Ramble - Google Stadia - the future of gaming?

The big reveal this week, then, was Google Stadia.  But what is a stadia?  Well, I shall tell you: a stadia is a measurement of length (about 185 metres).  Alternatively, it is the plural of stadium (an athletic/sports ground), which is probably what they were going for.  The Google c.185m doesn't mean that much, after all.

Stadia is not, as some thought it would be, a games console.  Instead, it's a streaming service.  The present setup is with Chromecast, so you'd plug a Chromecast dongle into your telly.  Your Google controller will connect directly to the service, and the service will broadcast back to your Chromecast setup.  Nothing is happening in your house - it's all happening remotely, up there in the Cloud.

The intention is that eventually the service will (I keep seeing this quote) "run wherever YouTube is".  Also, you won't have to use a Google controller, but with a Smart TV you'd be able to plug any USB controller in and use that.  What's intended and what's actually possible at this stage are two different things entirely...

The only games announced so far as Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Doom: Eternal, which aren't at all family friendly.  Since the service is due to go live later this year, you have to hope lots more games will be announced soon.  Google have said you'll be able to do couch co-op and there'll be parental controls, which shows they're at least considering family gaming in their setup.

A remote gaming service, where a console isn't needed, has been mooted for years as the future of gaming.  Every time we're coming up to a new generation of console, people start asking whether it'll be the least "console" generation, or whether we'll be looking to the Cloud instead.  Considering we're hearing a PS5 could be coming as soon as this Christmas, it seems like Sony aren't writing off consoles yet.  So far, internet speeds have meant that Cloud gaming hasn't really taken off.  The last thing you want when playing competitive multiplayer is latency!  Google say you need 25Mbps for it to work at 1080p 60fps.

(Apparently the average internet speed in the UK is now 46.2Mbps, though we're paying for fast internet and when I tested it a moment ago we were only getting 24.2Mbps.  The only good way to get that 25Mbps (or more if you want 4K gaming!) is to go fibre all the way to the front door.  For those of us who have to put up with fibre to the exchange and copper to the house, that might not be an option...)

Slow internet - it makes us all mad...

It's an ambitious service, then, and the "reveal" has left us with plenty of questions.  Various people have been attempting Cloud services for a while, with varying levels of success.  PS Now has been around for a while, though many of the games are older (most are PS3), and PlayStation let you download games if your connection isn't brilliant.  Also, you can't use if if you're under 18.  (But that's because you can't go online with a child account.)

My biggest question is, "How much will it cost?"  PS Now is £84.99 a year, so maybe we're looking at something similar.  They have been VERY quiet about costs, though.  And to get big games on there, you'd have to give publishers a way to make money.  If they can make more selling either digital or physical copies direct to the consumer, it's hard to see why publishers would want to shoot themselves in the foot and make them available via Stadia.

I guess we will just have to wait and see...

March 2019 PS Plus: The Witness

In February, PS Plus didn't really have any family games to offer, but March's lineup (now only two games, since there are no longer going to be PS3 and Vita downloads) includes The Witness (PEGI-3).  I'd heard a lot about how good this game was, but I'd never played it.  To be honest, I still haven't, since Dad and Seb have been playing it together.  I think perhaps it has melted their brains since at the moment Seb is giggling maniacally and Dad is calling him Mr Ploppy.  Ah well. 

The Witness throws you straight into the game, with no preamble.  It reminds me a lot of Rime in the way that you are just there, on a mysterious island, trying to figure out what on earth is going on.  I suspect, like Rime, you never actually find out what's going on...  After arriving on the island it's just puzzle after puzzle, which can be intense!  As you walk around the beautiful surroundings you discover new challenges: there are more than 650 puzzles, some of which are optional, thankfully. All the puzzles are solved in the same way, by drawing a line on a grid to get from one point to another.  There are different rules for each puzzle.  This doesn't sound that exciting, but it's keeping a 7-year old quiet for a surprising amount of time (and Dad hasn't wandered off or started looking at his phone), so it's obviously more exciting than you'd think.  :-) 

One of the maze puzzles in The Witness's pretty world

If you have PS Plus, download it and give it a go.  It's a great "couch" game for everyone to sit down and try and work out the puzzles.  Alternatively you can all sit there and shout at one person trying to solve the puzzles as if they are in the Crystal Maze.  Hehe.

