Finished Guacamelee yesterday, so here a quick recap of my experience:
I will never ever like the 360 controller. It’s especially crap for platformers with it’s spongy triggers that you need to use all the time for difficult dodges and stuff. And the damn game wouldn’t even let me change the controls. That’s an automatic minus point.
I feel like the difficulty curve isn’t very well designed. The difficulty ramps up like crazy after the first boss fight, once you get the thing that lets you switch dimensions at will. The tule tree with its horribly difficult jumping puzzles was probably the most frustrating part of the game for me. I nearly quit over that, because it annoyed the shit out of me.
That being said, it gets a lot better after that. I just looooved the two last bosses, they were really fun. And the levels were pretty cool as well.
In general, I had a lot of fun with the game, tule tree nothwithstanding. I might go through it again some time, get the better endings (I’m assuming there are better endings, I haven’t actually checked). I think its biggest weakness is really the learning curve. If there would’ve been one level before the tule tree that eases you into using the dimension switch in combination with double jumping and stuff, it would have been a lot better. It also seems to end rather quickly after you’re done with the tule tree, but that might have just been me pressing forward wanting to finish it.
Now I’ve started playing The Evil Within. Got it from my brother for christmas. I’ve played about an hour of it so far. I’m getting quite a bit of Resident Evil vibe from it, which is unsurprising considering that Shinji Mikami directed it. I really hope it’s as goofy and nonsensical as RE is, because I enjoy making fun of that quite a bit. We’ll see.
Beyond the usual stuck in the FFXIV hole now I’ve been playing my PS4 with a mixture of Dying Light, Geometry Wars 3 and going through Journey for the nth time.
Probably need to go back and finish my Ending 3 run of Bloodborne at some point.
And also finish DOOM, because thats been sitting on my PS4 taking up hard drive space.
Nuclear Throne, Day Of The Tentacle Remastered and Guilty Gear X2#Reload.
I unlocked Yung Venus in the first one so I’m pretty happy, second one is annoying me and I feel like just looking for a guide for some parts and the last is great but I-No being an SNK boss out of nowhere made me quit Arcade mode. I might just get Accent Core +R since her AI seems to be toned down slightly (although my favorite character, Justice, got nerfed from what I’ve heard although I can barely tell)
So after finishing up Wind Waker HD a couple of days and moving on to Twilight Princess HD, good gosh is it slow. There’s a lot to love, the dungeon design is pretty nice, the combat builds on some of Wind Waker’s better points and honestly I’m actually quickly finding myself kinda taking to the aesthetic, TP kinda nails a weird sense of melancholy that’s actually sorta cool and not a tone you really see in video games?
But it’s soooo sloooow, the opening crawl takes a long time to establish itself and get you into the game and there’s back and forth between Ordana and Kakariko before you can even ascend Death Mountain - and although the game is actually kinda pretty at times the npc character models are mostly terrifying. Also Midna explains a lot more to you than I remember her doing, honestly if it wasn’t for her personality I kinda feel she’d have drawn as much ire as Fi did.
Still if I remember correctly I think I’m out of the slower part of the game (Stopped after rescuing Colin from the boar rider) so it should presumedly be smoother sailing and I’ll find out how the rest of the game holds up I guess!
Agreed, there’s a lot to love about TP, but I still prefered a Zelda like Link to the Past where they’re like “here’s your sword and a general idea where to go, have fun kid”
I finally, finally picked up Yakuza 0 this weekend and golly I think I’m in love. I’ve went from doing karoake to smashing a dude into oblivion with a bicycle in the span of about 2 minutes and yet that didn’t feel jarring at all. I love how well the game has nailed its sense of tone, granted they’ve had 6 games to do that but it so perfectly balances the goofy side quests with its extremely serous, exaggeratedly emotional main story line. Rarely does a game come along that has me wearing an actual grin on my face but I was basically losing it as I drop kicked a man so hard out of a window that I literally flew out after him. It feel like a game I could play for days without putting down, but thankfully I share a PS4 with someone else so I can’t just keep playing it all week.
