Scattered Thoughts September 2018

The autumn months have arrived. I can’t say that really changes my gaming habits any. Guess you could say I’m doing some harvest cleanup since I played through a assortment of old games My only insight this month is that maybe I don’t like huge open world games that much. If a game has a open world I prefer a small one these days like the Yakuza games. It just feels like the game is wasting my time whenever I’m wandering around a big area in action games at least. Driving a car on the other hand, er well that’ll have to wait till next month.

Bionic Commando : Dumb plot points don't take away how fun it was to swing around levels.

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Tacoma: A more focused narrative leads to a more obvious conclusion.

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Kirby Star Allies: Nintendo has been releasing the same old Kirby game a bit to much.

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Horizon Zero Dawn: A solid mystery & combat are enjoyable at first but it gets tiring 30 hours later.

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Sonic Mania Plus: *nod* It is indeed the fabled good Sonic game.

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List items

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  Bionic Commando

  This revision of this series is just dumb fun. It isn’t trying to be serious at all which leads to some crazy moments. Between dumb action scenes the gameplay keeps up a breakneck pace thanks to the maneuverability of Spencer’s Bionic arm. Swinging around is as simple as looking at something and pressing a button. That does make it harder to hit enemies while swinging but the extra moves like a ground pound make up for this flaw.

  Unless you like collecting things the campaign isn’t very long at around 4 hours. Plus although they lean toward a sequel it isn’t pushed into the players face like some games tend to do. Although it is a bummer that they weren’t able to follow this up with anything since expanding on this foundation could have been amazing. Even if it was mostly thanks to how much fun it was to swing around levels.

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  Tacoma

  Tacoma really is just Gone Home 2.0. With the main difference being that the story plays out in a much more direct way instead of reading it all by looking through the environment. Via holograms that tell the story of what happened on the space station before the player character arrived. Which doesn’t mean that isn’t a focus in this release either since many a text document reveals a bit of the lives of all the crew too. Overall not a bad little adventure that should be played if you enjoyed games like this.

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  Kirby: Star Allies

  This game felt like they were trying to remake Kirby’s Super Star again but they only picked out certain chunks of it. While relying on 4 allies on screen at once to cause chaos. Yet it comes off as a even easier Kirby game than most. The fact that Kirby even has lives anymore is silly thanks to the 100 you can gain without even trying during one playthrough. All of the encounters feel like normal fights yet when you’ve got 4 friends on screen at once it makes any fight even easier than normal. Really sucks a lot of my interest in playing through it although the very short campaign made it easy to finish without putting in a lot of time. Even Kirby going full DBZ for the finale didn’t do much other than make me smile since they’ve done that multiple times at this point. Overall this game just felt like a big old rehash that relied on a gimmick that only really made the game to easy. Plus a lot of the combo powers don’t do anything fancy other than powering up your melee weapons attack power. Just another Kirby game is fine but this one feels to much like them just following the formula once again.

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  Horizon Zero Dawn

  This games greatest asset is the story of Alloy. Her journey to understand where she came from and the true past of the land is what I enjoyed the most. The many twists along the way just make it better once you think you’ve got the full picture. Whenever I wasn’t reading or listening to a tidbit about the past the combat is solid when fighting the assortment of robotic animals.

  Being able to use traps and weaknesses to take down a big threat easily feels really good. Even in a full on battle scenario being able to time rolls to dodge damage is great. Yet when they throw humans into the fight it becomes boring. Headshotting fools is a step down when you can fight a robot T-Rex. Whenever I wasn’t in combat exploring the world was rather basic. Kinda just felt like I was picking up stuff constantly only for it to tell me my inventory was full to often. At least the side quests have some depth to them other than go collect a thing sometimes. In general this was a fun and compelling game to play. Yet the open world just slowed things down a bit to much for me.

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  Sonic Mania

  Yup the fans did it. They made a great Sonic game again. The additional characters in this expanded edition do add just enough variations that it is fun to play through the same stages again. Plus the new game plus mode with Knuckles Chaotix like team system is interesting. Really the way the devs mixed up the standard platforming stages with new challenges is why it was fun to play through this. Sure it may rely on a lot of nostalgia but at least they retained what was good about Sonic in the past.