Hero-of-Time

It reminds me a little of the Age of Apocalypse, probably why I like it. I often like alternative reality stories. Its like the mirror universe episodes of DS9. They get slated by fans but I really enjoy them as well.

Completely burnt out with gaming at the moment and so I have spent this afternoon/evening reading some TPBs. Sat and read through Flashpoint and I'm now reading Injustice. I forgot how good both of these are, especially Injustice.

It's so frustrating. I could understand the boards reluctance if these guys weren't performing well but they playing better than ever. Gonna be a massive fail if all 3 players go on the free.

Another fantastic result for us today. Give the men their contracts!!!!

Finally got around to playing and finishing Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition. Yeah, it's pretty rubbish and not a patch on the NES Remix games. A lot of the challenges are ridiculously short, like 1-2 seconds long. You get ranks for your performance, with S rank being the highest, but there isn't much incentive to push yourself to get those because all the unlockables are unlocked by get A ranks. The argument could be made that getting S ranks will dish out more coins (used to by icons and pins) but it's far more lucrative to just find a 1 second challenge and do that over and over to farm the coins needed. Very disappointing game and I can see why it came and went without much fanfare.

It's great that they are rotating old sets again. Pretty sure I'm caught up with most of them now.

I see Andy Kubert is the artist on that. Loved his art work when he drew the X-Men comic in the 90s. Thanks for the recommendation. I may have to check it out.

With The Last Guardian done, I was looking for something a little more relaxing. There was a thread on Era about games that are like DKC and this one popped up in the conversation. I remember Aneres11 enjoying when he played it are a while ago and seeing as it was on sale for £1.59, I figured I would give it a punt. It was okay. It's very much a rip off of DKC Returns. The boss designs, look of the levels, world map and rolling move have been completely nicked from DKCR. Its so blatant. The first couple of worlds are stupidly easy but then things ramp up in the third. Turns out the third world was the final one. I was kinda baffled by this. It feels like the game is missing a whole middle section. It's as if the developers completely ran out of time and quickly cobbled together something. This definitely seems to be the case when you consider free DLC was added that gave players a whole new world to play through.

This is a game I've been wanting to play for a while and one that is on my 2024 pledge list. I've tried a couple of times to get into this, only putting around half an hour into the game each time I've attempted to play it, but this week was the week I finally sat down and played through it properly. It's a very frustrating game. The control scheme goes against every other game that you've played, well apart from Team Ico's other stuff, and I'm not sure why they keep doing this. I was half tempted to change things to how I like them by using the PS5s ability to customise your controls but I decided to persevere. Another point of frustration is the AI of Trico. Yeah, it can sometimes be very clever but other times it will simply not do what you want it to do. There were a few times where I had to reload the checkpoint in order for the right action to kick in. This also occurred in two big puzzle points. One involved using a box on the water and having Trico drop his tail for me to climb. This never happened. Another was when using a cart to catapult the main character up to the ceiling. Trico would constantly faff around with the cart, moving it out of position, causing me to reset the whole thing. Despite these frustrations, I did end up enjoying the game a great deal. Perseverance was the key and once I got the hang of the controls and how Trico moves and responds to calls, things went more smoothly. The game is still a looker after all these years. This picture I took sums up how amazing and magical the games visuals are. I also love the animations in the game. The way the main character moves and gestures is adorable. I especially love his little run down the stairs. Here's a quick video of me wearing the gear from Ico and doing the funny run. The platinum was very hard work and I can see why it has such a low percentage (0.3% completion rate). There's a trophy for listening to all of the secret hints. There are over 90 of these and getting them to trigger can be a hit or miss affair. You have to collect all 48 barrels but this is a little misleading because you need 96 in order to unlock the trophy for spray painting Trico. This means a few playthroughs are needed. There's another for finishing the game under 5 hours. Finally, another two toughies were to finish the game without dying and to finish the game whilst removing any spears as quick as possible when Trico is hit. All crazy stuff. I decided to do a standard run through the game first. I then went for the no death and under 5 hours trophies, before finally doing a third run that had me collect the remaining barrels I needed to unlock the paint gun. It took many years to get around to playing it but it's finally done. I think I still enjoyed SotC more but that doesn't really take anything away from this game. What a wonderfully unique experience it was.

Here's a decent article from Nintendolife that interviews publishers about the eShop, the state of it, market saturation and what needs to be done better. https://www.nintendolife.com/features/how-can-switch-2-fix-the-eshop-devs-share-their-storefront-stories I agree with a lot of what is being said, especially about the garbage being released across all storefronts.

It's sad to see them the way they are now. They were amazing in the SD era. I would love them to return to making JRPGs but I doubt they have the staff or budget to make one themselves.

After that early goal Leicester didn't really do anything. Crazy trying to sit back for 80+ minutes with a 1 nil lead. What's even crazier is still the lack of contracts for TAA, VVD and Salah.

How has this Liverpool match gone ahead? You can't see sod all due to the fog.

Now watch us squander the chance.

How so?

Played a couple of games today that reminded me of Christmas. Played through Jak again even though I just played through it the other week and so I wont harp on about it again. It was originally released December 2001 and it reminds of Christmas due to me playing it around that time. I finished off the DKL trilogy. DKC3 reminds me of Christmas 1996. Like Jak, it was released in December. I never got it (no way we could afford new SNES game prices) but my best mate did. We spent all the Christmas holidays playing the game. Seeing as I have played DKC3 too many times to count, this was the next best thing. It's a decent version of the game, although it is pretty stripped down when compared to the original. There's no Banana Birds to find and no overworld to walk around. On the plus side, Ellie is no longer scared of rodents and can fire unlimited amounts of water out of here trunk. Sweet. If you find all the bonus barrels and coins you will unlock some time trials. These are 13 stages from the game in which you have to beat certain times. It was a neat addition and is needed to get 103% completion. So that's the trilogy done. It's a shame there are no more DK games that have been added to NSO recently. Would have been great to play DK64 over the Christmas break. Yeah, I'm still bitter.

