Dufniall

The coral switch lite is coming to Europe:

Damn that looks awesome. I have so much nostalgia for that series, I just hope it's good as some recent remasters (Warcraft 3, Commandos...) just didn't deliver and they are not even done by EA. Great to see that Keplacki is on board for the sound remasters, love that guy. And the video confirms the Red Alert secret missions, nice! I think I played those more than the normal missions haha. Here's hoping they don't screw up, and more importantly, we will see a Red Alert 2 remaster in the future!

Got some new stuff for the Switch: Since I play 90 percent handheld these days and my Joycons are starting to drift, I decided to give these a try: Finally I could get a new phone for work. We get a certain budget and the rest your have to pay yourself. I didn't feel like paying extra so I went for the Xiaomi Mi 9T which has a lot of specs for a very fair price: Edit: And found this one quite cheap, never played it which is insane since I consider ALTTP the best Zelda:

That is ehm... quite a list! Plenty of potential great games to play. A bunch on my list: Celeste OlliOlli Steamworld Dig (have it already on DS but never played it Cuphead Untitled Goose Game Adding Ori and the Blind Forest to the list Also quite a bunch I have played but would not mind revisiting like Oxenfree (been meaning to give that another go), The Room (nice and short, played it on iPad), Limbo, Shovel Knight. But yes, I think we need some way of shortlisting this. Games on a lot of platforms (PC/PS4/Switch/Xbox), or a heavily discounted game on Switch.

Nah, I lost it at the big spike ball before that. Anyway, managed to get to and beat the boss... and fail in that final jump like many before me. I don't think I can muster the spirit to do it again haha.

Right, I gave everyone's level a go. Couldn't finish them all, but I'm willing to go back tonight for a second round. Great idea though, it was cool to go back to Mario Maker! Can't wait for April's theme. As for voting? I will go back to the levels I haven't finished but it's safe to say the winner here is RedShell! Thoughts:

Looks like almost everyone found my level, if not here is the code: Had a busy weekend so I'm gonna start now with all your levels!

Apparently the game can be played in Dutch as well, first time in the series. Seeing that it's quite a bit of work to translate this game (including puns) shows how much of a franchise this is for them. Looks like they are expecting a lot of this.

SNES controllers are back in stock for those interested.

The Kickstarter is ending soon, but they managed to hit the 2 million stretch goal:

It's stupid. They shouldn't have gone in the first place. There wasn't an official travel ban when they left, but they got adviced not to go. But being a fraternity of mostly rich kids means they don't really care. I'm really curious to see how they are going to treat them here, it's not like you can quickly and easily test 900 people for the virus, but they are also not the type of people who will willingly go into quarantine until tested. Luckily it's in the northern part of Netherlands, nowhere near me : grin: although I think there now is a student affected from the university in my town so it's coming close. But to be honest I'm not that panicky about it. I'll follow protocol but I'm not that scared of getting it. If it's going to happen it's going to happen, and for the rest just use your common sense (such as don't go skiing in North Italy...).

The tourism branch is already suffering a lot from the virus. The Mobile World Congress didn't happen this year due to the virus, resulting in empty hotels and 20,000 temporary jobs being lost. Travel agencies are not receiving any bookings, and hotels in Brussels have already asked for help as they practically run on the EU situated there but there are hardly any conferences taking place. The Game Developers Conference is cancelled as well, which is impacting small developers and people looking to work in the industry. They put serious money in their flights and accomodation as personal investment of being there. I heard about people from South America being basically bankrupt after this, and there are already some actions put up to help them. Dutch developer Rami from Vlambeer for example mentioned it: Events that are months away are being canned, so I can't imagine that we will see E3 this year. I'm still not sure if it we are all overreacting, but it does show how normal it is to travel all around the globe and how much of a globalised world we live in.

I work good under pressure.

Yes true, but I didn't want to keep fiddling with it all week so I wanted to finish it in a couple of hours.

Connection was very smooth, but what a difference coming from MK8. Haven't played SMK in a loooong time. Fun though!

Woops, I didn't really look at the rules so I already uploaded my level haha. Thought upload was this weekend and play until the next one.

I was away all day though. I'm free tonight though (say from 20:00 - 22:00 Dutch time). Otherwise I can do most evenings except Tuesday.

To be honest I was stocking up on pasta today as well. Only not for Corona panic issues but because there was a buy 2 get 1 free deal... I think we need some fit examples to be able to judge this as well.

It's interesting how they both seem to be very wary of naming a price, probably both want to either match the price or go 50-100$ below it. However I think Microsoft will have the deeper pockets. They look desperate to win back players to their platform: currently trying that with GamePass, but I expect them to go even more all-out with the Series X. Like they said, no matter on what device you play XBox titles, as long as you are on their ecosystem it's fine. Also don't forget that PlayStation is one of Sony's main divisions for profit, while they make big losses on for example phones and home entertainment. I can't see them selling the PS5 at a loss. But Microsoft? XBox is just a part of it and all their investment is aimed towards the cloud and the servers. They have the Windows OS, Azure, Office, and so on. I can see them taking a hit on every XBox. I'm not sure how the Corona virus is going to affect the launches. In the best case I guess shortages at launch, at worst they get pushed back to next year.

