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I never intended to play Marvel's Spider-Man when it came out on the PS4, it looked decent enough but it didn't really appeal to me but when I bought my PS5 it came with Miles Morales bundled in so I thought I might as well pay the extra to pick up the remaster of the first game and give it a chance. At first it was a bit overwhelming, all the usual open world nonsense batters you over the head in the opening section of the game with the map becoming a cluttered mess almost immediately and when it came to the actual missions I struggled to feel any fluidity to Peter's movements, with combat feeling more like a case of button mashing than deliberate decisions. I gradually began to warm to the game, finding myself making brief diversions on the way to the next mission to pick up a nearby backpack or photograph a landmark, but I never felt like I was truly invested in the story and the combat especially never really clicked with me - even at the end of the game I struggled to move about the arenas fluidly, becoming frustrated with quick defeats, so when I finally beat the end boss it was more of a relief than a sense of achievement. The music was pretty uninspiring, by the numbers superhero fare, but I was impressed by the visuals, I opted for Performance RT (I have never been too bothered by games running at 30 FPS but when I tried out the full RT mode performance was noticeably choppier and I didn't notice much difference in reflections either) and it was fun at times to explore the shrunk down representation of Manhattan but the world itself felt a bit lifeless and routine - there is definitely more scope for interactions with NPC's beyond stopping drug deals and car chases. I will try and get around to Miles Morales soon, hoping that the shorter more focused experience will be more consistently enjoyable than I found the 2018 original.

I found out about Lost Words: Beyond the Page via Daniel Bloodworth when he talked about it on Frame Trap and the concept of using words as objects intrigued me so I picked it up on Switch. Essentially it is a 2D platform game set across two distinct worlds the 'real' world of a girl's journal and the fantasy storybook world of Estoria that she creates. The presentation is simple yet beautiful, beginning as handwriting and sketches on lined paper as Izzy introduces herself to the player and we learn about her family before morphing into a hand drawn art style when we step into Estoria. The games unique mechanic comes from the ability to pick up a word and move it around the screen, imparting effects on the game world (for example holding the word 'Rise' over a platform causes it to begin moving upwards) which sets up the possibility for interesting puzzles but the game is clearly more focused on telling a story than building too deeply on its mechanical potential. I won't spoil things but it tells quite an affecting story, written by Rihanna Pratchett, that I can imagine having quite a profound impact on younger gamers (I am very interested to see what my 9-year-old niece thinks of the game). Definitely one to pick up for anyone who enjoys shorter, narrative focused titles.

I bought Dead Space for the PS3 ages ago but the sticks on my Dualshock 3 controllers were creaky and annoying to use so I always put off playing it. When the remake was announced for current gen systems it gave me the kick up the arse I needed to go out and buy a genuine PS3 controller from CeX and finally see what all the fuss was about. The opening was pretty strong, I was immediately drawn in by the atmosphere (the immersion helped by the incorporation of HUD elements into the game world) but most of all I was impressed by how good it looked, visually it seemed as if it still held up remarkably well 13 years after release. After the initially positive impressions things definitely eased off soon after the Necromorphs were introduced into the mix, they were threatening to begin with (I struggled to shoot straight at first) but they soon become trivial to dispense with so the tension dissipates pretty soon into the first chapter. As things escalate more challenging enemies are thrown into the mix but for the most part it feels like the developers just throw more enemies at you when they want to raise the difficulty, making many of the encounters more tedious than intimidating - what starts off as a slow paced survival horror soon seems to descend into a guns blazing shooter. I never felt too invested in the story or the characters, they seem like pretty standard archetypes from the outset, but the audio and text logs are all top notch - much more believable and engrossing than logs in similar games (DOOM 3 comes to mind as an example of immersion breaking text logs). The physics engine is interesting but in the end isn't utilised too creatively and the zero-g sections never really clicked with me but I can definitely see why the game is so revered, even if it has dated a little in terms of its gameplay. There is clearly a lot of scope for improvement in the remake, hopefully they add more stealth options, but while we wait for that to arrive I will certainly be playing Dead Space 2 after enjoying my time with the original.

Lastly I wanted to play something short and I have had thatgamecompany's Flower on my backlog for ages so I decided to give that a go. I rolled my eyes when I realised it used motion controls and it took me a little while to get to grips with things but once I did I started to have fun whizzing across the fields and picking up more petals. Sharp turns were a constant frustration though, hampering my enjoyment, and there are inherent limitations to using motion controls in standard game controllers but on the whole it was an interesting journey pollenating the plant life in the games 6 levels - a nice distraction for a couple of hours but certainly inferior to thatgamecompany's follow up. 

Edited by killthenet
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Doing some footage recording for my Gaming Anniversaries series on Youtube and during the process I noticed that there were a few regular missions that I never actually got the emblems for in Sonic Adventure 2: Battle. I was on 161 Emblems but that number has been bumped up to 168 after pretty much doing all of the Death Chamber missions with a few A Ranks in there. I then went and finished Rouge's Kart stage and then did Egg Quaters hard mode. So hard that the game never tells you what you actually need to do in order to be able to beat the level, picking up bombs that enemies throw in order to break certain containers? Really? I never knew you could do that and I don't know how the game expects you to know thats something that can be done.

 

So now on 168 Emblems but the last 12 I think are in the Chao races, A Ranks and Chao Karate.

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OK, I have been really neglecting my write-ups of games this year. So it's time to dump most of them all here. To avoid taking up three quarters of the page, I'm gonna put my thoughts into spoiler tags.

Just gimme a moment to psyche myself up...

Watching Ryuunosuke slap himself in the face is really amusing.: AceAttorney

Right, here we go!

Disclaimer: I've not actually finished Great Ace Attorney yet, still on Case 5.

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Spoiler

I bet some of you already have some questions about this one.

This is a fan mod of Banjo-Kazooie done by the ridiculously talented Mark Kurko. It's a 5 year endeavour that, as the title suggests, mixes the gameplay of Banjo-Kazooie with the setting of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Yes, really. It runs on real hardware too!

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It works a lot better then you'd expect!

Gruntilda the witch has managed to barge into Hyrule, kicked Ganondorf into Hyrule Castle's dungeon, and claimed the Triforce for herself. Using it's infinte power, she decides to... redecorate Hyrule to her liking. Naturally, Young Link is kinda peeved about this and has effectively gone on strike. This means that polite Bear, Banjo and sarky Breegull, Kazooie have to travel all around Hyrule, find the "Jiggies of Time" (Just normal Jiggies), and defeat Grunty in order to restore Hyrule to it's original state, so that Ocarina of Time can proceed as it should.

As you'd expect, the entire premise of this is played up for laughs. All the characters casually chat to each other in a manner that has no consideration for the fourth wall. Loads of references to both N64 classics, and all sorts of sarcastic snipes from Kazooie, who does not appreciate being in a fan mod instead of a real game. The humour is really on point and feels completely natural for a Banjo game, including a conversation between Banjo and Ganondorf about how fun Smash Ultimate is, only for Grunty to get in a massive sulk and claim that Sakurai didn't put her in because she'd be too overpowered. Fans of the N64 Banjo games will be right at home with the tone of this mod.

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Only Banjo can be polite, and end up coming off as disrespectful.

The setting might be Zelda, but the gameplay is very much Banjo. Hyrule Field acts as a hub world and various areas from Ocarina of Time act as the worlds that you must explore to collect all sorts of goodies. Just like the original game, there are 90 Jiggies to find, as well as Notes, Mumbo Tokens and various other collectables. It's quite impressive how natural it all feels. The Forest Temple was a particular favourite world of mine, as it's quite close to feeling like a proper Zelda dungeon, with puzzles to solve, and a labyrinth to navigate around. I kept finding new details that continued to impress me with how intricate it all was.

That said, the difficulty is a bit higher than Banjo-Kazooie. Platforming is more challenging, the puzzles are a little more cryptic. I did find myself wandering around aimlessly trying to find that last Jiggy in a world more then a few times. There are hints to some of the more cryptic ones, but even then, I did get stuck sometimes. I wouldn't say this was a bad thing, mind. If you're playing this mod, chances are, you've played Banjo-Kazooie a few times beforehand. The mod is designed with that in mind. Ironically enough, the infamous Water Temple is one of the easier areas to complete. Banjo actually points this out, saying he was led to believe that it was much harder, Kazooie accuses everyone of just whining about it. Neither of them seem to realise they can swim a lot better then Link ever could.

Ocarina of Time's areas are lovingly recreated with the more colourful style that you'd expect from a Banjo game, nothing feels that out of place. Even the soundtrack, that recreates classic Zelda tunes using the instruments from Banjo-Kazooie have absolutely no right sounding as good as they do!

I highly recommend this mod to any Banjo fans out there. It really shows the love and care that was poured into it throughout!

Speaking of mods...

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Spoiler

I mentioned @Dcubed and I were playing through this a while back, but I forgot to actually update this thread when we finished. Woops. Anyway, I won't go into too much detail about this, just list off a few highlights from the tail end of the game.

  • After more then 10 cycles, we figured out that the random Powder Keg in Clock Town Shop that we knew about from the start also included the license to actually use them. That could've saved us a lot of time...
  • In the Pirate's Hideout cage, we saw the icon for a new Ocarina Song. Naturally, we went for it immediately, only to disvcover it was actually an ice trap. That worked disgustingly well!
  • After finally getting the Song of Healing, we went back to Mikau after leaving him face down in the sand ages ago. We got 10 Deku Nuts for our trouble. I don't think that was worth killing him...

Anyway, on to actual games!

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Spoiler

I'm sure you know this, but FireRed is a remake of the original Pokémon Red that drags the outdated Gen 1 games into the slightly less outdated 3rd Gen. Unlike a certain other remake, this results in a game that's a flat out improvement over the originals. Psychic Pokémon aren't as overpowered, the pace is snappier and abilities add some nice freshness to the whole thing. Honestly, if you have access to this game, then there's no real reason to play a different version, and that's that.

While I was playing this, @Dcubed had some mild surprise with how easily I was getting trough it. Which brings to mind a common complaint when it comes to Pokémon games these days, that being that they're apparently not as hard as the older games. I don't think it's as clear cut as that. Personally, I think that Red/Blue are only seen as difficult because you're not given information that's taken for granted these days. Good luck figuring out what Agility does without wasting a move slot to find out.

Anyway, here was my team.

Marowak - Lv 56 (That actually had a Thick Club on it, that was hilariously busted!)
Nidoking - Lv 56
Lapras - Lv 59
Hypno - Lv 56
Charizard - Lv 56
Meowth - Lv 10

Sticking with old-school stuff.

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Spoiler

I'm not gonna focus too much on these individual games, as I've talked about them before in previous years, but I wanna focus on aspects these pixel remasters share.

  • I'm really not keen on the redone sprites. Sure, they look better then the NES originals, but these two games have been remade multiple times with higher quality sprites. For example:

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It's not the best look when a PSP version is outdoing you.

  • That picture also highlights another issue. That font is atrocious! How that was deemed acceptable is baffling! It completely clashes with the style the game is going for! Luckily, there are plenty of mods out there dedicated to replacing that font. @Dcubed opted for the GBA remake font. A million times better.
  • Both games lack the extra content from the GBA versions. With FF1, I can take it or leave it, but the lack of Soul of Rebirth in FF2 really stings. That scenario is a fun addition to the game that gives Minwu the justice he so rightly deserves. In this version, he just gets owned by a locked door, and nothing comes from it...
  • But, in all honesty? I can overlook these faults solely for the remastered soundtrack, which is absolutely godly in it's execution! In the "Best Gaming Music" thread, I mentioned how much I like remixes that subvert expectations by adding extra sections to a song. These soundtracks take that and run with it! Run with it hard!

The soundtrack is worth the price alone! It's that good! Can't wait to see what they do with the SNES games!

