Here's the on-going list for the games I played in 2023, for at least an hour or so.
(these are written over the course of the year, so any passages of time between thoughts are designated by dashes between paragraphs)
I certainly didn't expect to ring in the new year playing one of the greatest games of all time, but sometimes the cards align just so and Leon S. Kennedy is the only thing that can satiate that need. Resident Evil 4 is an odd beast compared to a lot of the games it inspired - the movement is stiff, the shooting is tricky, and the game loves to kill you out of nowhere if you aren't paying close attention.
This is my first time not playing the Wii version (which I've played and beaten at least ten times). RE4 is pretty challenging when you can't instantly pop off headshots, turns out!
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Sometimes I think this game takes itself a bit too seriously in the beginning, but then you'll have Leon say something extremely dumb like, "your right hand comes off?" or "Saddler, you're small time!" and there's a setpiece where you run away from a giant mechanical statue of the castellan and... yeah, this game is definitely winking and nodding at the player. It's very silly and I love it.
I somehow managed to beat some of the trickier rooms my first time through (namely, the water room, the double garrador fight, Verdugo, why are all the tricky rooms in the castle), even with me still getting used to the controls. At least I'm not reloading when I try to shoot anymore. The game is probably taking it easy on me, but I've definitely died about a half dozen times.
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oh my god the island *DRAGS*, y'all.
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11 hours and change and I'm done! (in-game timer, probably not counting deaths). 888 zombos killed, 8 deaths and I'm pretty pleased overall. The island still drags a bit too long but I had an absolute blast. I probably won't do Assignment Ada or the Mercenaries for now, but I might circle back when I have a bit more time.
I've definitely fallen off of the Marvel movie train but I still *like* superheroes, it's only that I had a kid in the midst of Avenger mania and then completely lost the thread somewhere - I think the last one I saw was Black Panther and that seemed alright? Now there are TV shows and a whole freaking content platform dedicated to it and man, there's a lot of fluff to shift through.
Marvel Snap seems neat though! Very quick six round card matches, every game has the potential to have new and exciting strategies to play off of the three different battlegrounds. Do you focus on the third field that hasn't been uncovered yet or do you maybe have a card that lets you see what the battlefields are going to be? Are there interesting synergies in your deck that you can exploit or can you mindfreak your opponent with just the right card? It's neat! Having a limited deck and only a few rounds makes it exciting and quick - I keep wanting to play more even though I've never traditionally been good at card games.
I definitely popped off when I placed a Jessica Jones in a battlefield that cloned three copies of it to fill out for a 32 power win. I tried it again in a different round only to be met with four America Chavezs. Good times.
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Fell off this one pretty shortly thereafter, seeing people paying an actual, literal hundred dollars for a cool card left a foul taste in my mouth.
SoulSilver attempts to bring Gen 2 to what was, at the time, the more modern era of Pokemon and largely succeeded, though the level curve is still an actual crime. I thought LeafGreen was bad but holy shit, I forgot how low level the Gen 2 pokemon are. The first Gym has a level 13 Pidgeotto and the highest level you can fight in the Route outside of town is a level 5 Hoothoot. Maybe a level 6 Bellsprout if you go into the Tower. That's *dire*. This is the reason I'm not doing a Nuzlocke because doing a Gen 2 only run is hard enough as it is.
Pour one out for my old Pokewalker, washed in the washing machine a decade ago and gone to Pokeheaven.
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I OHKO'd whitney's miltank with Heracross, nothing can stop me now.
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The level curve is still a crime. I'm just outside of Mahogany, the seventh gym, and I'm pretty sure Bryce's best Pokemon tops out at like 35. I think I remember the Indigo Plateau trainers topping out at like 50 the first go around. That's a lot of level to grind in-between.
But hey, I finally got a Crobat. Now I just need to get it Cross Poison.
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The biggest issue with SoulSilver is the much noted level curve problems - Red's highest Pokemon is 88 and the rest are mid 80s - but the highest level wild Pokemon you can face leading up to that fight is 50. Getting a semi-decent team up to 60 in order to be able to have a slight chance took fighting every single trainer in Kanto (and the wild Pokemon there are largely useless, mostly hovering in the 30s with some level 10s sprinkled in the early areas) and then spending another ten hours fighting Golbats and Ursarings in Mt. Silver. It's exhausting, but I did manage to do it with a team of Tyranitar, Espeon, Feraligatr, Heracross, Ampharos, and Mamoswine.
I wish I knew what it was about me, as a person, who sees the new entry of a series coming out and thinks, "aw dang, I should play one of the older ones". It's happening with the new Dead Space remake where I'm looking at Game Pass thinking, "surely this game can't be that old, can it" and it happened with Fire Emblem Engage dropped.
I didn't get that into Echoes at first blush - mostly because the first time I tried to buy this game, I somehow ended up buying a fake on ebay that wasn't even FE: Echoes but was instead a copy of Crush 3D with a blurry sticker of FE:Echoes stuck onto it and I have no idea how that happened - but even when I had a legitimate copy of the game, the changes in mechanics just threw me for a loop. You only have to be one faster to double? Archers can shoot from one away and can shoot up to FOUR AWAY? What the fuck are these dungeons, what is fatigue, oh my god why do these villagers suck so much. Hope you've figured out items have weight, because we're sure as shit not gonna explain it.
Now that I've gotten a few acts in, Echoes has really grown on me. The animations are incredible, I love the voice acting, and the story is pretty engaging! All around, having a good time, though I have had to abuse the turnwheel on some encounters in Alm's half of Act 3. All of his crew are pretty squishy. Not as squishy as like *all* of Micaiah's crew in Radiant Dawn, but still. Squishy.
Cute, short, reverse-Katamari. Just like Katamari, though, it has that build up to calamity that I really appreciate. Once you get on a roll and start to see the path to swallowing the universe, it becomes really great. I do wish there was a big, final, swallow everything kind of send-off, but the final section is pretty good!
It's Trails, but this time in a pretty big city with a central crew that seems to stay pretty static throughout the main game. I've only known Tio for a few hours but if anything happens to her, I will perish from this earth, she is incredible.
Everyone else is alright too! Love a good horndog character who isn't super gross.
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About twenty hours in so far and I'm still enjoying this gang! I had to turn the sound effects almost all the way down though because the confirmation sound effect rings in my brain and hurts my ears. An extremely me problem, one that only ever crops up in a handful of games (such as Kirby's Epic Yarn - the gem collecting sound or the weird background whistle in Dishonored 2). Luckily I can turn down sound effects here without losing too much. The sound mixing, in general, is all over the place. I kind of wish I was playing on PC because I could, theoretically, change the sound effect to a different one, but that would require rebuying the game and then messing around with ogg files or something, probably.
I love a good "world detective" game, a term I just made up to describe games where the central crux is figuring out a certain system, language, mystery, or lore. Games like Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, Return of the Obra Dinn, Tacoma, Outer Wilds - something is a mystery and you need to figure it out, but no matter what, you're still figuring out the world state. (The Case of the Golden Idol is more of a straightforward detective game, though there are some cases where you're trying to figure out what's going on in the world but there's always a murder to solve)
In Heaven's Vault, it's an ancient language and mystery you're trying to solve (so far) while hints and pieces of the world you inhabit are given to you. I'm definitely enjoying it, though I do wonder how the main character "knows" certain words are correct - the locking in feels a little arbitrary. Also she's kind of a dick! I do not know why she's kind of a dick, but I'm leaning into it because holy shit, she is acerbic.
I love the look of this game but cannot, for the life of me, get more than 50% just hits. No idea what I'm doing wrong. I'm usually pretty decent a rhythm games but this one is just escaping me!
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is one of my favorite games ever, full stop. Playing through this game again (even through the extremely slow opening hour) has been such an absolute joy, it's like I've been transported back in time to when I was 15. I'm now over double that age and I still love this game to pieces. I love all of the characters, I love the job system, I even find the laws fun to work around, even if the bosses you fight are largely immune to any negative repercussions which sucks! Let the boss get thrown in jail, show that no one is above the law (though this is reinforced that certain people ARE above the law because the law is trying to stop you, specifically).
I love that Marche is a villain and he's not right, but he's not exactly wrong, either. You can't stay in the dreamland but he definitely doesn't know that before he starts going around smashing the things holding the world together.
