an exhaustive list of her Zoo Tycoon animals’ family trees. An oddball, that one.

Penny Racers

The fact that I’d choose Penny Racers (known as ChoroQ 64 in Japan) over Gran Turismo should serve as your reminder that I was no less than ten years old when playing any of these games. Penny Racers, an objectively not-great racing game, was the absolute shit to my easily pleased child brain, and I’d be very interested to see how it plays in 2021. All I know is that back then, the only thing I cared about was that the tracks had tunnels you could race through, and you could race as a bus and find secret shortcuts! It was very exciting!!!

I bet I didn’t even notice that it ran at like, 10fps, if that video is to be believed.

Circuit Breakers

Another racing game! My favourite thing about the PS1 era is that racing games were all so different. You could put Circuit Breakers in the same camp as Penny Racers and RC Revenge, but they all look, feel and handle totally different. Circuit Breakers in particular had this kind of dark atmosphere which I don’t think was intended, it was just a limitation of the hardware causing draw distance fog to appear spooky. Looking back on the game now, I appreciate the fixed camera angles switching up how you’d approach corners in your traditional racing game.

According to my dad, I had a sort of an… episode when we were playing this game once. I have absolutely no memory of this, but once, we were playing a water level and I started bugging out and asking him to turn it off because it was weirding me out. Bizarre.

Wreckin’ Crew

I forgot this game even existed for a good twenty years of my life. It was only when me and my family got into a discussion about PS1 games a few months back that my dad brought this one up, and for a moment I thought he was describing an older game that I’d never played. After much searching, however, we found it, and man… I cannot explain in words how it feels to see gameplay of a childhood game which you’d forgotten existed up until that moment. Verbally, it was a lot of “holy shit I remember this!!” and “oh yeah and the little stars and- that’s right!”

It also hard to encapsulate, with words, the shape of a childhood game in your memory. Looking at this from a modern perspective I can tell you that it’s a racing game which uses sprites for the cars that changes as you drift, but from the dredges of my memory this game stands out as having thin lanes to corner around, bendy city environments, lots of steel beams to crash into, and none of the memorable cars that the other games in this list have. And it just had a… a feel to it that I can’t put into words. A runt of the litter aura to it, a game that sits in the corner and people forget about. Not that it was a bad game, I guess we just didn’t play it as much. Ah, I’m doing a terrible job of explaining this.

Micro Maniacs

I went many years without thinking about Micro Maniacs, but the difference between it and Wreckin’ Crew is that when I saw it, I instantly remembered what it was. With Wreckin’ Crew, I still had to strain my memory to recognise that it was a game I’d played before.

Anyway, yeah, Micro Maniacs was another take on the Micro Machines formula, only this time you’ve got creepy little people running around the place instead of cute little cars. Not a fan, in retrospect. Interestingly enough, the thing that sparks the most amount of nostalgia watching through this wasn’t the gameplay, but the opening cinematic. Perhaps it was unskippable back in the day. But I mean hey, who could forget the guy with fists where his nipples should be?

So creepy.

Rogue Trip: Vacation 2012

One of my absolute favourite games as a kid! I played the hell out of this, oftentimes with my dad but alone when not. I completed it multiple times. You’ll notice there’s no Twisted Metal on this list; this was my version of that. Although, I recently found out that this was made by the same developers, shortly after they lost the rights to Twisted Metal and started over with a new publisher. There’s a decent argument to be made that this game is the real Twisted Metal 3! Maybe I’ll have to go back and play those games.

I have a lot of love for arena shooters, so I think it’s interesting to look at my roots as a vehicular combat enthusiast before I ever played Unreal Tournament ’99. There’s a lot of similar gameplay here; you’re basically just roaming around the map looking for weapons to shoot at enemies, after all. There’s the whole tourist thing too, I suppose, but I never paid much attention to that. There were even secret areas you could unlock!

