What are you all playing?

But you have to buy those or find one right?

Trying to wrap up Final Fantasy VII and Uncharted 4 before Persona 5 is out next week.

Still working on Breath of the Wild, but I think that will be the case for months if I pace myself.

Playing through Tales of Innocence on the DS (well, 3DS) when I have a spare hour.

For short bursts, been playing Professor Layton and the Curious Village, and also been playing around with Super Mario Run a bit.

You get one really early on, if I remember right. And once you have it, it's yours. You don't have to buy new ones.

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valencia (3DS)
Mass Effect Andromeda (PS4)
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch)
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Switch)

I haven't posted here for a while, so there's a lot to catch up:

Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword (DS): I'm replaying it every time I hear CGR's podcast! I've finished Master Kunoichi mode (where you play as Rin), now I'm in the middle of Head Ninja. It's really fun to replay while doing something else as, unlike the other NG games, you don't have to be fully concentrated on this one.

Kid Icarus: Uprising (3DS): Haven't played for weeks, but I still want to finish it. A fun game destroyed by the most flawed and literally painful control method Nintendo could possibly invent.

Vanquish (PC): This is just awesome. I have already played it on my 360, but the pc version is a whole another experience. The visuals are very clear now, the animation is fluid and the aiming is perfect using a mouse. It's almost a whole different game, a much better one. I had only played on normal on the 360, so on PC I went straight for the hard mode. Love the stupid characters, the action b-movie tone, the absurdity. Platinum Games / Shinji Mikami doing their best.

I also have finished, during this time:

Mirror's Edge: Catalyst (PC): Well, this is... something. I love the first game and consider it among the very best of the previous generation. This one is... meh. The open world, to my surprise, is not too bad and is really well designed: you can see they took great care placing obstacles to be overcome. The parkour system is much more exaggerated than the first one, so it's worse, although still fun: in ME, Faith was only slightly above what a real human could do, so her parkour was very believable; in Catalyst, they made her a super hero, so it strangely looks much more boring (even with a grappling hook): her sidestep, for instance, looks like she is teleporting herself, her jumps have no weight, her roll can go bakwards etc. The revised movement system also added a plethora of bugs that weren't in the first game, so it's very disappointing.

The setting/visuals are terrible: ME was in a contemporary city and had very simple but realistic visuals inspired by the Bauhaus aesthetics; Catalyst is a Ghost in the Shell wannabe, with very SHINY visuals with plenty of lens flare (think the new Star Trek movies), so it has no proper identity, instead looking like generic sci-fi. Another difference between them is that ME looks very clear, while Catalyst added so many post-processing effects that the entire game looks smudged. This also goes for the story: ME had a very average story, but it was very simple and straightforward, had your usual action movie tone and was never too intrusive, with very few cutscenes between levels (in the levels itself, you were always looking through Faith's eyes like in the Half-Life/Portal games); Catalyst has a terrible, awful story that comes straight from those young adult novels/movies (Hunger Games and its kin), takes itself VERY seriously with twists that are both stupid and telegraphed hours before they happen, and fills the game with useless cutscenes and the most forgettable characters I've ever seen (the game is always pulling the camera out of Faith's eyes to show any stupid thing). This is seriously the worst story I've played in the last... I don't even know, probably the last decade or more. I hated, hated it. HATED it. The writing is just balls. You can't even make fun of it as it's just too boring.

Also, everything is very "gamey": ME had no HUD or any thing coming straight out of a game, so you just felt like you were running in a real city (the sense of immersion was exactly its greatest strenght); Catalyst has icons everywhere and literally has floating energy balls around the city for no reason, among other stupid generic video game tropes, like unexplicable audio diaries scattered through the city (worst exposition method ever).

Besides, I've already complained on another topic about the save system: you only have a single automatic save. It got corrupted and I lost my entire progress after 15h playing the game. That's unforgivable and the most stupid thing possible.

A lot of people complained about the very few obligatory combat scenes in ME (there's around three of them), so what they did for Catalyst? They thought they had "improved" it, so they decided to add dozens of obligatory combat. At least in ME you could grab a gun and end the combat fast, while Catalyst makes you use the awful first-person-melee combat they developed.

I'm noticing so many flaws now that I'm thinking/writing about it... Keep in mind I still had fun, so much that I kept playing even after it erased my save: even with all the stupid crap they added to this one, the movement system from the first game still lives (albeit slightly tweaked for the worse). All the fun I had with it probably came from the optional races, as they didn't had any combat or story - just the awesome first-person running. What leaves me sad is, if they ever do a sequel, it will be a sequel to this instead of a sequel for ME.

So, my final word is: play the first one, not this. Only play this if you love the first one so much that you want to play new levels, even if they suck.

Bayonetta (PC): It's the same Bayonetta as always, now with very detailed graphics that show even better how creative the art is in this game. We've discussed it in a "Game of the week" thread and everything I said there still holds up, so much that, in a single month, I played the game four times to unlock everything (normal/hard/infinite climax/easy) and got every achievement again. I still have to unlock Jeanne, though.

fsfsxii - Congratulations, mate! I'll try unlocking Jeanne (without cheating, of course!) later; I already got platinums in the first three chapters and in the Space Harrier one, but then, after replaying the game so much, I got burnt out before doing the others.

Did you beat the secret boss fight? I only did it now on the pc version, and it sure did live up to its fame. I still haven't beaten the Lost Chapter, though. On the 360, I got to the penultimate fight against , and then didn't have the patience to do the entire thing again.

Interesting how this game is short but, after six years owning it (and now owning a rerelease), there are still things to do.