I'm keeping my team pretty small this time - only eight people total so I can send off some of my team on dispatch quests without losing out. In past memory, Marche is always extremely slow because I have a tendency to rush through Soldier to get to Fighter so he can learn Air Render, so I'm actually having him go Ninja right now. I'm trying to make Montblanc useful, so I'm giving him some Thief speed, then will transfer him back to Black Mage to round that out and go Time Mage. Still need to figure out what I want my Bangaa and Nu Mou to end up being. Viera's either go Assassin or Red Mage/Summoner.
As an aside, there's a person from when this game was new posting on the internet who speaks entirely in character as a Bangaa, complete with double s's. I wonder how they're doing and what kind of psychic damage would be inflicted on their person by showing them their old posts.
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Oh man, the Laws do kinda suck, though. The main issue is the vagueness in a lot of the wording that I can't tell if it's intentional or not. One law bans Swords and it's not clear if that's all swords, or just straight swords, or does this include things like rapiers or greatswords too? Can I still use reaction commands like Counter or does that count as a sword hit? Do using abilities that then hit with a sword count? The game's sure not gonna tell you and if Marche gets a red card it's game over and that happened to me accidentally! The Copycat Law suuuuuuucks.
I might put a little more time in because I do want to make my party of stone cold killers but I also might jump ship to the sequel soon which makes the laws much more clear and less punishing.
It's more Theatrhythm!
That's it, that's kinda all you need to know. Do you like Final Fantasy music and rhythm games? Then hoo boy, strap in, because have I got the game for you.
New in this game (and I think the arcade game this is based on?) is the removal of the tap mode and the introduction of double notes - two inputs that you need to hit at the same time. Sometimes it's two long notes, two different directions you need to swipe, or two notes to tap. It's surprisingly tricky, how adding in one little change makes everything more challenging!
I don't necessarily love all of the changes, namely I miss the randomly generated quest mode most of all - just having certain songs strung together was so much fun. The character abilities seem a bit more limited than Curtain Call and I think the game is pushing you to have certain teams more suited to doing elemental damage than pure damage. Still, I'm having a lot of fun.
Final Fantasy VIII is such a weird, bold game. The shadow of its predecessor looms large over FFVIII, a specter that it can never escape from, doomed to be compared forever to one of the biggest games ever released. So, instead of trying to compete, it instead chooses to get weird and I love it so much.
It's messy, in so many ways. Every character motivation is understated, all of these emotionally repressed teens making the worst choices at every turn, refusing to reach out to one other. Glimpses into an older generation who also made poor choices, their own mistakes spiraling out of their own control. Everything is maybe just a bit too complicated; the characters, the story, the combat, the gameplay.
The Junction system, in which you take magic you suck out of enemies and apply it to your own stats is simultaneously incredible and so frustrating. Drawing magic out of enemies takes far too long (the most you can get at once is 9 of a spell and the max you can have is 100). Bosses will have rare spells while also raining down hell upon you and will even have special summons you also need to get from them. The best way to get spells is to use the abilities your summons can learn to transform items and cards from the card game sidequest into spells (which rules, I think this system rules) but it's still tedious at best.
The mechanics of Final Fantasy VIII respond best when you meet them on their own terms and I feel like that ties into so well to the story. You need to meet people on their own terms. We're all messy, we don't really understand what's going on around us at any given time, we'd all go to the moon for the people we love. And I think it's a great game to follow Final Fantasy 7.
I finally convinced my daughter to be Gooigi, because Gooigi regenerates health which Luigi, tragically, does not. Little buddy modes are great when the little buddy is cooler than the main character, looking at you Kirby!
The phrase "you gotta suck that guy, daddy" has been said far too often though. Need to teach her to say "vacuum" or something.
Devil May Cry 4 asks the player to forget every single thing you know about Dante and instead you're going to play as the embodiment of everyone's Deviantart self-insert original character do not steal fuckboy, Nero. He's got a Chainsaw Sword, a Cool Gun, a Devil Claw along with a Chip on His Shoulder and he's a Bad Boy but he Loves Kirie and he is such an incredible dork.
Naturally, I love him, to bits. Nero is such a breath of fresh air to play as, especially when you start really nailing his combos and revving the sword in-between strikes. Charging up the gun to blast off a huge hit, dashing in with a flaming sword and nailing a few revs in your combo to do a ton of damage, it all just feels fantastic.
And then, Devil May Cry 4 asks you 'hey, hope you didn't forget about Dante! now play as him again.' Uh-oh! I might be in trouble because I have forgotten everything about how Dante works!
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I took a long enough break that going back to playing as Dante was pretty easy but then you have to do a boss rush as Nero and uh-oh! I've forgotten all about how Nero plays now!
Didn't take too long to readjust, though. Good game! I might play around with Vergil and Trish/Lady or I might just move on to DMCV.
It's more Splatoon!
If I don't get out of C+ in Anarchy Battles, I'm going to lose my goddamn mind.
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This was somehow my third most played game on the Switch this year, though I definitely don't remember playing that much of it. I still never got out of C+, but I made peace with that and just played the standard modes.
A perfect roller-coaster of a game, with all of the positives and negatives that implies. Extremely linear, tons of fun, over before you know it. I've played through it about four times in the last week and it's the first game in a long time that has really scratched that itch of 'well i just want to unlock everything' because the time to play and beat the entire game is about two hours if you skip through all the cutscenes.
And while I do have some minor complaints, namely that Nemesis was extremely scary to me in the original. Here he just kinda... shows up occasionally. Mr. X in RE2R was a lot more in your face than Nemesis!
Also I cannot believe they moved Jill's line about STARS to towards the beginning. It doesn't work there because she's going to get hit in the middle of saying it! Move it to the end, even if it doesn't make sense.
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There are so many mods, my god. Goodness. Half-naked kitty girl Jill is going to rocket launcher her way through Inferno mode, lord willing and the creek don't rise.
When I sort my Steam games by 'Steam Review' which would, I imagine, sort my games by the positivity of all of the reviews the game has ever received, Mirror is in the top 50. Do you know how wild it is that a titty-based bejeweled game is higher up on this list than PEGGLE? Fucking Peggle?? It's in front of VVVVVV, do you know how fucking good VVVVVV is???
Anyway, the game is good! Exactly what it says on the tin. You play a puzzle game, you see some sex scenes.
I still have little to no idea what's actually going on in Paradise Killer, but the vibes, my god the vibes are immaculate.
Maybe one of the worst looking games in recent memory and I cannot stop playing it. It's slow and kinda buggy and the story is silly but endearing but y'all, there is something special here that I cannot put my finger on.
You give me a grappling hook and I'm gonna have a good time. Can you make a soundtrack entirely out of slap beats, cymbal hits, and crunch? I don't know, but Grapple Dog is sure as hell going to try.
The story takes maybe just a minute too long to unfold, but I'm having a ton of fun. Running around as Pablo feels great and the grappling mechanics are simple and intuitive. The arrow above points towards the nearest object you can grapple and you can swing back and forth or raise/lower yourself to build speed and jump. Then you can start chaining jumps or swinging yourself around to jump on top of the platform you just grappled. Every level has tons of collectibles and then a speedrun that unlocks after finishing it once.
I think my one criticism would be that Pablo moves pretty slowly, even at his fastest speed (which is indicated on screen for reasons that I'm not quite sure of - it feels like there's only two speeds, walk and run) and he doesn't carry the momentum of grappling particularly well after jumping. If you get a good swing going and really blast off but then hit the ground running, Pablo will run faster for maybe a second or two and then back down to his slower speed. Maybe to incentivize mastering grappling?
Also these stages are just a touch too long to comfortably speedrun. I've gotten all gold medals so far, but I can feel that breaking soon.
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100% completion! Still had a good time, though those final stages definitely pissed me off more than a few times. I think my criticisms become even more valid towards the end - Pablo just does not move fast enough or retain his momentum. If I fling myself towards oblivion as fast as I possibly can, I should at least get a little boost of speed.
Enemy placements feel almost arbitrary and they attack just a smidge more frequently that I would expect in a game that also expects you to speedrun stages. I definitely lost more than a few level runs to enemy placements which I guess is the idea? It sucks if it is, though!
GBC aesthetics mixed with some incredible acrobatic movement options and slightly too much dialogue. There's a lot of lore for what appears to be a simple story but I don't mind it too much - most of it is ancillary and you can peruse it at your leisure.
The way Belle moves is just so much fun. Your little buddy, Chime, can be thrown and tossed, but also he can be bounced off if you throw him down or at an angle. There's also a super fun slide dash, a Wario Land 3 style high jump, and several fun abilities to use Chime like an air balloon or a double jump. Just a ton of fun.
