WackerJr

Looks great, thanks!

Oh fantastic! Thanks! I’ve just been watching some of AGDQ 2024 recently and hadn’t realised SGDQ 2024 was so close. Will have to check the timetable to see what especially stands out this year.

I’m intrigued by the size of this exclusive mission is, and I like the inclusion of the speed running mode. Ultimately though I’m in the camp that @Julius mentioned, and from the sounds of it I would have wanted more. I’ve not played it since the GameCube and then subsequently the Xbox 360 HD version, and I love the game but wonder if it will feel just too familiar?

Return of the Obra Dinn (Switch) This proved to be one of the more creative games I’ve played. Difficult, clever and puzzling, although somewhat arduous later one, Return of the Obra Dinn to me was like a mash-up of What Became of Edith Finch, Moby Dick, Cluedo, and Sudoku. Played from a first-person viewpoint, you’re an investigator exploring the now empty ship The Obra Dinn, to try and determine what happened to its crew and passengers five years ago. It’s not long before you stumble across the remains of a corpse. This is the main premise of how to investigate what happened, as the game then prompts you to use a mysterious pocket watch to transport you back to a freeze frame scene showing the moment of their death. This is usually preceded by whatever the victim heard in the seconds prior to this. From there, you can walk around the scene looking for any clues that may help identify the people in the scene or learn what’s actually happening. These scenes are the main mechanic for trying to solve the mystery. You’re given a logbook at the start, which you need to complete. Initially all this contains is a list of the names of those on board, along with their nationality and a sketch of those on board. Whenever you find a scene, a new page is revealed in the logbook, which shows an image of a person or persons in the scene, and then leaves it for you to fill in the gaps for their name, what fate befell them, and if they killed then who was responsible for their death. Rarely are all three key bits of information revealed in one scene. Sometimes you may hear a name said, and usually you’ll be able to work out how the perished. The game is quick to tell you that inferring things is key, and won’t try and trick you. If someone’s acting like the surgeon say, they’ll be the surgeon, if they look of a certain nationality they will be that nationality. Often in a scene who will discover another dead body, and this will then transport you to another scene. The logbook carefully groups these into a set of events, which help reveal the story of what mysterious happenings occurred the vessel. As I was quick to discover, the game’s not afraid to throw into your face that a person is in the throngs of death. If they’re been shot you will see gussets of liquid shooting out of their body. Or at least I assumed it was. To this end I was glad at the design decision to make everything black and white and grainy. Often you’ll be able to tell what’s happened, but thankfully the graphics don’t reveal the gore in HD detail. On the flip side though, it caused some of the clues to be a little too subtle due to the lack of clarity. I thought I’d be able to brute force some of the details, and I could for a bit. The game only reveals you’ve got someone completely correct once every time you get three people and their fates right. I did find I would get to a stage where I was confident of two, then would go through guessing the options of a third person until the game told me it was right. To that end, most of the clues made me feel smart when I worked them out. It wasn’t easy though, and for many of the ones I brute forced I never found out what the clues were. It also got very arduous towards the end. Once I found all the scenes there was no quick option to go back to them. Instead, I’ve have to remember where a corpse was and find it, which considering some were contained within a scene contained within a scene within another scene, made things a little too tedious. I wish I had kept track of some clues with pen and paper and I’d often find myself meandering around not remembering where or if I’d spotted something. Finding a corpse and the surprise of not knowing what scene I was about to observe, and the mechanic of playing a tricky and dark game of Guess Who were enjoyable and fresh. It lost it’s freshness in the second half, but for the first initial hours this was a really fun sleuth-em-up.

I've had this on 3DS for a while and was planning to finally play it when I go on holiday in a couple of weeks... Suddenly I don't feel quite so excited about that! (Playing the game that is, not the holiday!)

Oh wow I completely agree. Even scoring in the 70s I thought I may get some enjoyment out of this, but boy was I wrong! I remember finding the later levels incredibly difficult too, and never could defeat the final boss. I’m hazy in the details but seem to recall getting there and needing a certain gun due to the lack of damage most of the others caused, but I had such little ammunition I could never defeat it and by that stage I’d been so drained of enthusiasm I quickly gave in.

