Posted January 18 Finished both of these games last night. Absolutely loved Tinykin. I'm not sure why people compare it to Pikmin. Sure, you have a little army of helpers following you but that's where the similarities really end. The game is pretty much a straight up 3D platforming game that has you collect a load of stuff. It actually reminded me more of Chibi Robo than it did Pikmin. I enjoyed it so much that I'm actually tempted to go through it again to earn the double platinum. Certainly one of my fav indies games I have played in recent times. I would give it a whirl, @drahkon. I know you said you wouldn't touch it due to it being like Pikmin but it plays nothing like it. Plus, it's a breezy affair, clocking in at around 7-8 hours and another 1-2 hours after that to mop things up, if going for the platinum. Cannon Dancer was decent, if a little short. The game is definitely a spiritual successor to Strider, which isn't a surprise given who made it. I still prefer Strider though but that could just be nostalgia talking. I wasn't too keen on some of the combat in the game, especially the suplex move. You would appreciate one of the trophies, @Julius There's an enemy that has armour on and flies around on a jetpack, just like a Mandalorian. You have to suplex this enemy to unlock the trophy... 3 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 18 1 minute ago, Hero-of-Time said: I'm not sure why people compare it to Pikmin. Sure, you have a little army of helpers following you but that's where the similarities really end. Sweet. 1 minute ago, Hero-of-Time said: The game is pretty much a straight up 3D platforming game Nice. 2 minutes ago, Hero-of-Time said: that has you collect a load of stuff Meh 2 minutes ago, Hero-of-Time said: Plus, it's a breezy affair, clocking in at around 7-8 hours and another 1-2 hours after that to mop things up, if going for the platinum. But doesn't seem to be that big of deal given this information. 5 minutes ago, Hero-of-Time said: I know you said you wouldn't touch it due to it being like Pikmin but it plays nothing like it Downloading now, will start it later today. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 18 @Hero-of-Time you were right, the game's fun Movement is very satisfying. But please...PLEEAAAASE. Why have a 0/1000 counter that once you reach 1000/1000 goes up to 1000/1600 Can you get 100% on every level immediately or do you have to get back eventually? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 18 3 hours ago, Hero-of-Time said: You would appreciate one of the trophies, @Julius There's an enemy that has armour on and flies around on a jetpack, just like a Mandalorian. You have to suplex this enemy to unlock the trophy... 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 18 1 hour ago, drahkon said: @Hero-of-Time you were right, the game's fun Movement is very satisfying. But please...PLEEAAAASE. Why have a 0/1000 counter that once you reach 1000/1000 goes up to 1000/1600 Can you get 100% on every level immediately or do you have to get back eventually? The 1000/1000 counter is there for what is required in the game (bubbles) but the next counter is for if you are just going for 100%. I think you can 100% all of the levels as you play them but it's far easier if you go back later and have more bubbles to float around with. 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 18 @RedShell did you ever play Tinykin? Think it was on Game Pass at some point. Cute, chilled out, colourful platformer seems right up your street. I remember @Cube enjoying it when he played it a while back. 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 18 Yes, I enjoyed it a lot. Very cute and charming. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 18 11 minutes ago, Hero-of-Time said: @RedShell did you ever play Tinykin? Think it was on Game Pass at some point. Cute, chilled out, colourful platformer seems right up your street. Nope. The last game I played on there where you have little creatures following you around was The Wild at Heart. Cheers for the recommendation though, will try to check it out at some point. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 19 (edited) Forgot to mention: Fun little time-trial racer for the PSVita. Yes, you read that right. I played a game on the best gaming device ever made again. Got the while I was fed up with FFXVI earlier this year. The grind was a little annoying as I had to crash a lot of times after finishing all the tracks. I also had to play the game for 10 hours total and fly 2500 miles. Wasn't even close to those numbers after being done with the races Anyways, still had a lot of fun with this. Been making my way through Tinykin. Completed the first 3 levels and got 100% completion on them, as well. The game goes way overboard with the pollen collectibles. Could've done with half of them and reduce the levels in size a bit. Aside from this, I'm enjoying it, though. Edited January 20 by drahkon 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 20 (edited) Tinykin After 6 hours: get! Not too shabby. Started off great, got a little annoying half-way through and overstayed its welcome at the end. Levels are a little too big, there are too many Pollen to collect and the missions became repetitive eventually. I did, however, enjoyed it for what it was: a cute little 3D-platformer. Nothing more, nothing less. Edited January 20 by drahkon Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 20 Played and platinumed Tinykin again (PS4 version). Loved it. It was a much breezier playthrough now that I knew where all the tricky bits of pollen were hiding. 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 20 Hey guys, I can't find the Tinykin thread, is this it? 