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Spoiler

This is an adventure game from the writer of the Zero Escape series, so you already know that this game is going to develop into some severe weirdness as you go along. You play as Kaname Date, a special agent of secret police-department ABIS. He's been tasked with finding a serial killer who is at large. This serial killer is going around, removing the left eye of his victims, which sounds like a pleasant experience for all. Along the way, Date will have to delve into the dreams of people who are not co-operating in order to try and extract information and figure out just what is going on.

Of course, things soon get a lot more complicated than that.

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There's a reason for this, I'm not telling you what it is, though.

The game is split up into 2 sections, the investigation parts play like a typical point-and-click adventure. You follow Date around as he investigates places, and interrogates people in order to find more information and advance the plot. Sooner or later you're going to have to enter someone's "Somnium", effectively, a dream world. In these sections, you control Aiba, an AI that is lodged in Date's eye socket. You have to move her around these dream worlds and interact with various things in order to find new information that advances the plot.

The issue with Somnium is that because it's a dream world, logic doesn't really apply as you'd expect, so you have to try and figure out what you need to do in order to make things react the way you want them to. The other issue is, you only have 6 minutes to get what you need. Luckily, time slows down a hundred fold when you're standing still, so you can look around and plan your next move. Unluckily, interacting with any sort of object will subtract time. These sections certainly have their moments of cool and trippy shenanigans and there's a surprising amount of comedy to be found through experimentation.

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Oh no! Green!

While these Somnium sections certainly have some cool interpretations near the end, the actual gameplay basically consists of trial and error. Because nothing works like you'd expect it to, you inevitably run around trying random things, hoping to stumble upon the solution. You rarely feel like you solved these through wit and cleverness, which is a shame. They're not as engaging as the escape sections in the Zero Escape series. I appreciate the attempt at something different though.

The plot is completely solid, mind. Lots of batty twists that change your view of the game and there's a decent amount of branching paths to discover that mostly bring new information to light. It's the main reason to play this game, and don't worry, you don't need to have played any of the Zero Escape games beforehand. Even though there are times when things get very ridiculous, almost unbelivably so, I still had a blast with it. I look forward to seeing where the sequel goes from here.

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Well, that's a pity...

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Spoiler

With @Dcubed raving about this game, it was inevitable that I give it a go. and honestly, I kinda agree with everything he said about it. It's brilliant, but for the sake of my sanity (I've been at this post for more then 2 hours at this point), I'm just gonna say that you should check out his review if you haven't already.

Give me a break! Alright?

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Spoiler

I'm just gonna come out and say it. I'm bored with this game now, and I've decided to drop it. Running around the city is mind-numbingly boring and the combat is not that great. The main plot has failed to grab me as well (which makes the really long cutscenes all the more apparent), the side stories are far more interesting with their completely wacky antics, but everything in between is just really dull.

If the game just focused more on the silliness, I'd probably be more into it, but as it stands, it's not enough. I'll probably give Yakuza 7 a go, what with that being a turn-based RPG.

But yeah, this series is not for me.

And that about does it. All caught up!

Well, almost... There is one more game I've completed, but I feel that deserves it's own article on the main site here. It really needs me to dedicate some time to express my strong and passionate feelings on it.

Spoiler

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3
Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX (100%)
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (100%)
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4
Tony Hawk's Underground
Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury
Bravely Default II
Shining Force: The Legacy of Great Intention
Monster Hunter Rise (Credits seen)
Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble (105%)
Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin
The Legend of Banjo-Kazooie: The Jiggies of Time
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (Randomiser)
Pokémon FireRed
Final Fantasy I Pixel Remaster
Final Fantasy II Pixel Remaster
AI: The Somnium Files
Dicey Dungeons
Yakuza 0 (Abandoned)

 

Edited by Glen-i
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Something @Glen-i didn’t highlight with FF1&2 Pixel Remaster that’s also worth noting is that there are some significant gameplay tweaks with both games as well.  Most notably, FF1 features the original magic system from the NES, with all spells being purchasable and no MP system, but removes the Level 50 cap, has purchasable Ethers and has all new enemy difficulty balancing (it’s not the same as the GBA/PSP version - Chaos is an absolute BEAST in this version! Seriously! He’s no joke, and WILL knock you all down!).

Meanwhile FF2 allows Toad to be used on basically anything except the final boss (which now gets healed instead if you try it!) and also features all new enemy rebalancing.  Stats are also calculated very differently from previous versions in both FF1&2, and there’s lots of small, miscellaneous changes; like the invisible man in Cornelia being gone, and the Peninsula of Power being removed from FF2.  So both games play out pretty differently from any prior version.

Edited by Dcubed
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2 hours ago, Dcubed said:

Something @Glen-i didn’t highlight with FF1&2 Pixel Remaster that’s also worth noting is that there are some significant gameplay tweaks with both games as well.  Most notably, FF1 features the original magic system from the NES, with all spells being purchasable and no MP system, but removes the Level 50 cap, has purchasable Ethers and has all new enemy difficulty balancing (it’s not the same as the GBA/PSP version - Chaos is an absolute BEAST in this version! Seriously! He’s no joke, and WILL knock you all down!).

Meanwhile FF2 allows Toad to be used on basically anything except the final boss (which now gets healed instead if you try it!) and also features all new enemy rebalancing.  Stats are also calculated very differently from previous versions in both FF1&2, and there’s lots of small, miscellaneous changes; like the invisible man in Cornelia being gone, and the Peninsula of Power being removed from FF2.  So both games play out pretty differently from any prior version.

FF1, you mean. You can still do a similar trick in FF2 once you get Minwu and level up his Teleport a bit. Although, given how stat growth works, it doesn't give you power, but it does give you crazy money, which you then use in Mysidia to buy loads of spells (including Holy!) way earlier then you're meant to.

It's less "Peninsula of Power" and more "Continent of Magic", mind. FF2 is a very weirdly designed game!

Well annoyed that Toad didn't work on the final boss though... It's still the best spell in the game (It still works on most of the bosses!), but it loses that really funny quirk.

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Picked up a new game to play recently. Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair which is basically the sixth Donkey Kong Country game as far as I'm concerned. Played the first two levels and it feels very much like Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze. Not that that's a bad thing, Tropical Freeze is one of my top 10 favourrite games of all time and my favourite platformer so having a game in that style can't hurt. Not quite sure how you're supposed to get some of the secrets yet as I missed two coins on Factory Fright (amazing music for this stage btw).

 

Although, I did manage to die on the first boss battle through what should have been a simple jump and was then booted out as if I was supposed to have died somewhere else in the Impossible Lair. I'm probably going to be doing all the other levels before I look to attempt the Impossible Lair and I'm still learning what certain things do. Like the bells I didn't realise were for resummoning Laylee but the damage part reminds me so much of Yoshi's Island so its a bit forgiving really as you can then just get Laylee back immediately, though it looks like fast paced sequences like chase sequences as well as areas with lots of hazards are going to make that harder.

 

Overall, liking this game so far, looking forward to the rest of it.

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Though I haven't completed much lately, that doesn't mean I've been inactive. Recently I've also been playing:

  • Advance Wars: Dark Conflict - Naturally, I had to revisit the series after the announcement. Fun times were had playing some games in the War Room, but considering that that mode doesn't have preset COs to beat, and the game seems to be very well balanced overall, it is the sort of game that functions better in multiplayer. For a challenging single-player experience, I did miss the original, colourful Advance Wars feel. Sadly, I lost my Dual Strike cartridge a few years ago...
  • Advance Wars: Dual Strike - ...only to randomly find it a week later! It had been missing for years! Turns out, it was still in my old DS Lite, shoved into an obscure drawer :heh: For all the wacky shenanigans that this game has (that make it disgustingly easy to break), it's a lot of fun in single player, between the Time/Survival modes, the robust War Room, and the game modes I can't even remember right now, it's got a lot of variety. I'm trying not to play it too much, but it is making me extra excited for WayForward's revival.
  • Adventure Bar Story - A 3DS game I got for a few Gold points a while back. A game about running a restaurant in a typical JRPG town. You occasionally go to dungeons to collect various ingredients to put on the menu. The writing is light hearted and silly, and I liked the recipe system where you need to figure out ingredients from context clues and irl common sense.
    But other than that, I found it pretty unimpressive. Farming for ingredients is repetitive and boring, the JRPG battles are painfully basic and dull, the art style is very bland, many recipes include typical Japanese dishes (most of which I don't quite know what they are), and the restaurant part (with the clients and sales) is virtually non-existent (baffling to me, that's the best part of a management game: seeing the fruits of your preparations in motion). This is apparently the port of a mobile game, but it's no excuse. I dropped this fairly quickly.

And as for a game I did start and complete:

Steamworld Heist

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Fancy name for a game about pirates...

A strategy game set in the Steamworld shared universe, this 2015 game (released between Steamworld Dig 1 and Steamworld Dig 2) firmly establishes that the Swedish developers Image&Form want to make several games of various genres, all set in this bizarre universe of steam-powered robots. Like Dig 1, I played this on my 3DS.

Heist is a 2D turn-based strategy game with guns where you aim and fire each shot yourself (a lot like the Worms franchise. Almost exactly so, in fact). During each turn, and for each character, you get to move a character and then shoot, or select a different action like using a personal skill or an equipped item (though you can't use your action, then move). You can also choose to "sprint", that is, move several extra spaces that turn, instead of acting. That's pretty much the basics of it.

One thing of note is that these bots don't have very steady hands, their aim is always shaking a tad. I personally loved this, adds an acceptable layer of challenge, since you can always see the shaking. Another quirk of the gameplay is that bullets ricochet off walls, covers, and stuff, which can lead to very creative approaches and takedowns.

There are 9 unique playable characters:

  • Piper is the main character. She only has access to basic pistols, and her main role is support (she increases firepower to nearby units), but she's also very accurate, being the only character who can use scoped pistols (accurate trickshots are nothing to scoff at);
  • Seabrass is an aggressive frontline specialist, capable of tearing holes through enemy defences with shotguns and automatics, and being built to take some hits himself;
  • Sally Bolt is an even more aggressive shooter, being capable of mowing down enemies like they're butter, though she's built like a glass cannon;
  • Valentine is a powerful sniper who's guaranteed to kill one enemy (or more) per turn, but somewhat immobile, being at his best when camping. Perfect character for getting those ricochet trickshots;
  • Ivansky is meant to be a shield. Sure, he can pack powerful explosives, but he's definitely more focused on strong defensive stats, and the ability to absorb shots for his teammates;
  • Bea is the more aggressive explosive user, having more options to cause a lot of wide splash damage, but not necessarily being safe about it;
  • Payroll is a flanker or scout, meant to move a lot around the level and sneakily shooting enemies from the back. Quite risky and frail, though, it's a bit of a gamble to use him;
  • Dora is a flanker/sniper hybrid, not quite as mobile as Payroll, and not quite as powerful as Valentine, but her flexibility also patches the biggest weaknesses of both. If you can master ricochets, I daresay she outclasses both;
  • Billy the Fish is also restricted to pistols, but he's a close-quarters brawler, very mobile and capable of hit&run strategies.

You pick a team of any 2-4 characters for any given mission/level, and off you go. Every character feels very unique, and though learning their skills is tied to experience points, it does feel like the learning curve is adequate for each character. I managed to find a use for pretty much everyone here (except Sally, who I really couldn't figure out), and when coupled to the variety of weapons you can equip, I do feel like there's a lot here to reward experimentation and satisfy any playstyle.

Besides killing enemies, the general goal for each level is to also gather the loot (mostly money, but there's all sorts of items and weapons as well) scattered around each level before evacuating. Each level is randomly generated as to prevent simple memorization (though several important aspects of the layout are always preserved, it's usually the specifics that change), which definitely keeps you on your toes. The game also keeps introducing new mechanics/obstacles well into the end, keeping things always fresh. Plus, you can't simply quit a mission, as doing so will cost you half your money, Pokémon style. This game isn't accepting of any cheese, you face these challenges like a man. Finally, there's very few same-turn reinforcements, which is lovely.