Wow that surpassed my expectations! A solid Direct with plenty of surprises. Lots of ports and HD remakes, but a lot more than I was expecting. The Mario & Luigi series is usually good fun. Is this the first game since AlphaDream went bankrupt? Despite being one of the weaker entries, I really enjoyed the Edgeworth Investigations game that for released over here, so having both to play is great. Shame it’s not actually a new Danganronpa game, but I’m excited to see how The Hundred Line LDA turns out. New Zelda is always a reason to be cheerful, and it’s about time Zelda took the spotlight. I prefer the more direct approach so I’ll wait to be convinced by the duplication mechanic, as I worry it might give too many options, but it’s Zelda so I’ll remain happily optimistic it’ll work. Metroid 4. That I was not expecting! I wonder if this was rolled out to show people it really does exist. At this stage I’ll be disappointed if it doesn’t become a Switch 2 game, to give the new console a big hitter early days. Making it a dual Switch & Switch 2 game to maximise sales is my hope. The new Mario Party boards and 20-player mechanic look interesting. It still makes me salty though that this will be the 3rd Party game considering the lack of depth especially in the previous one, when they could’ve made the others larger or offered DLC. MIO looked intriguing and those NSO titles are great additions too (Perfect Dark with save states means I might finally crack those multiplayer challenges). Surely Conker’s got to be coming soon? Finally, a point to the narrator who when the Funko Pop game was announced started saying “do you recognise who it is?” and ironically I immediately thought “no……”.

With Nintendo surely gearing up for Switch 2 I’m really tempering my expectation for this, although 40 minutes seems as if it may cover quite a bit. A few baseless predictions: • Mole Mania for NSO (I agree with you @Jonnas ). • No sign of Wind Waker / Twilight Princess (I’m fed up with predicting them & subsequently being disappointed) • A mass of indies & ports (inc Power Rangers and some sort of Fall Guys update). • A short multiplayer Zelda game (similar to the free limited DS download as opposed to a full Four Swords GC port). • Red Dead Redemption 2 port. • Finaly DLC for Mario Party Superstars! • I’d love Zelda Oracle remakes, but maybe that’ll be for Switch 2 instead? What the heck, a man can dream! 😄

Cool, thanks @Dcubed, that’s great & really helpful to know. 👍🏻

I haven’t looked into the Mega Man GB games before. Are they close approximations of the NES games (with reduced screen space) or are they standalone games?

I recently plunged into NSO to finally beat a couple of Rare games I was never able to originally complete when I was younger. Snake Rattle N Roll An isometric action platformer, with one of its main selling points being that it can be played in simultaneous local co-op (one of you as Snake, the other, unsurprisingly as Roll). Start each level as a floating snake head, your aim is to negotiate the various ledges and obstacles, while eating enough of the fabulously named ‘Nibbley Pibbleys’ in order to weigh enough to ring the bell at the end of the level, opening the exit. The controls feel floaty and loose, making it quick to move around, but tricky to gain precise control of your snake. Add to this the difficulty in judging the distance of gaps, with one false move plummeting you off the edge and losing a life, make this a very frustrating experience. Later levels add ice physics and slopes on corners, making jumps ridiculously tricky. Thank goodness for the save and rewind feature of NSO. Without which I never would have gotten through it, and I’d’ve had no interest in attempting to otherwise. I remember volunteering at an after-school club, and it happened it have a NES. Many times my ‘work’ involved being the 2nd player for Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll sessions. I have good memories of these, even if we never got past the first couple of levels. Playing this now, I’m struggling to find the fun in it. Maybe I’m that much older, maybe the mechanics just feel that much more aged now, or maybe it was never really that good in the first place? Glad I persevered and saw that completion screen, but I won’t be going back to this one. Blast Corps You don’t always need a plot that makes sense. That a nuclear missile is moving in a straight line and the only way to avoid mass carnage is to smash and destroy everything in its path is a ludicrous excuse for some immensely satisfying destruction! Each of the vehicle types you encounter feel unique enough, whether it be the simplicity of the bulldozer or the ‘roly-polys’ of a giant robot. Backlash remains the most frustrating still, requiring a Mario Kart-esque drift turn with enough momentum to destroy buildings with its solid posterior. I felt like a boss when it worked, but frequently filled with frustration when all too-often it simply tapped buildings with the force of a limp pillow so the building remained upright, taunting me with my failure until the nuclear missile took it down for me, sadly resulting in the failure screen. Each level can be replayed after initially clearing a path, in order to find and destroy every building and activate every light in the level. Eventually you can replay the missions with the carrier again, with medals based on how fast you clear a path. I’m delighted to brag that I finally earned a few platinum medals, something I never accomplished on the original N64 (yes I happily admit to using the NSO save states to help!). I was surprised at how much replayability there is, and how the game frequently threw up new challenges. Most of the time trial driving levels were also more of a puzzle to work out the best vehicle and short cuts or tricks to earn the medal times. I had a great time playing through Blast Corps. Rare truly shone in the N64 era.

