Fishing Star World Tour on Switch - A more arcadey & colorful fishing game that feels right at home on a Nintendo device (I think it was a retail title in Japan, but here in the west it's just a $30 eShop game). It's the first time in years I've actually enjoyed motion controls (it has regular controls as well, but things seem a bit too easy with them, as it seems like it was balanced with motion controls in mind). Great way to relax between sessions of bigger games or work. Also gets me in the mood for Spring which is a plus, lol.
Not feeling all that great at the moment, so I've spent most of the day playing LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga on my trusty PS3. Since it's a compilation of two PS2 games I'd aced multiple times over, I never played it much beyond the initial Story Mode run, so it's been perfect for those little moments over the past six or seven years where I've either been between games or just not been in the right brainspace for anything other than gaming comfort food.
Tomorrow I'm getting Dragon Age II so will likely start that in the evening. My PS4 won't stay neglected for long, but it's been nice to get back to my PS3 of late. Lovely machine.
"We want different things, Crosshair. That doesn't mean that we have to be enemies."
Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney Trials and Tribulations on 3DS. So far it's excellent, perhaps even better than the first two games. It has plenty of the goofy characters and the excellent plot that the series is great at.
It was fun to see Godot. I'm still unsure whether he's excellent at being a prosecutor or lousy at it. Plus he's relatable as he has the same love for coffee that I do.
I recently started replaying Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (NDS). Also trying to finish Zone 4 in Crypt of the Necrodancer (PS Vita) with Cadence, although, after many, many days of struggling with it, I'm losing my patience. It's so unfair to force the player to play through the entire zone if they can't survive going through it plus two boss battles in a row.
@Ralizah How does Days of Ruin compare to Dual Strike? The aesthetic looks very different - does this take anything away from the charm the series is known for?
I'm cautiously anticipating Cadence of Hyrule. Hopefully it won't be as difficult as that!
@mookysam It's a bit of a controversial entry in the series. It has the most balanced gameplay in the series (a really far cry from Dual Strike in that regard), which it accomplishes by mixing up a bunch of the units from previous games for new ones (the more gimmicky and overpowered units are gone, and lots of existing units have been re-touched so that pretty much everything is useful and has a place in a battle; personally, I really like the bikes, which are a new kind of infantry unit that are war faster on roads, and dusters, which are a nice, all-purpose air unit) and drastically nerfing CO powers. Regarding charm... I mean, it's pretty bleak. The world is dead, diseases ravage many of the communities struggling to survive in the post-apocalyptic landscape, and topics such as human experimentation, political corruption, genocide, the pointless savagery of war, etc. are touched upon. It still has moments of humor (granted, they're mostly buried in optional dialogues during missions, but they're still there), but the light-heartedness is pretty much gone. It also seems to be unconnected to the universe of the previous games.
As you've seen, the aesthetic is extremely different. The cartoony character designs of previous games have been replaced with more realistic looking portraits, and the color scheme is very muted.
From what I've played (the original, most of Dual Strike, and, of course, this), this one has the most in-depth and challenging campaign in the series. The war room is entirely absent from this iteration, but a lot of the maps you'd play in that have been integrated into the main campaign in the form of optional trial maps.
In general, there's a lot less fluff here than in Dual Strike.
The music is pretty good, too.
This game actually had online multiplayer, although, understandably, that's probably not very useful to someone playing the game today.
And, yeah, I'm hoping Cadence of Hyrule is a bit less ridiculous in its final stretch as well. I spent another hour or two last night trying to conquer it, and... no dice. Also, apparently the final story character is some insane, hardcore challenge: she dies the instant you miss a beat. Which means I'd be lucky to survive even one level intact, let alone an entire zone. So I'm pretty close to just giving up and talking about it in a somewhat incomplete state.
The pixel art in that game looks SO much nicer than the art in Necrodancer, though, which is quite underwhelming in comparison.
Finally got back to Digital Devil Saga (after months of not playing it, so it took a little while to re-orient myself and remember what I needed to do). I'm juggling too many JRPGs now, so I need to start knocking them down with merciless precision.
First up: Digital Devil Saga.
Then: Final Fantasy IX.
After that: Final Fantasy XII.
Hoping I can get through the first two before Fire Emblem comes out and saps all my free time.
@Ralizah Oh I'm in the same boat. Trails in the Sky Second Chapter has been on the backburner for months and I don't even remember what distracted me. Hopefully I can get back into it once I finish Pokémon Let's Go. My handheld backlog across various devices is practically all JRPGs so I basically see myself becoming some sort of Terminator to get through them.
Digital Devil Saga is also on hold for me at the moment because my PS2's disc drive is having issues. It keeps crashing mid-session (usually when it tries loading something) if it reads discs at all. I think the console will end up having to go in the bin.