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There's three medals per level and one is for finding the secret door (which is fine), another for speedrun (there's an option to toggle on a timer), and the last is for "hitting the end level from a distance" which I only have a couple. I wish there was an indicator or something for 'hey here's what we mean by "from far away". One level it's all the way across the stage and in another it's just across a little pit. Help me out here game!
The gameplay? Phenomenal. The story? I do not care.
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I took a month long break and completely forgot how to play this game, oh no. Playing on controller is Not Helping, gang.
In the truest, most pure dumbass fashion, I bought Xenoblade Chronicles 3 on sale and thought, "damn I never finished 2, I should go back and finish 2". Do you know how long Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is? Do you know where I left off?
I sure as hell don't. How do ANY of these systems work.
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I hate the gacha system for getting new blades. I hate it so much. Why is this system in the game! It doesn't add anything, takes way too long to get new cores and you can't you pay your way through it, it's the literal worst of every single world, why is it like this??
I finally hit Alltrades Abbey and goodness I forgot just how long that segment takes, then used the game's extensive beat-by-beat plot breakdown to find the next place to go to after it vaguely gestures at the next plot point and says 'figure it out bucko', and then spent several hours getting my team some job levels. Hell yes. That's how video games work, baby.
Main character is now a Gladiator, Ruff is a Pirate, Maribel is on her way to Sage. Ruff can hit all enemies for no MP, Maribel can lightning everything for no MP, and MC has a ton of options now that mostly involve punching someone as hard as they can.
I still do not have a fourth party member and I'm like thirty hours into the game.
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Forty hours now and I have the fourth party member! I spent a good long while getting them through their intro classes and now we're cooking with gas. My memory of original DQ7 is pretty fuzzy at this point, I don't think I ever got much farther than this.
No, you bought Octopath Traveler 2 and thought that you should go beat the first one or at least play a little bit more of it because you didn't actually get all of the Travelers when you played it three years ago.
(I started with H'annit and immediately reset the game to start with someone else because while I can deal with a Lot of bullshit, I cannot deal with H'annit. I then started with Tessa and that story didn't feel right. I felt the right groove with Ophilia)
Star Rail is a JRPG from the people who made Genshin Impact, so it's gonna have a lot of pretty anime boys and girls as well as some intense monetization systems. So far I've bought the intro pack so I can pull more of the early people easily and I can see myself sticking with this for just a bit, at least so I can see more of the characters.
Like, for instance, March 7th. Her name is MARCH 7TH and damn, if that's not the most Friends at the Table ass name of an NPC ever. I instantly love her, is what I'm saying. March rules.
I do have to wonder how you balance a JRPG, which is usually a linear progression of systems and powers with a game where you can instantly pump your party up to max level if you have enough money or time. Like, part of the fun of a JRPG (at least in my mind) is taking the systems the game gives you and find ways to break them. Star Rail has a little bit of that fun synergy, but I wonder about the balance and when it breaks.
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Fell off of this one when Zelda came out. Sorry March 7th.
The first Soul Hackers is one of my favorite 3DS games, even some ten years after it came out (and twenty-six years after it came out on the Saturn, jeez). Your gang of hackers, the Spookies, stuck in my mind to the point where anytime I'm asked to create a group name in any game, I default to the Spookies. I spent a ton of time with that game and while it definitely shows its age, I love it.
So, imagine my surprise when we got a sequel announcement! It doesn't seem to be related, almost at all, but I'm having a pretty good time. The setup for Ringo's character seems needlessly complicated, but we do get a cool hacker robot girl in a badass coat, so win some, lose some. Her saying she needs to be stealthy while also wearing a jacket that's literally flashing more than a train crossing platform is endlessly funny to me.
I also like the early changes to the "usual" SMT combat, but if I have to sit through the Sabbath animation every time, I might be annoyed. (oh good, it can be skipped, see ya Pixie)
My first few hours into Tears of the Kingdom, I was making jokes like "damn, more like Breadth of the Wild, am i right?" because at first blush, TotK just seemed like more of a game I absolutely adored. But as you go a little further, as you unlock your abilities and start to see just how all of the systems link together... Tears of the Kingdom is something truly special. The ability to create, to problem solve, the true freedom to imagine a creation in your mind and then make it work? It's truly incredible.
I love the little puzzles involving the Koroks, getting one from point A to point B, trying to fashion some sort of elaborate machine to transport them when just picking them up would probably be faster. I've spent so much time trying to make little carts or planes or minecarts.
I also just love the freedom to solve problems how you wish, using the game mechanics as you will. I ran into a musician stuck in a pit and spent half an hour trying to fashion up some hot air balloons to slowly lift him and his wagon out of the pit but it wasn't quite working right - the wagon wasn't loaded on the platform right and I didn't have enough battery juice to lift it all the way up. My solution? Pull out a rocket, attach it to the side of the wagon with him on it and hit the go button. Musician and wagon? Out of the pit. Where did they land? Who knows, I certainly don't. He's out and that's what matters.
As much as I loved Breath of the Wild and as much as I enjoyed the quiet solitude that game provided, I think I might be enjoying Tears of the Kingdom more.
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About a month post launch and I've still only completed one dungeon so far while piddling around the eastern part of the map. I'm slowly working my way towards Zora's Domain now, but I often find myself sitting down to play for a bit only to go "oh what's this, oh hey there's a cave here, aw hey little korok yeah i'll help you out, a quest? absolutely". I spent like a week of my playing time in Hateno village, just exploring the outskirts and I absolutely loved it. What an incredible game.
Specifically, the Freelancer mode, which I find fascinating but also deeply frustrating. At it's core, it's a run-based mode where you're given a random NPC or four to go murder at one of the locations you know and love. You're also given three optional objectives for more money and a much more difficult "prestige" objective usually worth as much as the three optional objectives combined. It could be something like "use one disguise", "don't get spotted", and "pacify three guards" and a prestige objective of "do a throw kill with an epic knife". These all work pretty well, I think, encouraging me to play outside of my usual playstyle or do slight tweaks to get more money.
I think my frustration comes from Showdowns, which doesn't explicitly tell you which target is which and I don't find the process of finding your target super fun. I had issues with this during some of the main Hitman 2 maps. I also think it sucks that you lose all of your briefcase items if you fail a mission - I understand losing your items you take with you, but losing everything in the briefcase is just demoralizing. Still, I've completed three entire Syndicate loops, so it's not like I'm having a bad time.
I stared at PowerWash Simulator so long that my eyes started to burn.
A pretty fun card playing game, though the HP scaling and escalation seems to happen almost instantly with bosses showing up with hundreds of hit points and just ruining me.
I loved Mass Effect during my early twenties and it's one of the games I used to routinely (and very casually) speedrun. I could beat the entire game in about three hours, hitting all of the main planets and going on my way. I even leveled up a character to 60, which basically meant playing through the entire game three times in a row with the same character - which I think was once to unlock levels 51-60, another to level up from 50 to 59, and then a final time to get enough XP to hit 60.
Returning to Mass Effect as part of the Legendary collection is weird, especially considering the oncoming shadows of Mass Effect 2 and 3, games I enjoyed but still found deeply and fundamentally flawed. But for now, I can enjoy this little crew and these handfuls of planets. I can run around with Liara and Tali and Garrus and Wrex to have the time of my life.
Kaidan and Ashley who?
Finally, after a number of years (and abusing the DLC quests to basically get infinite money and XP), I have beaten Etrian Odyssey V, which may be my least favorite Etrian Odyssey out of them all. I love some of the ideas here and the classes are absolutely top notch, no notes there. My final team ended up being a Dragoon/Pugilist/Masurao//Warlock/Poisoner which worked pretty well, for the most part. Fairly squishy aside from the Dragoon, but with the Warlock shooting out Clever Strikes like no ones business and the Puglist punching people in the face repeatedly, it worked.
At least, until the final boss, truly one of the most annoying encounters in the series, in my mind. That boss was the entire reason I downloaded the DLC (thanks hshop!) because otherwise I would've lost my mind having my team spin around in a circle for a few hours to slowly get XP. The main issue I ran into during that fight was that my Pugilist, who had maxed out every single Binding Attack, Status Attack, Double Punch, and Leading Blow (basically ensuring that they had the best percentage chance to successfully land status effects) and they *never* hit during the final battle. They hit pretty consistently during the entire rest of the game! The only time I was able to land a bind was by throwing an item. What was the entire point of this character if a fucking little goblin throwing something at the big bad was more important than this character I carefully built up over the course of the game? I would've been better off with three Warlocks, all blasting off Clever Strikes for about the same amount of damage. Really frustrating.