It's been about a month since my last post so time for an update! I haven’t completed any games since my last post, but I have been putting some more time in a bunch of titles and I started something new. Shadow of the Tomb Raider (PC) After making quite a bit of story progress, I decided to do a couple of the DLC side quests first. On the one hand I want to finish the game, but on the other hand I’m still enjoying it too much to just blast through it. I know I probably won’t go back anytime soon if I finish it so I’d better just go for a higher completion percentage before ending it. I finished The Pillar DLC and I’m now somewhere in The Forge DLC. I think those are the two I have access to now, and the rest requires me to progress through the story further. It's nice to have some extra tombs and graphically they are quite impressive. I love that my PC can now run this game on QHD with everything on ultra. So nice. For the main story Paladins I picked up the Battle Pass for this as I accumulated enough in-game currency to get it. I’ve played the game almost every day, doing the daily missions for extra XP and trying to get as many Battle Pass missions done as well. I think that clocks to about half an hour to an hour daily. There are about 10 days left and I reached level 40 with that amount of playtime, of the 80 levels needed to complete it and to get enough in-game currency to be able to get the next Battle Pass for “free”. Having the Battle Pass is fun, as you are constantly unlocking little cosmetic upgrades. The missions make you play some different characters and take on a different approach which mixes it up nicely. But the grind to level 80 is just too much and I can’t see myself picking it up again. It is too much of a burden of having to play to at least get a decent amount of progress in it. You can still gain in-game currency through the free path as well. But I can see how all these Passes in games can be addicting, the constant stream of small rewards pushes you to keep playing. Pokémon Sword Not much to say about my progress in Sword. I’ve been slowly filling my Pokédex and dabbled a bit with the connectivity between this, Let’s Go and Home. Maybe first thing I should do is go after my legendary as I still haven’t caught Sword Dog! Okami HD Speaking about weaponized dogs, I’m about 10-12 hours into Okami HD and so far I’m still enjoying it. There are some small niggles, such as combat becoming repetitive and the fact that it is not always clear where to go. The bug is still annoying as hell. But the quirky humour, the feudal Japan setting, the realistic drawings of bosses you encounter, and the visual style are enough for me to keep going. I heard how long the game is and that it drags on towards the end, but I haven’t felt bored in the first 1/3rd of the game so I can see me finishing this somewhere in March I guess. One thing I should do is play this game on the TV with detached Joy-Cons. I’ve only played it in handheld mode and while using the Brush with touch controls works well I usually just use button input. I’m curious to see how it would work with motion controls though. WarGroove I planned on finishing Valkyria Chronicles first before starting a new strategy game. But Double Trouble came out and I thought that was the perfect time to start WarGroove. Loving it. Take away the setting and it is essentially Advance Wars which is by no means a bad thing. The fantasy setting works well though, and having a commander on the field as a playable character adds a nice dynamic. He/she is pretty powerful so can cut through enemies quite easily, but losing him/her means losing the battle so playing too aggressive is tricky. I finished the first two acts of the main campaign, and it is such an easy game to pick up for one or two missions. Add to that the Double Trouble campaign plus all the user created ones, and I think this game will get quite some playtime. In the future I really want to do a co-op or vs. game with someone from here, so by then I will call out to you in the WarGroove thread! The only negative I have are the graphics. Or more specifically, how the artwork does not match with the in-game sprites. I dig the sprites (I still prefer the GBA/DS Fire Emblem style over the 3D style) but the character pictures are cartoony/undetailed and don’t match with the cover art. What’s also funny is that people are dying on the battlefield, but the commanders don’t seem to care. Hell, one side mission was a friendly match between me and another commander, but that friendly match involved killing troops and getting troops killed. Very friendly indeed. Kirby’s Dream Land 3 I know I have to play the game this week for the PodPals, and I played it for about half an hour last week after I started it a while ago. But I’m just not feeling it. I’ll see if I can plow through it, but I can’t guarantee I will finish it. And that’s strange because usually I love Kirby games.

I've decided to back the Kickstarter, just the basic pledge for the physical edition without extras. I've been enjoying a lot of Platinum's work lately (Astral Chain, Bayonetta 1 and 2 and Nier:Automata is on my Steam wishlist). What I've seen and read about The W101 looks very likeable. I also never backed something before, so I'm quite interested in the process and this is a fairly safe one to back as it is basically just a pre-order.

It looks like there is quite a number of animal friends that can wind up on your island:

Apparently this got an age rating in Korea, so it may be pretty close to launch. Guess they'll tell us the exact date in next week's Direct