Writing-wise, it's cute. Here's a silly world where robots mine for water in space (needed to run on steam) in a sci-fi wild west kind of setting, and you play as a crew of Robin Hood-like pirates/smugglers that keeps boarding ships and stealing their loot. But in this cowboy setting, there's also a royal government of elite robots that run on diesel, and they're racist towards steambots, and that's kind of crazy. I feel like the world could be more interesting and fleshed out, but the lighthearted tone of the game, along with the jokesy writing and the multiple references to various media, makes it hard to get too seriously invested.

I think the biggest weakness is the art style. The character designs aren't bland or anything, but they're not very expressive or animated and that leads to a painful lack of character. The writing does its job, and makes it clear this a cooky band of pirate robot cowboys from different backgrounds, but it's hard for me to get that invested in them. They're missing things like Kirby's dancing antics, or Wario's buffoonery, or Kratos' intensity (or even something as simple as SS Link's facial expressions), and that kind of leaves the franchise lacking.

The level music is also plenty forgettable (though the vocal country-style tracks in bars and shops are pretty dang awesome and atmospheric. I wish those had been used for stages as well).

In a nutshell, this game has very solid, fun, and varied strategic gameplay, with intuitive mechanics and level design (what Project S.T.E.A.M. didn't quite land), but it's missing quite a bit in the charm department (something Project S.T.E.A.M. did quite well). It's a shame, because Heist is otherwise very close to excellency, but as it stands, it's merely "very good". Though they're different genres, I can safely say this is a much better game than Steamworld Dig.

 

Spoiler

 

Played/Beat/Completed:

-Fire Emblem: Three Houses (2019) Beat (January 9th)

-Fatal Fury Special (1993) No Goal (January 17th)

-Art of Fighting 2 (1994) No Goal (January 19th)

-Samurai Shodown II (1994) No Goal (January 20th)

-The Last Blade (1997) No Goal (January 22nd)

-Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 - The Newcomers (1998) No Goal (January 22nd)

-King of Fighters 2000 (2000) No Goal (January 23rd)

-King of Fighters 2002 (2002) No Goal (January 23rd)

-Samurai Shodown V Special (2004) No Goal (January 23rd)

-Harmo Knight (2012) Beat (January 25th)

-Furi (2016) Completed (January 31st)

-Life is Strange (Episode 1) (2015) Beat (February 13th)

-The Stanley Parable (2013) Completed (February 14th)

-1979 Revolution: Black Friday (2016) Beat (February 17th)

-Azure Striker Gunvolt (2014) Beat (March 6th)

-Hitman: Blood Money (2006) Completed (March 10th)

-A Short Hike (2019) Completed (March 16th)

-ABZÛ (2016) Beat (March 20th)

-Silence (2016) Completed (March 27th)

-Huniepop 2: Double Date (2021) Completed (April 13th)

-Horned Knight (2021) Completed (April 14th)

-Inspector Zé e Robot Palhaço em: Crime no Hotel Lisboa (2013) Completed (April 18th)

-Munin (2014) Completed (April 25th)

-As Aventuras Interactivas de Dog Mendonça e Pizzaboy (2016) Completed (April 27th)

-Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light (1990) Completed (May 8th)

-Castlevania II Belmont's Revenge (1991) Completed (May 20th)

-Beautiful Desolation (2020) Beat (May 30th)

-Kid Dracula (1990) Completed (June 5th)

-Castlevania Bloodlines (1993) Beat (June 5th)

-Dr.Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine (1993) Completed (June 6th)

-Ristar (1995) Beat (June 13th)

-Nights into Dreams (1996) Beat (June 20th)

-Shantae: Risky's Revenge (2010) Beat (July 4th)

-Double Dragon Neon (2012) Beat (July 18th)

-A Boy and His Blob (2009) Completed (August 19th)

-Steamworld Heist (2015) Completed (September 5th)

 

Dropped:

-Perfect Angle (2015) (January 20th)

-Codename S.T.E.A.M. (2015) (May 16th)

-Castlevania - The Adventure (1989) (May 19th)

-Sonic 4: Episode I (2010) (June 7th)

-Sonic 4: Episode II (2012) (June 7th)

-Puzzle & Dragons Z + Puzzle & Dragons: Super Mario Bros. Edition (2015) (June 10th)

-Adventure Bar Story (2012) (July 20th)

 

 

 

 

Edited by Jonnas
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One more to add to the list... but there's a twist! The writeup is in a different thread and (shock!!) you're gonna have to... click a link to get to it!! (Oh the suspense!)

And with that?

Spoiler

New Super Mario Bros 2

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX (MSU-1 Switch Remake Music Edition)

Pilotwings 64

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & The Blade of Light

Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance

Super Mario 3D World (Switch Version)

Perfect Dark Zero

Castlevania: Circle of the Moon

Sabrewulf (GBA)

Actraiser

Sonic Delta (Sonic 1,2 and 3&K Combined!)

Bowser's Fury

Tales of Game's Presents Chef Boyardee's Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa

Terranigma

Metroid II: Return of Samus

Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney

Ace Attorney: Justice for All

Dicey Dungeons

Killer 7

Ace Attorney: Trials & Tribulations

Twelve Minutes

Metroid Zero Mission (Normal Difficulty, Any % casual playthrough)

Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes

Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind

 

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Halo 2

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The pacing throughout Halo 2 seems really off. The first Arbiter section really drags on (especially the Banshee part, which is very dull), and the game feels like it ends before it's supposed to (I’ve played Halo 3 before, so Halo 2 ending and leaving an unexplained gap in between felt really odd, too). It seems like you’re building off to a big climax...and the main character just leaves and takes himself out of the Halo 2 story. 

The gameplay feels a bit mixed. When it flows nicely, it’s a ton of fun, but some sections just drag a bit and it just feels like you’re going through the same rooms again and again. There are also sections where it’s extremely difficult to tell apart enemies and allies. You also seemed to be forced more into using certain weapons throughout the campaign, with fewer human weapons.

One big problem was that the voice lines were really difficult to hear, characters would be talking in the middle of big battles, with explosions happening on two screens, so you end up missing a lot of dialogue, and the Master Chief Collection version completely lacks subtitles during gameplay.

There’s still fun to be had in split screen, but I think this is the weakest Halo game I’ve played so far (all FPS ones up to Reach).

Halo 3

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Even though it hasn’t been upgraded to support widescreen in co-op, the gameplay in Halo 3 is still a ton of fun, it feels incredibly smooth and is simply a joy to play. The gameplay is mixed between shooting and vehicles in a way that keeps the whole game feeling fresh, with different scenarios. 

It gives you different weapons, but never feels like it is restricting your choices, and there’s usually a mix of human and covenant weapons. The second player being The Arbiter also makes it feel more like true co-op, although he does seem to have very little relevance to the story itself and does feel more like a background extra. 

I do really like that the developers realised that, while flying is cool, long flying sections do get tedious, so we get one main short flying section, followed by an optional one where you can jump onto scarabs, and there were sections that feel like you have a bit more freedom to how you approach it. 

Again, there’s the issue of no subtitles, but dialogue seemed much easier to hear, and I still absolutely love the enemy dialogue in this game, something which none of the others have managed to replicate the tone of.
 

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On 27/08/2021 at 1:39 PM, RedShell said:

Next update with probably only feature 1 game as what I'm currently playing is, a biggie... ;)

It certainly was, but I can now add to my list of completed games for 2021...

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Game of the Year Edition:

Very late to the party with this one, but after enjoying Cyberpunk 2077 so much last year, I figured that I should check out this game too. Picked it up dirt cheap on GoG and the original plan was to wait for the upcoming next-gen update to arrive, but then I was like "well, I should probably just download the game anyway". But then the icon was staring at me every time I used my PC, so I thought "well, better run it just to check it works" :heh: 100 hours later... here I am having completed the main game and both DLCs! :D
Yeah, once this game hooks you that's it, you're well and truly trapped. :grin:

I think the fact that once I'd started playing it I couldn't actually stop sums up how much I enjoyed it, in some ways it was a similar experience to how I felt playing Ocarina of Time for the first time back in 1998! :o Yeah, I now fully understand why this game has received so much praise, and why the hype was so insane for Cyberpunk. I have to say though, while I was playing the main story of Witcher 3 I don't think I was enjoying it quite as much as I did Cyberpunk, but upon playing through the 2 DLC chapters (both of which could easily stand as individual games BTW, in terms of playtime and quality!) it tipped the scale and now there's no doubt in my mind that Witcher 3 is the better game overall. :cool:

Having said that, it was interesting to discover that the game still has (even at this very late and heavily patched stage) quite a few bugs in terms of presentation, characters doing freaky animations, floating items etc. :hehe: not that I'm going to really criticise it for that, I'm mean this kind of stuff is to be totally expected for games of this magnitude, but in terms of the amount and frequency of visual glitches, Witcher 3 is definitely comparable to Cyberpunk, and keep in mind that I played both on the exact same PC and that I played Cyberpunk at launch. I imagine the main difference between the overall perception of the two games is that the console versions of Witcher 3 were probably a lot tidier than the console versions of Cyberpunk. :laughing:

Speaking of console versions, how... the... hell... did they get Witcher 3 ported to Switch?!! :eek: Knowing the game as I do now that is simply unbelievable. That has to be the most ambitious video game port of all time. Incredible. :bowdown:

Anyway, very glad that I finally got the chance to play through The Witcher 3 (and especially its DLC! ;)) it was an absolutely fantastic journey and I still have some side quests left to do for when the next-gen update arrives, so looking forward to jumping back into it then.  :)

 

Spoiler

Completed:

  1.     Tetris Effect: Connected (PC)
  2.     Doom Eternal (PC)
  3.     Dragon Quest XI (PC)
  4.     The Medium (PC)
  5.     Yakuza 3 Remastered (PC)
  6.     UnderMine (PC)
  7.     Ring Fit Adventure (Switch)
  8.     Levelhead (PC)
  9.     Superhot: Mind Control Delete (PC)
  10.     Sea of Thieves (PC)
  11.     Doom (PC)
  12.     Monster Hunter Rise (Switch)
  13.     World of Demons (Apple TV)
  14.     The Wild at Heart (PC)
  15.     Just Cause 4 (PC)
  16.     Rain on Your Parade (PC)
  17.     Game Builder Garage (Switch)
  18.     Little Nightmares (PC)
  19.     Part Time UFO (Switch)
  20.     Pokémon Unite (Switch)
  21.     Rage 2 (PC)
  22.     Control (PC)
  23.     The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Game of the Year Edition (PC)

Played for a while:

  •     Cyber Shadow (PC)
  •     Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair (PC)
  •     Yakuza 4 Remastered (PC)
  •     Wreckfest (PC)
  •     Taiko no Tatsujin Pop Tap Beat (Apple TV)
  •     Wonderbox: The Adventure Maker (Apple TV/Mobile)
  •     Clap Hanz Golf (Apple TV)
  •     Dragon Quest Builders 2 (PC)
  •     The Swords of Ditto: Mormo's Curse (PC)
  •     Darkest Dungeon (PC)
  •     A Plague Tale: Innocence (PC)

Older games that I'm still playing regularly:

  •     Mario Kart Tour (Mobile)

 

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Hades

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Not too long ago, I played Transistor, which had a gameplay style I didn’t like (pausing to plan combat), but surprised me in how much its charm, style and gameplay all made me end up enjoying it a lot. As someone who isn’t a fan of roguelike games, I decided to try Hades as I thought I could end up enjoying it a lot.

