Yakuza 0I was in a debate recently on where the best place to start for a newbie looking to get into the Yakuza series. I said Kiwami 1 as the PS2 original is a bit outdated. Someone else insisted 0 as it's a prequel and therefore the beginning of Kiryu's story. Having now finished 0 I would stick with my first assessment as Yakuza 0 has too much in it that will only really make sense for a Yakuza fan.
I would also disagree that this is the start of Kiryu's story and actually see it more as Majima's game. Goro gets the best city (Osaka), the best business sidequest (the hostess club management game) and generally his tale has more heart and meaning than Kiryu's. Kazuma's story is mostly just a retread of his story in Yakuza 1 with some events shuffled. It's absolutely fine though and as ever serves its purpose of being backdrop for the main game which is as full of amusing sidequests and mini-games. As usual in a Yakuza game sidequests feature everything from dominatrixes to slot-car racing to a dance off with Michael Jackson. Standard bonkers.
The combat has had a slight shake up with both Kiryu and Majima having three fighting styles although I found that the heavy styles for both characters were overpowered enough to make the other two choices kind of pointless. Once you max complete each character's main business sidequest, which is admittedly a pretty decent portion of the run time, you then unlock an ultimate fighting style which is basically their default style from the other games. Majima's ultimate is so ludicrously overpowered there really is no reason to use anything else.
Money plays a bigger aspect in the game than before reflecting the late 80's time period the game is set. You now pour money into yourself to unlock abilities and the prices for these soon rocket into the billions of yen so although the business sidequests are optional, they're also kind of not as you won't earn enough through regular gameplay to get any kind of beefy. As mentioned Majima's sidequest is good fun with you recruiting and training girls for your hostess club, winning the best assets off your rival's, and eventually earning massive sacks of cash. Kiryu's actually end up with getting a steadier and healthier income through his real estate dealings but it's a much more laborious process than it needs to be and requires an absolute ton of cash to get anything done. I found it a bit tedious to be honest and it deffo takes longer than Majima's to reach its conclusion with a lot of forced waiting while your earning are collected. Maybe Yu Suzuki snuck into the office on the day they thought this side quest up?
The 80's theme was a bit of a let down as well. Don't expect Vice City styled nostalgia, the most that you get is a disco minigame, the aforementioned reliance on money and some women wearing suits with big shoulder pads. That's about it. Since most characters in Yakuza games either wear a suit of some form of traditional Japanese dress the whole look remains fairly timeless.
I still highly recommend it though and it's a must for fans of the series. I'd still say Kiwami 2 is the best in the series (although I'm yet to finish 5 or play 6) but it's pretty close.
WandersongWandersong is a very cute game about a bard who goes on a quest to save his world from annihilation armed only with his amazing singing voice and his boundless optimism. The main two things you need to know are that there is a dedicated dance button and you can sing pretty much whenever you want. It's more puzzle platformer than rhythm game as it doesn't really punish you for being off beat and your singing is often used to solve environmental puzzles. It looks as good as it sounds and while the story starts cliche it becomes more character driven throughout and ends on a genuinely uplifting note. Literally. The below picture essentially sums up the entire experience. I liked it a lot.
Crash Team Racing: Nitro FueledThis was a bit of a disappointment. I beat the adventure mode and a few cups but I wasn't having too much fun with it so left it there. Beenox are in charge again after doing pretty decent work of the N-Sane trilogy but, like their remake of Crash Bandicoot, what has essentially happened is a less skilled developer has tried to remake an actual classic from a top tier developer and you end up with a game that is 90% solid remake and 10% oh god, why did you change this?
I found most issues arose from drifting which is really quite problematic when your game is based almost exclusively around CTRs take on classic Mario Kart drift mechanics. Basically I found that drifting sent your kart too far wide and actually in a lot of instances, when combined with the atrocious rubber banding of the AI, would leave you going slower in corners than if you just drove normally. And that rubber banding really is awful as the AI is actually pretty incompetent to the point it will frequently drive off the track into pits for no discernible reason. Let me tell you, it's pretty galling to be beat on the last corner by a Coco Bandicoot you've seen hit three TNTs and fall into a pit that same lap just because she has some mystery speed boost.
To makes things worse this artificial difficultly seems to come in peaks and troughs with most races being pretty challenging on standard difficulty with a few being, for seemingly no reason, absolutely maddening. So, Pinstripe (the penultimate boss) is hair pullingly, wall punchingly stupid hard but the actual proper boss of the whole game Nitrus Oxide is beatable first time. I can't really at that point say it's player skill because on average the game is less difficult than Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed but these spikes are like trying to play while on fire and someone is kicking you in the dick. It's a real shame as well because a lot of effort has gone into the game elsewhere with each character having a multitude of skins and new courses and characters from the inferior Crash Racing games upping the variety. The post launch support has also been excellent with new courses, characters and cups being added to make a robust single and multiplayer experience. It's all a bit surface level but it is appreciated all the same.
I'm also not really too keen on the structure of the adventure mode and with its overworld of adjoining maps. I get fans would have probably cried bloody murder if they were left out but unlike Diddy Kong Racing, the overworld is mostly static and frankly pointless. It just wastes time driving to the next event and then back there again to do the CTR/time challenges. Just give me it as cups with a boss battle, it's fine.
Unlike the N-Sane trilogy, which I do recommend because Beenox only ruined one out of the three games on that disc, here the whole package is kind of tarnished because what used to be a highly polished game that relied on it's precise mechanics has lost about 5-10% of that precision. And in racing 5-10% is basically everything.
Jurassic World EvolutionThis was fun. It's a pretty shallow sim/management game where you get to basically make zoos for dinosaurs. There's a healthy campaign mode where you take control of parks with various existing issues and try to get them up to snuff. Generally this means getting from a no star rating to about three but the real game happens when you try to get each island up to the top five star rating as that takes more in depth use of the various ways you can arrange both your parks and your dinos.
Your basic resource here is fossils which you farm to research new and ever more exciting dinosaurs. You send out missions to dig sites around the globe and with the returning fossils are able to build up a genetic profile of a given dinosaur. Once it reaches 50% you can breed one and stick it on display. You then have to manage enclosure sizes, viewing platforms, guest aminities like hotels and restuarants, transport and diversity of dinosaur stock. There's not much point in having seven enclosures if each one has a couple of tricertops in it and conversely there's no point in having 15 different species if no one can see them.
There is some stuff the game doesn't explicitly tell you that is massively important on how dinosaurs will behave, namely what percentage of their enclosure needs to be woods/grassland or how many other dinosaurs they can live with before they start to rampage. You kind of have to learn this as you go as you don't know these requirements until you breed a dinosaur. However once you solve it you can basically ring a group of Raptors and a T Rex in tissue paper as they'll never break their confines if they're content. Again, it's not super deep but there is about enough there to keep you thinking, at least in campaign. The sandbox mode lets you turn these requirements off if you just want a massive pen with all your favourite dinosaurs knocking about.
If it wasn't for those semi-hidden stats it'd be too much of a breeze but if you just want to mess about or have dinosaur mad kids then stick it on sandbox and go to town. It's a good timesink and lord do we need those right now.