Glen-i

@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.

D'aaawww. I think you're a valuable corner too.

I kind of agree. Sega lately has been acting like they're back to their 90's relevancy peak. No-one in their right mind would actually think releasing Sonic Superstars around the same time as Mario Wonder was a good idea. Except they clearly did. Sega, listen to me, you're not Nintendo, their subscription service includes other perks alongside "Play old games". Hell, some of those games even include games from your system! This isn't gonna work. Sony and Microsoft also have other benefits that you just can't replicate. Sincerely, Some weird spiky blue animal.

Probably my favourite take on them in the whole series (Even better then Majora's Mask), especially after the Zoras fell a bit flat for me.

OK, NSO night has three of us, so anyone who wants to join in, go ahead and let yourself be known. And feel free to name any GBA/N64 game you feel like playing. 8:30pm tonight.

Again, I saw some episodes of this (Dcubed's brother is a massive Trek nerd). It was fine. Clearly more aimed at younger viewers, which again, is great that the series is trying new ways of making programmes, but not really something I'd enjoy enough to commit to.

Yeah, I already saw that around when it came out. Fun idea, granted I had to have a lot of context explained to me about the actual show before hand, and how it was set in the past. You know, the past relative to most Star Trek shows. That's probably why I enjoyed Lower Decks so much. It's still funny, even with my barely there knowledge of Star Trek. The comedy doesn't solely rely on references, it's got a strong cast, and the ridiculous situations they get up to help to make it entertaining to anyone even remotely interested in Sci-Fi really. I think it's a shame it's over, I get Star Trek is meant to be a mostly serious show, and that's fine, but Lower Decks filled a really nice niche that the series could use. A comedic spin-off was a great idea, just a pity it didn't last longer. Granted, 5 seasons is not a bad run these days, and at least it got a satisfying conclusion. So I can't complain too much.