The on-going list of games I played for at least an hour or so throughout 2024. (this list is written over the course of the year, so any breaks in time for a game are marked by dashes between paragraphs)
My own personal goal this year is to finally, finally finish XC2, a game that I think is interesting, but I'm not sure if I 100% like.
It's a few issues all coming together: the combat, even if I feel like I know what I'm doing, never quite clicks the way Xenoblade 1 or X did. Two separate loops that you could be executing at the same time, but it's a gamble if your allies will actually be able to get enough energy or switch to the right Blade. I'm sure there's a nuance here I'm missing, but after spending so long in this game, I shouldn't be crushed by random, same level enemies that are between me and the next story checkpoint.
The gacha system is maybe my biggest annoyance, though. Even when you get guaranteed Blades or guaranteed drops, it's still just annoying having to spend so long going through the motions of unlocking Blade after Blade after Blade. If I could spend real actual money to just get a good Blade, I wouldn't, but god I would be tempted.
I also don't love the field skill system. If you're going to make me have fifty Blades attached to one character in order to get the one good one, why do I then have to switch out all of these Blades to find the right three combo of guys that lets me pass a random skill check while out and about?! Some of these skill checks are hard gates that you have to pass in order to move on and it sucks every time!
I do like using Pneuma to just wreck the balance of the game entirely though. That feels pretty great.
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I did, ultimately, beat Xenoblade Chronicles 2 after mainlining the story to the best of my ability. My feelings didn't change a whole lot, I found the last hour or so of the story pretty annoying, bordering on boring. The final boss having a move that just instantly kills you (and took me three tries to finally beat) is maybe the most frustrating of it all - I did finally figure out a way to get four orbs on an enemy as quickly as possible (basically use Mythra to set up each step and let your team fill in as much as possible before slapping a pure light orb on there) and it was the only time I ever did a Full Burst combo. The fake-out sacrifice during the finale is such an eye roll.
But, I'm mostly going to remember my time with the finale of XC2 because I needed to take my daughter to the hospital less than an hour after I rolled credits because she woke up with the worst cough we ever heard and she was wheezing while she breathed. She's fine now, nothing super serious (just croup, which some steroids cleared up), but dang. Weird night.
I was not expecting to be smacked in the face by "it's not a lake, it's an ocean" and an appearance by Saga Anderson within the first ten minutes.
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I'm going along, having a great time shooting dudes with time powers, but then I have to go out of the game (because the streaming in the game is broken) to sit down and watch an episode of TV. I don't think I'd mind a 30 minute long cutscene, but the act of having to go outside of the game just kills me. I'll power through soon, but I've been in gamer mode for a bit now, so I'll have to pivot back when I'm in the mood to watch some shows.
'What if we took the vibes of 2021's Guardians of the Galaxy and slapped a deck builder into it'?
'sold'
I'm a sucker for a game with decent writing and a lot of characters to hang out with that I generally like. I think everyone might be about 20% too quippy or jokey and there might be just a bit too much micromanagement between missions. Still, some of the jokes do land and I've been having a good time exploring the greater Abbey environs and upgrading cards, so I think it evens out.
I did lose almost an hour and a half of progress thanks to the autosaving only saving at the beginning of the previous day, which is such a wild decision that I almost can't believe it. I haven't had issues with an autosave losing progress in years, how the hell did they manage to mess that up?
I do love how the opening few battles make it seem like it's dishonorable to pull your sword on anyone of a greater rank than you, but afterwards you can just pull out a gun and start blasting. How did Ryoma beat the Masked Man? Blastin'. How does Ryoma beat random thugs out in the world? Spin in a circle while blastin'.
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'hey did you see that new guy that joined the shinsengumi?
'no, dang, how'd he beat the captain?'
'i heard he pulled out a gun and shot him forty times'
I forgot to equip the hammer for the first few hours and it wasn't until I got the Koopa Shell that I realized "oh wait"
Super Mario RPG is one of my favorite games of all time. Baby's first JRPG if there ever was one, but I loved it all the same. It used to be the game I replayed at least once a year, mostly because of nostalgia, but also because it's extremely short. I loved exploring the nooks and crannys of the reimagined Mushroom Kingdom and I loved bopping along with the music. I even had the strategy guide! Did it help me get those 100 Super Jumps in a row? Absolutely not, best I could ever do was like 30. But I had it and it was pretty neat!
