With another week comes another Press Play, our natty little feature where the team spill their guts on what they’ve been, will be and are hoping to play. This week there’s a nice split of tabletop games and video games – much as we see on our own humble homepage – including our own Reueben discovering what I (Dann) believe to be one of the greatest games of its era: Power Stone 2.
It’s all been a bit wobbly here, for me. In my downtime I’ve restarted a run in Menace, in which I’m thoroughly enjoying the SLs that have been added since I last played. I also rolled up Wetteroth for the first time, and while I’m very aware that most people seem to rate him incredibly low on the useability scale, pairing his melee ability with a jetpack and nasty SMG does a lot of work against some of the nastier enemies. That said, it’s still early days, so we’ll have to see how he performs against [REDACTED] when they show up.
Outside of this, much like Jupiter, I’ve been at AdventureX over the weekend and so was playing games there. Stop The Press – a press management sim with consequences for your headline finesses – was a highlight, as was the narrative puzzler Deep Fog Signals. More on those on the site soon.
A fairly light week in gaming for me unfortunately. I’m still hitting Marvel Champs quite hard, but we’ve also had a few other board games to the table including Symbiosis and Green Gold (another Essen release.) The video gaming front has been quite quiet, but time flies (as they say) and I am looking forward to getting back into a few games next week.
Well I’ve finally got around to starting Control: Resonant which I’ve been looking forward to. I’m only an hour or so in so far and it hasn’t clicked with me massively yet which is probably due to it playing quite differently to Control. I’ll have to give it some time to settle, I think. As a little cosy side game, I’ve also been playing Librarian on Steam in which you gather up magic books and put them on the correct shelves in a library. I’m aware there are tons of these sorts of games, but I like books so don’t judge me.
On the analogue side, I’ve been playing Chip Theory’s latest 20 Strong set which has been fun. It’s a system with twenty dice and a tracker dial where you can purchase decks of cards that utilise the system in different ways. There are some really creative sets out there. Tainted Grail is very difficult at the moment as I haven’t worked out the most efficient way to power up before facing a boss, but Nemesis has been pretty simple and fairly fun. I’ll get to Etherfields eventually.
I have been in search of a hit of nostalgia this week and boy oh boy did I find it with the Dynasty Warriors 3 Remaster. Battling out Lu Bu at Hulao Gate was genuinely a treat to relive all over again and with a few more years under my belt I certainly had a better chance at defeating the behemoth this time around.
Other than making my way through the Romance of The Three Kingdoms I have still been playing Star Wars Unlimited and fine tuning some of my decks as November has a store showdown approaching and I plan on competing (and hopefully winning) in that!
I visited my fiancé’s brother this week to sort out things for Christmas (apologies for bringing our proximity to that up!) and he took the chance to show us Power Stone 2 on the Dreamcast. He’s always been into retro games, even when they weren’t retro because they were new, and on a recent trip to Japan he picked up a bunch of cheap, well-looked-after hardware such as a Dreamcast and some games.
Power Stone 2 is a brawler game that, to a modern audience, resembles Gang Beasts but with some Smash-adjacent mechanics as well. You pick characters, run around fully 3D environments and beat each other up across different stages with their own mechanics.
What really stood out to me was the PvE mode, though. Power Stone 2 could easily have just been a PvP brawler, but there’s a whole PvE mode that allows you to move through a campaign map, fighting boss fights as you go. The stages have traps and platforming and unique interactables (one has a drivable tank, for example) that make PvE just as whacky and chaotic as PvP.
The game felt ahead of its time, and when the credits rolled you could count the number of people in each department on one hand. For years it’s been obvious that gaming isn’t linear, that new games aren’t better just because they need 200gb of space and half that much RAM, but sitting round someone’s house playing Power Stone 2 together on the sofa really made that clear.
Not much time for gaming this week. That’s the main problem being a grown up, I’m in the driver’s seat rather than passenger one now (literally, not metaphorically), so road trips suddenly give a lot less game time.
However, upon arrival home, the gaming lords have blessed me heartily. Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted has hit Game Pass! Funnily enough one of my seminal “long drive” games. If you haven’t experienced the tower defense masterpiece, this is certainly an adequate version to play, and if you’re like me, you don’t need much of a prod to replay the whole campaign from start to finish for the umpteenth time.
This week’s been a pretty wild one for me, with lots going on during the days. The nights this week though have been mostly reserved for Dead by Daylight with my friends, with us mostly running custom matches and rotating who is the killer. It’s nice to learn new killers in a more relaxed environment; and equally as funny to bargain for your life over Comms.
Anything else this week? Well, Sonic Racing Crossworlds has started off its Year Two DLC with a release of both a Godzilla crossover, featuring machines based on the famous Kaiju, and Bayonetta, who is now a playable character. Crossworlds is easily the best kart racer out there at the moment, if you’ve been taking a break, get stuck back in!
Over the weekend, I spent a lot of time at AdventureX, where I played a number of games from their indie showcase. Before that, during the week, Robin and I took on Planted! Which is a multiplayer, chaotic farming game where you are racing to plant and harvest various crops, throwing them into a crop shoot. It’s a fun game, though it wasn’t as good as I had expected from prior events where it had showcased (which is quite rare!) however we had an okay time on a slower morning this week.
That brings us to the end of this week’s Press Play.
Join us again soon to find out what else we’re playing through!