As with all of Supergiant’s games, the aesthetics in Hades are gorgeous, with a lovely artstyle, amazing music and great voice acting. Every screen is stunning to look at, and the characters are all incredibly charming, with lots of great dialogue as the various Greek gods (and other characters) comment on things you have done.

You play as Zagreus, the son of Hades, who wants to escape the underworld. You will fight room-by-room throughout four areas, facing a boss at the end of each one. While it is possible to finish on the first run, you will almost certainly die, getting sent back to the house of Hades, giving you a chance to talk to people and prepare for the next attempt.

Throughout each escape attempt, you will collect different resources, boons (powers) from gods and various other upgrades. Most of this is temporary and will only last for one escape attempt. The different powers you get, which will alter how you play the game and the tactics you’ll use, and the weapons you can unlock will keep the game feeling fresh.

The three main resources you will keep at the end of a run are darkness, keys and gemstones. The keys will unlock new weapons and talents, the darkness will let you upgrade talents and the gemstones let you add helpful elements to the maps, such as rooms with healing.

The downside of this is that it just turns into a game of just grinding until you think you’re good enough for the proper escape attempt, just collecting the various resources you need until you’re good enough to go. However, I actually never got to that stage.

The various boons from gods, along with other upgrades you can find (such as a Dedalus hammer, which upgrades your weapon in different ways) can vary massively in usefulness depending on how you play the game, making each run extremely luck dependent. I was focusing on a grinding run when I ended up getting an extremely powerful batch of powers. First was a second attack for my special attack, which dealt a lot of damage to all enemies nearby, then some boons which improved my special damage and added a critical hit chance (which seemed to also apply to the extra attack, too), then on top of this a boon which improved chances to get a second critical hit on an enemy and some which improved healing. This meant that I could mash the Y button and breeze through all the encounters.

Now, there is a lot more you can do after a successful escape attempt, there’s more dialogue to be found. I messed around a bit afterwards, unlocking the final weapon, along with a system that lets you upgrade the weapons. You also unlock a set of modifiers, which add additional challenges to mix things up, but ultimately playing through the same areas just doesn’t appeal to me, especially as it seems it’s more about grinding or just getting lucky than it is about learning how to beat the game.

I did really enjoy my time with Hades, even if it ultimately felt that the game itself decided it was time for me to beat it, and loved talking to all the characters. The core gameplay itself was fun, it’s just that the main elements of the structure of the game aren’t for me.

 

I Am Fish

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From the creators of Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread comes I Am Fish. It’s a platform game with the “frustrating control” style of gameplay, hiding its difficulty behind an incredibly adorable graphics style, which looks way too nice for a game about fish that want to escape to the ocean.

Four fish: a goldfish, pufferfish, piranha and flying fish, are fed magical bread while living in a pet store, gain intelligence and become friends. Three of them get purchased and taken to different homes, while the goldfish gets transferred into a small fish bowl and placed on a higher shelf. Although a bit of artistic license is taken and fish bowls in the game’s universe are perfectly spherical with a watertight lid.

While Surgeon Simulator, I Am Bread and other similar games are difficult due to purposefully bad (but still functional) controls, controlling the fish in I Am Fish is pretty simple and feels very responsive (although there is an option for a ridiculous control scheme). The dilemma is that you’re always controlling the fish itself, and the fish starts off in a ball. As it takes time for the fish to swim to the edge of the bowl, it means there’s a delay in moving, which you will have to calculate while manoeuvring around.

If this was a game about moving containers around and you controlled the container, the controls would feel pretty sluggish and bad, but the idea of controlling the fish means that you understand why things feel delayed, and as a result the controls themselves don’t feel delayed. You’re playing as the fish, not the bowl.

Most of the time, there’s usually a path to follow, with some visual clues finding the way (and checkpoints that are clearly marked from a distance so you know you are heading the right way. The bowl smashes very easily, so to get down from high places, you’ll have to figure out the route down. You won’t be spending all of the time in a bowl, as you will swim through various bodies of water like ponds, lakes, puddles and sewers, and end up in other containers, the most common being mop buckets and jars.

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The mop bucket is the easiest container to move, but the jar will cause the most frustration. In the jar, you can’t just move in the direction you want by swimming that way, you have to push forward at the left and right corners of the jar to turn it around, then in the middle to push it forward. It’s very difficult to get used to it, but quite rewarding when you get the hang of it.

One you finish the goldfish’s missions, you get to play as the other three fish, all with special powers. The pufferfish can puff himself into a ball, rolling along the ground for short periods and launching himself out of the water, the piranha can bite and destroy certain objects and the flying fish can, well, fly. Well more glides, soaring between different bodies of water.

There are 12 levels with the individual fish, all of which are great fun. They’ll all have some really tough moments, but there are lots of creative ideas that make them worthwhile, along with the satisfaction of having bested the game. You’ll swim through swers, shops, farms, markets, hospitals and more. There’s a surprising amount of variation for a game with a simple premise, and background details and story elements that you can overhear from humans talking.

After all the fish are in the ocean, you’ll get one final mission where you can swap between all four fish. I wish there were more levels played as a group as I really enjoyed the puzzles in this one, utilising the abilities of each fish to progress. There are puzzles in the individual levels as well, but they’re more straightforward as you only have a limited amount of tools.

I Am Fish is a surprisingly fun game, the difficult controls make a lot of sense and there’s an immense amount of charm in the game, with some really fun and unique ideas you’ll encounter in each level. It does have some issues, such as checkpoints occasionally being really far apart, and seagulls being annoying (like real life, I guess), but I think it’s definitely worth checking out.

 

skateBIRD

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SkateBIRD is a Tony Hawk-style skateboarding game featuring birds (including a Tiny Hawk). For a fun premise like that, a game doesn’t have to be astounding to be enjoyable, it just needs to have decent gameplay (even if it’s mostly copied from another game) and some fun levels, missions and dialogue. That’s what I was hoping for from skateBIRD, nothing mind blowing, but a cheesy, fun experience. Sadly, I ended up very disappointed.

Starting up skateBIRD, you’ll get to customise your bird, choosing from many different types of bird (all control exactly the same), hats and various other accessories. You can’t rotate the bird, so you won’t know what some of the back accessories look like until you start playing. There’s a lot of fun things to choose from, with more to find hidden in levels.

You’ll skate through five different levels: a studio apartment, the top of a building, an office, a server and a different studio apartment. The majority of the game is just grey and brown, and there’s very little in the way of background detail to look at. It’s all very drab. To make matters worse, there’s some kind of effect (depth of field perhaps) that makes things not directly next to your bird look like a blur, so most of the time the only things you can see clearly are the bird and floor. The texture of the floor itself (and other scenery) is fairly low quality, while ramps made out of magazines (and the cat photo) are extremely well detailed, creating a mitchmatch of things that just don’t fit.

The levels themselves have very little structure to them, different areas don’t flow into each other very well and you won’t find yourself chaining combos between different sections of the level, instead focusing on just getting a score in one small section. The missions also rarely use the levels well. In Tony Hawk games, sections of levels seem specifically designed for missions, while in this it seems they just came up with random ideas for missions and just worked them into somewhere in the level. Missions will involve getting a high score, doing specific tricks or collecting objects.

There’s a “arrow” in the shape of a bird at the bottom of the screen that tries to lead you towards objectives, but doesn’t take into account that thing can be on a higher section of the level, meaning you have to take a long route to try a different height. The dull colour scheme also means that items don’t stand out, and there’s no highlight or “glow” on them. There’s one in particular where you find paperclips and they’re difficult to see even looking directly at them (the image below actually contains most of the paperclips). The cutscenes are (apart from two or three instances) focused entirely on the birds, so won’t show a rough overview of where you need to go.

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I haven’t even touched on the core gameplay yet. Take one of the older Tony Hawk games (before they added things like tricks while grinding) and this aims to function in the same way. Sadly, everything feels floaty – not “better air due to bird” floaty, but in a slow and delayed way. There are a lot of corners, nooks and crannies that your bird will get stuck on, grinding only works when it feels like it.

One big difference between the gameplay of Tony Hawk and skateBIRD is the “FANCY” meter. As you perform tricks, it will fill up. This isn’t a combo meter (although that also exists), but determines your speed and how high you can jump. Crashing or bumping into something will reset it completely, although sometimes the game likes to reset it on its own. Filling it up also feels very inconsistent, sometimes a small amount of tricks on the ground is enough, sometimes doing 5 kickflips and a spin off a ramp won’t add anything. As having a high FANCY metre is necessary, the issues with it, and the control issues that can cause it to empty, lead to a lot of frustrations, and will require you to reset the missions a lot. It’s a really horrible game mechanic that isn’t fun in any way.

Restarting missions a lot also comes with other annoyances. The music in skateBIRD is surprisingly good, starting off with some odd but entertaining tracks where people give bird facts in tune to music (it feels a bit Jet Set Radio), with a bunch of rock songs you can unlock throughout the game. Starting a mission, restarting a mission and ending a mission will make the game skip to another track, you’ll unfortunately mainly hear the start of each song a lot. The starting cutscene for each mission will play every time, and you’ll have to tap A repeatedly to skip. There’s also another really odd thing about the start of missions: the place you start at (and respawn if you have to reset when you get stuck) seems to be the position your bird is in for the cutscene. This means that for a lot of missions, you start off facing away from where you need to go, sometimes facing a wall or a few times just aimed right at a drop (which means if you mash A to skip the dialogue for slightly too long, you’ll jump down when it starts and have to restart again).

The dialogue is mildly amusing. I didn’t encounter anything hilarious, but it would be entertaining enough if the gameplay was fun. One really nice feature is that you can “birbify” the words with a slider. The more “birb”, the more it sounds like a kid being silly with purposefully misspelt words and bad grammar.

For skateBIRD to be an enjoyable experience, all it needed to be was a semi-decent Tony Hawk clone. Sadly, the gameplay itself is incredibly frustrating, inconsistent and, frankly, a complete mess. It’s something you would expect from an Early Access title, not the final release.

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Time for another update, this time featuring games with no end! :hehe:

Fist of the North Star LEGENDS ReVIVE:

Fist of the North Star in a crappy mobile phone game that is jam-packed with soooo many different microtransactions and in-game currencies it'll make your eyes bleed! :laughing:
Yeah, this one is a bit of a mess really, and gameplay is practically nonexistent, but for some reason I can't stop playing it. :heh: Maybe it's one of those "so bad it's good" kind of things, or perhaps it's just the ludicrously OTT presentation that keeps me coming back. The incredibly overexcited Japanese announcer on the title screen (and in the above trailer) never fails to make me laugh. :laughing:

There's some cool crossover stuff in it too, right now I have Chun-Li and Pai Chan in my team. :D And I see Sonic is also in the game. Hopefully they add some Yakuza characters as well.
There is actually a story mode, but progress to each chapter is locked behind your overall level and it starts to take a long time to level up, especially if, like me, you don't make any purchases. But I can't say that I'm particularly interested in the story anyway, so am happy just jumping into the game for a few minutes every now and then. :grin:

 

GWENT: The Witcher Card Game:

For anyone that might not be familiar with it, Gwent is a tactical card game in the Witcher series that is also a playable minigame in the Witcher 3, where I was first introduced to it. Initially I was not a fan :heh: but the more I played it, the more I started to like it. Eventually I'd even start going out of my way to challenge as many of the NPC's in Witcher 3 that I could find! About midway through my Witcher 3 playthrough I discovered the standalone version of Gwent on GoG, at which point I was like "hell yeah!" so I downloaded it and jumped right in... and then, right out again. :laughing: What the hell? They had changed it from the version in the Witcher 3! It was all weird and needlessly complicated. :shakehead I uninstalled it almost immediately.