Geno is the most nothing character but he's a cool little puppet with a GUN. Incredible.
I've spent about a dozen more hours with Lies of P since last year and I'm of a few minds about it. It's definitely the best non-From Soft Dark Souls game I've played and I absolutely love tearing through some of the areas. I'm also completely ass at the parry mechanic (even still) and have mostly relegated myself to double dodging and stabbing puppets from afar and whipping out the legion arm shield if I'm out of stamina. I can pull of parries sometimes, but it's not really my strong suit.
My strong suit is, instead, recognizing that a lot of enemies will just rush at you so then I can use the glaive mode of the Holy Sword of the Ark to poke at enemies from a distance and almost always two shot them. It's worked 90% of the time and the rest I can usually poke and dive away from to slowly chip away. It's a very Dark Souls 1 'okay just use the lightning spear from Sen's Fortress on everything' type gameplay but hey, it's working.
Also working is stocking up on throwing items before every boss. Very few things can take 15 bombs hurled directly at their face. Case in point: The Green Monster boss from area 8 used all of my tricks. Summoning a specter to help, poking from afar, throwing like seven bombs when it got down to low health because wow some of these fights aren't fun!
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Finished the game clocking in at around 20 hours, somehow speeding through the HLTB estimate of 30. My strategy of 'summon the spectre for every fight you can and then never stop never stopping' seemed to work all the way up until the end of the game. Even the final fight, which must be done solo, fell to my strategy of the above along with throwing 21 bombs directly into its face.
My final overall thoughts are "huh that was neat" mixed with "dang, i never did get good at those parries". I'm sure there are deeper thoughts out there on the story, on Pinocchio himself, on Geppetto's final lines of P being a useless puppet, on the nature of creation and art itself, how we make art in our image and liken ourselves as gods over our work, but are also remade ourselves as our creations outgrow their need for whatever divinity we claim to be, but I couldn't really bring myself to engage with any of the story beats or plot. I'm sure it's neat! I was mostly just here to stab monsters, tbh.
I love the idea of FE Echoes, but not really the execution. Just taking the old systems, updating the graphics while changing almost nothing else seems like a great idea, but what Fire Emblem has become over the last few years is so diametrically opposed to what Gaiden was, way back when.
I still can't get over that you only had to be one over to outspeed. I got outsped by nearly everyone during the last few fights! My Pegasus Knights (all four of them) were getting doubled and do you know what the Peg Knights are supposed to be good at? Not getting doubled! That's their whole shtick! To be fast and not get hit and instead they're just getting slammed down constantly. Everyone is too slow, the maps are bad, magic taking health to cast is an interesting idea but leaves every single mage just getting absolutely annihilated. Just so many weird decisions, all stacked on each other.
That final map with tons of boss units was just dire. I did manage to beat it without losing anyone, but it was definitely a slog that basically ended with the final boss surrounded on all sides with only Alm able to do anything resembling damage to it. And then it healed for 40 health. Twice! Jesus. Rough end.
My favorite unit was probably Delthea, though she definitely has some issues (namely she can't really utilize Enemy Phase counters because she has almost no HP to start with and what little she has gets shredded with her magic). Sometimes you just need someone to cast a magic nuke and Delthea's your girl.
I haven't been a 'gotta get all the achievements' gamer in quite some time, probably since the PS4 became the dominant platform and ever growing big ol' number on the dashboard faded from view. I'm sure it's still there (i checked, it is, though mine was definitely higher than 55,000 so i'm not sure what happened) but I just stopped the artificial grind for that bigger number.
RE3R is the first game in a long time that the bug bit me, though. I wanted and needed to get every single achievement. I pulled up guides to show me which documents I missed and which Charlie dolls I needed to grab. One doll is hidden at the very beginning of the game which is a giant middle finger! I definitely laughed as that was the last one I needed, though.
