Geekly Review #242

What year is it? One half of GSRR has gone back in time rediscovering their love for some classics. Here’s what we’ve been up to this week.

Pokemon Red

I did query what year it was. Recently Matthew Estes from Normal Happenings posted about his next collaboration piece that he’s putting together calling on bloggers to write about games from their childhood that defined them. Looking at the list of games featured and contributors it’s going to be a great piece. Will and I both selected games for the piece with myself choosing Pokemon Red. Now I can remember Pokemon Red incredibly well and to be honest have pretty much got my piece ready for submission already. But with all the hype surrounding this and talking to others when discussing that I was going to write about this game, a sudden flow of nostalgia came swooping back. I bought Red version from the Nintendo eShop, but stopped playing after a while as friends of mine who bought Blue & Yellow also stopped. The idea was we were going to complete the Pokedex together, I did the deed of restarting the game 3 times, trading starters to a friend to then get them back so we’d have the 3 starters on our caught list. I got them to their 2nd evolution and again we’re at the process where I trade them back so they appear as caught in their Pokedex’s again with the intention of them coming back to me to then continue. This stopped though and despite playing for 12 hours, I only had 2 badges and was waiting around Vermillion City levelling up before boarding SS Anne.

Well, the nostalgia has hit me like a ton of bricks, plus the ever increasing hype for Pokemon Let’s Go due in November which I will be buying a Switch for. So I searched in my loft for my 3DS and picked up where I left off with my save. I’ve spent a good 4 hours still floating around Vermillion City just training and I guess in today’s terms ‘grinding’ in Diglett Cave levelling up other Pokemon I’ve caught to get the Pokedex count increasing. The talk of me doing this has kind of spurred on my fellow Pokemon trainers as they have since dug out their 3DS’s and are back on the same scheme as me levelling up and progressing through. We’ve decided to be incredibly cool 32 year old’s and head to Wetherspoons in the week at some point with our 3DS’s for some trading with beer.

Grand Theft Auto 3

And still somewhat back in time, I was also discussing GTA3 with some friends as the piece mentioned above by Matthew, I had considered opting for GTA3 over Pokemon Red at one point, as it really was another game that had taken over my life upon it’s launch in 2001. Again memories of the game were shared with a group of friends in conversation and as always is the case, the bug to play it again was overpowering. I didn’t restart the game as I had completed it earlier in the year via the PS4’s version of it. I simply just loaded the game up with the sole intention of simply driving around what you’d call limited and simple to today’s standard open world, blasting out my favourite radio stations and taking it all back in. Trying to get that damn Dodo to fly for longer than 20 seconds. Driving from the very start of the game outside Luigi’s Club all the way to the Dam on the 3rd Island that the final mission takes place on. Granted that doesn’t take long at all now, but I can still drive around the Islands knowing where each road goes and never getting lost. I found it enjoyable just walking around the cities looking at some of the details.

I was quite taken aback when I’d found something I had never noticed before, perhaps it’s not on the PS2 version of the game due to limitations, but certainly it’s there on the PS4 downloadable versions. In the rendition of Times Square, there is a clock that I had never noticed, and it’s moving in real time with the game clock. Here we are 17 years later and I’ve found something new in the game that I hadn’t seen before, And I swear I had walked and seen every tiny detail of this game.

As mentioned last week, silly game season is approaching, and while I mentioned that Madden 19 will be out soon and my first game of the crazy season, I forgot that Shenmue 1 & 2 HD are out before Madden in August, and that this will most definitely be my first purchase of August, so it doesn’t look like I’ll be leaving the past for a few more Geekly Reviews yet.

– Murr

No Man’s Sky NEXT

If you follow my Hudson Gaming accounts, you will probably have noticed that I’ve been playing a lot of No Man’s Sky this week since the NEXT update hit. I was one of the many that felt let down by the game when it released for reasons that we all know by now. But I’ve still been following along with the progress of the game to see how it’s doing and it has improved things over the last 2 year with a few fairly large updates. The latest update is the big one though, the one that adds full multiplayer and a hell of a lot of other changes that culminate in a much better experience overall.

I’m currently working on a larger piece giving a more in depth look at the new update, but I wanted to share a little bit about my experience so far.

I don’t actually know what it is that has made the game feel so much better this time around – maybe it’s just that I now have a lot of other friends who are also playing, but I’ve been loving the game and in the last week have doubled my play time from the past 2 years.

I think things feel a lot more streamlined, there are multiple ways in which you can go about getting upgrades now, there’s a lot of interesting new items to find in the wild and you can get a freighter fairly early on now which is awesome!

I’m just going to share some screens since I’ve been back!

Overwatch

If you know about Overwatch, you’ll probably know about the Overwatch league. Well this weekend was the finals with London Spitfire taking on the Philadelphia Fusion. Before the playoffs began London had been in pretty dire form whilst Fusion were arguably on the up. Both teams pretty much sailed through the playoffs with Fusion making very light work of the no1 seed NYXL and London seeming to recapture their form form stages one and two.

Incidentally Fusion and Spitfire are my two favourite teams in the whole league, so no matter the outcome I would’ve been happy. What I wasn’t expecting was the complete whitewash that happened. London Spitfire absolutely dominated the whole series and won in very convincing fashion with DPS player and MVP Profit and Tank player Gesture in particularly scintillating form. It was very impressive indeed and I probably would’ve liked a bit more of a contest just to make it a little more interesting, but it wasn’t to be.

I have to say that I’ve enjoyed the Overwatch League way more than I thought I would. I don’t actually really even play Overwatch any more but I still love to watch the pros doing their thing. The whole league has been amazing to watch and I can’t wait for the next season as we will get have new heroes and I’m guessing a new meta to see unfold. It will be interesting to see how characters like Symmetra – who didn’t get any play time at all during the entirety of the league, but has now had major reworks and Hammond – a brand new character who plays unlike any of the others, will fit in with this new meta.

-Will