Fast forward to the end of my Witcher 3 playthrough, and I'm having serious Gwent withdrawal symptoms. :hehe: Decided to give GWENT: The Witcher Card Game another chance. I still hated it, but (and you know where this is going :heh:) eventually it started to click. The changes from the much simpler Witcher 3 version that seemed so terrible and inexplicable to me at first, began to make sense. And yeah, I love this game now! Not very good at it mind you, but that's to be expected given my severe lack of tactical ability. And playing against other people, rather than AI obviously makes a big difference as well. That said, I still manage to win about 50% of the time, no doubt because of the fact that I'm being really nonstrategic and doing completely unexpected and stupid moves which end up putting my opponent off. It's also the only way I'm ever able to win Pokémon battles too. :D

Anyway, I will definitely be sticking with this game for a quite a while now I reckon. It can also be played on mobile and features crossplay/progression with the PC version, which is super handy. :cool:

 

Last but not least we have...

Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout:

Oh my God! It's Takeshi's Castle the video game! :yay:

This caught my eye back when it launched but I was playing other stuff at the time so decided I would check it out at a later date. It was recently half price on Steam, so decided now was a great time to pick it up.

Ear to ear grin the moment I started playing. :grin:

This has to be one of, if not the best, slapstick comedy game ever made. It's just hilarious. :laughing: Easily my favourite battle royale game too. I managed to win a show on the second day of playing, but haven't managed it again since then (apart from in team games). Even with a lower number of players compared to most battle royale games, it's still very tricky being the last one standing. Hell of a lot of fun though. :D The way the characters look and move about is just so ridiculous, no matter what happens in a round, it's always entertaining.

However, it does get repetitive super fast! Also, there don't seem to be that many different maps/style of game, so even after a few shows it feels like you've seen everything Fall Guys has to offer. :hmm: Looks like they periodically update it with new cosmetic items and modes though, so I'm sure it'll be something that I continue to play every so often for a while to come. And any time I need a laugh, I definitely know which game to play! ;)

 

Quick mention on Yooka-Laylee. This is another game that I started playing but decided to drop. While I get what they were going for with this, the N64 platformer nostalgia thing doesn't really have much of an impact on me and I just didn't find the gameplay that fun. ::shrug: It was a similar experience to when I played the Impossible Lair earlier this year (yeah, I played them in the wrong order :heh:) just not the kind of thing that appeals to me really. I tip my hat to whoever worked on that N64 filter though! That was legitimately impressive, right down to the fact that it even made me a bit nauseous. :bowdown:

 

Spoiler

Completed:

  1.     Tetris Effect: Connected (PC)
  2.     Doom Eternal (PC)
  3.     Dragon Quest XI (PC)
  4.     The Medium (PC)
  5.     Yakuza 3 Remastered (PC)
  6.     UnderMine (PC)
  7.     Ring Fit Adventure (Switch)
  8.     Levelhead (PC)
  9.     Superhot: Mind Control Delete (PC)
  10.     Sea of Thieves (PC)
  11.     Doom (PC)
  12.     Monster Hunter Rise (Switch)
  13.     World of Demons (Apple TV)
  14.     The Wild at Heart (PC)
  15.     Just Cause 4 (PC)
  16.     Rain on Your Parade (PC)
  17.     Game Builder Garage (Switch)
  18.     Little Nightmares (PC)
  19.     Part Time UFO (Switch)
  20.     Pokémon Unite (Switch)
  21.     Rage 2 (PC)
  22.     Control (PC)
  23.     The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Game of the Year Edition (PC)
  24.     Fist of the North Star LEGENDS ReVIVE (Mobile)
  25.     GWENT: The Witcher Card Game (PC/Mobile)
  26.     Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout (PC)

Played for a while:

  •     Cyber Shadow (PC)
  •     Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair (PC)
  •     Yakuza 4 Remastered (PC)
  •     Wreckfest (PC)
  •     Taiko no Tatsujin Pop Tap Beat (Apple TV)
  •     Wonderbox: The Adventure Maker (Apple TV/Mobile)
  •     Clap Hanz Golf (Apple TV)
  •     Dragon Quest Builders 2 (PC)
  •     The Swords of Ditto: Mormo's Curse (PC)
  •     Darkest Dungeon (PC)
  •     A Plague Tale: Innocence (PC)
  •     Yooka-Laylee (PC)

Older games that I'm still playing regularly:

  •     Mario Kart Tour (Mobile)

 

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More games need that announcer from FOTNSLR.  Everything would be improved with him in it.

I will pay real, actual money for a proper game with that guy in it! You hear me SEGA?

Edited by Dcubed
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Platinum'd Ghost of Tsushima. I don't want to spend too long talking about it because I feel like I've lost two years of my life playing this game. Two quick things...

1. There's simply not enough gameplay variety, nowhere near enough. It's a perfect example of AAA devs creating a game based on a storyline or world, rather than centre it around the gameplay. Every mission is literally identical. It's laughable that more reviews didn't call this out.

2. It's also an example of why achievement systems aren't always a good thing. I'm a bit of a completionist, and unfortunately, I felt compelled to 100% this game after enjoying the first 10-15 hours. If this were on the Switch I wouldn't have done every single mission or went running after every single fox :zzz:, I'd have just played the story, beaten it and moved on, and been left with a much better experience. So I think it's more complicated than just 'achievements = better'.

The game was also really grim and depressing. I chose the less bloodthirsty ending because I'd had enough of killing in this game, even though the other option probably made more sense.

After the Platinum popped I couldn't exit to main menu and quit the game fast enough. Cool world Sucker Punch, but I don't ever want to spend another second in it.

Edited by Ronnie
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Superliminal

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Superliminal has some very interesting mechanics regarding perspective, with a Portal-like “test chamber” setting and a narrative about using dreams to beat depression and the feeling of not being good enough.

The main concept is using perspective to alter the size of objects. You will encounter drinks cans, chess pieces, boxes and other objects that you can pick up. When you drop them, they will be close to the wall away from you (or the floor under you), but the same visible size as when you picked it up. So if an object is further away, but still looks the same size, once you move closer you’ll see that it’s much bigger. You’ll resize objects to make platforms to climb across, push switches or knock stuff over.

The “test chamber” style is only the very start of the game and you’ll quickly find out that the narrative aspect of Supeliminal is its main component, with more focus on spectacle rather than puzzles. You’ll encounter a lot of neat optical illusions and tricks, but at times it feels more like a ride than a game.

What doesn’t help is a lack of consistency in the game’s mechanics. The main resizing mechanic itself is the same (except for one section of the game, where you randomly have a completely different ability for a bit), but the objects you can pick up are very specific. At first I thought it was the same kinds of things – like drinks cans or chess pieces, but then I entered a room and couldn’t interact with the chess pieces in it. It means that you’ll end up looking around for your crosshair to change to find out what you can and can’t interact with.

Another example is that the game tricks you early on with a chess piece you can’t pick up, only to find out that it’s warped paint that just looks like a chess piece from a certain angle, but the next section of the game uses the concept of finding the correct perspective (using paint on walls) to turn the pain into a 3D object you can move. The lack of consistent rules just adds to the feeling that it’s a theme park, not a puzzle game.

So while the puzzles are underwhelming, Superliminal’s short length makes it worth playing just for the visual spectacles the game has. The interactive part of it is still important, as you will move around to examine the optical illusions. The objects you interact with are always everyday objects (one of the notes you can find lampshades this by asking why nobody dreams of any interesting or fictional objects), but I think they enhance the absurdity of it somewhat.

There is an additional challenge mode. This lets you replay the puzzles from the game but with some restrictions, such as only picking up X amount of times or jumping X amount of times, but I find this just ruins the fun of messing about and it just amounts to remembering the final solution and just doing that. It would have been nice to have new puzzles to solve.

 

Last Stop

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Last Stop is an “interactive film” type game set in London. It follows the daily lives of three characters – John, Meena and Donna – until they end up encountering some supernatural elements. On a chapter-by-chapter basis, you can choose which order to play them in, but must play through all three before you can start the next chapter as anyone.

John Smith is a middle-aged single dad, looking after his daughter Molly. An incident with a stranger causes him and his neighbor – a mid-20s game designer called Jack – to switch bodies. They try to act as each other with some really fun heist-style segments (with John’s daughter, Molly, commenting on it and pointing out flaws), while also trying to figure out how to go back.

Meena is an agent for a mysterious agency, while at home she’s keeping an affair a secret. It takes a while for her story to pick up as she’s rather unlikable, and the best parts of her story are when she starts encountering the other characters fairly late on.

Donna is a high school student, who encounters a strange man with glowing eyes. Her friend knocks him out and, worried that he’ll go to the police, they tie him up and take turns watching him, who stays silent until it’s just him and Donna.

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The gameplay of the game is quite simple, you walk around as each character, interacting with the small amount of things it allows you to (although sometimes even walking will be automated). You will get conversation options, but these just slightly alter the tone of the conversation and won’t affect the overall story, there’s no “wrong” option, you’ll end up in the same places no matter what. There are a few minigames, such as pressing musical notes or throwing bottles, which are a nice distraction but failing doesn’t change anything.

That said, the characters and dialogue are very engaging, especially in John and Jack’s segment, and the mystery will keep you wanting more until you get to the end. Unfortunately, the ending itself is a bit of a let down. The final section is very over the top, and then the game will give each character a choice on what they want to do.

Meena and Donna are pretty much given a “no good option” choice at the end, while’s John’s choice is to swap bodies or to keep his new one – a choice which comes out of nowhere as for the entire game he never gives it a moment’s notice, clearly being offended that someone would think he would be so low when other characters suggest it. I can think of a better choice John should have been given, but can’t go into details without spoilers.

That said, Last Stop is still worth a playthrough, for all the moments leading up to the ending, and especially the interactions between Jack, John and Molly.

 

Sable

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Take one look at Sable and the most striking thing about it will be instantly obvious: it has an incredibly unique art style for a video game, inspired by Mœbius. It looks absolutely stunning and most screenshots look like a hand drawn 2D image, it’s amazing to look at and is pulled off extremely well.

During the day, you’ll see an impressive amount of beautiful colours. However, at night (and in some locations), it opts for a more washed out style, and can even go to a single shade of grey with just black lines. The lack of colour is something I found off-putting, and I wished you could skip until the daytime, but the only thing you can do is let the game run. Unfortunately, over half of your time will be spent playing the game with the washed out colours, it’s a big shame when you approach something that looks impressive for the first time, but don’t get to see its true beauty. I even drove into water occasionally as when the colours are washed out, you can’t tell the difference between water and land.

There are also a lot of visual issues which can sour the looks of the game somewhat, such as flickering shadows (particularly in the main city), and the sky flicking between two vastly different colours instead of transitioning between them. The game will also freeze a lot for very short (half a second) periods, making it very choppy. Some people will also find the animation framerate for walking, which is intentionally low, nauseating, but I personally loved the look of it.

Sable is heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, with similar exploration, climbing and gliding mechanics. There’s no combat in Sable, so it focuses entirely on exploration, fetch quests and a bit of puzzles and platforming. Climbing is not quite “climb anything” like BOTW, as there are lots of areas you’ll never be able to climb up, and some surfaces can’t be climbed on (frustratingly, some surfaces you have no idea you can’t climb on until it’s too late).

The world of Sable is….very empty. I felt like it could have been condensed a lot, as vast areas will have absolutely nothing in it. The top left half of the map, for example, doesn’t seem to have anything to interact with or find at all. When you do discover stuff, it does feel amazing, and at its best it feels like you’re a true explorer, but most of the time you are traversing an empty land on your hoverbike.

The hoverbike itself should be fun, but unfortunately Sable fails to deliver on this aspect. The bikes (you can buy parts and customise), will bounce around, seemingly hitting invisible objects and spinning out of control. It spoils the flow of the game and is a constant reminder that you’re playing a game. If you get separated from your bike, you can call it and it will drive to you in real time. The pathfinding is not good at all, and your bike will often fall through the map when trying to get to you, meaning you have to fast travel a few times to try and get it to respawn properly.

