Hero-of-Time

Not looking good for the US at the moment.

City getting beat again and Haaland misses a pen. These things give me life. Another solid performance by Pool. We are a bit of a second half team at the moment. Faff around in the first half, clearly getting a telling at half time and then come out swinging in the second.

Nice. I didn't know they had been added. https://store.nintendo.co.uk/en/mario-and-luigi-brothership-pin-set-000000000010015107 I may order them myself.

Results for the last quarter are in.

Donkey Kong Country 2 icons are now available.

Following on from playing the Bayonetta trilogy for Halloween, I decided to play through this. It's been sat on the backlog for a while now and it seemed fitting to play it now. The credits rolled this morning and I have mixed feelings about the game. Visually, the game is quite the looker. I love the art style used. It's very stylish and gives the game a lot of personality and character. Mixed with these visuals, the way that cutscenes play out certainly help add to the storybook feel that the game is going for. The voice acting is very charming. The narrator of the story seems to do the voices of various characters, much like a parent would do when reading a story to their child. I didn't mind Cereza's voice acting but I hated how she pronounced Cheshire. The fact that she constantly shouts his name throughout the game was like nails on a chalkboard for me. My main issue is just how long the game is. It really starts to drag on as the game goes on and probably could have been a few chapters shorter than it was. Some of the chapters really dragged on as well. I think it was Chapter 4 that was nearly two hours long on it's own. With the game being quite lengthy, the gameplay becomes a little repeatative. A lot of the puzzles are quite fun to figure out using the dual player mechanic but by the halfway mark you've pretty much seen everything the game has to offer. The game was enjoyable enough but I'm happy I bought it when it was on sale, rather than paying top dollar for it. It's a very charming experience but the charm can only carry it so far.

Donkey Kong Country 2 soundtrack has now been added to the service.

Reviews are all over the place for this. Apparently the game is a bit of a slog as well, with it being close to a 50 hour experience.

It's so weird that I can't get away with Tooie but will happily play DK64.

Yeah, but getting those 94/100 jiggies is a tight, fun experience.

My mate is only playing it for the collection aspect and so hasn't really bothered much with any deck building or battling.

What a great advert.

Following on from my Final Fantasy 1-6 marathon, I decided to play through INTERmission again. I first played it earlier in the year, just before Rebirth was released, but I never bothered with the trophies. I decided to fix that. I had to go through the game again on hard difficulty and tackle a couple of super bosses as well. I finished the story yesterday evening and also tackled Weiss. It was an interesting battle because you have to load up a save from the main game and defeat him using characters from there, rather than Yuffie and Sonon. Dude packed a punch but with all my materia maxed out, it didn't take many retries before I took him down. The team of Tifa, Cloud and Aerith was more than enough. Ultimate Weapon was a fun fight. You have to defeat Bahamut, Ramuh and Pride and Joy one after the other on hard difficulty. I could consistently defeat the first 2 summons but kept struggling with the lumbering robot. I then read that it's best to stay behind him. Downed it first try this morning after adopting that tactic. It was fun playing on the hardest setting. Like the main game, you really start to appreciate the battle system more when faced with harder opponents. The synergy system with Yuffie and Sonon really came into its own during this playthrough. The rate that you can stagger enemies when using it is a little nuts.

By all accounts it's pretty rough on a base PS5 as well.

Haha. Yeah, I'm not even gonna edit that out.