Article - The argument for playing video games with our kids

This is a refreshingly positive article: The argument for playing video games with our kids, by Elissa Strauss.  The author definitely hits upon a few things that I wholeheartedly believe in, namely about this being a huge part of our kids lives; we shouldn't abandon them to make their way in it all by themselves.  There are a lot of opportunities for learning, like social skills (such as teamwork and conversation), psychological aspects (resilience, and so on) and with games like Minecraft you can tackle science stuff as well as things like ethics (the author points out it gives you an opportunity to talk about why you've killed something in the game - I know for ages Seb was very against killing the animals in Minecraft!).  Definitely worth a read.  And the book she's advertising (Raising Kids to Thrive in a Digital World by Jordan Shapiro) sounds interesting, too...

Ramble - YouTube & money money money

This year has so far been a bit rubbish for those of us who watch YouTube a lot in this house.  Which is all of us, since we watch things together on the telly.  Stampy and Sqaishey have disappeared - apparently they're getting married this year, which is nice, but I miss them on YouTube...  Then there's Squiddy, who seems to have gone a bit haywire.  He was very strangely hyper in the last video of his we tried to watch, plus he's blaspheming a lot... he doesn't feel safe for kids to watch any more.  I suspect he's deliberately trying to attract an audience who can give him money on Twitch etc, rather than the kids he was getting before.  It makes me sad though.  Having to unsubscribe from one of your (previously) favourite YouTubers is like cutting off a friend who has let you down.  Boo.

Squiddy has made me feel like this...  :-(

I've been trying, largely in vain, to find some new family friendly YouTubers to watch.  Seb's been watching Tewtiy playing Plants vs Zombies, since he's gotten back into that in a big way.  We're still watching Zebra Gamer, Dan TDM, Paul Soares Jr and ThinkNoodles.  But a lot of the old gang aren't playing things that we're finding all that appealing.  Somehow it feels like YouTube isn't as easy to watch.  It's certainly not easy to try and find new family friendly YouTubers.  Discoverability is poor.  And I get fed up of watching loads of YouTubers to find out whether or not a) they swear and b) they're really annoying.

Perhaps YouTube's becoming a little outdated.  The main problem seems to be that people aren't making videos for fun any more, which might have been how it worked a while back.  Now they're desperately trying to make some money.  YouTube ad revenue clearly isn't paying enough.  A lot of people stream these days, with subscribers paying a monthly fee, and donating money as they play.  You can also have subscribers on YouTube, for instance ThinkNoodles and Dan TDM charge £4.99 a month to get perks such as custom emojis and money off merchandise.  Paul Soares Jr has a Patreon thingummy where if you give £5 a month you get access to his private Discord server, so you can chat with him and other fans.  Various people are trying money making ventures.  I don't know what works best.  I'm not sure I like anyone enough to give them £5 a month though...

I was going to recommend something, but I'm not sure what we've enjoyed enough lately to give a glowing review.  I like that Paul Soares Jr has started a new Minecraft series.  But to be honest, I'm feeling a bit down on YouTube at the moment!  So... here's an amazing Planet Coaster rollercoaster, on Channel5 Gaming.

A-MAZE-ING...!!!  

Edit - I just realised one solution (der!!).  Watch some old videos!  This never seems like an option when you log into YouTube on the telly and it just tells you the latest videos by your subscribers, but it could be a solution.  I mean, there are 649 videos in Stampy's Lovely World playlist!

Game Review: Love you to Bits

Seb's latest obsession is Nova the robot.  We love her to bits.  And the crazy thing is, she's not even in the game much, because at the start of it she's BLOWN INTO TINY PIECES BY THE EVIL DR EROS!!  Yes, we've just finished Love you to Bits (PEGI-7).  What a wonderful little game!  Well worth the £3.79 it currently costs on Google Play, plus it goes into your family library so that you can all play it.  And it looks totally amazing on our new Samsung Tab S2.  (In fact, I'd recommend you play it on a tablet if possible, it's a bit small on a phone to spot all the details.)

LOL I just realised I sound like I'm doing a lot of product placement.  I'm not getting paid for this.  Honest.  ;-)

The game's a point and click puzzle adventure.  Generally you can solve the puzzles by wandering backwards and forwards picking up everything and checking to see if you can then use the things you've just picked up.  Sometimes, though, you have to do things in a certain order to progress.  And some of the levels definitely had us stumped for quite a while.  And we did not find all the extra collectables.  Boo hoo.

The premise is that Dr Eros (evil dinosaur scientist), who created Nova, attacks at the beginning of the game and blows her apart.  You (as her boyfriend) then have to find all the pieces and reassemble her.  Also, you can collect objects that contain her memories, and feed them back into her.  All her memories can be accessed via the computer she's hooked up to, and can be watched over and over.  They're cute little animated stories.  Some are very funny, and some tug at the ol' heartstrings.  