Meanwhile, thanks to Fire Emblem Heroes, I got the urge to return to Fire Emblem Fates and actually do the Conquest campaign. I finished Birthright when it came out, but lost steam a few chapters into Conquest. I’m digging it a lot, and I like that the battles are actually significantly more interesting in their design than its counterpart. Who knows if will have the strength to finish Revelations after this though.
A couple weeks ago I picked up Code Name: STEAM because I had birthday money and it was like, 8 bucks or something really cheap. It was honestly an impulse buy caused by low price + curiosity after I’d heard mixed things about the game. I hadn’t heard much, just a mix of “it’s good” and “it’s bad” more or less. I then quickly shelved it with the other couple games I’d gotten that day because I was too busy… playing… other… games…
Then earlier this week I actually started playing it, and man, this game is so totally my shit. I love the style and presentation; they really nailed the comic book feel. The gameplay has been pretty fun so far, though I’m still early on and learning how to use my dudes properly and getting characters/mechanics introduced. I’m having a blast though!
Let’s see, this last week and a half I put a gross amount of hours into Nioh, currently about halfway through NG+. I started playing Gravity Rush on impulse too, I’m not very far into it, but it seems super interesting so far. On top of that I’m also trying to get through the DQ8 port on 3DS.
I feel like I’m still stuck in this crazy limbo of;
Start Game - Play some of Game - New Game comes out - repeat
My backlog is ridiculous at this point, plus with the Switch coming out I’ll have Breath of the Wild and then Persona 5 in April, so I have no lack of stuff to go play at this point.
as someone dropping a ton of time into Gravity Rush 1 for an LP and dropped a ton of time in DQ8, I can say you’ve got two of my favorite games right there
Well, The Evil Within kind of annoyed me, so I stopped playing that. I might try it again eventually, but it really doesn’t seem to be my thing. I got to the first boss, and everything just seemed fiddly and a drag to play, so I quit. I might actually go for easy mode if I ever try it again, because the nonsensical-ness of it does have its charm. But for now, I really wasn’t into it.
So I got myself Psychonauts on the gog sale and played that instead. I already played it on the PS2 years ago, but seeing as how my PS2 is busted, I just grabbed the PC version. And what can I say, it’s every bit as awesome as I remember it being.
It’s gonna be down to three game for me: Nioh, Monster Hunter and Final Fantasy XIV
Nioh’s the main game here, FFXIV is just for something relaxing between Nioh sessions and Monster Hunter is mostly played on work lunchbreaks.
Currently Nioh with occasional Elder Scrolls Online while I watch streams. Since Night In The Woods drops tomorrow though, that might wind up taking precedence for a while.
Taking a break from Overwatch and FFXV to play some other games. So far I’ve put about 2 hours into Shadowrun Returns and I’m pissed that I didn’t play it sooner.
On the one hand, I kind of want to try Horizon Zero Dawn when it comes out next week, despite knowing that I’m probably going to burn out on it the same way I did Far Cry 3 and 4.
On the other hand, Nier: Automata is coming out in a couple weeks and there’s no way I’m skipping that one, and Nioh’s NG+ will probably keep me entertained until then easily. So I’m probably not going to get it, at least not for a while. Because after Nier comes Persona 5, and oh man, Persona 5.
I 100% understand being burnt-out on open-world sandbox games after playing too much of a Ubisoft game, though. I haven’t played a sandbox game I’ve enjoyed since 95%-ing or so Assassin’s Creed IV and that was what, four years ago.
I’m thinking slash hoping Breath of the Wild will change that. Also Breath of the Wild is in less than two weeks, holy shit. Until then I have Tales of Berseria, and I’ll probably start trying to give The Witcher 3 more of an earnest shot. The griffin fight was pretty fun.
Yeah, that’s true, but its structure borrows a lot from them, complete with towers to climb to reveal map icons (except this time the towers walk around). I’ve heard Horizon actually does have worthwhile side quests–not quite Witcher 3-level, but still good–so that helps a lot. It’s why I’m still tentatively interested in it.
I’m definitely not totally opposed to open-world games. I’m just really wary of anything that looks like it’s taking any cues at all from Ubisoft’s collect-a-thons.