Did I have a great time rocket launching my way through Inferno mode? It wasn't much more difficult than Nightmare mode, which I also rocket launched my way through, which is to say, no, I did not have a great time. I did it though! The final boss was a pain in the ass that I needed like six healing items to beat because just scraping its side would nearly kill me. Did I find it absolutely hilarious when two of the save points I planned on using were just straight up ripped out of Inferno mode? Absolutely. Incredible joke, honestly.
A neat little GBA action RPG! I'm mostly playing this one so I can get a feel for the gameplay before moving on to the superior sequel. Having a fun time so far, though, I'm a sucker for a centralized dungeon that you return to multiple times over the course of a story and diving ever deeper into. I really loved the Temple of the Ocean King in Phantom Hourglass, is what I'm saying.
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Wrapped this one up in around twelve or so hours. Nothing world-shattering, but I had a good time! I ended up using a combo of a fancy spear and a drill to break boss weapons for the majority of the game and that was a ton of fun.
I had a save from a few years ago during my last deep dive into SMT4 that I left off right before the Blasted Tokyo segment, which then leads into Infernal Tokyo and the route lock. I do mean right before, I beat the boss I was standing in front of and then got immediately shuttled to Blasted Tokyo.
I'm now officially locked into the Neutral Route, though. I originally was on the Law Route but was able to reload (and refight Kenji because I didn't save right after) to finagle my way to Neutral to see the most content. I haven't quite decided if I'll go do some New Game pluses to see all of extra endings - I have other SMTs to get to and even other SMTs on the 3DS to check out.
I looked at my overall playtime (which is just a hair over forty hours now) and I've spent seven whole ass hours just in the Cathedral of Shadows, merging demons. That's...that feels like way too much time. Maybe my one real point of contention in the game - because you level so fast and you're just tearing through these demons due to the rocket tag nature of the combat, you don't really spend a lot of time with any one particular demon before it's fused and fused again. Helpful when you're trying to get skills to your main character, but I often find myself rolling up on a boss battle reviewing what I have at the moment because I haven't thought about team composition in at least an hour. And then just hitting the Megidola button. Or, if I'm being real, Concentrate and then setup with demons, and then pass the turn back to me to Megidola.
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Credits on Neutral Route! Kind of an underwhelming end, especially having to look up guides to find the exact 19 subquests you have to complete in order to become the Champion of Tokyo. One of them isn't even on the quest board! But, I finally did it and felt pretty good about putting to rest this game I bought *brand new* way back when.
So brand new, in fact, that I accidentally got two copies of it from Amazon. I didn't get the first copy on the day of release because my apartment back then was awful about letting UPS workers in so they just straight up didn't deliver packages sometimes and Amazon overnighted a new one to me, which then came at the exact same time as the one I preordered. I sent the other one back, I'm not a monster. End of an era, really.
I've been playing this on my TV in the living room via Moonlight, which has worked surprisingly well. While I love having a game room, I miss being around my family and the ability to stream games to the big screen TV is a nice little boon. Some games work better than others (Death Stranding works pretty well, as does Persona, but Stranger of Paradise feels just slightly off and RE2R feels sluggish).
I think Death Stranding is pretty cool, though my wife did pipe up with the comment, "this is some fuckin' capitalism bullshit, good job Sam, go do this Sam, help us rebuild america Sam, there's some banana bread in the kitchen Sam."
She's not wrong.
The Mega Man collections are on sale via Humble right now, but I've always felt a bit of input delay while playing those, so I instead opted to go the self-hosted route of playing classic Mega Man (namely through Mesen, which I love).
I definitely meant to only dive in for a few minutes, but I ended up doing a full run in about an hour, needing to rewind a handful of times as my old speedrunning skills have slipped. I forgot the Dragon was an instant kill on touch! I was able to one cycle the Boobeam Trap which felt great.
I still think Mega Man 2 is one of the greatest NES games but man there's some grade-A bullshit in there.
Sometimes, in an effort to cut through the chaff and just a pick a video game to play, (I swear to god it's not that hard, this is the least complicated problem, but oftentimes i'll spend so much thinking of playing games instead of actually playing them, pick something dumbass!), I'll sort the games on my platform of choice by install size. Play and enjoy the biggest game which lets me free up some space to tackle the next biggest game or install a bunch of cool small games. Watching the numbers go down, instead of up.