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 20 I've finally finished Kirby Air Ride. 100% cleared. It was tough but I didn't want to shame myself and use any of the free purple squares. Took some doing though. The Jet, Rocket and Turbo Stars are a nightmare to handle and a lot of the time trials that I needed to finish required me to use them. With me needing a new TV, I also had to pick up a HDMI adapter for the Gamecube to work on it. I went with Kaico's product as a stop gap until the Rad2X is avaliable. I thought the visuals looked awful and very jaggy but then I turned off the line doubling option and everything smoothed out nicely. There are a bunch of other options on it but I have no idea what they do and so I'm not faffing with them. Very happy I can play Gamecube games again and with the original hardware this time as opposed to just using my Wii. 1 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 21 My next Gamecube adventure has been decided. This is another game that I have fond memories of playing in multiplayer with my friends. It's also the console Zelda game I have played the least. I've only ever played it the once and that was nearly 20 years ago. I honestly don't remember a thing about it. It's like playing a completely new Zelda game. I've finished the first world this morning and rescued the first maiden. I love all the callbacks to A Link to the Past. The music, setting, sound effects, all of them are like a love letter to that game. Some of the puzzles early on have been great. There was a room that had a couple of doorways and no way across to the bottom one. You had to shoot an arrow out of the room and off the GBA screen and allow it to go outside and hit the switch. Simple but satisfying. I'm obviously playing it in single player mode and it plays really well. You hit a button to switch your formations, another to seperate them and a GBA screen appears on the TV when you enter a building. It all works great. I thought the Force Gems you collect were just part of the multiplayer mode but completely forgot they are needed to break the barriers at the end of each stage. On the 2nd stage I was short of them and to rewind time to collect more. I thought this meant I had to go through the whole dungeon again but once I had collected 2000 I was instantly teleported back to the exit. Nice. Looking forward to playing some more of this old/new Zelda game. 3 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 21 Four Swords Adventures is great! Though obviously better in multiplayer, as that's what the game was really built around, the single player experience is great too. It's the perfect bite-sized Zelda experience that's perfect for when you don't want to commit to a longer game; but you can just as easily binge-play all the stages to the end too. It's the most versatile Zelda game ever made (Also both Shadow Battle and Tetra's Trackers kick arse! Amazing party game experiences that are well worth tracking down four GBAs and four link cables for!) 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 21 Just completed the Village of the Blue Maiden stage in Four Swords Adventures. What a fun level. There's very little combat but the puzzles were great. Working out how to get rid of the line of people, finding a way to jump the gap so I could get the spell book, figuring out how to dig up the Force Gems, all great puzzles. Lovely stuff. Remember when Zelda had good level design? 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 21 (edited) 1 hour ago, Hero-of-Time said: Just completed the Village of the Blue Maiden stage in Four Swords Adventures. What a fun level. There's very little combat but the puzzles were great. Working out how to get rid of the line of people, finding a way to jump the gap so I could get the spell book, figuring out how to dig up the Force Gems, all great puzzles. Lovely stuff. Remember when Zelda had good level design? One of my favourite levels in FSA. Having a group of people all wander around the place trying to figure out what needs to be done. And there's always that one person whose like "Nah, I haven't found anything" while they're sneakily pocketing all the Force Gems they just stumbled upon... Screw all those Zelda HD remasters people keep asking for! Gimme an online version of this game! It'd be amazing! Edited January 21 by Glen-i 1 1 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 21 1 hour ago, Hero-of-Time said: Remember when Zelda had good level design? Oh how I miss it so much 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 22 10 hours ago, Glen-i said: Screw all those Zelda HD remasters people keep asking for! Gimme an online version of this game! It'd be amazing! I've been wanting this for years. It just seems like a no brainer. The closest we got was Triforce Heroes. Tingle is a thieving SOB. There was a huge purple Force Gem at the end of the stage and he casually floated over to it and snatched it up, all the while I was frantically trying to cut my way through the bushes to make a path to it. I just missed it (didn't need it anyway) and I was hammering the item button in the hope that using Roc's Feather would pop his balloon and bring him down. It didn't. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 24 Finished Donkey Kong Country on the GBA today at work during my lunch. Not 100% but I was never going for that. After finishing Metroid Zero Mission, tried a few games but nothing was clicking for the 30 minutes I had each day to play. This ended up being the perfect pick up and play game I was looking for. Forget how awesome DKC is, the level design and that absolutely incredible soundtrack. Was humming the tunes for the rest of the day. David Wise was on fire here. I absolutely hate swimming levels in games but the god tier soundtrack for those levels made them bearable. Next up. DKC 2: Diddy Kong's Quest. Once I've completed the trilogy, I'm now very tempted to playthrough Returns and Tropical Freeze again. Oh and I finished the main story on God of War Ragnarok on Monday. Just working my way through the post game stuff now. Really enjoyed it and justified me not buying a PS5 just yet as it looks incredible on the PS4 Pro. Santa Monica Studio pushing it to its limits. Don't think I'll be able to get the Platinum. Missed too many collectables that I can't be bothered searching for. Looking forward to playing through the Valhalla DLC once I've done as much as I can. 4 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 27 (edited) Sea of Stars is a... oh wait, that image already explained that... It's developed by Sabotage Studio and was released in 2023 on most current platforms. I played the Switch one. The game follows Zale and Valere, two Solstice Warriors. Solstice Warriors are people who can utilise the power of the Sun or the Moon, because they can use these powers, they are the ideal people to combat "Dwellers", insanely powerful abominations that can only be defeated