My prevailing memory of this game is one of when there was a lot more mystery in the world. As a kid, I sometimes dreamed about games that I spent a lot of time playing; Rogue Trip was one of those games. In my first time playing through it, I reached the mid-game level Neon Nightmare, where you fight the first boss. For whatever reason, I had a dream that I was in that level and that I got to choose which boss I faced off against, out of a selection of whatever bosses I made up inside my head. In the dream, I chose the one that was in the game, and when playing through the game I was convinced that I’d somehow chosen that boss in my dreams.

Childhood. Kids be dumb.

Grand Theft Auto 1 / London 1969 / 2

Should I have been playing these games as a kid? Probably not. But look at the gameplay, it’s fairly harmless compared to subjecting a kid to something like GTA V. And I loved these games!! I (luckily) never played the missions because they didn’t interest me. No, my enjoyment in these games came in the form of exploring the open world, trying to find the best cars, trying to find the coolest tunnels to drive through… I was very into tunnels in my games, let me tell you. I was actually very uninterested in the combat. I enjoyed running people over, but besides that I found the gunplay to just be… kinda boring.

I guess what I’m saying is that I automatically censored the game for myself? Anyway, GTA 2 was the best out of the three games!

Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee / Abe’s Exoddus

I have trouble spelling the word odyssey to this day and I blame this game for that.

This is among the earliest games I remember, to the point where I didn’t even play it; I was sat on my dad’s lap simply watching him play through it instead. After all, this is not the kind of game that a three year old is likely to excel at. It’s an important inclusion, though, as the creepy, ominous, dystopian vibes of Abe’s world are among my earliest childhood memories, and I remember being surprised that, when he finally escaped the facility, the outside world was no less dark or deadly.

“Hello.”

“Hello.”

“Follow me.”

“Okay.”

“Azuazuazuazuuu…”

MediEvil

MediEvil is another game at the earliest fringes of my memory, although I think I did play a bit of this one. A lot of the comments for that video talk about how scary this game was to them as a kid, but I don’t ever remember finding it creepy. In fact, the only thing I remember from this game was the club weapon. It reminded me of a chicken leg, and it amused me greatly that you could just run around whacking people with it.

Frogger 2: Swampy’s Revenge

This game was my absolute jam! I loved it to death as a kid, probably among my younger years once again. For some reason I always called this game “Frogger Hopper”, and decided to give my bedroom an address that was basically my home address, followed with “Frogger Hopper” at the end to let people know to deliver it to my room. I probably liked the game because it was colourful and had a soundtrack that… oddly enough, reminds me of Ratchet and Clank here in the futuristic year of 2021. I wonder…

Worms / Armageddon / World Party

I’ve been quoting voice lines from this game for my entire life.

Worms! How many hours did we spend playing Worms? Such a simple game, and yet a masterpiece. Laughing hysterically when a bazooka would get caught by the wind and go shooting off god knows where, or when you’d accidentally TNT your own worms. Beyond that, I’d spend hours playing against myself, doing kamikaze-only games because kamikaze was an instant side-splitter, or spending the entire game bunching every worm into one crater just to watch them all blow up at the end.

Worms is timeless. There have been many Worms games, but even the original, as archaic as it looks, still holds up. I could go for a game of Worms right now! Who’s in?!

Hogs of War

Somehow, Hogs of War managed to make 3D Worms before Worms did, better than Worms would, and an entire system earlier. The somewhat problematic international stereotypes have aged poorly, but the gameplay… well, let’s just say that my dad still plays this game fairly regularly. The only thing missing from this game that made it inferior to Worms was the lack of terrain deformation, although to be fair, changeable 3D world terrain wouldn’t be a thing in games until much further down the line, unless I’m missing an example.

And the rest.