Which brings me back to Stranger of Paradise, now that I've found some options to help mitigate the loot firehose. It's basically 'optimize your gear after every level and auto-dismantle the rest' because it doesn't really seem to matter until post-game content.
I really love how the magic classes in this game work. Hitting people with a club and then diving back to cast a huge spell or activating spells during combos feels so good. Really great time.
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Just hit Mt. Gulg and I'm /probably/ about halfway through now, I just hit level 50. The levels really don't matter and I'm still autodismantling just about everything that's below my level as the gear score keeps going up and up. I think I've hit unlocked all of the Advanced jobs and am slowly working my way through those as I find the ones I gravitate to. Still having a great time!
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Hit credits! Really lovely time, thoroughly enjoyed the story though I do think it takes a bit of a dip in the middle where you're just going to each fiend and taking them down. Love how it all wraps up towards the end.
Didn't super love the tendency the game has to have you finish a level and then pop up a new level that's twenty above where you are but hey here are four sidequests you should probably do! (it's refighting the fiends, have funnnnnn) But it's relatively minor and I did just about every sidequest anyway - none of them took that long.
Once I unlocked Sage, I spent most of my time with it except at the start of missions where I would quickly build up my MP meter with Breaker. Hitting the three White Magic sigils and flipping over to build up the Black Magic sigils and then hitting whatever was standing in my way with Ultima felt great and continued to feel great every single time I did it. Just about every boss melted to this strategy, as I would save Ultima to be the first thing I cast during the second stage and just shred that stagger bar to nothing. Once I figured out my Ultima strat, I only struggled with the final boss and that's mainly because I didn't have my usual MP bar.
Wonderful time, all said. Not much of a desire to play any DLC or postgame stuff, but I loved what I played.
I'm attempting a nuzlocke and I forgot how rough early game B/W is. You have a max of four pokemon before the first boss and no way to easily grind up to 14. I managed (and gave myself a mulligan because I was definitely not prepared the first time), but at what cost to my soul.
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Beat Lenora without losing anyone to her Watchog and its Retaliate which I remember being a nightmare. Praise be to my Herdier with Intimidate that I kept swapping out with my Audino to get it down to about -4.
Persona 3 is one of the biggest influences on my gaming preferences - both in terms of mechanical complexity and character interactions. Prior to Persona 3, I knew that I loved JRPGs, but they were mostly of the grindy 'numbers going up' variety (though, depending on the day, I'll definitely prefer a Dragon Quest over something more serious). After P3, though, I knew just how much I enjoyed turn-based JRPGs filled with colorful characters that bounce off each other, crunchy chain-summoning of creatures to make cool new ones, and lo-fi beats to chill out to. That 'one more day' feeling of Persona hit me in a way few other games did - I spent basically an entire summer between sophomore and junior year of college staying up until 4 AM playing through Persona 3, just one more day. Just one more day. Okay, just one more day. But for real now, just one more day. Just -
I kept myself almost entirely out of the loop when it came to preview coverage for Reload: it was a remake of one of my favorite games of all time. The game I think of that, when people point to how great the Scooby Doo squad is from 4, I say, "but SEES is RIGHT THERE and you have a DOG with a knife in his mouth!". And while I'm a bit disappointed by the lack of the FeMC, who is probably my favorite addition, (especially when considering Persona Q), in my heart I was always going to play it.
I can't tell if this game is good, but it's definitely a lot.
I've owned Blaster Master Zero 3 for a while now and need to play it, so I've been trying to mainline BMZ2 and the game is just SO LONG.
I promise I play more than Resident Evil and JRPGs but, uh, not much more. After wrapping up everything in RE3, I loaded RE2R back up to get some more of that Resident Evil goodness. Did a Claire 1st, Leon 2nd run this time and wow things are a lot harder to deal with as Leon in the 2nd Run. Poor boy is getting his ass tossed around right and left.
While I still tend to veer on the side of preferring the original, it's neck and neck. I'm just a sucker for PS1 aesthetics and original RE2 is a game I've played at least a dozen times through.