Vampire Survivors (Switch) Great value for money and I can see why it’s been so popular. Really does feel like the videogame equivalent of popping bubble wrap! I enjoyed this for a few hours. I also had that great feeling where the first few times I was left wondering how on earth I was supposed to last longer than 10 minutes until I finally had one of THOSE runs! I’m not sure I’ll be returning to it now, but for those few hours this was I was engrossed with the ‘just one more go’ mentality.

This was one of my guilty pleasures on the N64. Apart from that bug (which later it was revealed that the final level could be played via a cheat code I believe) I loved this game! It shouldn’t have worked, and had so much against it, from the fairly basic graphics to the camera you mentioned, but the puzzles were good and the bizarre robotic creatures had so much character. From the moment you crashed landed and immediately landed upon the romantic partner of another robotic sheep, only to take over its lifeless body you knew exactly what kind of humour you were going to get. Creative and fun. Talented game designers have the ability to make this kind of thing work. Glad to hear others liked it too!

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (Switch) I’ll keep this quite short as most of the discussion about it took place in its own thread. I loved the original DX game, with a GameBoy Color being my first handheld console and I saved up and bought it mainly so I could play Link’s Awakening! The quality of life improvements, while necessary (e.g., having dedicated buttons for your sword, shield, running, etc), are all good and enhance it over the original, plus the graphical updates here bring out the character of the already quirky cast of characters and Koholint Island as a whole. The only real new addition is the dungeon creator, which I didn’t feel any desire to play through longer than necessary. It’s clever, but being you can only use rooms you’ve already completed it feels rather sterile in comparison to the rest of the game to me. It’s compact, but gameplay just flows so smoothly, and the island is just so brilliantly designed to follow the familiar Zelda formula to progress from dungeon to dungeon. I was also able to play this with my family, and seeing my daughter able to and enjoy controlling Link was really heart-warming. I still really enjoyed Link’s Awakening, even if it felt a little too familiar, with little new added beyond what the original game offered (so no new dungeons, etc). What do they say? Form is temporary, class is permanent!

I do like me a bit of Eurovision! I have to admit I thought Baby Lasagna was going to romp this (& I did find I had it in my head the following day). Everything ended up a little odd and strained this year, what with all the backstage issues, and acts coming out after the show to say they had suffered over the week. I know public affairs seem to affect the show each year, but this year it really did overshadow much of the show. Despite liking Croatia, I’ve no issue with the winner, who I thought was very good. Mr Windows95 made me laugh, although I thought there would be more ‘Eurovision-style’ acts this year. I liked Ireland’s Bambie Thug did something different, but we weren’t fans in our household. Shame that Olly Alexander didn’t do that great. While the act looked impressive on the TV, I didn’t think much of the song, and even thought the mics weren’t working at one point as his signing was so quiet. Plenty to talk about at least this year. What about everyone else?

Aha. Thanks!