All right, folks, here’s the thing: There’s still a lot of games here. But I’ve already talked about an exhaustive list of games here, and I don’t have much to say about the rest of them. In fact, most of the rest of these games were only remembered and included because I trawled through a list of every PS1 game ever made to be reminded of them. But if you’re interested in seeing the entire scope of my childhood, PS1 games, once again, here’s the playlist. For the sake of posterity though, as Youtube videos sometimes go missing, the rest of the list goes as follows:

• Breakout
• Bust-A-Move 4
• Pandemonium 2
• O.D.T
• Forsaken
• Mickey’s Wild Adventure
• Hercules
• Asterix: Mega Madness
• Hugo 2
• Bomberman Fantasy Race
• Bubsy 3D (shudder)
• A Bug’s Life
• Colin McRae Rally 2
• Demolition Racer
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
• LEGO Rock Raiders
• Motorcross Mania
• Rugrats: Search for Reptar
• Scrabble
• Overboard
• South Park
• TOCA World Touring Cars
• Toy Story 2
• V-Rally
• Who Wants To Be A Millionaire
• Three Lions

I was a lucky kid.

Join us next time when I’ll attempt to make some sort of dent in the behemoth of PS2 games that I played as a kid! If you thought this was a lot… this was tame.

My Xbox All Access Adventure #5 – Surprises Galore

Another post, another month’s worth of Xbox gaming to catch you all up on! To be honest, my Series S was in danger of getting dusty by the beginning of last month, and this month didn’t look much brighter. But in the last week or two, a game release and an update have had me spending a lot of time on Xbox, and these titles, alongside my growing discontent for Sony and Nintendo’s treatment of their back catalogues, have me more thankful than ever for Game Pass.

First things first though, we’ve got a dud:

• All-Star Fruit Racing (Free with Xbox Live Gold in… certain regions.)

Listen, when it comes to Kart racers, I’ll try anything. And while I never expected All-Star Fruit Racing to appeal to me, being far outside the target demographic, I was hoping it would surprise me. Ah well.

Moving on to what I’ve continued playing since we last met, then:

• Forza Horizon 3 – The upcoming Hot Wheels Unleashed game has reinvigorated my efforts to finish up the main game and try out the Hot Wheels DLC.
• Halo: The Master Chief Collection (PC) – I finally installed Halo 4’s multiplayer and I absolutely love it. It might be my favourite Halo multiplayer.
• Wreckfest – Smashing cars together is great background noise for when you’re catching up with friends on Discord. Still waiting on a Discord app for Xbox to make my life easier.

It’s always good to spend a little more time with titles that I’ve already played enough to write about. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t spend plenty of time indulging in fresh and updated experiences, too.

Xbox Game Pass (Including EA Access)

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

I’ve spent about 6 hours in Morrowind so far and I find it absolutely fascinating. As a huge fan of the series, and as someone who has perfected Skyrim and spent hundreds of hours in ESO – favourite zone Vvardenfell, by the way – it’s incredibly endearing to go back to the title which marks what is essentially the starting point for the kind of RPGs Bethesda would go on to create. Obviously Arena and Daggerfall came first, and shouldn’t be ignored, but Morrowind marked their first attempt at a fully 3D world, and established so many hallmarks for not just the Elder Scrolls, but their later Fallout games as well.

I actually do own Morrowind on PC, but I think the Xbox backwards compatible version is a far more playable experience. One could say that… it just works. Without the burnout of trying to make it run in a reasonable manner and figuring out how to control the character, most of my attention was free to be spent on figuring out what the laws of this world were. Similarly to my time in World of Warcraft Classic, I discovered that a lot of time spent questing in this older RPG would be based around orienteering, with navigational directions being given in the quest text as opposed to a simple marker being added to your map. While this can be off-putting at first, it does reward the player with a sense of familiarity over time; I found that I was getting the lay of the land of Vvardenfell in a way that I otherwise might not have. I certainly wouldn’t argue for this style of world-building to be brought back in modern RPGs – perhaps as an option, like in newer Assassin’s Creeds, but even that option isn’t this bare – but I can’t deny that it has a certain effectiveness in its own right.

I’m probably going to explore Morrowind in small stints over the coming months, and I doubt I’ll ever really finish it. This game is more of a museum piece of me. The rigid combat and archaic quest design is interesting to go back and experience, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it fun.