I also didn't love how the food mechanic was handled, or the UI change(s), or the soundtrack. Not my favorite.
I've been a Street Fighter fan for most of my life but I would never really consider myself "good" at Street Fighter. I've always been passable at best, okay at worst, admonishing myself for jumping in too much and being really bad at chaining together combos.
I thought SF6 might go the same way, I jumped in with Cammy and started doing alright but quickly hit a wall as the way to really get good with Cammy is to learn to chain together Spiral Arrows and Cannon Spikes in a quick way that I'm just not great at.
But, I thought, what if I treat Street Fighter like how I treat Monster Hunter? Maybe Cammy's just not my weapon of choice. Okay, so let's try out the other characters a bit. Who kept beating me a good bit when I was Cammy? Zangief? I'm not good at hitting the 270s/360s. Juri? Kind of the same problem as with Cammy, I'm not combo driven. Cue: Manon.
Holy shit I love playing as Manon, even when I get my ass handed to me. Being able to slip up and into someone's guard to throw them around, hitting those command grabs, building up her medal count, twirling around Hadokens and kicking people in the face, it's exhilarating. I'm a bit ahead of where I was with Cammy in Ranked (I made it to Platinum!!! And I circled back around to Cammy and made it to Platinum with her too!!!) and I'm having an absolute blast.
This feels like a shitpost made manifest and I kinda love it.
I don't love the loot firehose, how has the Nioh team STILL NOT FIGURED THIS OUT.
I am lost in the vast sea of time and have no idea which direction to go. Whoops.
Hey, you ever play Wario Land 4?
Hey, what if we just made Wario Land 4.
Usually in time loop games, the loop has an explanation, but this one is just "try again dork, kill your husband better".
Potentially interesting, but I think there are going to be so many individual steps in order to correctly find the Golden Path that I'm going to get annoyed sooner rather than later.
My current game with my daughter. I make some thoughtful levels that she finds a bit too hard (usually I put too many enemies in, she's still working on jumping over them) and then she makes nightmare creations that she then wants me to try a beat.
We also play a lot of the Easy user made levels and have a pretty good time!
I'm not the kind of Etrian Odyssey player that creates little stories about my characters while I play. They have personalities, sure, and I will likely get annoyed at one or two of them if they miss a critical shot, but I don't imagine what they're like when they get back to town, or when they hang out after a tough boss, or what they chat about while exploring the labyrinth. They exist as blank slate professionals, there to do a job or die trying.
So, naturally, I thought, "Etrian Odyssey with a story mode and actual characters? That sounds interesting, let's see!"
And it's... fine. Not stellar. The characters are fine (I especially love the main character and Frederica), but the thing with a story mode in games is that it has to occasionally stop you to tell you the story and the thing I don't like doing in Etrian Odyssey is stopping. See, the thing about not imagining my characters doing a lot is that they Don't Do A Lot and just dive into the mazes. They don't need to stop to explain mechanics, or talk about noises they hear, or chitchat while wandering around. They just go and bulldoze their way through.
Still, it's not like the story is bad. Just a little stop start. I get to use a cool Gunner and turn my head sideways at the Grimoire system that makes absolutely no sense.
For the first time in a long time (maybe ever, actually) I made my way to Mike Tyson legitimately, and then was immediately KO'd. Still, considering how much trouble Mr. Sandman and Super Macho Man gave me as a teenager, I'm pretty proud to be able to take them down pretty consistently. The fight with Mr. Sandman always felt like a weirdly beautiful dance, so I'm happy to get the steps down finally.
Still only ever beat Tyson once, though. By decision, of all things.
Dang, remember this game? 2020 might as well be a decade ago.
The main game my daughter and I played this year. She would play second player and follow along (or usually running ahead and instantly getting killed). I think she had a pretty decent time, though some of those later levels are fairly difficult!
She also got extremely frustrated any time that I got more points than her in the end score of a level. I wish there was a way to turn that off because it served as a point of contention almost every time and I got tired of having to have conversations about how feeling frustrated is valid and it's okay to feel that way, but if you're playing a game that makes you constantly frustrated or if you're complaining loudly about it, then we're not going to play.
One of my favorite genres of games is "oh this should not be on this platform" games. Your Borderlands on Vita, your DOOM Eternals on Switch. There was an attempt to put Resident Evil 1 on the Game Boy Color?? I am all about that.
So, during one of my dives into Ys III, I played just about every version (and will eventually play through the actual good version of this game, Oath in Felghana, soon), but I was definitely charmed by the Famicom version of Ys III. The TurboGrafx and Genesis versions are much smoother to look at and slightly better to play, but man, the NES looks like garbage and I find it so interesting. It's nowhere near close to a good game, in fact it's pretty bad!
But it *exists* and I love that for it.
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I put some time into Ys III and ended up finishing it! Fun game, I'd probably recommend either the Famicom or Turbografx versions, the final boss is absolutely fucked.
I started out New Mystery of the Emblem on Hard because I am a Fire Emblem Fan, only to realize that this game's Hard mode has same turn reinforcements which is maybe my least favorite thing in Fire Emblem ever. Back down to Normal I go.
I don't know if this is a fan translation-only inclusion or was in the original, but it's interesting how the game has dialogue explicitly referencing the Main Unit's gender. One instance early on has a character saying "it's a man-to-man challenge!" and my Main Unit pipes in with "but... I'm a woman". I haven't seen too many games with selectable gender actually reference the characters gender. It's a nice little touch!
Let it never be said that I'm not committed to bad ideas. Namely, I'm kinda bad at point-and-click games! But The Dig sounds interesting (based on a blog post by ZombiePie, natch). Am I ready for some rough puzzles and quickly running to a guide? You betcha.
I think I might be done with games that hide the actual mechanics of how the game works from the player character. Love looking at Rain World, do not like the actual playing of Rain World.
When playing Muv-Luv, a lot of people recommend doing the main two routes and then moving on. I, of course, am a much more cultured individual. I'm going to play all the routes in Muv-Luv - I need to see everything the game has to offer.
Do not play all the routes of Muv-Luv.
I started out playing the Dig and having a pretty good time and then remembered that I only ever played about half an hour of Fate of Atlantis. I decided to temporarily switch gears and give this classic a try.
Overall, I had a pretty good time! I didn't have too much trouble with the early stages and ended up going the Teams path, really only needing a guide for using the surveyor's tool on the bull horns in Crete - it wasn't clear what part of the horns I was trying to line up against. For anyone wondering, it's the literal edge of the horns.
I did smash right into the third act and stumbled my way around every single room in the maze before giving up and using a guide for the rest. The maze is just too vast and disconnected for me to really get a sense of space. If I didn't whip out the guide for knowing that I needed to trap a crab, or make more beads so I didn't run out, or for any of the half dozen backtracking bits that could have happened, I likely would've said "actually fuck this".
A similar thing happened when I tried to play Maniac Mansion a few years ago - the third act just completely falls apart to me and some of the logic leaps feel arbitrary.
My third (or maybe fourth?) attempt to get into The Longest Journey. I downloaded an HD mod to make it work a little nicer on my computer and I have a guide nearby to reach for whenever I hit the rubber ducky puzzle. I'll try it for a bit before giving up, I promise.
I've never traditionally been a big PC guy. More specifically, I've never really enjoyed using a mouse and keyboard to play games - I much prefer a controller as typing and data entry is part of my day to day job and I have enough hand and wrist trouble as it is. I have an internal shit-list of PC games with console ports that then do not have controller support. I know it's inferior for some games but, importantly, I do not care.
All that is to say that I tried out Baldur's Gate II for a while, even with my usual issues of using mouse and keyboard. I... don't think I like it a ton! I don't think I ever realized that Baldur's Gate was real time with pause. It's a bit overwhelming, to be honest.
The inventory system still seems a lot easier to use than the times I've tried to play Divinity: Original Sin, though.
It's the year of visual novels, gang.
I will beat Terranigma this year, this is my promise to myself.
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About seven hours in now, well into the human world section of the game and Terranigma feels... Weird. Offputting? Disconnected, maybe? It's hard to describe. I'm glad I'm using a guide because aimlessly wandering from one incoherent plot beat to another would frustrate me endlessly. In one section you need to follow a young girl into a ghost town that transforms overnight into a zombie village and then slowly work your way out only to discover all the zombies are... illusions?