during an eclipse. If left unchecked, these Dwellers become World Eaters, which are bad news. There's only one Dweller left, so Zale and Valere have it relatively easy... Like the image above says, Sea of Stars is a turn-based RPG that takes a lot of inspiration from other RPG's. The most apparent inspiration is it's presentation, which is reminiscent of Chrono Trigger. Most encounters can be seen on the overworld, and there's no seperate battle screen as the gameplay transitions smoothly between exploration and battles. Weirdly enough though, the battles don't actually follow suit. The battles mash multiple mechanics from different games, Chrono Trigger's splash damage mechanic shows up, but the battles take more cues from Paper Mario, of all things. Looks friendly You can have your three party members attack in any order you like, but they all must act once before you can use them again (Paper Mario does this), so careful planning over who acts when can make fights easier. If you have more then 3 characters, you can swap them out on the fly for when the situation calls for it (Yep, Paper Mario). Which is good, because each character has a very limted moveset (Kinda like the partners in Paper Mario) The game also has action commands for both attacking and blocking (Paper Mario again). The game claims that the bonuses you get from nailing the action commands should be seen as just that, a bonus, but I find that hard to believe, because you very much need to get good with them later on in the game. Which brings me to a small criticism, some of the attacks you do are not obvious for when you should input a button imput. A small graphic signaling when the button should be pressed would've gone far. It all sounds kinda derivative when I list it out like that, but thankfully, Sea of Stars does have it's own ideas. MP, which lets you use special skills, is very limited. It's not weird for a character to be tapped out after using only 2 skills, but you can recover MP with standard atttacks. Standard attacks also give you "Live Mana" which you can use to power up your attacks. So the dynamic of battles involves balancing using your strong special skills with keeping your MP high enough that you can do said special skills if you suddenly need it. It's cool that the game successfully encourages you to spend MP, because doing a standard attack with max MP is a massive waste. The main defining feature of battles is the "Lock system". When enemies are about to use a stronger attack, a number of various icons will appear near it. For example, you could see two moon icons, and a sun one. What this means is that if you're able to hit that enemy with 2 moon attacks and 1 sun attack before it can attack, you can cancel that attack., and even if you can't pull it off, breaking some of those locks will still weaken the attack. It's a cool system that rewards knowledge of the capabilities of your team. And then there's the combo attacks, which are kinda like Chrono Trigger's Dual Techs, but they don't actually function like that game. Instead of just using two charcater's turns at once to execute Dual Techs in Chrono Trigger, combo attacks in Sea of Stars are instead, a seperate resource that builds up over time, and they only use up one character's turn. Functionally very different from Chrono Trigger there. There are still more cool, original ideas. The relics are a good example of this. These are toggable options that provide modifiers to customise the game to your liking. The game does a good job of identifying the relics that may be too overpowered for those who don't want to make the game too easy ("For those looking for a lighter challenge"), as well as the ones that make the game harder. Massive praise must be given to the actual overworld itself. In most RPG's, dungeons aren't very engaging to traverse through. There are some exceptions in the genre, such as Golden Sun. Another of Sea of Stars in this aspect is Golden Sun itself. Dungeons are full of cool puzzles and terrain that requires a keen eye to progress through. You even get some Zelda like items to increase your puzzle solving capabilities. It's very cool. Wish more RPG's had great level design like that. The visuals are obviously absolutely gorgeous. Intricate pixel art combined with modern lighting techniques make for a beautiful game. The soundtrack is probably the weakest part, not because it's bad, but because everything else surrounding it so good. Sea of Stars is great! Truly excellent. It may take some inspiration from other RPG's, but it takes those aspects, and combines it with it's own ideas to make something it can call it's own. Shame I only played it now, because it would certainly be among my favourite games from last year, otherwise. No idea why Daffy Duck is here, though... Spoiler Sea of Stars Edited January 27 by Glen-i 1 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 27 On 1/24/2024 at 9:21 PM, lostmario said: Oh and I finished the main story on God of War Ragnarok on Monday. Just working my way through the post game stuff now. Really enjoyed it and justified me not buying a PS5 just yet as it looks incredible on the PS4 Pro. Santa Monica Studio pushing it to its limits. Don't think I'll be able to get the Platinum. Missed too many collectables that I can't be bothered searching for. Looking forward to playing through the Valhalla DLC once I've done as much as I can. Well I wasn't as far off getting the Platinum trophy as I thought. My 21st Platinum Trophy in the bag. The Gna and King Hrolf were tough fights, had to go full defensive against both and gradually get their health down. Onto Valhalla. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 27 24 minutes ago, lostmario said: Well I wasn't as far off getting the Platinum trophy as I thought. My 21st Platinum Trophy in the bag. The Gna and King Hrolf were tough fights, had to go full defensive against both and gradually get their health down. Onto Valhalla. I cant remember, have you played through the original trilogy? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted January 27 1 hour ago, Hero-of-Time said: I cant remember, have you played through the original trilogy? Yeah, still got 1 & 2 on PS2. Had 3 Remastered but must of traded it in at some point. Not played the 2 PSP games or Ascension. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