Wolfenstein: The New Order

I’m a big fan of retro-style shooters and alternate history settings, so believe me when I say that I fully expected to fall head over heels for this game. Instead, I found that it was just… fine. I got about three levels in, and I liked the shooting, I appreciate that it had secrets and health pickups and unique weapons, and I had a decent time with it. But as with all games in the Game Pass landscape that are Just Okay, I inevitably ended up shelving it for another day when something more lucrative came along.

I have no doubt that this is a good game, and perhaps I simply had to spend more time with it. The prevailing advice is that “if you love games like DOOM, you’ll love this”. Maybe it was overhyped, for me. But it came across as overly gritty and grey, and some of the guns had obnoxious recoil, and the story wasn’t really doing anything for me, to be honest. I was surprised at how much it reminded me of a Call of Duty campaign. And if that sentence made you recoil, then maybe I truly have misunderstood the game. I’ll get back to it someday, don’t worry. Someone’s gotta kill them Nazis.

Octopath Traveller

One of the biggest surprise releases onto Xbox and Game Pass this month was Octopath Traveller, a JRPG which I’ve almost bought for the full £50 on Nintendo Switch in the past. I was absolutely delighted to see it announced for Game Pass! So far, I’ve played Chapter 1 of three of the characters – Olberic, Nessa annnnnd the scholar guy – and I’ve enjoyed them all a ton! My bad attention span makes JRPGs specifically really tough to stay with, no matter how much I enjoy them, but the chapter-based nature of this game encourages me to pick it up again whenever I wish with minimal difficulty remembering where I was.

For those who have never seen it, Octopath Traveller has a really unique and charming 16-bit inspired, almost paper-craft macro-lens style to it, proving that pixel art can still dazzle when freed from the limitations of its associated gaming era. The story for all three of the characters I’ve played so far has been very engaging, and the combat system is simple, yet surprisingly deep. The use of BP for extra blows and the fact that different enemies have different weaknesses means that you’re constantly juggling when to use what, how to interrupt an enemy’s turn, whether to heal or defend or attack in the first place. As someone who has sampled a decent number of JRPGs but never finished a single one, it’s a surprise to find battles exciting rather than routine or at worst, cumbersome.

I have the distinct feeling that if I had pulled the trigger and bought this game for full price on Switch, I wouldn’t be left feeling disappointed with my purchase.

No Man’s Sky: The Expeditions Update

Join me in welcoming our first returning title, which to nobody’s surprise is the frequently updated and constantly improving No Man’s Sky! I first wrote about No Man’s Sky in #2 of this blog post series, albeit only to say that it ran well but not perfect and that my immediate discovery of a Paradise planet killed my motivation to keep playing.

Well, the Expeditions update feels like it was made specifically for people like me! I’ve heard some people say it’s lacking in actual content compared to other updates, but Expeditions introduces a new community seasonal journey for you to begin on a new save file. In this save file, the tutorials are removed or expediated where necessary, your character is randomised and so starts with some decent equipment, and you all begin on the same planet and follow the same journey across the stars to various rendezvous points. As somebody who has barely touched the multiplayer in this game, it’s been thrilling to share this space with others and see what people have made of it, as No Man’s Sky’s galaxies are so big that you’re highly unlikely to just run into people unless you’re looking for them specifically.

This update has captured a lot of my initial love for the game, and I find myself still discovering new aspects of it, and not just by way of updates I haven’t played. I’m realising that I never payed enough attention to the technology upgrades, and how transformative they can be to the gameplay experience. I’d never spent much time visiting other coloured stars, and so missed out on some of the weirder biomes, like one planet which turned everything grayscale except for certain colours. I named it Westview. Just thinking about this game makes me want to jump back in and play it, and I’ve already sunk 10+ hours into this expedition. The expeditionary milestones – which are more than just rendezvous points – have me trying out different aspects of the game, like farming, which I’d never bothered with before, and in doing so finally got me to understand how simple the new (to me) base powering system actually is.

