Ah, a fellow fan of that particular game!
Nice, I wishlisted Escape Academy after playing the demo.
Maybe I’ll finish Yakuza 0 before it leaves this time…
Looks like Solasta was stealth dropped to Xbox Game Pass yesterday (it’s already on PC Game Pass).
I messed around with the new tennis game last night. Boy am I bad. I think I played 6 matches and they were all 6-0 with two 6-1. I’m playing semi-pro level which is the default. There is a tutorial which is ok. I do have some pretty good rallys so even though I’m getting crushed I’m having some fun.
Yeah, me too. I was kinda undecided about how much I wanted it after playing the demo. I kind of felt it was okay but not outstanding, and wishlisted it thinking I’d play it if the price was right. Well, “included in GamePass” is pretty much the right price, hehe.
Awesome…I love challenging tennis games…will check this one out.
Please don’t take my skill level as any gauge on how challenging the game is :)
I also lost my opening match as Medvedev vs [Spaniard] 0-6.
Phew - almost bought it.
It is worth buying if you’re into oldschool CRPGs and want to own it permanently. That’s kind of the beauty of Game Pass, you can play highly anticipated games like Starfield on day 1 and then buy them a year or two later when they’re off GP and cheap.
Well, Starfield will never leave Game Pass, but your point stands.
True, that was a poor example.
Although I do plan to buy Starfield when it hits $30 regardless. I want to own all the big RPGs.
Maybe I’m just cranky and old, but i have a hard time believing that Starfield won’t be a mess like No Man’s Sky. Glad I don’t have to pay for it. I mean I love their games usually, but I’m super skeptical on this one.
It may or may not be a mess, but the budget is 10 if not 100 times larger than NMS, and the staffing is probably at least 20 times more. If it’s a mess, it’ll be a mess for Bethesda reasons, not because of any similarity to NMS.
I can easily see the procedurally-generated planets being intensely boring and full of Ubisoft-style open-world collection objectives combined with NMS-style resource collection. That’s totally possible. Hopefully not, shrugemoji.gif.
Sure. I wouldn’t call that a mess, personally, but that could well happen. But I would be very surprised if there weren’t also a robust set of Bethesda style story and quest heavy locations within the universe.
I would-- it would be a reversion to Daggerfall, when Bethesda focused on an enormous play-space that was completely bland. That sucked.
Of course that would only apply to those 100s of generated planets, I’m sure they would still have hand-crafted play areas too, so not quite as bad as Daggerfall.
I put the difficulty down from 2 to 1 (semi-pro to amateur, I think) and won the rematch!
After going up 2-0 I lost four straight games and was like “This some bullshit. Doesn’t seem very Amateur” then bounced back to 4-4. Saved three match points at 5-6 to take the match to a tie break and then won that 7-1.
The actual tennis reminds me a bit of Tennis Elbow with nicer graphics, which is quite the statement considering in Matchpoint Tennis the players look like they might have a skin disease, there’s a weird glow emanating from their hair like their scalp is covered in ghosts and cutscenes show a walking animation that suggests the players are actually aliens trying to convince passers by they’re human.
The matchplay has the same style of mechanics as TE - run into position as early as possible, start to power up a shot and then move an aim point for where you want it to go.
Serving feels underpowered though - too often you can place a fast first serve right in the corner and your opponent runs around it, gets into Karate Kid Daniel San position and hammers a return past you that looks four times faster than your serve.
On the plus side, career mode allows you to make your player look like this
Oh, also, the in-game commentator sounds like he has been kidnapped and is in a dark room somewhere being forced to read political messages off of flashcards in a language he doesn’t understand.
Daggerfall came out nearly 25 years ago. I can’t imagine that project having any influence or impact on the what they do today.
I didn’t mean to imply it would, just using it as an example.