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Super Tyrant is still a pain in the ass. I'm probably not going to do a hardcore mode run, but I'll leave it installed for now.
I'm behind like two Yakuza games and need to finish Like A Dragon, which I'm enjoying though my two main points of criticism is that that job system is a little half baked and the timing on Perfect Guards isn't intuitive. When it comes to a JRPG with jobs, I expect either those jobs to unlock other, more powerful, jobs (DQ-style) or for those jobs to combine together in interesting ways (FF-style). Like A Dragon kinda manages to do both and also neither?
Jobs unlock based on either Ichiban's level and stats or the character's level and their relation to Ichiban. In each job, there's a list of skills that the job has and a handful (usually 2-3) will carry over to wherever you go, along with a set of small stat buffs that unlock in-between skill levels (usually every 4-5 levels). The idea seems to be that you should shift your characters around between jobs, grab all the special skills and stat buffs, and then stick them in their final job but the time investment to do that is far too much, especially since every job starts at level 1, though they do level up quickly.
It's all a bit much and I still haven't found myself using skills from the other jobs, except maybe the healing spells that you can grab. I've tried branching everyone around and my gang doesn't feel much more powerful than if they stuck in their default job. Whacking someone with a 2x4 into traffic is still a ton of fun, no matter if you're a Hero or a Foreman, at least.
Ichiban is a great protagonist though, see above my love of JRPGs with colorful characters that bounce off each other.
My Steam playtime for Balatro is already over 40 hours and the game's been out maybe less than two weeks as I write this? Whoops.
I'm usually good for a roguelike a year, maybe two. The ever upward spiraling nature of the genre, the grind to unlock more equipment or abilities, the gear treadmill, the drip feed of new content, whatever you want to call it - I have to be in a specific mood to have my time wasted. Say what you will about my love of JRPGs, but those numbers go UP and they very rarely stop going up.
So imagine my surprise when I fell deeply in love with this poker themed roguelike. The premise is simple: You have eight cards dealt to you out of a standard deck of 52. You can play about four hands to beat the round and you can discard five cards at a time, three times. You're trying to hit a score target and your score is made up of Chips and Multipliers. So, for example, Full House is worth 35 Chips X 4 Multiplier and each card that is part of the hand is "scored" to add to the Chips. So, a three Queen, two 8 Full House would be worth 35 plus your cards (10+10+10+8+8) times 4, for a score of 324. Hey, you cleared the first score goal. Great job!! Next one is 450, buckle up, because the store just opened up and now we have Jokers!
And the Jokers are the real stars of the show, as they radically and dramatically alter your hands and points. One Joker might score every single card that's played - suddenly you can just play High Card hands and add every single card to the Chips counter. Oh, dang, you also have Hiker Joker, which adds four chips to a card every single time it's scored? After a few rounds, that 3 of Clubs is worth 15 Chips, dang. And you have Green Joker that gives you more multiplier each time a hand is played (and takes away a multiplier if you discard?) So just never discard, got it. And you found the Gros Michel which just gives you a flat +15 Mult at the risk of it going extinct 25% of the time? Sounds like you're doing pretty good! Throw in some XMult and you got yourself a stew!
With 150 Jokers, the possible builds are endless and fascinating to play through. That's not even touching on the Planet cards, which level up your various Hands (so that a level 3 Full House is now worth 90 X 8), or the Tarot cards, which have effects ranging from delete two cards, to generate two random Planets, to doubling your money, to adding special effects to cards and the different decks with different effects built in (like +1 Hands to play or No Face Cards).
It's just a fantastic time.
My weird sound issue crops up again in Star Ocean: The Second Story R - this time it's the confirmation sound effect when advancing the last line of dialog, which, in a JRPG, you do A LOT. Previously it's been menu confirmation sound effect in Trials from Zero or a weird background whistling sound in Dishonored 2.
Luckily, I can just turn the sound effects most of the way down and avoid the issue. I even went and loaded up the PS1 version of Star Ocean Second Story to see if it did the same thing and no! It doesn't! It's something that was added to this remaster for some reason. Part of me wishes I had bought it on PC so I could muck with the sound files and try to eliminate that annoyance.
