WackerJr

I'm glad I'm not the only one. It took a while before I eventually realised it's a follow-up of sorts. After the deterioration of the quality of the Lost In Blue series, that Survival Kids turned into, I'm glad they reverted back to Survival Kids. A shame about how it looks mind, despite the proverb 'looks can be deceiving' I feel this might not be in this case...

At last! I didn’t think it would come, but I’m excited to see Survival/Stranded Kids come to NSO. I fear rose-tinted glasses may have affected my memories of it, but I’m going to replay it still. In fact, it was rated highly on the N-E Top Ten GameBoy Color games six years ago too!

Chrono Trigger (DS) So I’ve finally finished this RPG called Chrono Trigger… anyone heard of it? 😁 I came away really conflicted. I enjoyed it & it’s clearly a great game, but I didn’t love it. Maybe my expectations were a little high, or maybe it was my rather disjointed playing experience, as I ended up playing it on & off for months, partly due to having get my DS replaced midway through. The large sprites & exaggerated reactions convey plenty of personality for Chrono & crew and they’re all largely likeable. This is enhanced with the 90s cartoon-style animated videos, which I wasn’t expecting but really add to how the characters are supposed to look. For me it’s a game that given a modern makeover with various QoL improvements would be excellent. For each excellent design decision or gameplay element there was some minor irritant for me. The story is engaging and clever, although all too often I was wondering where to go next, a quite 90s issue, despite the relatively small map. I didn’t help myself by playing this on-and-off. Gone are frustrating random battles, instead interacting with enemies on the map, a good design choice that also reduced the necessity for lots of grinding. I imagine the DS hosting menus on the second screen clears up a lot of screen space compared to the original. I thought this would help, but by design, playing it on the DS caused me difficulties in battles. I would often be scrolling the second screen to select attacks or techs to use, but doing so meant I wouldn’t see what was happening in the battle itself. Due to the default setting being for real-time battles where the enemies can attack while scrolling, I would miss this and usually miss how much damage my own attacks were giving. This caused a headache in some battles, especially boss ones, where I wouldn’t spot attacks which were ineffective and would keep spamming the same ineffective attacks until I’d finally realise. Another quirk of this DS version is that selecting a tech or item gives a description of what it does, useful for players like myself who can’t recall what does what. However, the DS is slow to change the descriptions so I’d often be left with the wrong description when selecting items and so unable to remember what it did, or trying to wake my sleeping character with the wrong item. I also wasn’t great at figuring out which weapons dealt elemental damage & which enemies were susceptible to what. I appreciated the game was good at highlighting where items were, usually with a glowing blue spark, and didn’t expect me to check and open every drawer and cabinet within a house. Out and about though, while looking lovely, it wasn’t always clear when to interact with important objects (eg., computer screens) in order to progress. So far I realise I sound quite down with it, but I think it’s just because I can see how good this game is so my gripes were more just frustrating at things which were more accepted with game design 30 years ago. The music was exceptional. I expected good things from Square(-Enix) and the score for this is memorable and every track feels epic and easily listenable. The story is great, the characters and scenarios throughout were memorable and I liked the decision where at one point I could choose to go to the final boss or venture out on further side-quests and build up my level first. There’s a fantastic game here, and had I had first played this 30 years ago (or even 15 when the DS version was released) then I would have been blown away. The 90s idiosyncrasies frustrated me, but as I mentioned, given a modern update with QoL improvements I can see this being an exceptionally fun game to play now. Here’s also my 60-seconds YouTube review.

That’s really positive to read about the sequel. I enjoyed the first game, albeit it did overdo the crude jokes a little. I was intrigued but didn’t know too much about Nirvana Initiative, but it sounds as though it improves upon the first while keeping the gameplay mechanics, which sounds good to me. This is another one to add to my Wishlist! Thanks! 😃

Utterly bizarre, I loved this game! You’ve covered its quirks and there were plenty of confusing and frustrating aspects, but I agree that it’s totally worth checking out. NSO maybe…..

Thanks @S.C.G for the kind words, and both you and @Dcubed for your advice. Let’s see how it goes, and yep I’ll definitely let you know what I get then@Will. I went ahead and sold Legacy of Darkness for £350 through eBay. Hoping they’ll be no shenanigans when they receive it…

Wow! In every way, that’s fantastic! Just reading you post about getting that one it must’ve been incredibly satisfying! Congrats!

Quick question I’d love to get the opinions of you lovely people: I’ve just been offered £350 on eBay for my boxed copy of Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness if I stop my auction & put it up for that as a “Buy it now” price. Worth it? They’ve got good feedback and seems a good price to me, but I haven’t had this kind of request before so wonder if anyone else had too?