In another, you stumble upon a princess who looks like your friend from the very beginning of the game who is unable to speak but if you can cure her, you can marry her. But the ACTUAL thing you need to do during this sequence is go to a random forest to grab a mushroom, trade that mushroom for a sleeping potion, poison the entire castle to knock everyone out, free a thief from a jail cell who tells you where a treasure is, find that treasure, then go through a forest dungeon with that treasure to find another ghost village (that looks like the starting village) and find a painting in that village and then return to the castle. I feel like I talked to every villager before looking at a guide and there's almost no hinting at what steps need to be taken here.
It's not exactly fair to compare Terranigma to Dragon Quest, because DQ is one of the greatest series ever made and has this type of episodic 'roll up in town to see what's going on' story telling down to a science, but it's so baffling when it's not done well. Almost every single villager or townsperson in Dragon Quest will point you to the next story beat or where to go or will at least have flavor text referencing the events going on. In Terranigma it's shit like "you need to buy a flower to go back three towns to give this girl a flower" or "hey the economic forecast of this town is 20%". Dog, what the fuck are you talking about?
Add on top of all of that my annoyance at the magic system and I'm just not having a great time. I miss the very first world with the absolutely buckwild map that rotates above you or even the animal kingdoms you have to battle through.
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I made it to the castle on what I think is the Iberian Peninsula and had to tap out, I'm done. I read ahead in the guide a little bit to see that the next boss is the one that everyone hates and one you can use magic on, which has not been true of ANY PREVIOUS BOSS. Bosses are a no magic zone! No thank you, I am good.
A Donkey Kong Country-esque platformer that seems pretty neat so far, though what's up with that extremely depressing intro story cutscene?? Not every game needs to be turbo depressing, especially when it's about a cute animal going left to right and collecting gems. Just let me collect gems, jeez.
There's something more under the surface here, I can feel it.
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Oh, that something more is that the game deletes your save file if you happen to die during your "one last shot" at the final final boss in a long segment that is both boring and hard to tell what's an enemy and what's not. I had already been hit twice by the time I realized that I needed to hover over enemies in my new form in order to actually deal damage. No thanks, game. I'm good.
Like the idea in spirit, definitely not a fan in execution.
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I backed up my save after my third attempt ended in failure, grinded up some extra continues to serve as extra lives during the final gauntlet, and finally made my way through. I do like a lot of what this game does, and I get why the finale needed to be so challenging in order to make the last shot worth it, but still. Frustrating that I needed to resort to grinding out some continues.
I bought a Flip Grip almost specifically for this game (and a few other shmups that I haven't put a ton of time into just yet).
I'm not sure if it makes me any better at Crimzon Clover, but it is a ton of fun to slap my Switch into that grip and try my best to hang out at the bottom of the screen while blasting tons of dudes.
I am able to instantly clock Wendee Lee in whatever she voices and I feel like she was just testing out her Haruhi voice here.
Luminous Arc 1 has the dubious honor of being maybe my least favorite DS game, one of the few games I sold and do not regret for a single instant - on top of being boring and mediocre, there were so many graphical glitches that bothered my eyes that I think I sold it within the first week of me buying it.
Luminous Arc 2 is slightly better - the gameplay is still slow as hell (something that the most recent game by this crew, Stella Glow, still has not really fixed) and the storytelling is bogged down by having so many characters that all feel the need to pipe up during cutscenes which are presented as visual novel esque affairs. I'm... not having a great time, is what I'm saying here.
I might try out 3 or I might restart my Stella Glow save since I don't believe I was that far in. Or maybe I'll just play a better tactics game elsewhere.
I, admittedly, don't know a ton about vtubers. I exist on the periphery of the vtuber sea, occasionally glancing towards it and thinking "oh neat". I don't have the time or attention anymore to watch hours long videos of cute anime girls playing video games or just chatting, but I'm glad they exist.
And then I thought, man, how funny would it be that my first real experience to vtubers would be Holocure?
It's a neat little vampire survivors clone! I like how the characters have their own main individual weapons, wish that the combo weapons were a bit more obvious from the outset (my main complaint with Vampire Survivors too, natch).
It's Pokemon but with only a single move that upgrades over time and fun tactics to mess around with. Bond with your chosen partner and go from castle to castle knocking down tough guys. It's a lot of fun!
Back in 2018, I absolutely hated the Messenger. I had just come off of Celeste, which I still prefer greatly, though I haven't replayed that one since the DLC a few years ago.
Namely, where Celeste uses its difficulty to turn into a touching narrative about facing yourself, overcoming obstacles, and personal growth. The Messenger prefers to use its difficulty to make fun of the player for sucking at the challenges presented and spends the majority of its narrative making painfully mediocre jokes with an ironic self-referential spin.
I wanted something earnest and sincere and what I got was a little demon telling me I should've jumped better. Not my favorite at the time.
I've softened on it a bit, but only just. I still think the writing is bad, but the banter between the Shopkeeper and Messenger can be fun. The gameplay is surprisingly not as difficult as I remember (dumb insta-death pits notwithstanding) and the genre twist works more than it doesn't.
Though, I wish the screen-by-screen navigation was slightly more vertically integrated with a few more teleport points because having to traverse huge swathes of levels over and over sucks. And having to make sure you're in the right period without being able to switch easily or know ahead of time also sucks.
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I ended up uninstalling after falling into the same pit twice in a row with the game saying, "hey maybe you should try jumping". Fuck offfffff.
Soma Bringer existed in my mind as this kinda mythical DS RPG that was never brought over - it occupied the same spheres as Xenoblade, Last Story, and Pandora's Tower. The forbidden DS game, the one we're not allowed to know about.
Turns out it's because it's actually just kinda boring! Whoops!
I played about an hour or so, but the difficulty and random aspects don't particularly jive well with me right now. Seems great, but not for me.
About once every few months, I would boot up Halo Infinite, sit through the minutes long load screens to get started, only to suddenly remember that Infinite has determined that my bluetooth headphones were also a microphone and that there was no way in the settings menu to say 'hey don't fucking do that' - the solution was to go outside of Infinite and dig through several menus to uncheck an option in my Windows settings that's not a problem with literally any other program I use or game I play.
I'm not fucking doing that for a single solitary game that I should be able to play solo without a fucking headset! If even Microsoft Teams can figure out how to separate my audio from my microphone, Halo Infinite should be able to as well. Uninstalled forever, fuck off.
Let me tell you about a little game called Tail Concerto on the PS1. It's a game I've never actually played, because I didn't have a Playstation until sometime around 2000 and actually finding copies of limited print run games was extremely hard if you happened to be in the rural South. Not impossible, mind, because I definitely bought a copy of Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete from the local game store so it's likely I saw it and my mind just glazed over it.
What I did do, though, was subscribe to Tips and Tricks which had absolutely exhaustive (read: six page) spread on the game complete with a guide, screenshots, and character art. I was absolutely enthralled. It, and the spiritual sequel, Solatorobo, always occupied a space in the back of my mind as 'dang, I should check those out one of these days'. Also in that issue is a giveaway to win a copy of Thousand Arms, which, dang. Did you know TOSE made that?
Enter, Fuga: Melodies of Steel set in the same universe and enter, Game Pass (and also enter, an Austin Eruption video like two years ago about how this game is neat).
I... hm. I don't love Fuga. It's *so* grim but also has *so* much micromanagement that it becomes tedious pretty quickly. The premise is that there's a huge war going on and your characters happen to fall into a gigantic tank that's able to help turn the tide. There is, of course, a catch: at any time when the tank gets low on HP, you can sacrifice one of your kids in order to completely win the battle. You don't generally need to with decent strategy, but you can also roll back at any time if you lose to try again.
This 'anyone can die' mentality could be interesting, especially if the game was difficult enough to warrant having to use the nuke at any point (it's generally not though). The problem is that all of the characters are pretty one-note and you have to spend a lot of time interacting with somewhat boring characters in the interstitial bits in order to get their friendship levels in-between each other up enough to use special skills. And, in those same bits, you have to upgrade your tank, and farm, and feed everyone, and fish for gear, and make sure you're rotating your characters to spread XP evenly and it's just... a lot. I wasn't even an hour in and the game was still unlocking stuff for me to do in the tank and I just had to tap out. I can put up with a lot if the combat is good, but even that wasn't really doing much for me.
Playing a bit of Fuga and thinking, "man I wonder if Tail Concerto is any good" made me realize that I could just... find out for myself. Put to test those memories and pull up the old Tips & Tricks magazine to play through an old PS1 game like it's 1999.