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There are a lot of other bugs in Sable, too. Fast travelling only to find an empty white void, objects clipping through the main character, menus getting broken, controls becoming unresponsive, the camera swerving unresponsively in a random direction, quests getting deselected (which happens every time you pick up an item) and many others. The oddest is probably encountering many bushes with a “talk” symbol, which vanish when you try to interact with them. There’s also a lack of detail in some areas, such as some text not fitting the text box, so you can’t read the full description. One major bug can also cause you to be locked out of one of the larger quests if you explore one of the locations in it too early.

The story of Sable is about the young heroine (called Sable) setting off on her “gliding”, a quest to find masks and discover what your purpose in life will be. You need to collect badges to turn into masks, each one representing a different way of life (such as cartographer, machinist and guard). Once you have a couple of masks, you can return to make your choice (the end of the game) or carry on exploring until you feel you are ready. The masks have no gameplay relevance (even though the descriptions imply they do), but you will occasionally get new dialogue due to them.

The background lore is very interesting, you will find small snippets in crashed ships and get to piece together the history of this world, although some details are still kept under wraps. Dialogue is charming, especially the “narration” style for Sable herself. It will make you want to explore and find people, even with the heavy amount of bugs. The music is also extremely wonderful, matching the atmosphere perfectly.

In its current state, I can’t recommend Sable at all. Hopefully the game will get patched enough to feel completed, but at the moment the bugs, as well as other annoyances, impact the gameplay far too much.

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I've had Kentucky Route Zero on my backlog for what seems like forever (a quick google shows the TV version came out in January 2020) and I finally got around to playing it at the start of September and what else is there to say except this game is my jam? It took me a little while to acclimatise to the experience, I wasn't immediately smitten, but by the end of the first episode I was well and truly on board. I read through Lanark by Alasdair Gray for the first time earlier in the year and Kentucky Route Zero stirred up similar feelings - the utterly Kafaesque and baffling logic made it feel very much like an interactive version of that book. It definitely tailed off to a certain extent towards the end, it didn't stick the landing as well as I had hoped, but those few evenings playing through the bulk of the game left quite an impression on me. I have to mention the musical interludes though, they were hands down some of the most captivating moments I've experienced in the medium, stand out sections in already stellar experience. 

Next up I thought I would give Beyond: Two Souls a go, I played Heavy Rain recently and I was not impressed at all but I figured that Quantic Dream might have done better with the follow up and, for the most part, I was correct. Page and Defoe elevate the performances far beyond the schlocky, wooden acting on show in Heavy Rain and the range of interactivity tends to be more interesting here too but it still suffers from a lot of the same problems as Quantic Dream's first PS3 outing. The writing is still sub-par, taking sudden turns that don't seem to make any sense and in general moving around the environments feels as stiff as it was in Heavy Rain, ruining any success the team has in immersing the player into the world and its story. The way the narrative was structured did work to the games benefit though, ensuring that there were questions on my mind going into most chapters, but on the whole it was a pretty average experience - although it has redeemed Quantic Dream enough in my mind to want to give Detroit a go when the mood strikes me.

I dusted off my Wii U gamepad and downloaded the Virtual Console version of Metroid Prime: Hunters next. Visually, even with the obvious jaggies on my 4K TV, it was instantly impressive - it does a great job at recreating the Gamecube visuals on a vastly underpowered system but the controls took a while to get used to, I tried several different set ups but eventually settled on having the TV show the top screen while the gamepad showed the touch screen. I figured that exploration would be pretty limited compared to its siblings on more powerful hardware and first impression were that it was going to take place in more restrictive, indoor environments but the level design actually ends up being more varied than I first feared. The worlds still feel very much like levels but the more open environments on the planets help to make it feel like more of a world. Unfortunately it suffers a lot from repeated boss fights, having to fight the same two bosses over and over was pretty tedious, especially as the fights don't get shorter as you get further in the game, the battles for the last two Octoliths changed things up a little bit but not enough to redeem the concept. The difficulty spike for the final boss felt pretty sharp though, it might have just been me being rubbish but it felt like a marked step up from the rest of the game and it took me a while to defeat it. I've played through every Metroid over the last few years (apart from the NES original and the Game Boy sequel - but I've played the remakes so I've technically experienced everything the series has to offer) and Hunters is definitely the weakest entry but it was still a lot of fun to play through and it must have been mind blowing to play this on a Nintendo DS in 2006.

Last up I continued my Castlevania odyssey by playing through Castlevania: Bloodlines on Switch. I think this is technically the first Mega Drive game that I've ever played but even for a novice the telltale visual differences from the SNES are plain to see, sprites are definitely a bit smaller and transparency is clearly bodged with dithering techniques but its still undoubtedly Castlevania. I was a bit disappointed with how much more linear the level design is than something like Rondo of Blood but I suppose they were working with more limited storage capacity. I don't feel like I was properly able to engage with the game, it was a nice distraction to play through a couple of levels a night but it didn't leave a mark like Rondo & Symphony did, I'm interested to check out the Game Boy entries that are in the collection but my next taste of proper-Castlevania will undoubtedly come from the recently released Advanced collection that I will be picking up when I've got a few more games crossed off my backlog.

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Two more games to add to the list (both very timely!)

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Wait a second... Super Monkey Ball Deluxe didn't come out on the Gamecube you say? It was a PS2/Xbox port you suggest? Well... you'd be right... AND YOU'D BE WRONG!

Thanks to the power of insane fans with crazy software engineering skills; the above is now a reality.  Super Monkey Ball Deluxe is now available for YOUR Nintendo Gamecube!

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As God intended

 

First, a bit of context.  Super Monkey Ball 1 & 2 were released on the Nintendo Gamecube back in 2001 & 2002 respectively; as you all know.  However, in 2005, the two games were compiled together into one game, alongside 47 brand new stages recovered from the cancelled Super Monkey Ball 3: Banana Crazy, into one giant game called Super Monkey Ball Deluxe that was only originally released on the PS2 and Xbox.  This game is basically exactly like Sonic Delta, in that it's a port of Super Monkey Ball 2 with all the content from the other games grafted onto it; the only difference being that it was an actual official release as opposed to a fan-made project.

However, Super Monkey Ball Deluxe was somewhat of a botched port overall; with downgraded graphics & sound on both platforms (but especially on PS2; now running at a miserable 30FPS that even drops further still!), a myriad of glitches and worst of all, they botched the controls something fierce.  Quite frankly, Super Monkey Ball Deluxe was a poor way to play two of SEGA's very best games... but it did actually have extra content that was worth playing.  If only there was a way to play through this extra content on its original platform... OH WAIT! NOW THERE IS A WAY!! :D

Naturally I just had to give this a try; and I can confirm that it does indeed run on real Gamecube hardware like a champ! The fans have basically done exactly what SEGA did, they took Super Monkey Ball 2 and squashed all of the stages from SMB1 and SMBDX into SMB2! The result is a port of Super Monkey Ball Deluxe that looks and runs far better than the official release ever did on PS2/Xbox! (And indeed, offers a much better experience than the recently released HD Remake to boot ;)).

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Has much better physics than the HD Remake.  Fans do what SEGADon't.

 

The port is almost completely perfect.  Barring a few minor issues with Practice Mode not displaying its stage list correctly, a few bits of slowdown in some stages and the attract mode videos going out of sync; this is basically a commercial quality port that is, quite frankly, the best way to play Super Monkey Ball Deluxe today.

Of course, that then begs the question, is Super Monkey Ball Deluxe the definitive Super Monkey Ball game? Are these games better for having been combined into one massive game? Honestly? The answer is no.

Super Monkey Ball is an arcade game, and though Super Monkey Ball 2 was designed for a home console? It too was designed as an arcade game first and foremost.  At the maximum game length/difficulty (Expert Mode; 50 Stages), you can blast through either game in just about an hour or so.  Here though? Beginner Mode starts at a whopping 30 stages (including the Beginner Extra stages, that makes 40; that's already almost as long as Expert Mode!), Advanced is 70 stages long (becoming a ridiculous 90 with the Extra stages), and Expert is now a staggering 100 stages long! (An eye watering 120 with Expert Extra!).  That is absolutely exhausting to go through in one sitting! And if you thought beating Expert without losing a single Continue in SMB1 to unlock Master Mode was hard!? Yeah... you aren't pulling this off in Deluxe without unlocking the 99 Lives option!

But it doesn't end there! Because once you beat Beginner, Advanced and Expert? You unlock the utterly monstrous Ultimate Mode... 300 STAGES BACK TO BACK!!!

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Your eyes will fallout of your head before you beat Ultimate Mode

 

Needless to say, I could not stomach Ultimate Mode.  There's something to be said for there being too much of a good thing here; and that saying definitely applies in this case.

What about the new 47 stages that were added into the game though? Are they any good? Well I'm glad you asked, because the answer is YES! The new stages are excellent, and fit right in with the original ones from SMB1 & SMB2 perfectly.  I'm really glad that I got the chance to play them with proper controls at last; they all play great here.  It's definitely well worth trying this port out to experience them.

Overall, I would not choose to play Super Monkey Ball Deluxe over the original Super Monkey Ball 1 and Super Monkey Ball 2 as seperate games; I think that they are better seperated, as they lose their arcade immediacy when slammed together, and the absolute marathon presented here in Deluxe is just absolutely crushing to all but the absolute most hardcore of the hardcore Monkey Ball players.  That being said though? It's definitely worth checking out for any fan of the first two titles, not only for the ability to play the additional Deluxe stages, but also for the novelty of seeing two games grafted together.  I don't think that this experiment works as well as Sonic Delta does, nor do I feel that the games benefit from the grafting process like Sonic's MD outings do, but it's definitely well worth experiencing.  At the very least, I'm glad to see that Deluxe finally has proper representation in Gamecube form; like it should always have been.  And you'll still be getting a much better experience than the crappy HD remake on Switch either way!

 

Next...

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Now, I didn't plan on playing through the Metroid games before Metroid Dread comes out; I didn't want to play too many Metroid games within a short timeframe, as I wanted to experience Metroid Dread feeling as fresh as possible... but I just couldn't help myself! I suddenly found myself really in the mood to play through Metroid Fusion again, and I simply couldn't resist the call.  So I fired up my Wii U, cranked up my surround sound system and delved once more onto the BSL Research Station.

Immediately I am greeted with this...

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Fucking CHILLS!

 

... and I am home again.  Now I know I previously mentioned a bit of background regarding Metroid Fusion when I did my writeup about Metroid Zero Mission, so I won't repeat myself here.  You all know that Metroid Fusion is, by far, the most linear game in the series; and that it reneges on the series' trademark exploration and freedom in favour of a tightly scripted and narrative driven experience.  The question here though, is whether or not Metroid Fusion's tradeoff was worth it and whether or not it succeeds at what it sets out to do.  I am of the firm belief that... yes! It absolutely does succeed at almost everything it attempts to accomplish.

Metroid Fusion is not a horror game, but it absolutely succeeds at drawing upon elements of horror to craft a dread atmosphere that leaves the player constantly feeling at unease.  This game represents a corruption of the Metroid series in almost every sense; you are never free to explore, you are never granted a feeling of safety, and you never get to the stage where you feel overwhelmingly powerful.  Samus is no longer the hunter, but rather the one being hunted.  And even the Galactic Federation turn out to be just as evil as the Space Pirates were! Nintendo R&D1 successfully subvert just about everything that players knew about the Metroid series up until this point; and it's done in brilliantly stylish fashion.