That’s a fantastic collection you have there! If it helps decided what you’re going to do with them, I’m selling my N64 collection on eBay so I can tell you what I get for them if that helps? I see you have a few N64 games on your list and some are the same as ones I’m selling. I’m trying out a few of the rarer ones with 10 day listings, the remaining 19 I’m putting up for 7 days on Sunday. Here’s my link to my Mario Party 3 eBay listing. I’m hoping the likes of Paper Mario and Conker do well, but I’m not sure about many of the others.

My wife and I have just finished Split Fiction too. Brilliant game! Full of inventive and creative co-op gameplay. Your write up was great @Cube, and thorough. While not a difficult game, I’d put it as tougher than ‘It Takes Two’ which my 8 year-old is currently playing through with my wife. It’s also more ‘videogamey’ (technical term…), in that more of the scenarios are very reminiscent of recognisable games (morphing into a ball for 2D sections, Gradius-style shoot em ups for instance), but that’s not a criticism, especially considering the volume of ideas they’ve come up with for the players. There’s so much variety, and the narrative decision that side-stories are based on stories outside of the main storyline frees up so many creative and fun scenarios, we were excited every time we came across one in anticipation of whatever we were going to come across. They provided some of the most memorable moments too. I think I can get away with saying “sausages and sweets”… IYKYK. The final act plays as if Hazelight had so many mind-bogglingly inventive ideas they hadn’t managed to include earlier that they threw them all out there in bite-sized sections, and most were fantastic! The start was a little slower for us, and while we enjoyed it we weren’t sure it was as good as It Takes Two to begin with. By the end we were hooked though and had an absolute blast! Here’s my short minute-and-a-half video review: YouTube link.

Same here. I had to double-check it wasn’t a spam message at first! I’d better put my DS/GBA on charge!

I expect that have, but I do hope Nintendo have kept plenty of secrets about the game for people to discover at launch. The number of tracks is the biggest thing for me, as I hope they have more, including those classic tracks. That’s likely to be a hangover from the incredible volume of tracks in MK8. Missions returning is brilliant, as I loved this in the DS game, so hoping there are plenty of these to expand the single player experience. Smaller things they’ve improved upon are nice to see too, such as the accessibility options (auto-accelerate, etc) being easier to find. Like pretty much everyone has said though, there must surely be a way, either at launch or via an update, to make it easier to scroll and select your character & outfit. I’m cautiously excited and can’t wait to play it. It looks great, but as it’s Mario Kart you just want it to be as close to perfect as possible!

I’ve just seen the Zelda trailer on Nintendo’s X account. Did I miss the announcement of Achievements within the Direct? They seem to have added them to the Nintendo mobile app!

He’s finally back, to kick some hell tail! 😁

Wait. What. Silksong? Just like that!??

GameCube! 😁 Guess there’ll be no Wind Waker HD then.

Ok, let’s move on to new games now please…

Just one? So I can’t mention The Witcher 4 being announced as coming to Switch 2, or Microsoft allowing new Conker & Banjo games to come to a Nintendo console, or Mario smacking the snot out of Master Chief in a new Smash Bros game? A Chrono Trigger remake? Or even a collection of old point & click games (Toonstruck, Monkey Island, etc) to show off the mouse? 😃 Fine, a new 3D Zelda game, but showcasing a realistic Zelda as playable & with abilities similar to what we’ve come to expect from Link (so not just focused on magic) & hinting at a raft of recognisable villains from the series.