Tail Concerto is a strange little beast. The controls are probably the place where I struggle the most - your character, police dog Waffle, controls a mini walking tank that can pick up and throw objects. The tank is, for lack of a better word, *sluggish*. For instance, pressing right on the D-pad seems to suggest that your tank starts to move to the right. Hold it down and eventually you'll start moving right. The camera then slowly swings behind you because there's also no camera controls: R1 can be used as a gas pedal for the tank, and R2 will reverse. L1 and L2 are used to raise or lower your throwing reticule. There's some analog support but it's still Not Great.
A lot of the game involves picking up bombs to throw at enemies or chasing after small cats in order to get the next item needed to proceed but your tank obscures what's right in front of you and *also* the tank swings its arms in a right-left-right fashion so if what you're trying to pick up is on the other side of you, then you better circle around and try again.
And also to progress the story sometimes you just have to head home and I suppose the idea is to explore the two screens that make up Waffle's hometown, but instead you can just turn right back around to get a message from your boss and head off to the next story point.
I haven't even touched on the voice acting yet, which is All Over the Place in a way that only late 90s Atlus could think of. People pulling double and triple duty, some voices sounding just fine and some trying to replicate 'okay try to do Elmer Fudd but worse'.
Also the character designer is the same character design as Escaflowne?
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Wound up finishing this one since it only clocked in at around 5 hours, all told. Love a nice short game. Nothing too much to say, I thought this one was fine, a three-star adventure if there ever was one, but I do love the little after credits bonus mode where you can just enjoy Waffle's day off, talk to the three sisters, hang out for a minute. It's cute.
The last platforming gauntlet to get to the final boss was truly one of the worst things I've ever had to play, though. It's a teleporter maze with imprecise jumping through slow down goop with enemies constantly attacking you. Absolutely awful.
Specifically, the DS version, as I'm more than a little nervous of turning on my SNES one day and just finding all of my save files erased. Rather than find out for certain, I will just continue to live in ignorant bliss
(i checked, they're still there for now)
Anyway, Chrono Trigger! I had been playing and trying out a lot of games that didn't quite hit right or I just wasn't enjoying, so I went back to an old classic that I know I love and adore. And, hey, you know what's good? CHRONO TRIGGER.
In the circles I used to run in, way back when, it was passé or gauche to even think of mentioning games like Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy 7 on your 'favorite lists of all time' lists. You could only be a 'real' gamer if you had obscure games on your favorites list. Everyone with a SNES has heard of Chrono Trigger, it can't be that good of a game.
Except sometimes games are popular because they're good! And Chrono Trigger is amazing. The curse of being just head and shoulders better than almost every single game that it inspired. I think the thing I love most about this game is how quickly it moves and just throws you into the adventure. Within the first hour you're back in time, on your way to saving Marle, with a full party, potentially even on your way back to 1000AD - this is even with some wandering about on my part to see exactly how railroaded the Millennium Fair sequence is. FF4 is one of my favorite Final Fantasies for this same reason: you're thrown in and the game just starts immediately. No preamble, no fluff.
Hey you know what my least favorite part of Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros 3 is? Did you know it's the part where the Mario Brothers constantly yell out about how a certain power-up was 'just what they needed' every single time you collect one?
What if a game was just those call-outs.
(i played a demo and could not make it very far because of the characters yelling constantly. i can't)
A fun 3-D platformer with 2-D sprites that feels great to long jump in. Kind of all I need, tbh.
An interesting and truly ambitious GBA JRPG. I need to spend more time with this one to try and figure out all of the nuances, but I'm kinda flying blind in this open, 'go-anywhere-do-anything' type game that's really unusual for the genre.
I wrote a few years ago that Astro Boy: Omega Factor is one of the greatest action games, both on the GBA and maybe ever. But what is it that makes Astro Boy special, especially considering the limited moveset of a four hit combo plus a kick, three special moves, and rocket jets?
I think it's the way Astro Boy embraces connections and understanding through its titular mechanic - the Omega Factor. A superpowerful machine implanted in Astro as his core, the Omega Factor (and Astro) grow more powerful as you meet more people and come to understand them throughout the game. Each person you get to know lets you upgrade one of your abilities - health, punching, jets, your specials, or your sensor for finding more people.
You beat the game having about half of your abilities upgraded and the story leads Astro Boy to truly failing - humanity and robots cannot understand each other and we are doomed to repeat this cycle of war and destruction forevermore. At least, until Phoenix from Tezuka's unfinished masterpiece appears and gives you a chance to be reborn. Find the truth, uncover the secrets, make connections and stop this catastrophe. And also here's a stage select.
Rebirth mode RULES. You then go through the game again, but significantly harder, finding hidden secrets throughout the levels and finding ways to stop the devastation. I did need to look up the final path because I had forgotten where one character showed up for a half second cutscene, but still. Great stuff, incredible game.
My only real memory of Armored Core before playing a bit of AC3 was a guy begging me to play the versus mode with him and then completely smoking me with the custom mech he had made.
I am so bad at the parry mechanic, I feel like every enemy has two hitches in their swings that are specifically designed to wreck my day. (they patched the game to be a little easier, haven't tried that out yet though).
My prevailing memory of Mega Man Legends is of the N64 version - while I played Mega Man Legends 2 a good bit, I never played much of PSX Legends 1 until this year. It's so smooth to look at! I'm sure that I don't remember Mega Man 64 perfectly, but I don't remember being as crisp or with as much voice acting.
Personally, I had a great time over the six or so hours it took to beat MML. I didn't spend a ton of time doing sidequests, just sort of mainlined my way through the game. I absolutely love the world of Kattelox Island: the design, the visuals, the one big ass city, the surprisingly interconnected underground tunnels, how Mega Man just stumbles ass over teakettle upon his destiny, the power plant/evil dog zone.
I had a great time, is what I'm saying. Fairly easy, once you figure out how to strafe shoot and change the default controls, that is. I think I lost to two bosses - once because it has homing fireballs it throws at you constantly and the other being the final boss.
I didn't quite finish Live a Live last year, but did work my way through the last three scenarios and the final chapter, so I'll detail the rest of my thoughts here:
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* Prehistory - Probably the longest chapter, but also the one I think is most improved from the original SNES version. The crafting is still fiddly and it's probably best to look at a guide, but Pogo's ability to sniff and search out has been greatly improved, mostly because the radar shows you where to go. I did fight and beat the superboss of this chapter about two levels before the online recommendations and it didn't drop the overpowered item that wrecks the balance curve. Rude.
* Wild West - Quite possibly my favorite chapter? I love the Sundown kid, I love finding all of the traps and having the townspeople set them up, I love that the Sheriff's kid who is gung-ho about justice and fighting back is also just dogshit at setting up traps.
* Medieval - The chapter that unlocks after beating the previous seven is interesting and reveals more of the truth about what's been going on throughout time. This is probably the most difficult chapter, especially towards the end as you're fighting through tough bosses solo with only a few abilities. This is maybe the most surprising bit, though - I didn't really like Oersted! I remembered him being fine, but no, he really does fuck this one all up on his own, tbh.
* Finale - I picked Sundown as my protagonist for the final chapter, mostly remembering how much of a pain in the ass to recruit he is otherwise. I immediately picked up Lei, Akira, and Masaru since I had a feeling I wasn't going to be using Masaru or Akira in the final party much. I wanted to get their ultimate dungeons out of the way and then swap them out for the other members one at a time to build levels. My final party ended up being Sundown, Lei, Pogo, and Cube - I used Oboro instead of Pogo for a while but I needed someone who could get up close and take hits.
I like a lot of the final chapter, though some of the character dungeons are a little flimsy. Masaru's is just a straight shot, the real trick is finding it. Oboro's is truly annoying, with having to fight a specific enemy to get a key that breaks after one use and doing this *over and over again*. And the dungeon is confusing! Bad, all the way down.
Minor annoyances aside - like having to look up where the superbosses were or having to run away 100 times to fight one of those bosses (or one of the superbosses being right before the final boss and then being sent ALL THE WAY BACK TO WHERE YOU STARTED in order to fight it for some boots that give +7 defense instead of +3 or whatever) - I absolutely love the final chapter. I love getting the gang together, I love the remix world, I love the finale and how the story wraps up. Just had an incredible time, all said.
My tradition of playing Curtain Call during plane flights continues this year - the 3DS is more convenient to pack and play in a cramped plane environment as opposed to a wide Switch. I also play this to vibe out, not to be stressed out by four note coming at me all at once. It's also not really easy for me to read while on a plane, so most games I've been playing at whatever time I'm travelling don't work too well on the plane.
