Glen-i

I alluded to this when I looked at this game on my Pokémon Spin-off's thread, but this is one of only three times where the Pokémon video games even so much as acknowledge the anime, the second one is a clumsy cameo of Ash's Greninja in Sun/Moon, and the third one is an awful mobile game which shoved Ash Ketchum in for Gacha purposes. Smash Bros. Brawl, and especially Smash Bros. Melee also does so (Mewtwo and Lucario are specifically based on the movies they feature in). Although even this series has started to veer away from using the anime too much. You'd think with how prominent the anime actually is, more games would be based on it, but nope. It's very strange.

Not available in online arenas, unfortunately.

It's up now!

I think one of the best things about Smash Bros is the customisability of it all. Now, I personally think there are some setups that I would never want to do (No items, Omega stages only, stuff like that), but things that change up the dynamic while still maintaining some level of chaos are worth playing. The FS Meter is just one way of changing that dynamic, and that sense of anything being able to happen isn't lost by removing just that. And it's not like Final Smashes won't be a factor, because the Smash Ball will still be around, if anything, during cycles where the FS Meter is turned off, that Smash Ball might become more desirable. I'm not aganist the idea, as long as the FS Meter doesn't go away for good.

Mad respect to the lead. 19 minutes straight. You can hear his voice breaking near the end. Also mad respect to the runner. Crazy Box is legit hard, even without doing it fast and mad distractions.

Zelda's Final Smash is one of the most ridiculous ones ever, I'm not even gonna dispute that, the suction range is far too big, so when it comes down to 1v1, there's not really much the other person can do. The Smash Meter is a tricky one, because for every Zelda and Diddy Kong, there's a few characters who would really struggle to confirm a KO without it. That said, I think you do have somewhat of a point. I don't want to get rid of it, because I quite like the mechanic. So how about this? Each time I rotate back around to Time format, I'll toggle the FS Meter Off/On.

@BowserBasher and me on voice chat desperately wanting to say "That's an actual Smash Ball! Go for it!" on Flat Zone X there.

Call your Grandma, damnit!

I have to assume you're using some kind of guide for that? Grandia has a ridiculous amount of cut-off points where you can't go back to previous areas.

Stock format tonight. Custom nonsense starts at 7:30pm.

Some choice moments from Mario Golf. And some context for this Perfect Dark one, but after literally getting irritated to death by slow motion lasers, @Dcubed decided that he wasn't going to let that happen again...

Yes, absolutely. Agree wholeheartedly.

I can kinda believe this. BTW, forgot to post my stats.

Ah, gotcha. Probably my bad, to be fair. The Dominus Collection does have the instruction booklets in the gallery.

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin is an action adventure game developed by Konami that originally released on the DS in 2007. As you probably would have guessed if you read my Dawn of Sorrow post from last year, I played this on the Castlevania Dominus Collection that came out last year. A man with improbable jumping skills and a catchphrase runs into a big castle and finds it weirdly devoid of human life. After exploring it a little, he comes across an enchanted painting that also doubles as a portal to the place depicted on it. Using these paintings, our protagonist has to get to the bottom of where the owner of this castle is. What? That reminds you of something? I can't think of what you're talking about. You must be imagining it. I mean, this game takes place in the Victorian era. At least, I think it does...? There are two key differences between this and the two "X of Sorrow" games. The first is that JONATHAN there has some backup in the form of CHARLOTTE. You can swap between the two at any time. Other then repeatedly cycling through their voice clips over and over again, they specialise in different methods of attack. JONATHAN uses more physical weapons, including a lot of the traditional Castlevania subweapons like Axes, and Crosses, while CHARLOTTE has a load of magic spells in her book. Neat idea, but CHARLOTTE ends up being far too slow to be of much use in a fight, and can't upgrade her spells, so JONATHAN ends up being the only character I used by the end. Which is amusing, because I've been playing way too much Vampire Survivors recently, and CHARLOTTE is way better then JONATHAN there. But then again, that's the game where you can throw 50 knives in about 2 seconds, so it's probably not that accurate. The other big difference is the paintings I alluded to earlier. Previous games would have one massive area to explore, but here, there are many different places to explore. This means that progression is a lot more linear, which is fine, makes for a nice change of pace. What I wasn't keen on was the absolutely insane difficulty spike halfway through the game. Yes, it was Death, but that's not what bothers me, straight after Death, there's another boss fight, where in order to not get the bad ending, you have to hit it with a certain spell. The problem is that this spell takes about 10 seconds to charge up, and the boss does not give you anywhere near that amount of time to do so. So you have to let the AI handle CHARLOTTE's casting and hope she doesn't get hit. Oh, and you can't go too far away, because she despawns if she goes off-screen. Never again... Despite that setback, it's a really fun game. Balanced a bit poorly with how much better JONATHAN is, but solid. Dawn of Sorrow is better, mind.

Hah! That's rich. I've played that game. The endgame strategy just boils down to "Use most expensive Skell and win" Every other Xenoblade has a more robust combat system then this one.

Player's Choice tonight at 8pm.

Not like they could do anything about it, anyway. You see? His is green. Non-standard pledge design, you can't hold him to anything!

I mean, yeah, you're right. The average schmo (and me) doesn't really give much of a toss of what the hardware looks like ahead of time. What games are available? How much is it? Can I get it in blue? That's the stuff that will really matter.

Oh, right. Almost forgot. Absolutely busted a gut with laughter, @RedShell. I think you have an idea of what stage I'm talking about.

Making a good case there for why old SNES RPG's don't need achievements. I really don't recommend that, but that's not gonna stop you.

OI! I was there first!

Does it, though? I would just dedicate a particular weapon to one character (Knuckles on Girl, Lance on Sprite, etc). And as long as you swap them around when they reach the level cap, just fighting stuff along the way will do the job. The only thing I would say is that Randy absolutely should have the Sword. Trust me on this. The spells, on the other hand, yeah, that needs a lot of grinding. Especially on single player, because the AI is uber dumb, at least Randy can't learn any spells, so you don't have to worry about him on the magic front.

That ain't the Simogo game I was referring to in the other thread... But yeah, utterly agree. It's a very cool take on the rhythm(?) genre. I enjoyed it so much that I went for Lorelei and the Laser Eyes pretty much day 1, even if they play nothing alike. That's how much faith I had.

Righty-o, back to the regular schedule this week. Time format, with Custom Stages starting from 7:30pm.