I’m so confused by the sandwich talk… 😂 Storyteller (Mobile) I found this to be a charming little puzzler that feels a good fit in mobile (the caveat being the need for a Netflix account), but sadly stops just as it starts finding its stride. If you don’t know it, you’re tasked with filling in pages of a storybook by creating short ‘story mountains’ to correctly represent the story given by the brief title of the page. Each page has between 3 and 8 blank panels. You’re given a selection of 2-3 different scenes (e.g., “Wedding”, “Death”, “Cliff”, “Kidnap”) that you can drag into the blank panels and add to them a few characters from a small selection. The order of scenes and characters dictates how they react, and most pages were about figuring out how to create the right motives. For instance, the “Kidnap” scene has a cage and lever, so adding one character by the lever and another in the cage naturally causes one to become the ‘villain’ and raise the cage trapping the other. To rescue them you’d add the same panel again, but include your ‘hero’, who will now lower the cage, causing both characters to also be angry at the ‘villain’. The story may end there if the title just wanted you to show a rescue, but if the page hinted that you needed a story focused on revenge then adding an “Execution” panel would give a darkly different ending! Of course you could skip the rescue and simply add the “Throne” scene to see the ‘villain’ smugly get the crown instead! The stories are mostly familiar tales, with scenarios based on the likes of Snow White, Shakespeare and Adam & Eve. This helped with identifying what I needed to do (the Evil Queen, or “Witch” in this case, was naturally intent on ridding herself of Snow White “Snowy”). It had plenty of chucklesome moments, often seeing characters react to situations even if they weren’t the right answer, and the game rewards you for doing this by having an achievement system for creating those moments, although there’s no other reward other than sniggering at the various predicaments you’ve created. The whole thing is very short, I finished the main game within a couple of hours. Sometimes the solutions weren’t obvious, but I found it easy enough to ‘trial & error’ my way through the limited number of possible combinations. There is some short post-game content, plus finding all the stamps/ achievements took another couple of hours, mainly because the game doesn’t tell you what levels the non-solution scenarios are found in. (Spoiler of an early-game solution) It was a little repetitive by its nature, but each puzzle being so short meant I could spend a few minutes here and there at a time, and I enjoyed the whole concept. It’s just a shame that there are only a few puzzles more than 6 panels long and it abruptly stops just as it gets more challenging. I hope that they expand on it in future, as I was rather charmed by it. Here’s my 70 seconds-long video review: https://youtu.be/3fnqBEKeC5Q?si=_uTFY-SHZy7EwKF2

This last Direct saw Nintendo announcing they were showing their final game, lots of people ogling the screen, fingers crossed for one of the Zelda HD remakes… and Nintendo in true trolling fashion: Here’s your Wind Waker… Thanks Nintendo. 🤨

It remember it being ok to play. The fairly zoomed in view did make it a little trickier to get an idea of the surrounding areas and less time to react to wherever enemies were. It used the GameBoy Rumble and was one level in particular, I think it was on a boat, where it would rumble every few seconds to indicate… something. It wasn’t until I turned off the rumble that I realised how it added and that I missed it! With those Rare console games appearing on NSO, I do hope we one day see Perfect Dark, Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge and Conker’s Pocket Tales?

Similar situation for me me too. I’ve been finally selling off my old games and systems over the past few years as while I’d love the time to play them again, I’d been saying that for years and realistically it’s never going to happen on their original format. Plus now with modern TVs not having the SCART ports I’m loathe to put in the extra effort to buy additional adapters just so I can maybe one day play them. I’m now up to my N64 games to part with, which probably hold the most nostalgia for me, being the first system I bought myself. With so many modern games to get through though know I need to sell these…

Having managed to get my physical copy, I’m playing through it with my wife, as we loved It Takes Two. At a guess we’re over halfway through and for us Hazelight have hit another home run! As the reviews suggest, it’s excellent! The concept of being able to create scenarios based on fictional stories that the characters have come up with really gives the developers flexibility in creating a mixture of gameplay styles, and they’ve really done that. They’ve managed to create a lot of situations where you need to work together and where you’re each having to perform something different, it’s been very clever and full of ideas. So far the gameplay’s been more varied than It Takes Two, but our opinions have each differed on whether we prefer the story and setting of this or the previous game (so far). I’m hoping we’ve got a long way to go still though, as it’s great!

Thanks, I hadn’t realised that! I may have to track that down! 😁

Yep, we’ve followed up Uncharted 1-3 with Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. Gameplay-wise this follows the blueprint of the the previous games (“if it ain’t broke….”) so there was a lot of 3rd person shootouts, more ‘ninja warrior’ style climbing acrobatics, more perilous situations for Nathan Drake to find himself in, and more adrenaline pumping set pieces. The whole game looks fantastic, whether it be crumbling ruins, expensive villas or Arabic market towns. Even if it’s just to essentially to create a pathway to another area looks impressive and in turn makes locations feel more immersive. Naughty Dog put a lot of effort into the detail of each area. Nathan’s brother is a new character, voiced by Troy Baker (Joel from The Last of Us for those unaware), and the banter between the two is strong throughout. The story brings a lot of focus to Drake’s family and his relationships and for me it was a natural fit to the stories established in previous titles and answered some of the previously outstanding questions. There was a little more focus on hand-to-hand combat (more so with your NPC friends alongside you) and the new grappling hook was just an extra option for traversing the terrain. These were the only noticeable new additions for me, along with some driving sections which felt comfortable to control. To be honest I was happy they hadn’t really changed much, and the set pieces were again fantastic! My wife and I both thoroughly enjoyed another Nathan Drake outing, and it stands to how well the gameplay, dialogue and set pieces were, that we played 4 games back-to-back with a similar gameplay loop and didn’t get bored once. It’s a shame Naughty Dog have suggested that they’ve no plans for any more Uncharted games as I expect there’s still a thriving market for them, or at least there is in our household!