Here, Super Metroid is almost an enemy to be taken down, perhaps embodied no better than by the SAX itself; a literal incarnation of Samus from Super Metroid, complete with her end-game arsenal, presented as your greatest enemy.  Metroid Fusion is a firm statement by Nintendo R&D1 that the Metroid series is not just bound by the formula set up by the original NES Metroid and Super Metroid; but rather it is something that can be adapted into other forms that can deliver different experiences.  Yes, Metroid Fusion is a much more linear and scripted affair than Super Metroid, but that allows it to present a much more dynamic and intricately crafted play space that changes unexpectedly (though, of course, that element of surprise is somewhat lost after your first playthrough).  No matter how many times I play through this game though, I still love all of the scripted moments though; be they the dread-inducing encounters with the SAX, the exciting mid-game self-destruct sequence, the power outage, Nightmare's escape from captivity... they're all just handled so well, and bring so many well designed and exciting moments.  Metroid Fusion is just a brilliant action platformer that never has a dull moment!

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I will never not get chills down my spine when I come across this scene

 

The linearity of Metroid Fusion does bring about issues with exploration... but these do subside towards the end of the game; as it does grant you the opportunity to freely explore the BSL station to your heart's content at the end-game.  And here, the game's excellent level design really shines; as its myriad of items are hidden in devious fashion, requiring insane shinesparking skills to solve the environmental puzzles needed to get to each hidden powerup.  While the game does lack in freedom throughout the main story, it is a very satisfying game to attain 100% completion in (or indeed, 1% completion; should you brave the challenge of a minimal percentage run!).  Speaking of level design and freedom... while it's true that Metroid Fusion is the most linear game in the series, it's actually not true that this game tells you exactly where to go.  Sure, at the start of the game you're held by the hand, but by the time you reach Sector 2, you're already mostly on your own to figure out how to get to your target destination.  Cleverly, the map only shows a fraction of the total area that you'll need to explore; it's up to you to chart the uncharted territory on your own!

 

The linearity also comes along with benefits to the action combat part of the game, with more engaging enemy and boss encounters than what you got in Super Metroid.  Simply put, Metroid Fusion has some of the very best and most exciting boss battles in the whole series; especially if you are attempting a 1% challenge run! They're all brilliant!

The story is also far more engaging and intricate than in previous entries; and it's genuinely pretty gripping.  It's not overly complex, but it's just told really well, with brilliant environmental story telling matched with clever foreshadowing, mood, contrast and timing used throughout.  The moment when you step into the Metroid Breeding Lab is just absolutely spine tingling stuff! Quite how Sakamoto went from this to the absolute disaster that was Other M's story is beyond me, but that doesn't take away from what they accomplished with Fusion.

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Ahh yes, the bastard that ruined countless 1% challenge runs... This nightmare still haunts my dreams...

 

If there is anything I have to complain about with Fusion though? It's perhaps the ending... which cribs a bit too much from Super Metroid for my liking (like, come on! The final Metroid encounter is far too similar to the sequence where the Baby saves you from Super Metroid!).  Also, I feel that the game could've done a bit more with the idea of having inter-connections between the different Sectors.  This only really crops up once throughout the main story (though there are more hidden connections if you go off the beaten path looking for powerups), and it feels like a bit of an underutilised idea.  Also, yes, I would've liked to see a bit more freedom to perform sequence breaking, but I understand that this isn't what the game was going for; it just didn't fit in line with Metroid Fusion's goals, and that's ok.  Metroid Fusion sets out to prove that the Metroid series isn't just confined to repeat the Super Metroid formula ad-nauseum, and it absolutely succeeds on that front.

What is less of a success though is the selection of items.  Metroid Fusion only introduces two "new" items to the series and really? I'd barely even call them new items at all.  You get the Ice Missile (which is, let's face it, a rebadged Ice Beam) and the Diffusion Missiles; literally useless outside of a couple of rooms where it acts as a glorified key.  Not very exciting stuff, and I was disappointed with the lack of real new items, even all the way back in 2002.  This is something I really hope that Metroid Dread rectifies.

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A lame addition, even for its time

 

But that's it.  Metroid Fusion is an absolute belter of an action platformer, and is one of the best games Nintendo have ever made.  It's absolutely insane to think that I have waited more than half of my entire lifetime for a true follow-up; but we're just a scant two days and a couple of hours away! Metroid Dread has some awfully big shoes to fill; and I absolutely cannot wait to see how they follow up this masterpiece! I just hope that Nintendo are brave enough to not just be content with letting Metroid Dread stand in the shadows of the past; but rather allow themselves to push the Metroid series in bold new directions with this final installment.  If there's any lesson that Nintendo needs to learn from Metroid Fusion? It's that they're at their best when they're not beholden to the past and aren't afraid to experiment with pushing their series' into new, scary and uncharted places.

See you next mission.

 

And with that?

Spoiler

New Super Mario Bros 2

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX (MSU-1 Switch Remake Music Edition)

Pilotwings 64

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & The Blade of Light

Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance

Super Mario 3D World (Switch Version)

Perfect Dark Zero

Castlevania: Circle of the Moon

Sabrewulf (GBA)

Actraiser

Sonic Delta (Sonic 1,2 and 3&K Combined!)

Bowser's Fury

Tales of Game's Presents Chef Boyardee's Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa

Terranigma

Metroid II: Return of Samus

Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney

Ace Attorney: Justice for All

Dicey Dungeons

Killer 7

Ace Attorney: Trials & Tribulations

Twelve Minutes

Metroid Zero Mission (Normal Difficulty, Any% casual playthrough)

Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes

Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind

Super Monkey Ball Deluxe (Gamecube Mod)

Metroid Fusion (Normal Difficulty, Any% casual playthrough)

 

Edited by Dcubed
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While I've been taking it easy as of late, I'm chomping at the bit to play Metroid Dread, and I thought I needed to play something in preparation for it. I did play a Super Metroid Randomizer, which, while fun, sadly ended in failure. As the last week loomed, I thought, "I can't play a new Metroidvania now, I'll get burned on the genre for sure".

And then it hit me, I should play a Stealth game. A 2D one, a short one. So I went into my Steam backlog and fetched:

Master Spy

That's some excellent music. Check the full OST!

Like with Double Dragon Neon, I first heard of this game when browsing VG music on Youtube, and ran into the track above. I looked up the game, thought it looked neat, and eventually got it because it was so cheap (and I got the version with the Soundtrack too). It seems to be the only notable game from indie developer TURBOGUN, as they've been nothing but radio silence since the game's original release in 2015.

Anyway, Master Spy is a surprisingly fast 2D platformer, and the stealth elements consist of pretty much only "Don't let guards/cameras see you or you fail instantly", because with everything else (like guard dogs or traps) you just need to avoid danger like a regular platformer. There's a button to jump, one to toggle on an invisibility cloak (guards won't see you, but you move much slower), and an air-dash technique that they don't tell you about (but will absolutely need for lategame levels). The goal of each level is to collect every keycard and then reach the exit.

Presentation-wise, it's meant to look like games from the late 80s (NES and Pentium alike), with humans looking like Prince of Persia, and cutscenes looking like Ninja Gaiden. Screenshots from the Steam page seemed to have a CRT+scanlines sort of filter, but I didn't find the option on the game itself (I likely missed something really obvious). The game nails the aesthetic look it's going for - albeit with a much higher level of detail - so I don't have any complaints, except that, in some places, it wasn't too clear on what I could interact with or not.

The game is fairly short, with 5 missions total, with around 10 levels per mission (plus 8 bonus secret levels), but it's the right length. Doesn't overstay its welcome, and it keeps introducing new obstacles/enemies well into the final levels, including *gasp* guards that actually react to sound! Also you have to sneak around sharks and tigers, it gets wild. It should take 3-5 hours to finish (and indeed, its brevity is why I picked this to play before Metroid Dread drops).

As for my complaints... this game gets hard. Really hard. Super Meat Boy hard. I'm not even joking, as around Mission 4, the levels are filled with seesaws, crushing pistons, flamethrowers, etc. and in this environment, the guards' eyesight may as well just be yet another death laser, considering their function (and considering the plot and context, I really don't see how being briefly seen should constitute an instant Game Over).

I started the game on Master (Hard) difficulty because I'm such a masochist badass, but had to reduce it to Operative (Normal) at the end of Mission 4 because it was getting so bad. As it turns out, difficulty levels don't change level design or AI or anything, the only thing is that Operative actually has several mid-level checkpoints... and yeah, that helped a lot, actually. It also made the game even more like Super Meat Boy.

Unlike Meat Boy, Master Spy doesn't have fancy wall slides or malleable physics, the execution is all do-or-die, and God forbid if you're one pixel off, or one half-second late (and if the game decides to hiccup, you certainly will be). This pixel-perfect requirement to beat the game made it too frustrating by the end.

To end this review on a better note, I should mention the plot... At first I thought it would just be a generic plot involving a conspiracy and a predictable twist villain reveal, all in cheesy good fun. But it soon turned into something more unexpected and... dumb. Very entertainingly so.

Spoiler

We start the plot with Master Spy (that's his actual name, yes) being hired by a MegaCorp CEO called Ludwig Gale. He wants you to recover a disc, stolen by a hacker, containing highly sensitive information "that will cause a commotion on the global situation". They negotiate the price ("I'll pay you 10.000!" "I'll only do it for 50.000" "What a hard bargain! I'll pay you 100.000!") and off he goes to steal back the disc from a rival CEO.

When he gets there, the dude is dead. Evidence suggests that Chinese assassins did it, so off goes Master Spy to talk to them. When he gets there, the Chinese assassins welcome him respectfully as a colleague, but refuse to reveal their employer... and at that moment, the hacker who stole the disc presses some buttons that activate the assassins' suicide switches (why did they even have that? And why were they connected to the internet!?), and reveals that he took over one of Ludwig's factories. Master Spy invades the factory, and when he reaches the hacker, we get the oh-so-predictable twist that Ludwig's daughter Lily is behind all this. She shoots the hacker in the head, and destroys the factory with both Master Spy and the disc inside.

And it is then revealed that the TRUE mastermind behind all of this is... Ludwig Gale. Which means... he told his daughter to hire a hacker to steal his own disc, frame a rival CEO, then hire Chinese assassins to kill said rival, then kill the assassins (definitely too many steps here), then... take over one of his own factories... in order to lure and kill the Master Spy that he himself hired in the first place... to recover the disc that he himself stole.

And we're not done yet! We then get a cutscene to reveal that Ludwig Gale's company was working on a computer that recognizes any face on the planet... and immediately knows everything about that person - including criminal records and tax information - and reveals it out loud, in public. He is supremely confident that nobody will see this as scandalous, nor suspect that he's been stealing/acquiring private metadata from people, and proceeds to reveal and sell this computer for 2 million each. It's hard to communicate just how supremely irrelevant this 2-minute cutscene is towards everything else.

Anyway, Master Spy survived, and he's here to invade Ludwig's yacht for the final mission. When he reaches Ludiwg, it turns out... the spy doesn't really care for any of the convoluted machinations, or the murder attempt. He's just here to finish the contract: simply return the disc, and collect the 100.000, as promised. But Ludwig Gale is not a man to keep things simple! He decides to release heat-seeking murder-balls on Master Spy, turns his own yacht into a submarine (with millionaire guests/clients still aboard), kills his own daughter just to slow Spy down, then runs towards the escape pod, seeking to leave Master Spy stuck on an underwater deathtrap forever.

And why did he go to such lengths? Because he didn't wanna pay the 100.000. Seriously, that's it. That's our villain, ladies and gentlemen. He had 10 million in a briefcase, but didn't want to pay for shit. Master Spy simply catches up to him, whoops his ass in a fight, lays the disc next to him, and takes the 100.000, as he said he would. Like an honourable professional.

But it wasn't enough for this game to leave it at that! It just... had to have more!

If you complete the 8 secret bonus levels, you actually unlock some alternate cutscenes along the way. Clearly, this plot wasn't complicated enough.

