i got banned trying to beat this game 3 times, so i won't lie and tell you i finished it or even got super far in it, but i played enough to come away with an opinion and i did really enjoy my time with it, brief though it might have been. the game itself had a long and troubled development, it took so long to come out and even longer to be localised that by the time they made any real progress on the localisation, the game was already a flop in Japan and was announced for shutdown, knowing this i downloaded the game and tried to give it a real shot and i did get a decent chunk of time in here, though obviously not enough, this is just a first impressions moreso than anything else. pic unrelated

the process of getting in the game is kind of complicated, first you'll need to get it from a PSN store, i got mine from Japan but i think it might have been on other Asian stores too, though not any euro or American ones, it would have been eventually after it had been localised but that never actually happened. once you manage to get this downloaded you have to make an account, but you can't do this from ingame, you needed to use a QR code to make it on your phone, something that i feel a little weird about, like why should i need a phone to play a video game? what if i don't have a smartphone? i do but i plan to get rid of it soon for a flip phone and i don't think i should be locked out of games for this, but that's a minor issue i guess. once you get in, and don't immediately get banned you do get pushed right into the character creator and for some basic combat. the character creator was solid, i was able to make a character that looked a decent amount like me and the classes are very varied and fun, plus you can even pick them up on the fly and changing them via the weapon wheel, and in a very nice move from the developers they even gave you near max level weapons as a gift near closure! so you could try all the skills and combos. after you get in the game you do a few story bits and combat and then you get thrown into the world. the story the game sets up is pretty interesting, you have this greedy fairy helping you get by and recover your memory, helping you get a job and driving the story, it's very recettear honestly, at least this one character, the writing is overall very solid from what little i played, there are also archived versions of it that are fully translated online if some of you at least want to see what that part of the game had going for it.

i also want to go from a dead game to talk about a dying game, that being ubisofts XDefiant, long time readers will know that this is not my first time talking about XDefiant, i talked about it before in a short review compilation and enjoyed my time with it well enough, even if i didn't stick with it and thought the game was too difficult to really get into for me because of the skill gap between me and other players, this all changed a few months ago when the game had announced its shutdown far before i ever expected it would have, far, far long before that, see i expected this to last at least a few years, right, like its an ubisoft game and its one that seemed to be doing well for itself that first week, but it didn't, and what success it did have did not last, eventually they just decided it wasn't worth the effort and announced a shutdown, leaving tons of potential unfinished and lots of content lost to time with none of it to ever be acknowledged or seen again....except that didn't happen, what did happen was that the devs stopped giving a fuck what ubisoft wanted and threw all the content, finished or not in the game, characters, maps, weapons, weather they were finished or balanced or not, maps without sound effects and weapons without template pics, all broken and unfinished and all up there to use for the few people lucky enough to still have the game in their libraries after delisting, this is very impressive and downright inspirational and i'd like to talk about it just to give them credit for their work here, what they did was brave and it deserves to be given recognition.

so what all was added, for a start a few new groups of playable characters. the wolves from ghost recon breakpoint (literally who?) the assassins from assassins creed who have some of the games coolest looking outfits and an ult that lets you disintegrate people and some guy from far cry blood dragon (NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO), thankfully he's not as overtly racist as you've probably come to expect from anything to do with that subseries, they're not super unique characters but the assassins are great fun to use and the blood dragon guy seems downright broken but in a fun way. you also have maps from series like rayman, which is complete with a lum collecting mode!! prince of Persia and more tom Clancy whatever's, but the main draw here is the rayman and POP maps, they're cool as hell and worth checking this out for alone, there was so much care put into both that it's honestly a little inspiring, they even have unique mechanics like jump pads in raymans stage or teleporters in the prince one. there's new modes like a bot mode that sadly still requires you to que up for a match and can't be done in a private match but like, still, bots. there's a tactical valoranty mode and i think more but i'm not totally sure, there's new weapons and cosmetics, all of which are just given to you for free since the game is dying which was super nice and i'm very grateful for that. serious work was put in here and it's such a shame that so few people will even get to experience it. the team stuck their neck out to put this stuff out there even in an unfinished state, they really went for it and i think that deserves some serious recognition, so often things like this are just lost to time, never to be seen by anyone other than a page on the cutting room floor, but here it's all there, you can go and try it and see how fun this stuff was and that's just not an experience you get often, it's a digital museum for a cancelled game and i think that's really beautiful and it really shows that any game can have passionate, caring people working on it that really care, too often are games like this written off as being slop with no value, disregarding the work of the staff and with people all but laughing when they eventually become lost media and i think that's a real shame, this game clearly had a lot of passion from the people working on it on the ground, sure maybe the idea behind it from the higher ups might have been a little cynical, but care and love was put into the final product and i think it's a shame to write it off like that, it's those kinds of attitudes that always end with genuine ,caring artists continuing to be unknown and uncared about by this industry, eventually being pushed out of it, we need to do better especially now in an age of *real* slop, generated by machines without a human touch, you may not care about this as a game, but it deserves credit for what humanity it has, because soon games like this won't even have that much.

the last game i want to talk about in this catchup page is a game called nour, a cute little physics tech demo that somehow gets sold 10 dollars digitally which i think is a good bit overpriced for what this is, though i played it by mooching off of someone elses ps plus so am i really one to complain about that? its a physics demo where you get thrown into a food scene and can add and play around with it using a set of super basic tools to spawn and manipulate food, it's very reminiscent of an older trend on ps3 for short games similar to this, thing .detuned or linger in shadows, tech demo games made to show off something cool the developers managed to do with the console's tech, with some added artistry thrown in, this is that but for people who watch lofi mukbangs on youtube..... this is not me and i kind of really did not enjoy this at all, it's a game seemingly made just for terminally online twitch viewers to gawk at and no one else and something about that just skeeves me out a little, it's streamerbait, a game made to be seen in funny youtube letsplays and tiktok compilations and not actually played and that is a real shame, all of this is what i want to say but i don't think any of it is really fair, much like XDefiant before it it might seem like slop on the surface but someone making this probably had a lot of passion and care, it's so singularly focused on what it is that even if i think it's not very good, that doesn't mean it doesn't have value at least to the people making it, i'm not fair on this game and i think it is a good example of the very thing i talked about earlier with XDefiant, i am not immune from that feeling, much as i would like to be and it just goes to show that sometimes you do need to re-examine your feelings on things, even things you might dislike, because they're not for you, but they might be for someone else, even just the people making it. though again selling a 45 min long game for 10 dollars is a bit much, you have to give me that one point.