Game's pretty good though.
I grabbed a PC version of Trails from Zero and then edited the sound files to fix the issue my brain was having with the 'confirm' sound effect. Basically, that one particular sound effect is too loud, too long, and echoey - when you're buttoning through attacks rapidly or just trying to menu, the confirmation is so much louder than everything else. The Cold Steel games use a similar sound effect but it's mixed in a different way that bleeds into the background audio so I don't notice it as much. It's also much quicker, so it's less likely to overlap with itself.
All of that to say I replaced the confirm with the dialogue beep sound effect, so my issue is completely solved. Wish I didn't have to do that, but oh well.
Trails from Zero is still pretty good! The save file I grabbed from Reddit was right about where I left off, though the way this person had their quartz set up has raised so many questions. How were they playing like this? They didn't scan anything! They didn't have the bestiary filled out at all!! HOW?!!
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Wrapped this one up and immediately moved on to the sequel. I was probably about twenty hours from the end on my Switch file and things really escalate from the point I left off. I appreciate that Zero didn't do the 'surprise twist ending fuck you' that both Sky FC and Cold Steel wind up doing. While I appreciate those, saving all of your best story bits for the very end is a dick move.
Sometimes the heart wants what the heart wants and you have to put down every single new game to play a tactics game that you put about three hours into in 2022 and then never touched again, because the alternative is selling your soul to buy Unicorn Overlord and you already have a tactics game you haven't played much of, bud.
I think I like Triangle Strategy, though I wouldn't say it's particularly subtle about any of its storytelling - I'm also not sure if it's trying to be? I like this little band of misfits and I think the actual tactical gameplay is a ton of fun. Not sure how much the area effects (like setting a square on fire or iced over) is going to play into battles, but it could be fun.
Another game where I needed to edit the sound files but also turn the sound effects way down because, apparently, that's just a known problem with this game. Everything sounds tinny and bad!
The SSS is back(?) with two new members, one of whom I love and the other of whom is fodder for a lot of gay jokes but he also seems to be making a lot of them himself and also leaning into how much he makes people uncomfortable? Azure is maybe the most "anime" (derogatory) that the games have gotten in that there's a lot of jokes about the characters' sexuality or played off groping of the Elie's breasts. It sucks! It sucks every time, come on guys, why do you have to be like this.
There is a joke about how much Daddy energy that the new mayor has versus the top Bracer that sent me howling, though, so maybe I'm not immune. We're not hitting Persona 4 levels of problematic, is what I'm saying.
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If anything happens to KeA, I'm turning this fucking game off.
Parasite Eve is a game that I love, in theory. In practice, I've only ever gotten to Central Park in day 2, been frustrated that you can't use the Dpad and analog at the same time, found Aya's run speed way too slow, not been able to find the key to move on and spent about an hour just shooting crows in the face before turning the game off.
This year, I've resolved to actually put some work in getting to the meat of the game because the fact that the only Parasite Eve game I've finished being the Third Birthday is actively upsetting. I'm just now hitting day 4 and am having a good time so far! I think the inventory system can be needlessly limiting in the early game, though, and how the gun/armor tools work needs more than a single tooltip. Right now I'm using a pistol with four slots that I'm pouring all the other guns into to upgrade the stats.
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Beat Parasite Eve! Probably took around 9 hours or so, counting deaths and continues. There's a chase sequence after the final boss (and that final boss has three different stages) where going the wrong way or taking a second too long results in instant death and having to do the boss *all over again*. The first time I beat the boss and then accidentally pressed the wrong button during a scene transition (and thus going backwards accidentally) which resulted in me dying made me straight up turn my Vita off. I was so pissed.
So pissed that I downloaded a save file, loaded the game up in Duckstation because the work of transferring over my save from my Vita felt like a pain, and then did the final boss gauntlet again and save stated right after to beat the game. I then tried to do the EX Mode but the save I downloaded didn't engrave their guns, rendering all that useless.