Reassembling Nova and giving her her memories back

So, in each level you're on a different planet; you have one part of Nova you have to find, and a couple of memories.  When you obtain the piece of Nova you can teleport back to your ship and see your progress, and watch any memories you've found.  Gradually you get more and more invested in both Nova and Kosmo.  We really wanted to get them back together, despite the sticky issues surrounding robot/human relationships.  (We aren't going into that with Seb.  But hey.  Blade Runner.  That's all I have to say about that.)

It's hard to say what my favourite level was.  'Matter of Perspective' was clever, with lots of platforms you had to rotate around to get to different sections of the level.  It took a lot of thought.  And 'A Dungeon in Panels' was fun since you wandered from comic book panel to comic book panel, becoming larger and smaller as you did so.  That said, there are a few moments I found a bit questionable.  For instance you do kill some people.  'Trapped in the Lab' is a sort of evil lab where they're doing some sort of crazy monster construction, but is it right to kill people who work there so that you can put your girlfriend back together?  I really don't know.  But perhaps I'm overthinking things...

I should also mention the music.  When we first played the game, Seb said the music at the start was the saddest he'd ever heard.  Great compositions - they add such a lot to the atmosphere of the game.  Despite its cartoony graphics it has a lot of depth to it.  

Totally recommended!  Great fun to play together as a family.  It took all our brains to complete it.  :-D

Video - Crypt of the Necrodancer REAL VOICE!

We discovered Nicolas Daoust tonight and it was the funniest (and best) thing we've seen in ages!  Seb's been crazy obsessed about Crypt of the Necrodancer (PEGI-12) lately. Our house is covered in A3 paintings of all the monsters in Stage 1. And it turns out that this crazy Canadian has been doing REAL VOICE versions of the songs in the game! Perhaps this isn't as funny to most people as it was to us.  But hey.  It made us smile.  :-)

I love that the internet means people who like to do these mad things can be discovered and applauded.  Kudos, man!

January 2019 PS Plus Goodies!

With not long left now until PS Plus stops supplying us with PS3/Vita games (which tend to be more kid friendly), this month's offerings are actually pretty family friendly!  I speak particularly of Portal Knights and Amplitude...

The complete line-up is:

Steep (PS4) (PEGI-12)
Portal Knights (PS4) (PEGI-7)
Zone of the Enders (PS3) (PEGI-12)
Amplitude (PS3) (PEGI-3)
Fallen Legion: Flames of Rebellion (PS Vita & PS4) (PEGI-12)
Super Mutant Alien Assault (PS Vita) (PEGI-16)

Not that interested in Steep (some snowboarding game or something), or most of the others, to be honest, but Portal Knights (PEGI-7), aargh, this is sucking my life away..!!!  It is a little reminiscent of Minecraft, in that you mine blocks and can build houses etc from them, or nerd pole, but it's much more of a traditional RPG.  A catastrophe split the world into 48 floating islands, which you travel between using portals.  You have to roam around, killing monsters and completing quests.  There are three classes to choose from (warrior, ranger or mage).  As you go through the game you put points into your basic traits (the usual strength, dexterity, etc), so you can make yourself a sort of paladin if you put some points into intelligence as well as strength (to give yourself more mana).  Every five levels you get to choose a special ability.  It's a game with a great sense of humour (the pirates are pretty hilarious), and a good introduction to the genre for younger players who are probably already familiar with Minecraft.  I've certainly been enjoying it.  You can also play online with your friends, if you want to, and there's a two-player split screen co-op mode.  Definitely one to download if you've got younger kids.  Hooray!

Cultists - they're always up to no good...

The other game I'm excited about, despite it being a few years old, is Amplitude (PEGI-3).  I have now totally confused myself, since I wondered why it was only the PS3 version, searched for the PS4 version and it was showing as free, so I clicked to get it, and it seems to have cost me nothing, but now it's showing as £15.99.  I have no idea what has happened.  Hmm.  Anyway, it's a Harmonix rhythm game and I haven't played it before, so I'm excited.  I spent many happy hours of my life playing Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and Seb's keen on games where music plays a big part, so we'll certainly be playing this.  At its most basic level, it's a game where you fly a ship along a lane and shoot cells, but like its relatives, it's a reaction game where you play it without knowing what your brain is really doing.  It's pure reaction, getting lost in the music.  I love Harmonix...  You can play against friends or there's a team vs. mode - it supports 1-4 players.  Woot!