And they could have absolutely charged for this one. Expeditions are similar in many ways to a battle pass. But it’s still a free update, free to play and explore to your hearts content, given that you already own the game or have it on Game Pass. It’s industry leading consumer friendly game development, though I hope they’re earning enough for themselves over at Hello Games.

Outriders

I cannot express how little I cared about this game when it was first announced. My friend Reece was interested, but I was at a time when Destiny 2 was letting me down, and I was getting burnt out on live games that weren’t fully-fledged MMOs. Even when they showcased more of the game, or released the beta, I had no desire to pay any attention to it at all. It’s actually not even a live game like Destiny 2, but is more akin to Borderlands 2 or Diablo 3 in how it handles story, loot and co-op. Maybe if I knew this from the outset, I’d have been more open to it.

Anyway, I absolutely love Outriders. The gameplay is like DOOM and Gears of War had a baby in that it’s a cover shooter that rewards aggressive play, at least for classes like the Trickster, which is what I’m running. Shotgun slugs turn enemies into piles of red goo, pieces of gear and new weapons fall out of their pockets in enticing glowing chunks, abilities cool down quickly and make you feel like a living god who’s playing with cheat codes on, and yet somehow the games manages to retain a difficulty that makes it actually engaging to play. I’ve found myself bumping up against walls of difficulty several times, having to stop and re-examine how I’m engaging the enemy in combat. It’s downright masterful, and while I’m yet to complete the campaign I can already see myself playing well into endgame and hungering for more content afterwards. Hats off to People Can Fly, seriously.

As for the story, I… really, really like it. I’ve only heard bad things from others, about how cheeseball some of the acting is, how the writing is unoriginal or the dialogue is questionable, but I’ve gotta be honest, I’m deeply invested in the world of Enoch and its inhabitants. Maybe it’s just because I don’t watch a lot of movies or read a lot of science fiction, but I’m all-in on this world. And I don’t even like post-apocalyptic settings! But I’m reading every scrap of lore I find, going down every dialogue tree I can, and playing through every side-quest. Maybe my standards are lower, or maybe I’ve spent so much time in Destiny 2 that this is super refreshing to me, but the prospect of the last scraps of humanity making it to a brand new planet intrigues me to no end. It’s a similar premise to Mass Effect Andromeda, minus humanity burning in the rear-view window (that I’m aware of – never played the Mass Effect series), and I’ve always been kept away by people criticising that story. But if I like this, maybe I’ll like that.

In Summary

Lots of wonderful surprises this month, from Octopath Traveller releasing on Xbox and Game Pass, to No Man’s Sky getting an update that’s tailored to my playstyle, to Outriders releasing onto Game Pass and my giving it a shot turning into me focusing most of my gaming hours on it. All fantastic stuff, none of it expected by the end of last month’s blog post. But before we leave, I should address a game I said I was going to play, and actually did, but if you remember this feature from a few months ago, here it is, making a return.

Games I Need More Time With:

• Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

So far, it seems like a good game, although I’m not a fan of how it treats stealth, which bodes ill for a, you know, stealth game. But I got thoroughly distracted with all the surprises shot at me out of a Microsoft cannon this month, so you’ll have to bear with.

Next month, expect, ah… you know what? I don’t know! I have nothing new that I’m planning on playing at this point, just more of No Man’s Sky and Outriders. But hey, maybe I’ve forgotten something or maybe something will surprise me.

Thanks for reading this month’s entry! I recently discovered that this blog is perhaps the most popular thing that I do, going off of follower numbers, and that absolutely delights me. I’m probably going to put a bit more effort into supplementary mid-month blog posts from here on out, focusing on retro stuff for the time being, so keep an eye out for that! If it’s just the Xbox adventures you’re interested in though, I will happily meet you back here next month.

Gamerscore as of March 10th: 10,395

Gamerscore as of April 10th: 11,050