I had to re-read that last line a couple of times to make sure I’d read that right! Was there a story reason for the nuclear bombs to be transported through the garden? 😂. There doesn’t need to be, I’m just curious. I never played Buck Bumble and I also didn’t realised Argonaut was involved so thanks for this.

Broken Sword 5: The Serpent’s Curse (PS4/5) I confess to growing up as fan of point & click games, namely due to the excellent LucasArts titles. Broken Sword was one of the non-LucasArts point & click series I got into, with its more complex stories, witty humour and excellent banter between main protagonists George and Nico. I missed out on Broken Sword 4 as my PC caused it to churn away as a stuttering, freezing mess, and quite unplayable. I was pleased to see the Kickstarter campaign succeed for this 5th instalment and a chance for me to get back into the series. Maybe my expectations were a little high, but I came away a little underwhelmed. It was perfectly fine, and played very similar to the original games, but didn’t quite hook me in like I recall the originals doing. A murder and art theft set the scene up nicely, and there are plenty of standard point & click puzzles to solve along the way. There are also a few puzzles in there that are a little more complex, ideally requiring pen & paper (one late-game one particularly confused me). Thankfully there’s a good in-game help system that gives hints towards the next thing to do, before finally telling you just how to solve the next step, all without any penalty. I guess their previous experiences with death have dulled George & Nico’s reactions to dead bodies, as they do seem eerily calm each time they come across one! The PS4 version is sadly riddled with a number of visual glitches though that did spoil my enjoyment, and probably contributed towards my overall apathy of it. Sometimes important items just didn’t show on the screen, puzzle pieces were invisible, or vital codes were missing. All of them were there, but if you didn’t realise there was an invisible item somewhere on screen then there was no way to know to click on that particular area, and no way of being able to solve the puzzle and progress. Reloading my game usually caused them to appear, but I got frustrated many a time because I didn’t know if my progress had been halted by a clue or object not being visible, or if I just wasn’t thinking correctly to solve the puzzle. Beyond the glitches, the story did get a little lost on me at times, a few of the puzzles a little abstract, and I did miss some interactable items amidst the, admittedly nice, hand-drawn backgrounds. I’m still looking forward to seeing what Broken Sword 6 holds, but with a little more skepticism than before.

I remember enjoying WWF War Zone and even having a deluded notion at the time that it played better than WWF No Mercy (then I actually played No Mercy and came to my senses!). Adapting a fighting game button combination to execute special moves seemed a smart idea at first, but I seem to recall each character only having a few (3?) of these, so it became repetitive quickly. At least Cactus Jack (one of my favourites at the time) had two finishers to choose from for variety(!?). I think he was the only one?

Could it be that Nintendo have been looking at this and how to incorporate games into the Switch’s successor? I agree about the size issues, and so would either need to ensure a suitable streaming service, or plenty of storage space (I can only imagine they’d treat the app similarly to the current NSO ones). Having it early doors would ensure plenty of games for people to play in the new system. I think Luigi’s Mansion would be on this as opposed to an HD remix.

Anyone else watched it? I was thinking the same, but haven’t watched it yet.

I’ve played a few GameBoy games on NSO recently: Kirby’s Dream Land It was nice to see where the pink (err… white) puffball started, but ultimately felt this was pretty underwhelming. I appreciate the inhale technique was improved in future games with the ability to take on abilities. Here you can suck enemies in and spit them out. While this created the unique attacking concept for defeating many enemies, the fact that you can simply inhale air and spit it out as an attack nulled a lot of the need for me to use enemies as projectiles instead. Yes this would’ve been impressive and likely fun at the time, as far as early handheld platformers go, but really feeling its age now for me. Super Mario Land 2 The bulky sprites make this look like a Mario game and add character to the cast. However, the compromise of having large characters on a small screen meant the gameplay is really slowed down to allow for the subsequent small viewing area. Not as good as I remember. Just so slow with a low difficulty level. It’s not a tricky game. It was fun finding the hidden exits, but even though I hadn’t played this in around a decade (as a download on 3DS) I was able to blast through it in just over an hour, finding most of the hidden routes. I can imagine most people getting through it faster.

