What are you currently playing?

[The Drunkard Kid]

I'm cycling between Shenmue 1 & 2, Yakuza 0, and Gravity Rush 2 on PS4, which is like cycling between Logan, Deadpool, and a mix between Mario/Sonic/Zelda/Yakuza/Star Fox.

On handheld, I'm playing Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC (Vita/PSP), Crisis Core: Final Fantasy (PSP), Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep (PSP), One Piece: Pirate Warriors 3 (Vita), and Borderlands 2 (Vita).

[Bloodbones]

I'm playing Mafia III right now. It's this month free PS4 title. Can't wait to play Spider-Man though!! It looks amazing.

[Carabas]

Wolfenstein: The New Order.

Mostly a fun, chill game, but there are some harsh and random difficulty spikes that come out of nowhere.

Just got Shenmue I & II in the mail the other day, but it looks like it'll be a while befoe I can get to those.

[Kevinroc]

Finished the main campaigns of Octopath Traveler. Yay me.

[gordonm]

Dead By Daylight. Umm... is it worth persevering with? I seem to always end up on Team Clueless or be the victim of Sir Spam-a-lot.

[Starter Set]

Dead By Daylight. Umm... is it worth persevering with?

It's fun once and in a while.

[soniacastellanos]

Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds

[Starter Set]

A little game called Patchwork.

Curiously mesmerizing.

[BeastieRunner]

Overcooked 2, Jurassic World Evolution, Super Mega Baseball 2, and PUBG.

Starting a fresh play through of Walking Dead since the final season is coming out.

[Zero Hunter]

Played Detroit: Become Human, and it was not bad at all. I did end up getting EVERYONE but Alice killed, but I did get the Androids their rights.

[Carabas]

The Witcher 1.

Figured it's way past due that I get into this series.

[Kevinroc]

Marvel's Spider-Man. Or Insomniac's Spider-Man. Or PS4 Spider-Man.

Call it whatever you want.

It's good. Although I'm finding the game a little choppy (I am playing on an original PS4).

[CraigTheCylon]

When not getting distracted by Destiny I managed to complete The Silver Case, the PS4 remastering of an old Suda51/Grasshopper Manufacture narrative adventure. No, I don't know entirely what that means, it's...a very hard game to pigeonhole into a genre. Since the story pretty much IS the game, I'll be as vague as possible and say it centers around Kamui Uehara, a near-mythical serial killer responsible for the deaths of the senior politicians who ran the 24 Wards of Kanto. Kamui was thrown into psychiatric care decades ago, and just recently escaped to restart his rampage...or maybe he was sprung by an accomplice who's the real culprit...or maybe 'Kamui' was never real but his tale has infected the minds of others and turned them into killers. There's a lot of 'or' going on here, to the point where I'm still not sure what the ultimate truth is, or if there even was one. Anyway, when you're not simply scrolling through text, you see a very sparse-looking world through a limited window and move between fixed points in what feels like an attempt to mesh the feel of an old point-and-click adventure with a first-person POV, using controls designed by a meth addict. You have an 'interact' option to trigger conversations, look at computers and so on, plus an 'item' usage option which I think you only need to use once through the whole 20+ hour game. Puzzles are frequent and their solutions require a lot of close reading, observational skills or plain old lucky guesses. To be frank, this is a very acquired taste. If I didn't have a standing appreciation for Suda's particular kind of narrative I'd have given up before the halfway point. But if you like your games to run straight past 'weird' and into 'surreal', this might be the kind of thing you're into.

...and after that I also finished The 25th Ward: The Silver Case, the very belated sequel. As the name implies, they added another Ward; this one's a carefully regimented 'ideal society' meant to banish all negative social behaviour that might trigger criminal thoughts. Guess how well that works. Again, keeping spoilers light, there's 3 different 'campaigns' each dealing with a different set of characters that intersect with one another's stories. Correctness is about detectives, Matchmaker is about government spooks, and Placebo stars a returning schlub of a reporter from the first game. While there's nothing here to push the technology of modern consoles, the environments look a lot sharper and more natural, and even simple things like menu layouts have a cleaner design. Also, the key art used in each campaign is subtly but noticably different, like each one had a separate art team working on it. It's a nice touch. The 25th Ward still plays by the same rules, but its command setup is more natural than its predecessor, even with the baffling rotate-a-ball used to input word or number codes on the reg. There's more commands with more specific names, and each one gets a repeated workout. Another thing it has is 100 different endings, all starting with the same Mexican standoff and asking you how you want to deal with it. Pro tip: shouting out the names of all 12 of Akira Maeda's famous suplexes probably isn't the canonical conclusion. But it's an option!

In slightly less crazy news, also finished Yakuza 6: The Song of Life. This is, I think, the first Yakuza built specifically for the PS4 (the previous 2 releases being upscaled PS3 ports) and you really can tell the difference. Not just in resolution, or improved lighting and weather effects, but just in the simple little things like how Kiryu moves smoothly enough now to vault small obstacles and jump down a storey or two without looking for a ladder. Story-wise, Kiryu spent some time in jail after Yakuza 5 due to an assault charge - no idea which assault that means, Kiryu beats up like 500 guys every day without breaking stride - and finds that his ward Haruka has gone missing in his absence. Stranger still, when he chases down her trail he finds her in a coma and her baby (!) unattended. Now with baby on board, Kiryu hops between Kamurocho and the sleepy coastal town of Onomichi, tracing back the circumstances of Haruka's pregnancy and injury while unearthing a labyrinthine criminal plot that will shake the underworld forever, because it's a Yakuza game and we need one of those. I gotta be honest...this didn't work for me like I wanted it to. I mean, it's still Yakuza. I still love its world, its combat, its many flights into silliness. The rejigged combat system feels like a step backward (why no more style switching?) but the heat-based super mode works well and there's the usual helping of bonkers finishing moves. The also-rejigged EXP setup can be a hassle, but I appreciate the encouragement to engage with side activities, as brawling will only award experience in 3 of the 5 or 6 possible categories. Most of the big fights have a suitable layer of drama attached, and the new semi-RTS gang warfare activity is genuinely diverting, and not just so you can get into fights with New Japan Pro Wrestling's upper card players. Oh yeah, and there's a livechat café where you can enjoy the spectacle of real women pretending to be turned on while Kiryu types out "take off your top" and "I like breasts" with two fingers while nodding to himself like he's proud of it. All that said, for what is at least rumoured to be the 'last' Yakuza title (or at least the last Kiryu-centric one), the story isn't what it should be. For whatever reason, most of the series' regular players - Date, Majima, Daigo, Akiyama, Saejima - are reduced to cameos while Kiryu chiefly hangs around with a new crew he picks up in Onomichi. The newbies are fine and the stories around them are interesting, but Kiryu has little investment in them beyond being nearby when developments happen, so the big moments don't land like they should. The ending largely left me cold too, but I can't explain how without getting into spoilers. It's a fine game overall, but it could've been so much more.

[BeastieRunner]

Anybody play No Man's Sky on PC or console?

I've been wanting to play it since launch but I'm a little gun shy.

Recommendations?

[Carabas]

Anybody play No Man's Sky on PC or console?

I've been wanting to play it since launch but I'm a little gun shy.

Recommendations?

On PS4.

And you're too late.
It used to be a chill game about exploring weird alien worlds. Now it's just yet another overly grindy survival thing.