Christmas Presents!

Christmas is pretty much over, then - nearly 6th Jan.  I'm sure, like us, plenty of you got some new games for Christmas.  Or if not for Christmas, you probably bought some stuff in the ubiquitous 'sales'.

Our big real world/video game crossover present was the Pokemon trading card set that Seb bought Dad, though we did end up buying another deck and some boosters in the excellent Argosy toyshop in Southend.  I ordered the Alolan Sandshrew and Alolan Ninetales Sun & Moon trainer kit.  You get two mini decks of 30 cards and a game to play through (with the cards in a particular order).  Great way to learn the game.  Then I downloaded the TCG onto the PC (PEGI-7) and gave that a go.  Definitely be playing a bit more of this, and it was fun to play in real life as well.  We don't play enough games together.  ;-)

Seb also got a bunch of Pokemon plushies, some sort of Pokemon in a pokeball, and a Pokemon encyclopaedia.  Our favourite plushie is Litten because he has FACE HANDS!!!

He has FACE HANDS!!!!!

Seb bought me Unravel 2 (PEGI-7) on the PS4.  This is (obviously) the sequel to the excellent game Unravel, which I enjoyed very much.  The big difference is that the game is now a two-player co-op game!  Hooray!  It does take some serious co-operation if you play with a friend, though.  Otherwise you can press triangle to switch between your two yarnies.  The art in this is breathtaking, the music is haunting, the puzzles are tricky but it's possible to work them out in the end.  I haven't finished it yet but what I've played so far is, though perhaps not AS good as the first game, still perfectly capable of sucking you in.  I'm not sure what the story behind it is, yet, but there are some eerie memories going on in the background...

We also ended up with a few new games on the Switch.  First of all there's Crypt of the Necrodancer (PEGI-12).  This was out a few years ago on PC, but only arrived on the Switch in 2018.  It's the only game I've ever played like this - it's hilarious!  But also quite hard...  The music is an integral part of the game.  You have to move on the beat of the music, and if you do you get a multiplier.  When the song ends you move to the next level.  When you get to the shopkeeper he sings along with the music.  It's pixel arty, toe-tapping fun.  And what's more it's two-player co-op again.  Hooray!

Necrodancing!

Second new Switch game is Dead Cells (PEGI-16).  I'm not going to say much about this since as a 16 certificate it's heading outside what I want to talk about here.  Also, I haven't played it yet!  But Dad has played it a fair bit over Christmas and he says it's good.  (I've also heard it's good from numerous other 'top indie game lists', so it must be, right?)

Thirdly Dad bought Into the Breach (PEGI-12), which he says it just like playing Pacific Rim.  If you like little mechs, this game might be for you...

He also bought himself at least one game on Steam - Enter the Gungeon (PEGI-7).  This is a dungeon crawler, and another one of those games that's been on the 'top indie game lists' for 2018.  It's a bullet hell, rogue like, boss-filled game.  More pixel art.  Good stuff.  :-)

I don't know why Dad bought the last one on the PC when he'd been going Switch crazy.  Though he did get a £10 Steam voucher for Christmas, so maybe he was spending that.

Oddly, Seb's favourite present on the day was a Hollow Knight keyring!  He also spend some of his Christmas money on the two Hollow Knight soundtracks, which he made me burn onto CDs.  He's still old school.

Hope you all had a good Christmas and HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Ramble: mobile games of 2018...

There are probably quite a few of you who do the majority of your gaming on a phone or tablet.  Following the rollercoaster ride that Lemmings has recently presented me with, I thought I'd do a quick ramble about some mobile games that we've enjoyed this year.  (And some that we haven't enjoyed so much...)  After all, if you get a new tablet for Christmas you might want a few games to put on it!

Christmas Lemmings - from back when Lemmings was good!

To start with, then, three games that cost money but can go into your Google family account (so you can all play them on all your devices whilst only paying once).  All of these are great fun.

First off, there's Bloons TD 6 (PEGI-3), which is currently on sale on the Play Store (for £1.89).  This is the latest instalment of Bloons Tower Defence and it's just as fun whilst offering a few new things like tech trees.  The basic premise is there's a track along which evil balloons travel, and you have to pop them with various warrior monkeys to prevent them getting to the end of the track.  There are plenty of tower defence games out there, but this is cute, fun and really well made.  It does have in-app purchases, despite being a game you pay for, but you don't need to buy these to play the game.  Unlike free to play games you're not going to hit a wall; it works perfectly well without paying out any more money.  I should probably also mention that a free to play Adventure Time version also came out this year, which is worth a look if you're a massive Adventure Time fan...