So, instead of shooting the hacker, Lily hears him out: it turns out that the disc that Ludwig ordered to be stolen from himself did contain highly personal information about Ludwig and Lily. Reading it makes the hacker say she's awesome, and swears allegiance to her. As a result, she secretly keeps him alive instead of shooting him.

And in the end, after Spy leaves with the 100.000, we get a flashback from Ludwig... in which it's revealed "Ludwig" used to be an assassin who murdered the real Ludwig Gale and his wife. Their infant daughter caught him in the act and immediately told him "Hey, did you notice you can replace him? You can be my new daddy now", and so he did.

The flashback ends, but then a shadowy figure appears, accompanied by Chinese assassins, Lily Gale (oh, I guess she survived, then?), and the hacker. The figure says that Lily brought them the top-secret info on the disc which was, indeed, this "Ludwig impersonation" business we just saw in the flashback. They're here to kill him and tie all the loose ends. Fake Ludwig's last words are that Master Spy will destroy them all as well someday. A hook for a sequel that never was, most likely.

...

Why the fuck Ludwig actually got his own real disc stolen by himself, and why he needlessly hired a Master Spy to retrieve it from himself is highly unclear. Whatever the reason, it got him killed. By his fake daughter, whose parents he murdered in front of her. Jesus Christ, this game.

For all of my frustrations with the game's difficulty, this plot was needlessly contrived and deliciously funny. The sort of thing that deserves to be on the "So bad, it's good?" thread. The fact that the game's script feels as badly written as the Ninja Gaidens of yore is the icing on the cake.

In conclusion, this game turned out to not be very satisfying as a Stealth game, but it's a rather enjoyable 2D Platformer for sure, as long as you're willing to lower the difficulty when needed. And the insane turns that the plot took were a hidden gem all on its own. Finally, the soundtrack is legitimately great, I don't regret getting this album.

  My 2021 log (Hide contents)

 

Played/Beat/Completed:

-Fire Emblem: Three Houses (2019) Beat (January 9th)

-Fatal Fury Special (1993) No Goal (January 17th)

-Art of Fighting 2 (1994) No Goal (January 19th)

-Samurai Shodown II (1994) No Goal (January 20th)

-The Last Blade (1997) No Goal (January 22nd)

-Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 - The Newcomers (1998) No Goal (January 22nd)

-King of Fighters 2000 (2000) No Goal (January 23rd)

-King of Fighters 2002 (2002) No Goal (January 23rd)

-Samurai Shodown V Special (2004) No Goal (January 23rd)

-Harmo Knight (2012) Beat (January 25th)

-Furi (2016) Completed (January 31st)

-Life is Strange (Episode 1) (2015) Beat (February 13th)

-The Stanley Parable (2013) Completed (February 14th)

-1979 Revolution: Black Friday (2016) Beat (February 17th)

-Azure Striker Gunvolt (2014) Beat (March 6th)

-Hitman: Blood Money (2006) Completed (March 10th)

-A Short Hike (2019) Completed (March 16th)

-ABZÛ (2016) Beat (March 20th)

-Silence (2016) Completed (March 27th)

-Huniepop 2: Double Date (2021) Completed (April 13th)

-Horned Knight (2021) Completed (April 14th)

-Inspector Zé e Robot Palhaço em: Crime no Hotel Lisboa (2013) Completed (April 18th)

-Munin (2014) Completed (April 25th)

-As Aventuras Interactivas de Dog Mendonça e Pizzaboy (2016) Completed (April 27th)

-Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light (1990) Completed (May 8th)

-Castlevania II Belmont's Revenge (1991) Completed (May 20th)

-Beautiful Desolation (2020) Beat (May 30th)

-Kid Dracula (1990) Completed (June 5th)

-Castlevania Bloodlines (1993) Beat (June 5th)

-Dr.Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine (1993) Completed (June 6th)

-Ristar (1995) Beat (June 13th)

-Nights into Dreams (1996) Beat (June 20th)

-Shantae: Risky's Revenge (2010) Beat (July 4th)

-Double Dragon Neon (2012) Beat (July 18th)

-A Boy and His Blob (2009) Completed (August 19th)

-Steamworld Heist (2015) Completed (September 5th)

-Master Spy (2015) Beat (October 7th)

 

Dropped:

-Perfect Angle (2015) (January 20th)

-Codename S.T.E.A.M. (2015) (May 16th)

-Castlevania - The Adventure (1989) (May 19th)

-Sonic 4: Episode I (2010) (June 7th)

-Sonic 4: Episode II (2012) (June 7th)

-Puzzle & Dragons Z + Puzzle & Dragons: Super Mario Bros. Edition (2015) (June 10th)

-Adventure Bar Story (2012) (July 20th)

-Super Metroid Randomizer (???)  (September 18th)

Bring on Metroid!

Edited by Jonnas
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Holy shit @ that plot synopsis @Jonnas! The definitely belongs in the So Bad It’s Good thread!
 

Might just have to watch a let’s play at some point :laughing:

Edited by Dcubed
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OK, when was my last Gaming Diary entry?

 

*checks thread*

 

*August 9*

 

OK diary, we have a lot of catching up to do!

 

So I played through Super Castlevania IV a bit more, all the way until towards the end of the game but never actually beat it. Production on more Gaming Anniversaries videos was getting in the way which includes actually playing the games.

 

 

So I went back to Sonic Adventure 2 Battle for some recording and in the process managed to knock out a few more A Ranks. and complete a few missions. Finally, I have finished all of the level missions in the game and gotten all the emblems. The A Ranks and the Chao Garden are now my biggest obstacles to 100% but since I was only playing for footage I moved on to Sonic Heroes quickly but that was just messing around for footage.

 

 

Then it happened, I played through the entirety of Shadow the Hedgehog from beginning to the end of the last story. At least it was for footage so I could complain about the game in a video straight after! But yeah, I took the path of least resistance to get all the Emerlads and as a result I could pretty much do Westopolis, Glyphic Canyon, Prison Island and Sky Troops without the sound on at all!

 

 

The recording continued as I then picked up Sonic and the Secret Rings which I didn't make much progress on, just doing stuff I'd done before for footage. Things changed when I got to Sonic Unleashed, this was the first time since I beat the game that I picked it up and... this game holds up well! Really enjoyed the daytime stages and didn;t really find the werehog to be that bad when replaying. I went out of my way to get missing Sun and Moon medals this time around and in the end I stopped short of 100% completion of the game. So most of the stuff in the game I was able to unlock. This was on the Wii version btw. Then I went back to Sonic Mania and got all the Chaos Emeralds, getting the true final boss battle in the process.

 

 

 

Hasn't just been Sonic games I've been playing although there have been quite a lot of those for the video that was in production. September saw me end my game purchase drought, I hadn't bought a new game since Nier Replicant in April but in September I picked up a game I'd been wanting to get for a while, Yooka Laylee and the Impossible Lair. I am currently up to Chapter 14 (Hazard Hangar I think its called) and the last I did was find the secret exit, though I did open up the entire overworld. Soundtrack is really good, it definitely feels like the Tropical Freeze sequel we never got. Level design is pretty good too though I find the penalty for getting hit isn't so great and with no lives its just easier to die after you hit a checkpoint if you only have Yooka available. Also I think the timeframe for when I picked up this game was not ideal due to the amount of Sonic games I needed to play so Impossible Lair is definitely something I still need to finish.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Didn't realise the surface was climable here)

 

 

But then Toby Fox had to go and drop Deltarune Chapter 2 on everybody. I mean, come on Toby, really? So, I downloaded that and played through Deltarune Chapter 2. Progresses things in an interesting direction that's for sure. I did a pacificst route if anyone is curious, didn't kill a single enemy aside from perhaps when fighting was the only option

 

 

Spoiler

in the Punch out style final boss against Queen.

 

By far the funniest moment in the entire game was this though

 

 

Other interesting moments...

 

 

 

 

And if THAT wasn't enough my most anticipated game of the year came out and Metroid Dread is so good. This is some of the best map design in a Metroid game I've seen in YEARS. They really managed to create a complex an interweiving map while simulatenously making the route through the game fairly straight forward. But you also have plenty of room to go off the beaten path to find all the upgrades.

 

At first it seems like the game might be something of a procession but...

 

Spoiler

After you get to Ferenia everything changes. You learn that there are in fact two Chozo still alive and you have a conversation with one of them. I like how this is done, the Chozo is speaking in its native language with text to translate but then Samus talks for the first time in this game and thankfully its done in Chozo language which is a nice attention to detail, something she would have learned growing up with bird people.

 

Finding out that the Metroid DNA is why the EMMI is after you is an interesting thing. I had a feeling that the rogue Chozo, now I know to be called Raven Beak, was responsible for the EMMIs attacking but I didn't know why. Then all the EMMI get deactivated and you're free to roam around the zones in new areas without being detected, not that you go through many of those zones mind. More upgrades are acquire and bosses fought and then you stumble on the game's big twist. A very contained area by the name of Elun and it turns out, yes, the X Parasite still lives. This is something I don't know how to feel about, I have questions over how the parasite was still able to survive but I suspect Raven Beak may have brought the Parasite to ZDR or Raven Beak himself was infected by the X Parasite when he killed all of the Chozo... well, all but the one he needed alive for his plans. But yeah, looks like this has unforseen ramifications as now every enemy in the game has been made infinitely stronger and you now pick up X Parasites instead of regular beam and missile pickups when you defeat enemies. Its' a subtle bait and switch and honestly its handled really well.

 

I have a few non-spoilery tweets I wish to share..

 

 

So we're finally caught up... phew! Two months worth of gaming which involved the acuqistion of three new games and progress on a lot of older ones.

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Did you manage to find the secret boss in Deltarune Chapter 2, @Aperson? It's a toughie, but totally worth it.

Spoiler

Warp back to the Trash Zone, and go left. You should be able to figure it out from there.

Worth it for the music alone, it's a right bop!

Edited by Glen-i

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On a whim, I decided to boot up SNES online and play through Super Mario World.

I've talked enough about this game in previous threads, but I just had to share this moment where I was a bit too skillful for my own good.

Spoiler

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3
Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX (100%)
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (100%)
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4
Tony Hawk's Underground
Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury
Bravely Default II
Shining Force: The Legacy of Great Intention
Monster Hunter Rise (Credits seen)
Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble (105%)
Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin
The Legend of Banjo-Kazooie: The Jiggies of Time
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (Randomiser)
Pokémon FireRed
Final Fantasy I Pixel Remaster
Final Fantasy II Pixel Remaster
AI: The Somnium Files
Dicey Dungeons
Yakuza 0 (Abandoned)

Super Mario World

 

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Metroid Dread is now finished. Absolutely loved it. Might replay the game on Hard mode at some point or try and go for all the hidden endings, if I can be fast enough that is!

 

That being said, there are still two games left on Switch that I still need to finish. One of them is Pokken Tournament DX and I'm going to do that as part of the next Gaming Anniversaries video. The other is Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair which is not tied to any particular video production so that's going to be the game I focus on finishing next. Not withstanding the fact that I also need to finish Super Castlevania IV!

 

So in terms of games played and finished this year its currently looking like:

 

Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time

Ratchet & Clank (2016)

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Nier Replicant

Metroid Prime Hunters

Shadow the Hedgehog

Deltarune Chapter 2

Metroid Dread

 

Games played for video purposes but not fully and jumping to finished files for the endings:

 

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Metroid Other M

Metroid Fusion

Sonic Adventure 2 Battle

Sonic Heroes

Sonic and the Secret Rings

Sonic Unleashed

Sonic Mania

 

Games I have got this year that I still need to finish:

Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair

 

Games I'm interested in getting at some point:

Castlevania Advance Collection

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

Elden Ring

Pokemon Legends: Arceus

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