I've definitely learned some bad habits from Final Bar Line, though. Those diagonals actually kinda matter here! Can't just mash them out like I used to.
Killing digitally distributed games for no other reason than greed and FOMO is dire and a blight on the game industry at large. I hate the notion of limited exclusives and how easy it is to fall into the 'well I gotta play it now because who knows when they'll pull the plug' and that SUCKS. Tetris 99 only survives because it was able to work as free advertising for whatever Nintendo decides to put out next. I miss Mario 35, is what I'm saying.
That said, I think limited exclusives can be kinda neat, actually! Everyone playing the new thing at the same time hurts a little less when the new thing is vaguely free if you have Nintendo Online. Just wish they weren't taken away.
F-Zero 99 is an absolute blast to play. I'll admit to never really "getting" F-Zero until this game - the cars felt too slippery and I could never handle how the drifting or boosting works. Here, though, it all feels pretty great. Drifting around sharp corners, spinning into opponents to smash them into barriers, KO'ing unsuspecting racers right before the finish line, it's all pretty great.
So far, I've won 3 races (total) and came in the top 3 of two different Knight Cups. Feeling pretty good about that, tbh.
While I have a Flip Grip and a bunch of shmups, I don't really think of myself as being "good" at shooting games. "I'll check out Novice mode and see how that goes", I thought, assuming I would struggle through Novice mode for a bit before getting a handle on how the game works.
I 1CC'd Novice mode on my first time through. Hm. Interesting. Time to try out the harder modes.
A pretty good puzzle game!
There's more lurking under the surface. Much more.
Don't ask me how I know.
(okay, I really loved a lot of this game but some of the hard mode puzzles did have me looking up solutions and some of the puzzles beyond that are genuinely frustrating. several puzzles in the very definite final dungeon use a mechanic that had never even been shown up to that point and require what i feel is wayyy too much lateral thinking and the final gauntlet repeats the same sins as the end of ZeroRanger, though luckily without repeating just how punitive that game could be. still, there are plenty of guides and lore documents that the community has created so it's not as onerous as it *could* be, thankfully.)
It's a fun momentum based 3D platformer starring a dummy thicc goat. I'm not sure what more you need, to be honest.
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Started using a fan-made map for this one, but I'm somehow missing a key to get to the next area and I don't have the motivation to scour every corner of the map trying to find it. Still, a really great game for running around in.
The game has a melee magic staff that's actually fun to use??? Hot daniel, that's incredible.
Pikmin 4 may have one of the most perfect gameplay loops I've ever experienced. Every day feels just long enough to get something exciting done, but short enough that I'm constantly stretched to the limit. There's so much to do, so much to explore and dive into, just so much Pikmin to have fun with. This may be a perfect video game.
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Finished! 100%, all treasures, rescues, and onions complete. I didn't love the Cavern of the King, the massive twenty floor dungeon that's mostly just a series of battles, and I thought the final final boss maybe sucked a bit more than necessary, but those are my only real negatives. Great time!
Loved Olimar mode to bits.
Oh, Fell Seal, I wanted to love you so much.
I love tactics games, as can probably be guessed from my sojourn earlier this year into the depths of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, but Fell Seal just misses the mark for me. It's hard to describe exactly what feels off here - one thing I can definitely point out is the injury system that immediately made me go "wait, excuse me?" where your characters are out of the game for a few battles if they take too much damage. Even though you can turn this system off (and almost every single other system too), I felt annoyed by it, like the game was taking it easy on me. Sometimes too many options are overwhelming and lead to a lesser game, y'know?
I'm not sure if it's that I've become a Monster Hunter sicko, or weapon damage has been boosted, or I've just figured out the golden method of dealing with the majority of the monsters, but I've been tearing through Rise at an incredible clip on PC. Smashing monsters in the head with the sword and shield over and over again, rising up through HR and nearing the new content of Sunbreak.
I'm not even using the Defender weapon or the fancy Black Belt armor! Just the Magnamalo SnS and repeatedly shield punching dudes in the face.
The Case of the Golden Idol is a detective game where the questions are ever changing but serve the purpose of igniting your curiosity to discover the truth of the scene you're observing.
Here's how it works: You're presented with a 2-D scene over a few screens with some murder or disaster having just happened - a man literally set ablaze just after the reading of a will, a man being shoved off a cliff after discovering a treasure, a woman choking to death from a poisoned dinner in a grand estate. Shining points of interest lead to smaller insert images with either verbs, nouns, ideas, or places to collect and each of those is color coded.
The game then presents you with an investigation screen divided into sections. One section always laying out what happened where you fill in the color coded blanks with the correct words. ______ killed ________ with _______ because they __________ and _________. _________ set up __________ and wanted to ____________ the ____________ __________ which they ___________ in their ____________. And so on.
The other sections of the investigation screen then help lead you fill in details to lead you to the final answer. Maybe it's a game sheet with initials so that you can puzzle out who owed money to whom and how much and then use those initials to deduce identity based on the contents of their purse and how much money they should have. Or it's a layout of the bedrooms with one character having something in there they ought not to lead your investigation in a completely new direction. Sometimes it's just "alright what does the Golden Idol actually DO".
Helping you along is that when you get close to the right answer (within two blanks of being correct) the section will change to say that you're close. Having these hints (and actual, in-game hints, should you need them, but I never accessed them) is essential because when you get stuck and are mulling over the scene in your head, I found myself trying to different options for who did it or even what they did to try and lead my thinking down different paths. One instance I remember is putting in a completely random name for the murderer in a scene, only for the game to then note me as within two of the right answer. "Wait. If... If that's right, then that clue must mean something completely different. And if THAT is different, then that means..." and so forth.
An absolutely phenomenal game. Uncovering the identities, piecing together the story, figuring out the murders was such a great time. I'm excited to get the DLC just so I can experience some new cases.
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The way the Case of the Golden Idol saves its biggest reveal until after the credits roll is truly incredible.
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I did something I almost never do and bought the DLC for Golden Idol: The Spider of Lanka and the Lemurian Vampire and had a tremendous time with each. Getting into the first case of the Spider of Lanka and instantly deducing everyone's identities correctly the first time and figuring out how the card game was played right off the bat made me feel like I was right back in it, baby.
While some of the Wonder moments have been "okay here's the stage but sillier" and those are fun, but occasionally there's a moment that turns the entire idea of a 2-D platformer on its head that makes me wide-eyed and excited in a way few other things can. Moments that make me exclaim, 'oh. oh! holy shit, WHAT!?'
Fantastic game.
I finished Psychonauts 2 finally!
While I think the game is strongest in its earlier stages (literally getting the band back together in the PSI King's Sensorium, exploring the ramifications of mind meddling in Hollis's levels, all of Compton's cookoff), I still enjoyed the story beats of the later stages of Psychonauts 2.
Bob's Bottles, for instance, is a great introspection into alcoholism and what fuels it. As someone who has a family history of alcoholism, I thought it was handled particularly well and thoughtfully. I just didn't enjoy /playing/ it.
The platforming really plummets towards the end of the game for me, as it grows more difficult for reasons that don't feel narratively or mechanically interesting. Just tight jumps that lead to combat encounters that lead to frustrating boss encounters and I didn't really love any of them enough to do harder versions of them!
Also when all the kids show up at the end, I completely forgot any of them existed. Whoops.
I wound up finishing the Great Ace Attorney Chronicles this year, an incredible game when you consider both 1 and 2 together and two half-baked ones when considered separately. Great Ace Attorney is, well, great mainly because it functions as a super long Ace Attorney game, just with some minor pacing issues.
Because, truly at its core, there are maybe six cases in the entire game that I would say utilize the entire cycle of an Ace Attorney case: the setup, the crime, the investigation, and the trial (and then looping through the investigation and trial again as needed). You could argue that the loop isn't really necessary as it definitely pads out some of the cases in earlier Ace Attorney games, but the slow build-up as you explore these locations to reveal new information always felt important to me. There are about four tutorial cases and while GAA2-1 is probably the best tutorial ever, mainly because of who is in the driver seat for that case, but it's still a tutorial. Splitting up the last case over two actual 'cases' is frustrating and almost feels like a cop-out.
My favorite cases from Great Ace Attorney are probably, in order, The Adventure of the Runaway Room (1-3), The Return of the Great Departed Soul (2-3), and The Memoirs of the Clouded Kokoro (2-2). The Adventure of the Unspeakable Story (1-5) is also good, though the stereoscopes fucked me up quite a bit - those probably played better on a 3DS.