October is over and that means so is my spooky game marathon. I also played a few other games in between all of those as well. Vampire Survivors I played a lot through the DLC at the very start of the month. I spoke about it in the thread but it was due to trophies being broken and then finally being fixed that got me playing it again.. Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare I wasn’t a fan of this at all. It started off pretty decent, with the game having a very Resident Evil feel to it thanks to a mansion to explore and puzzles to solve. Eventually the game just feels like it runs out of ideas and the puzzles just go out the window and it instead has you traipsing through corridor after corridor, with enemies popping up left and right. I had to go through the game twice due to it being like Resident Evil 2 and having 2 different characters to play as. Unlike Resident Evil 2 that used this system quite well, this one doesn’t really do anything special with it. Little Nightmares 2 Thoughts haven’t changed since the last time I played it back a couple of years back. The game got a PS5 update and so I decided to platinum it again. Ghostbusters Spirits Unleashed Loved this. I played a couple of games online but spent most of my time just playing against the bots. Being able to play as both a Ghostbuster and a ghost meant the gameplay was varied enough to keep things feeling fresh. Very surprised by this one. Gungrave: G.O.R.E I didn’t think I would get to play this due to Sony secretly kicking it off the PS+ list this month but I managed to play and platinum it before it happened. I loved the original game on the PS2, as well as the anime that was released in the early 2000s. The game is a pure definition of run and gun. It’s like playing a 3rd person version of contra. Completely over the top but fun enough to warrant a couple of playthroughs for the platinum. Ghost Hunter I loved this back in the day but playing it again some 20 years later I don’t think it holds up that well. Don’t get me wrong, the visuals and effects that are being pulled off for a PS2 game are amazing, but the gameplay is pretty bland, as are the environments. Spidersaurs Really enjoyed this one. It’s been on my wishlist for a while, and it was recently reduced to £6. Anyone who has played any of Wayforward’s games should know just how good their cartoony visuals are. The gameplay is stupidly fun as well, with the game being essentially their take on the Contra franchise. Ghoul Boy I had a couple of quid left in my PS wallet and seen this was in the Halloween sale. It’s an indie platform game that has a spooky setting, with the main character hacking and slashing his way through zombies, skeletons and ghosts. What was a little more difficult than I thought it was going to be, with some checkpoints being very harsh with their placements but it was enjoyable enough. Crow Country I’m still not sure what to make of this one. It’s an indie game that takes inspiration from Resident Evil. It certainly looks the part but it just lacks something that made me really enjoy it. I think the map had something to do with it. I found traversing though a lot of the areas a little confusing at times. The respawning enemies didn’t help either. Bayonetta 1-3 I had played the first 2 games back on the Wii U but had yet to play any of them on the Switch. I could have gone straight to the 3rd game which I have never played at all but with it being the spooky season, I decided to do the trilogy. My thoughts remain the same about the first two games (fun enough but very overrated) and so will just speak about the 3rd game. Awful game. I hated the new design and look of the characters. The first two games struck a nice balance between realistic and a more anime type style but here they push for a more realistic look, and it doesn’t pay off. Bayonetta has been toned down about (thank goodness) but Viola unfortunately makes up for the lack of sass due to how annoying she is. Thankfully, she plays pretty well and feels a bit like Vergil from the Devil May Cry series. Also, the game is very bland and dark. The heaven and hell settings of the first two games allowed for some contrast between the light and dark levels, but here everything is very doom and gloom. Story wise, the narrative is a mess. It’s like the jumped on the MCU bandwagon of multiverse shenanigans and, just like Marvel, didn’t really pull it off. The levels themselves felt very disconnected and it was if they had a bunch of ideas but couldn’t merge them all together in a cohesive way and so went with the alternate realities setting instead. The Kaiju style battles are a miss for me as well. They are so slow and don’t really add anything to the game other than dragging it down even further. I honestly didn’t start enjoying the game until around chapter 11 where there was a Panzer Dragoon type stage. From that point on until the end of the game I actually did have a little fun and there was one section that did get a good laugh out of me. I will say that playing these back to back you can definitely notice a difference in the voice acting between the two actresses. I certainly prefer the first. Looking back at the whole situation, I wonder if when she was asked to do a cameo it was for when a certain set of Bayonettas show up? It would make sense that it was going to be for that. Overall, it was a meh experience and once again highlighted that the series is a poor imitation of Devil May Cry. Final Fantasy 1-6 With the physical release of the game finally being made available for purchase this month, it was time to play through the early games of the series. It was nice to finally finish Final Fantasy III. It was the only game in the main series (outside of the MMO’s) that I had never finished. It was also nice playing through Final Fantasy VI again. I had only ever played through the PS1 version of the game and had to endure the long load times between random battles and so this was a much better experience. It’s probably been 20 years since I played through it and I certainly enjoyed it more than I originally did back then. I still find it overrated though. Having played through them all I can understand why Final Fantasy VII was such a big thing when it first released. Sure, the graphics helped but it is such a change when compared to the first six games. 1 through 6 do feel really similar, what with the fantasy/sword and sorcery setting and so Final Fantasy VII was probably seen as a breath of fresh air at the time. One thing that did hit me when playing through these is just how many times the party needs to be switched. 2-6 have you constantly switching party members, with some being killed off or others disappearing for large parts of the game. It got pretty annoying and FFV was even worse with how many times I had to keep switching jobs for certain situations. Trophy wise, I pretty much had to 100% every single game. All hidden items needed to be found, all beastiary entries had to be entered and all treasure chests opened. It took some doing but the platinum was achieved for each and every one of them. The RNG for some of the enemies or items needed was a bit of a nightmare at times. From best to worst, this was probably how I would rank them all. Final Fantasy VI Final Fantasy IV Final Fantasy Final Fantasy III Final Fantasy II Final Fantasy V Busty month. lots of games played and finished but I still didn't get through everything I wanted. I was planning on playing Luigi's Mansion 2 HD but unfortunately I ran out of time. Hopefully I will get through it this month.

Launch trailer.

The Super Mario Bros. Wonder OST has now been added to the service.

As far as I'm aware it was a bit of a bomb at the box office, at least in the US.

New Mario posters were added for 600 platinum coins. https://store.nintendo.co.uk/en/super-mario-bros-a4-embossed-wall-art-set-nintendo-switch-online-exclusive-000000000010015026

There's quite a collectors market for those now, especially if they come with the various code wheels that they used to come with.

Is there no where to see who the composer is for each track? Also, not a single Xenoblade soundtrack is on the service yet.

Agreed. If it does happen, I hope those left standing don't repeat the same mistakes.

Problem with this is that this isn't really any safer than the AAA space at the moment. Sure, it will be much better for them from a personal standpoint, being happier in their place of work and all, but success for smaller developers has become increasingly hard in a saturated market. The fact is, there are simply too many games being made and everyone is fighting for the same audience. I do think smaller teams make for a better work atmosphere though. As someone who has worked for a couple of start up companies, there's always a great feeling working with a small group who all share a common goal. Things tend to go to hell when the company starts expanding and becomes more corporate, with meetings happening left and right and people not really sure what others around them are doing.