Secondly, I'd like to mention something very, very different - Gorogoa (PEGI-3), which is currently £3.79 on the Play Store.  This game is really hard to explain.  I finished it in a couple of hours but I still don't completely understand what happened.  Not that I say this to put you off - it's a strange and beguiling puzzle adventure.  You have to look at different pictures in various ways, zooming into them, moving them around, joining them up, to move the protagonist along in the story.  I really can't think of a good way to explain it.  You ought to just spend £3.79 on it (face it, that's not a lot of money for a proper game) and try it yourself.  It's beautiful, in more ways than one.

Gorogoa: it's beautiful!

Thirdly there's a game I've talked about before (Motorsport Manager Mobile 3 (PEGI-12), so I won't bore you with that again.  But if you like motorsport, you won't regret spending £3.99 on it.  Honest.

Time to move onto the more depressing end of the mobile gaming spectrum, then.  One of the games in this section is, sadly, the surprise new version of Lemmings that came out a few days ago.  Now I will always have a place in my heart for Lemmings, and Lemmings 2: The Tribes.  I had an Amiga and I loved Lemmings.  My PSN avatar is a Lemming.  After playing this game, however, I'm severely tempted to change it...  Lemmings (PEGI-7) asks you to rescue a bunch of lemmings by getting them to an exit portal.  You can order them to do things like build bridges, stop other lemmings, or use an umbrella to land safely.  But the mechanics are simplified from the 'proper' games, and you can do whatever you like as long as you have enough energy.  You can wait to get more energy or spend your real world cash.  Then there's other free-to-play horrors in it, too.  The most expensive in-app purchase is £90.99.  I really am coming to hate free-to-play games.  I just didn't find this game fun, and I really wanted to like it.

The second disappointment of the year for me is Assassin's Creed Rebellion (PEGI-12).  I'm a big Assassin's Creed fan, so I was hoping this would be fun.  And for a few days I did play it fairly obsessively.  But then I hit a wall.  I couldn't progress without my assassins being higher level, and the only way was to grind or pay real world cash.  And I'm never going to pay real world money.  Grr.  You have a base, you discover new assassin DNA and fill the base with assassins, you send them on missions (which are kind of fun), train them, make them gear, etc, etc...  But that wall is the problem.  I don't appreciate being funnelled into a trap that's designed to make me spend my cash.  I'd rather just pay an up-front amount and get a proper game.  And if you were wondering what the most expensive in-app purchase is in the game, it's £99.99.  Imagine what sort of a game you could get for that - WHO ON EARTH IS SPENDING THEIR CASH ON IN-APP PURCHASES AND ENCOURAGING DEVELOPERS TO DO THIS STUFF!?!?

I knew I was a bit cross about these free-to-play games, but writing about them has made me far angrier about it all.  Perhaps I should just think about the good stuff from this year.  Like Gorogoa.

Please, please, spend your money on encouraging the developers of interesting, original games.  People who actually want to make a game that's fun.  Not someone who's just making a 'game' in order to make you give them more and more money.  These things are NOT games.

Drat, went downbeat again.  And this is supposed to be a fun Christmas post!  Ah well.

Hope you have a good Christmas day, and get all the gaming delights you've asked Santa for.

Ho ho ho!

Game Review: Just Dance!!

I haven't been posting much lately, I know.  I've been feeling fairly awful for ages (terrible germs) and I just haven't felt like it.  I haven't been playing games much, either.  But a few weeks ago we bought something that I fully intended to "review", or whatever it is I do on here!  Yes, we bought Just Dance 2018 (PEGI-3) on the Switch.  And let me tell you, if you're looking for the ultimate party game for Christmas, this, my friends, is it...

You may ask why we bought 2018 when 2019's available.  The simple answer is:

(Yes, Beep Beep I'm a Sheep.  We enjoyed watching DanTDM play 2018 - watch at your peril - Beep Beep I'm a Sheep is unbelievably catchy...)

A while back we tried a few different options out for Just Dance.  Seb's school had been showing the kids YouTube videos of Just Dance to get them moving in the mornings, and he seemed keen.  So we bought some old copies for the Wii, but the Wii we had didn't work brilliantly since the controllers weren't charging properly any more.  The PS4 version using the camera sounds like a good idea, but it doesn't work well with kids (they're too short to detect well).  We did try the version with the phone app, and that did work, but I'm nervous about holding a smartphone and prancing around the room.  The Switch version sounded like it might solve all our problems, and indeed it does.  I suspect that the Switch has given us the best way to play this game.