I attempted to do a complicated job run earlier this year but it was mostly just unwieldy. Randomly rolling jobs but also making sure everyone got at least was just too many jobs to comfortably hold on to. Something like that works well if everyone gets like two jobs max. Limit my wings and I will show you just how high I can fly. What if there were only four jobs, though.
Some kind of... party. A gala. A jubilee, even.
Four Job Fiesta has been a ton of fun so far! I ended up rolling Monk, Red Mage, Ninja, and Samurai. Monk was extremely useful during the first world, mostly because Chakra keeps everyone's HP topped up and the Monk's raw strength helps bowl over most challengers. Red Mage is mostly helpful because it gave my characters the ability to break rods during some fights that threatened to stop the run (like Byblos?? Rough fight).
I never used Ninja much, but Throw is instrumental in my success right now, as thrown scrolls do over 1000 damage and can easily end encounters. Samurai is probably one of the more broken classes with Zeninage doing endgame level damage for about 1200 gil per enemy at the point I'm at in the game. I might train up to get Ianuki just so I don't have to waste gil on items and Zeninage and can instead save up that money for the actual endgame when I need steady damage. oh, I could also probably toss Smoke on a character to escape from all fights if I really need to make a clean dash for the end.
I've had Game Pass for about a year now, but one of the key components of Game Pass, EA Play, had been completely inaccessible to me. My linked EA account was locked to an account I have never seen before and could not access, the error screen when attempting to link my Xbox account to a different EA account I had said "sorry, this one is used by ****@disabled.ea.com". Frustrating. I wrote it off, thinking 'well, i don't play that many EA games, this isn't a great loss. I don't do sports games or anything like that and the game I want (Fallen Order) goes on sale so often for so cheap that I don't mind tossing Respawn four bucks.
And all this is fine and good except Fallen Order hasn't been on sale once since Survivor came out! not ONCE! So I finally got my account fixed and have been playing Fallen Order. I'm not traditionally a big Star Wars guy. I didn't really grow up with the movies though I did see the original trilogy (I want to say in drama class in high school?) and the first prequel movie when it was contemporary. I like A More Civilized Age and have slowly been working my way through the Clone Wars TV show (and the prequels) and have been having a pretty good time overall!
Dathomir and Kashyyyk are places I kinda recognize through cultural osmosis but I couldn't tell you much about either, is where I'm at.
The gameplay has been a lot of fun. Cutting through dudes, hearing Stormtroopers yell "oh shit a Jedi!" is fun and force pushing enemies (especially the threatening Purge Troopers) off cliffs is powerful. I also am really enjoying the exploration - finding hidden away trinkets or story bits. Minus all of the obvious time wasting/loading zone 'go through the narrow crevice' or 'climb around for a few minutes to move from point A to B' with no difficulty or mechanical complexity. Some of these moments are used for narration and exploring the dynamic between Cal and BD-1, which is nice. When Cal creates a double bladed lightsaber? I popped off. BD-1 trying to tell Cal a joke while he's climbing on the underside of a spaceport? Incredible. Good game.
Eastward was cycling off Game Pass so I thought I'd give it a shot. About an hour in, I didn't find much to really keep me interested or curious about where the story is unfolding. People who's biggest influence is EarthBound sure do like to tell you about how much they love EarthBound, though.
Which maybe brings me to my biggest game shame: I don't actually like EarthBound all that much! I can recognize how amazing EarthBound was if you never had played another video game before, but it just never really clicked with me. I tried playing it a few times over the last nearly thirty years (though I don't think I would actually give it a longer shot until I had my own laptop, sometime around 2005? I might have rented it once in the 90s, though?) and I bounced off well before Paula joined the party, every time. I think I made it about as far as getting Jeff, once.
Well, this time I resolved to put my past prejudices aside. Give EarthBound an honest shot, see how it resonates.
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So far, I'm enjoying EarthBound, though I think some of the bosses are ridiculous beef gates. The first one is probably the hardest, requiring a ton of solo grinding in order to make a dent on it and hope you don't get smashed. The second boss took me a few tries, mostly because he kept healing the first time and I didn't have PSI Magnet on Paula just yet. Moving on to the Runaway Five (I'm assuming) and Threed!
I'm a Kingdom Hearts sicko, but I've never been a Kingdom Hearts Sicko, capital S. Meaning, while I've enjoyed the games, I've never been the person proclaiming that Kingdom Hearts II has one of the greatest battle systems of all time by pointing to the Data Battles against Organization XIII. 'They take all the nuance of the battle system to fully beat and really test your skill!'
Kinda.
At their face, the Data Battles are just harder versions of the Organization XIII battles found throughout the story (and in side areas for characters not fought over the coures of the story). They hit harder, they attack faster, they have more abilities, or more gimmicks. Demyx summons water clones three different times throughout the fight, capping off with a 30 second timer against 99 clones. Axel has a floor that constantly drains your health immediately starting the fight. Larxene just never stops never stopping.
I like the idea of these bosses in theory, who doesn't love an actual challenge instead of just artificially inflated stats and damage? Looking up strategies to these fights online usually just leads to a lot of Kingdom Hearts Sickos saying "oh looks like you have a skill issue".
What the Sickos don't reveal, however, is what Dark Souls Sickos also don't reveal: they all know the strategies for cheesing each and every single boss and look down on those who just haven't 'got gud'. Limit Form makes trivial work of most bosses since you get a free MP refill and Sonic Blade also restores health on each hit (and you can do it three or more times each transformation because it also has MP Rage). Final Form with the Bond of Flame Keyblade and Firaga spam destroys a good third of the bosses.
But hey, I've done almost all the Data Fights now. Just one left and I can't remember if I ever fought Lingering Will or not. I think I did? (nope) And then, on to Birth By Sleep and Dream Drop Distance and then, maybe finally, KH3.
I did not spend a ton of time playing through VVVVVV, but someone posted a screenshot of Veni Vidi Vici (what many think of as the hardest collectible in the game to get) and I thought, "hm. I bet I can still do that."
I can.
I've been watching Jeff Gerstmann play through a bunch of NES games lately and it's a lot of fun revisiting some games I absolutely love and some that he loves that I've never really tried. I know the existence of Rygar, but I've never really given Rygar a fair shot. Still haven't, since it's not on this list yet.
Super Spy Hunter is a cool as hell game with a killer soundtrack and might actually be a bit too hard but I'm having fun. It's also pretty short, which helps, a complete playthrough is about an hour. I definitely used some save states in the last level just to get through it, though I could probably pick it up and make it most of the way there now - that final level has a bit too many "gotcha" moments like sudden jumps over lava pits where you have to be going fast but not too fast or you fall into lava or electric gates that are one hit kills. The final boss is a giant missle (?) that doesn't telegraph attacks! Never sit behind it, I guess?
The Turbografx version, with the fandub, specifically. Bump and grind combat is back! It feels so good.
I played a bit of Timespinner about two years ago, but never quite finished it. I restarted entirely since the entire experience is about six hours long and really enjoyed my time with Lunais and her crew. I thought Timespinner was a fun little Metroidvania. No real deep thoughts here, just a good time, get in and get out. Once I got the ability to constantly shoot lightning out of my hands at the cost of a little MP, I basically never switched. If everything expects you to be in melee range, being able to shoot from afar is gamebreaking!
Ending was a little weak is maybe the harshest thing I could say about it.
I will admit something - I've never been a big Alan Wake fan.
Most of it stems from the gameplay, though. The game tugs you at every opportunity to shove you towards the next story beat, enemy encounter, or huge setpiece while *also* encouraging you to stick around, look for some coffee thermoses, hey check out around the corner for some extra supplies, listen to the radio show, oh huh this TV turned out, what cool little Twilight Zone episode did we rip off this time? That push pull felt awful to play through - I wanted to take the game seriously and if it wasn't going to treat its own world seriously, then I wasn't going to give a single shit. And also fighting enemies sucked!
These days, I've... mellowed, at least a little bit. Yes, all of the obvious collectibles are annoying and I still felt the way I felt back then. But, I think, Alan Wake isn't a game you're really meant to take seriously - you're an avatar of an avatar, running around through a video game picking up pieces of a shlocky horror novel. It's meant to be a little silly. So, hang out for a bit, watch some Night Springs, have a good time. Enjoy the vibes.
Also, does anyone remember that there are driving sections in this game? This is like when I remember that Tony Hawk Underground has driving sections.