@mookysam Ouch. I had to replace my original thin PS2 with someone's phat PS2 a couple of years ago once the laser went. It's enormous, but has been working well. If that went, though, I'd probably just burn the rest of my PS2 games and play them on PCSX2 with some enhancements to the internal resolution (and nothing else, because I like my emulated games to stick close to the original experience on the native hardware). Silent Hill 3 looked pretty darn good when I played it this way.
I have a mess of Atlus games haunting me. DDS, which I've made some pretty good progress in since that last post. Nocturne, which I never finished back in the day and need to restart. Persona 3, which I also never finished back in the day. Soul Hackers, which... you get the idea. And my copy of Strange Journey Redux is just sitting around, completely unplayed. I've owned it for a year now.
Rune Factory 4 has been sitting on my shelf for four years or so, quietly judging me. Never got around to it.
I have TitS (snrk!) SC on my PC, but I'm not playing that until there's nothing better to do. The original was kind of boring, but I'd like to eventually resolve the cliffhanger it ended on.
If I had any sense to me, I wouldn't be downloading Dragon Quest XI S this year. Or buying a mess of Nintendo-published Switch games (I have 4 vouchers reserved so far).
@Ralizah It's not even had as much use as my other consoles. Maybe a little over 1000 hours. I've looked on eBay and probably will get a second hand one at some point. Digital Devil Saga and its sequel, Suikoden V and Valkyrie Profile 2 are the main games left to play.
That's... a lot of Atlus. How far did you get with Persona 3 and Nocturne? I ended up cancelled my pre order of Persona Q2 because the first has been on my shelf in its cellophane wrapper for years. Most of my handheld backlog is PSP and Vita stuff, but now the Switch is adding to it.
TitS (yeah, I giggled at the acronym) SC is definitely on the slow side but I enjoyed what I played once I got into it.
@mookysam I've heard the phat systems are more reliable. Thankfully, PS2s are generally pretty cheap to come by. The games often less so, however.
I got 10 hours or so into Nocturne. Only a few into Persona 3, unfortunately. I'd start them and then get distracted by something else.
There are so many Atlus games I want to play, but I also space them out so that I don't burn myself out. Once a release date is announced for SMT V, I'll probably avoid playing those games like the plague for a year or so until it releases so that it feels entirely fresh for me.
As to Trails, FC is, like, thirty hours of build-up for practically no pay off. And it does the Japanese thing where the central romance is kinda-but-not-really incest. I don't get why so many people online act like the series is God's Gift to JRPG fans.
But, then, people acted the same way about Xenoblade Chronicles on the Wii, and I was similarly... underwhelmed by that.
So, for SC. I nabbed the music files from the Vita Evolution remasters and swapped them in to replace the vanilla PC version's music. Also replaced a few of the tracks with their Zanmai counterparts. So, for example, when Sophisticated Battle happens to play in SC, I'll hear this version of the song:
The files were slightly modded so that they loop like normal background music, of course. Otherwise you get a really distracting space between the beginning and end of the song.
@Ralizah Thanks for the tip, I'll have a look at phat ones.
Nocturne takes some time to get into and is one of the most difficult RPGs I've played. You can really see how they stripped out a lot of the MegaTen difficulty from modern Persona games. Anyway, once I did get into Noctune I found it pretty phenomenal. It's dark and although the story is light, alignment choices feel like they matter.
I'd recommend the P3P version of Persona 3 if you have the means to play it. Production values are stripped back but the ability to directly control battle actions for party members is a huge improvement. The female MC has a lot of changes and additions which is great on a replay.
Burning out on RPGs (especially more hardcore ones) is always a concern for me. SMT V will have to wait until I get round to playing IV!
I really enjoyed Xenoblade on the Wii. It was never God's gift, but it was one of the few noteworthy JRPGs to exist on system. Perhaps the campaign for the US release raised hype levels too and it kinda stuck?
That's a noice tune for SC.
In SC an issue is that the romance is a heavy aspect of the story. Estelle needs to get a grip. 😂
Playing Kingdom New Lands on Switch. It's a side scrolling pixel art kingdom builder. You control a king or queen that rides back and forth, collecting coins and using those coins to spend on various resources, such as hiring soldiers and weaponsmiths, building defenses against creatures that can attack and steal the king or queen's crown which will end the game, and otherwise expanding their kingdom. You otherwise have little direct control of the game, and thus must use the coins they collect in judicious ways.
It's quite obtuse, apart from a very brief tutorial at the beginning you are left to you own to find out how the game works. Your builders, erm, build and control catapults (how you get these is not explained), archers shoot arrows at the enemies and hunt rabbits and deers for income etc. You have to recruit wanderers with coin and then turn them into workers with more coin, building anything also costs coins. You gain coins by the aforementioned hunting, paying taxes, farming and exploring. Exploring is probably the worst part of the game so far for me. You can find chests of coins, boats to build, shrines (not found a use for these yet) and camps of wanderers. The only thing is your horse doesn't have a great deal of stamina and the day doesn't last long enough, as the enemy comes out at night and your only defence is back at the kingdom.