You're only level 95 though. Must try harder. See me after class.

Merry Christmas!

This time last year I sat and played Streets of Rage 4, so it's fitting that I've once again sat and played another scrolling beat em up during the festive season. Sadly, Asterix is nowhere near the quality of that game. I was a big fan of Asterix as a kid. I have fond memories of playing the classic Konami arcade game while on holiday at Blackpool, as well as renting the Asterix books from my local library. I was hoping this game would match the quality of the Konami game but it wasn't even close. The game is a looker, for sure, but the gameplay is really lacking. For one, a lot of the stages go on for far too long. These types of games are best when the levels are short, snappy and varied. The later stages really start taking liberties with how long they are and how many enemies they throw at you on screen. This can be brutal on the hardest difficulty (needed to play through it on this setting for platium) because you can only take a couple of hits and then you are done. No lives and no continues, which means back to the start of the very long level you go. You can switch to the second character to give yourself a second life pool but it's difficult to do when you get swamped by enemies. A lot of the scenery gets repeated in the game, as do some of the bosses. There's a pirate boss named Red Beard which constantly pops up, as does the Roman Centurion. This is baffling because the books have such a rich enemy roster to choose from and yet they felt the need to repeat the same ones over and over again. It's not a bad game, just very boring. If the levels had been shorter, the areas more varied and the bosses changed up a bit then it would have been a far better game. Despite all of this, I still wouldn't mind giving the sequel a whirl to see if any improvements have been made. Playing the game did get me all nostalgic for the franchise and I went searching for the 80s animated movies. My two favourites were Asterix in Britain and Asterix and the Big fight. I found the latter on YouTube (proper UK dub instead of the US one) and I was sat watching it while I was doing my grinding on Various Daylife. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ5uTeuVuiE

Mario 64 has been added to the service.

Finished a few games over the past several days. With the sequels dropping on Premium, I decided to play the first game again and in doing so nab another platinum. I played through it earlier in the year but figured I would cross it off my double platinum list. I played through the original game last year and it was a decent, chilled out experience. This dropped on PS+ and I gave it a whirl. It was pretty cool seeing a lot of the characters make a return to the coffee shop for a brew. I also can't believe they kept the trophy/achievement from the first game where you have to leave a latte sitting for an hour. Another Cotton game was on sale which meant I had to pick it up. There are two more available for me to buy but one of them has a broken trophy list which doesn't seem like it's ever getting fixed and so I won't be touching it. This verson of the game gives you multiple characters to control. You pick your team of fairies and witches and when one of them is defeated the other takes its place. You can also swap them on the fly, providing you have enough power ups to do so. You can use this to great effect when a shot is heading your way. By switching out at the right time your characters become invincible. They also play slightly differently, with each of them using a different style of firing projectiles. It was another fun and breezy adventure. This was a doozy and ended up really surprising me. I picked it up during the TGS sale on PSN and have been waiting for the right time to play it. Having plenty of time off over Christmas meant that time was now. There are so many systems to get to grips within the game that it can be very overwhelming to begin with. Levelling up is done by doing jobs and earning gold but you can only do jobs if you have enough stamina. To regain your stamina you need to use facilities, such as having a beer in the tavern or a soak in the hot springs. These things cost money though and so a delicate balance of doing jobs, relaxing and earning money needs to be struck. You can earn quests to tackle by talking to villagers. These play out very similar to Miitopia. Your team automatically walks through the level and then you take control when an enemy is encountered. From there it's a typical JRPG set up with a little twist in the battle system. Standard attacks are pretty much useless and you are really required to use your special moves. This is where the CCC system comes into play - CHANGE, CHAIN, CHANCE. You can change the status of the enemy by say using a fire attack, you can then cause a chain to happen by using a water attack. Finally, a chance is created once you get a chain higher than one. At any point you can end this chain but if you keep switching between attacks and getting the chain to 10, you will be doing some stupid damage. Another thing that features in the quest is a stamina system. You can load up with food before you set out but certain foods will spoil very quickly if they are in an area that they aren't meant to be in. For example, taking things meant for frozen maps to a volcano area ain't a good idea. The stamina needs to be managed well otherwise you will fail the quest. The game features a job system. Now, usually I don't care for these but I didn't mind how it was set up here. Each of your team members has a set job (2 sub jobs can be unlocked later) and there's only the main character who can switch between different ones. This makes it very manageable to create some very useful team compositions. Anyone who enjoys job systems in JRPGs will get a kick out of it. The platinum took some doing, with me needing to put 50 hours into the game to obtain it. The last couple of quests to get the real ending aren't for the faint hearted. I pretty much had to max out my perfect team and even then it was pretty difficult. It was hard to come be information, given that not many people seem to have played the game. There is very little out there in terms of best teams/characters to use. There were only a handful of Reddit posts that ended up being pretty helpful. I really enjoyed the game, far more than I thought I would. I will say though that there is a lot of grinding in it. Money is the key to levelling up and by doing various things and managing your time and jobs well, you will end up earning a lot of cash pretty fast. However, it still takes a lot of grinding, even when you do get to grips with every system the game throws at you. Luckily for me, I love repeatative actions in games that allow me to see my stats keep going up. It's very much a game made for me.

Nah. I'll just stick to firing it up when there are platinum points available for it.

Nine nine!!

Sounds about right for comic books. I keep checking out X-Men storylines and a lot of what Hickman set up with the Krakoa era seems to have been binned off now. You reading his Ultimate Spider-Man stuff? Apparently it's really good.