When you buy Just Dance 2018 you also get a 3 month trial subscription to Just Dance Unlimited.  This gives you access to hundreds of additional songs.  This was good since Seb's a massive Sia fan and the service includes The Greatest, Cheap Thrills and Titanium.  Hooray!  They're only adding new content to Just Dance 2019 from now on, but it still gives you a lot of stuff to play with, and if you're having a party you can buy a one day pass for the service to get all your mates jumpin' (or looking stupid).

The game is easy to get into, though admittedly hard to do well.  I'm not the most co-ordinated person in the world, and I don't dance in public, but this is ok.  I can cope with this.  And if I play it by myself I can say it's part of my keep fit regime.  (It even has a 'sweat mode' with more physical moves and a calorie counter!  It certainly got my heart pumping - I'm not convinced about the accuracy of the calorie counting but it must be doing me good.  :-)

The game did make me feel old, since I didn't know most of the songs that came with the game, which means I was hopelessly out of touch with the 2018 'hit parade'.  But hey.  There are some classics too, like Queen and Boney M.  And plenty more 'old songs' on Unlimited.  To be honest, though, it doesn't really matter what the song is if it has a beat that makes you want to dance.

The Switch joycons are brilliant for dancing with, and vibrate with the beat.  They're so small that they're super easy to keep hold of.  They pick up your moves well.  And there's even a dual mode where you can hold joycons in both hands and it will detect what both your arms are doing!  No problems here playing with small people, unlike with the PS4 camera version.

Another plus for small people (or children as they're sometimes called) is 'kids mode'.  This has some special kid friendly songs with kid friendly graphics.  It's a safe space for your super-littlies to play. 

The only thing I don't like is that for something that's called Just Dance it has a lot of ridiculous add-ons that are not just dancing.  When you look at the menus there are loads of things on there.  It's not a clear and simple interface.  It has an odd story mode, and a silly prize machine thing where you win various stickers.  I don't see why all games have to have things like that these days.  Does it add anything to my enjoyment of the game?  No.  If anything it's the reverse.  But maybe that's just me.

I'm a fan of this game, basically, despite never normally dancing in public.  It's a polished game that has survived the ups and downs that have meant the end for music games such as Rock Band.  It might make you feel like you can dance (a belief that will probably be shattered when some annoying person videos you playing!).  But hey.  It's a really, really fun family game.  A big thumbs up from me and Seb!

December 2018 PS Plus Goodies!

The PS Plus games for this month are (drum roll please)...

SOMA (PS4) (PEGI-16)
Onrush (PS4) (PEGI-12)
Steredenn (PS3) (PEGI-7)
SteinsGate (PS3) (PEGI-16)
Iconoclasts (PS4, PSVita) (PEGI-12)
Papers Please (PSVita) (PEGI-16)

We're back to another month of not particularly family friendly stuff, then, though if you have older kids then Onrush (PEGI-12) is a crazy arcade style racer that's worth a look.  It's a fairly recent release (June this year) so is actually a pretty good deal compared to a lot of the things that end up on PS Plus.  There's no local play, but you can play with 2-12 people online.

If you're still using your PS3, then try Steredenn (PEGI-7).  This is a shmup (shoot 'em up)/rogue-like (procedurally generated) pixel art space shooter.  Sadly, this is also only one player.  If I can be bothered to boot up the PS3 (every time I try I discover the controllers have lost charge or something) then I'm definitely going to give this one a try.  It looks great, in an old pixel art kind of way, and lots of crazy space shooting and boss fights sounds like fun.  A different version of this, "Binary Stars", was released in March on the Switch (it's been out since June 2016 on the PS4).  It's sad that we didn't get the "Binary Stars" version as a December download - it's two players so would have been fun to play with other family members.

I should probably also mention Iconoclasts (PEGI-12).  This is a pixel art platformer in a Metroidvania style.  As well as defeating various enemies and bosses, the world is full of brain-teasing puzzles that you have to solve.  Unlike old-style platformers, this game has a proper story, and one well worth experiencing.  The game has also had a recent release on the Switch...

That's it for this month.  I have to admit I haven't been playing anything much lately, and a few of this month's games do intrigue me.  (Including SOMA, though it sounds scary!)  :-o