I've had three runs at the game and not really got any further than my first attempt. If you make a mistake it is quite hard to correct it. Like in my first run I was cutting down trees, only to find out later that if you do that on both sides of a wanderer camp they will be gone forever. The nearest other camp was almost a day's horse ride, the wanderers take an age to get back to the kingdom so it made it really difficult to progress, especially if any of my workers get killed defending the kingdom at night. It's stuff like this that bring the game down.
I will probably give the game another couple of goes to see if I can progress, if not I will probably sack it off.
Last night I started Splinter Cell: Double Agent on PS3... and I'm torn.
On the one hand, I'm so ready to play a Tom Clancy stealth game. The atmosphere is spot-on for where my mood is currently at. Lots of sinister techno music thudding in the background as I sneak around in shadows, using fibre optics to peer under doors and shooting terrorists with air foil rounds... yes, absolutely yes. It's everything I loved about the Splinter Cell HD Trilogy years ago (having missed most of them on PS2 in favour of Metal Gear Solid, they were a joy to play on PS3).
But on the other hand, simply being "more of the same" isn't always a great thing. The game's sporadic tutorials do a poor job of reintroducing a clunky interface which, yes, was perfectly fine a couple generations ago, but was already long-overdue an upgrade by the time Chaos Theory came around. Using the jump to PS3 should've been the perfect time to overhaul Sam Fisher's movement and interaction mechanics but instead, here I am, still taking ten seconds to cycle through slow, fiddly animations as I scale the shortest of walls. I get that Tom Clancy games have always traded on realism and trust me, I know what running around in full tactical gear feels like; a stealthy gazelle, you ain't. But there needs to be a blurring of the line for the everyday entertainment factor of a game, and Double Agent feels like it's blurred the wrong bit. At times, trying to steer Sam around has felt like trying to steer a milk float with burst tyres. Whilst wearing oven gloves. On the Moon.
The story feels interesting in parts, but severely undercooked. It's like those old PSone Bond games, where you watch a very short video briefing and then you're largely left alone for the mission itself, with only brief, blink-and-you-miss-them clues about where to go next. It made sense with Bond; they were based on films, you were kinda expected to know the story before putting the disc in. Several times in the opening missions of Double Agent, I've just stumbled onto solutions or happened to notice interaction icons as I've passed a junction box. Maybe it came with a manual that I'm not seeing with this digital purchase?
But from what I can gather, the premise is solid enough; after a mission goes wrong in Iceland, Sam Fisher is put into deep cover with a domestic terrorist organisation in New York. Whilst I'm still not clear on why, it did lead to a really cool third level where I was left to roam the terrorist base with a checklist of optional objectives for BOTH the terrorists (who I was trying to impress, to earn their trust) and my CIA-esque organisation. At the end, I was given the typical "shoot this innocent man to prove your loyalty" choice and it would impact my standing with either group. If this mechanic remains simple throughout, then it's a neat little addition to give missions and their consequences a bit more personal weight. I just hope the story becomes clearer, or is better-presented, by the time I really start to care.
The bitter icing on this already half-baked cake, however, is that the PS3 version's technical performance is woeful. It's what had put me off purchasing it before, but it's just as bad as I'd heard. The framerate struggles even in the simplest of environments, and the loading screens (where the brief, context-lacking snippets of story are delivered) stutter and crack with alarming reliability. The environmental graphics are fine, but character models are blocky and awkward, Sam himself notwithstanding. It's playable, but only just, and combined with the sluggish controls can make for some painfully-slow lowlights.
I'll press on. My spy mood remains intact, and the next mission holds some promise. I'm to infiltrate a super-tanker lodged in an ice floe, in broad daylight no less.
Damn it. I gotta get me those PS4 ones, at the very least. Might also get the Jedi Knight and Shadows of the Empire PC releases as well, now that I've got a machine capable of playing games on.
Thanks for the heads-up!
"We want different things, Crosshair. That doesn't mean that we have to be enemies."
Bounty Hunter is up soon, end of the month I think - keep an eye on their site. I know there those who say you can't get LR stuff, but so long as you're within 5 or 10 minutes of the start time for something really popular, you'll be fine.
They usually run a second batch these days too.
Bit of a shame, I really hoped that Super Star Wars would make the list for Vita.
You don't need much of a PC to play any of them without mods. I'm assuming they'll be the GOG style DRM-free ones too, but who knows?!
It is a great list though, I'll keep an eye on deployment too, there's a lot of really good gifting potential there!
PSN: KALofKRYPTON (so you can see how often I don't play anything!)
Twitter: @KALofKRYPTON (at your own risk, I don't care if you're offended)
"Fate: Protects fools, little children, and ships named Enterprise." - Cmdr William T. Riker
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