THEN, I transferred over my save from my Vita, beat the final boss, started EX Mode, went to the Chrysler building and then immediately died at the first encounter even with my brought over gun and armor. I'm... done. I'm out. Had a good time, but I'm not playing through the whole game again just to try to do that gauntlet.
The map update really helped out, though I could *also* use a compass so that it's easier to orient myself to where I'm actually at on the map. Small issues, though. I actually started a brand new file because I couldn't figure out where the map was supposed to be. Took about four hours, all told and I had a great time. What a fun little game!
Sometimes the best games are the ones that take two concepts that you didn't necessarily love in other games and remix them into something entirely new that makes you want to re-evaluate that distaste. In Unicorn Overlord's case, that would be the real-time tactical movement à la Ogre Battle and the gambit system of FFXII. I haven't really liked either game, but I just absolutely adore Unicorn Overlord. Setting up my units, making unstoppable squad combos and just steamrolling through enemies. It's an incredible time.
If I have any complaints, they're mainly about audio quality - a lot of the characters are hissing their S's when they speak, but the story is pretty whatever, so I've been buttoning through a good deal of it. It's not a deal breaker like it has been in other games recently. The story also sets up a truly evil dictator that's ruling over the land, but no, it's just evil magic mind control that's making people terrorize villages and towns. Look, I get it. To quote my favorite tweet from headfallsoff: I'm fundamentally opposed to the monarchy and the church as ruling powers. But, I love when the chosen king reclaims his divine sword and leads his army in glorious battle.
I just wish the divine right of this king was a bit more divine and that we're taking on a truly vile dude! Not just some magic bullshit! Let evil characters be evil! Give me a dude to hate, not to pity.
A while back, I bought an Anbernic RG35XX (one of those all-in-one single board computer retro handheld systems) for about half off in what I can only describe as a sign from the universe saying 'hey you've been curious about this why not check it out'. And so check it out I did! I bought some extra cheap SD cards, set up everything on the system, fixed the dpad, got all of the box art downloaded, tried it out for a bit before trying a different operating system, and then promptly forgetting about it. I thought it was neat but didn't really fit into my life or how I like to play games. A fun little experiment to play around and tinker with, but I like to play retro games on the original system if I can - a GBA with a flashcart or a modded Wii.
But then, a few months later, I found out about the Funnyplaying FPGA GBC - a brand new Game Boy Color made entirely out of new parts that you can assemble yourself. I was obsessed with learning about it for a bit. What can it do, how's the compatibility, what's the build experience like. And then I had to have a talk with myself - I don't actually own that many Game Boy games. I think I maybe own half a dozen outside of all the Pokemon games and I'm not even sure if that's right. If I got and built this thing (which, right now, is around $80. Cheaper than modifying my original GBC, but still!) I would also need to get a flashcart of some kind. And the FPGBC doesn't have perfect compatibility with the Everdrives as it is and I just spun myself around in circles before saying 'well, i already have the RG35XX. let's play around with it some more before seeing if i even want to spend all this money on a nicer thing'
Which was kind of the point of buying the RG35XX in the first place. And all of that was to say, I really loved Bionic Commando GB!
My secret shame is that I've never actually beaten Bionic Commando on the NES. It's an incredible game, one of the best on the platform, but it's also a pretty lengthy experience. While there are technically infinite continues, I usually stall out around halfway through. Bionic Commando GB then parachutes in with passwords! My hero!
I'm not going to say something crazy like "this is the way Bionic Commando was meant to be played" or "this is the only way I'll play Bionic Commando in the future" but I definitely had a great time. It fixes the main issue from the NES game (forgetting the right communicator) because you can re-equip at any communication point.
I will say, though, that the game gets extremely fucking brutal right at the end. There's two levels where there are several blind gaps and swings to make, all right in a row, and the grappling hook feels a little inconsistent with how long it shoots out. Right in the final level there are two sections broken up by a boss fight that had me turn off my game several times just muttering 'okay fuck this': one over a pit of spikes that I needed to damage boost past because I couldn't figure out the exact right pattern and another on the underside of the Albatross that took me over 40 tries. That second one took all of my continues! Luckily during those attempts it starts you right at the section in question - if I had to do all of it in a row, I probably wouldn't have.