You’ve covered the main ones I could think of, with the Rare move along with Shadowman (I didn’t realise about Winback though). Okami came to Wii. I suppose Toe Jam & Earl 3 was being developed as a Nintendo/ multi-platform game at one point. Too Human, as a Silicon Knights game I thought would be released on GameCube, before eventually coming out in XBox 360. I only recall that one as I read about how they’d lost a lawsuit and had to stop making new copies of the game / destroy existing copies. I immediately tracked down and bought a copy for cheap (under a fiver) and have still never played it, thinking it would naturally become a collector’s item. Needless to say, over a decade later and interest never picked up - you can pick it up for a couple of quod on eBay! 😂

Metroid Dread (Switch) A triumphant return for the Metroid series and while it doesn’t reinvent the franchise, it is essentially 2D Metroid on modern consoles. The counter move, introduced in the 3DS Samus Returns I believe (correct me if I’m wrong) adds an extra nuance to gameplay, although is pretty much a necessity on bosses. Speaking of which, I thought the bosses here were excellent. Each major one I did, I pretty much got wiped out quickly and wondered how I’d ever defeat it, especially with no visible life bar. However, each attempt I lasted a little longer through naturally learning the attack patterns and my fingers hitting the right buttons a fraction quicker. It’s a pretty cool feeling and motivation to persevere, and actually after a few attempts I found I was taking them down. I’m glad they introduced the QoL improvements such as areas of the map flashing to indicate there’s a hidden power-up, without revealing exactly where it is, and the scanner to identify breakable blocks in an area. I was never that great in backtracking and finding lots in previous games, so this made that aspect faster and much less frustrating, especially as having a host of missiles and health is vital later on. I can see why views are mixed on the E.M.M.I. stealth sections. I appreciate whst they added, but I didn’t really enjoy them, employing a more cowardly ‘run, run, as fast as you can’ mentality a lot if time and seeing way too much of Samus’ death animation! I preferred the Zero Mission stealth sections. The Shinespark puzzles were clever, although some used mechanics I don’t recall the game ever mentioning, which made some much trickier. I did need to look up help on a few. I had no desire to replay it though, unlike some of the previous games, so I was determined to at least find and collect 100% of the items. Overall, great game, and fixes a Metroid itch and will introduce many to the 2D Metroid games. It feels tough, and players need a little patience, especially with boss battles. A good ‘once and done’ title.

Into the Breach (Switch) I remember @Londragon raving about this a few years, so I finally got around to trying out this roguelike turn-based strategy game. Starting off with just three units who failed miserably to defend my cities, I quickly realised this wasn’t an easy game (until I changed the difficulty setting anyway!). I was expecting Advance Wars, but actually Into the Breach does enough to differentiate itself and carve out its own unique and fun niche. Battles aren’t necessarily won by defeating the ever respawning the alien bugs, but simply by surviving each short 5-turn level. Each of your three units has a pilot, who earns experience which can give them a couple of new skills over time. If any of them die in a level then the unit itself will be replaced next level, but the pilot will no longer be able to able to earn experience. Each level has optional objectives which earn you additional stars, which can be used later to replenish the health of your cities or to gain new abilities or maximum health. I like that this allows for you to strategise in each level and amend tactics, as the upgrades do become very useful as the game gets tougher later on. The best part for me was the decision to show you what the enemy is planning to do on its next turn. This allows you to prioritise certain enemies and potentially push them or dodge so they end up attacking and taking out each other. It’s a tremendous idea that turns each go into a puzzle. It was fun for a short time. I could have invested more time earning even more unit types, but after opening all levels and beating the final level it did feel a little too repetitive to me. I ended up spending probably too much time on each level working out strategies for what would only need to be 5 turns each time. For me personally I prefer the Advance Wars story-lead gameplay with a little more variety to levels as opposed to the shorter number of levels but do them repeatedly with different unit types mentality of Into the Breach. I can see the appeal though, and with plenty of unit types to open it has legs for those wanting to put the hours in. Glad I played it, and fun for a short while.