Pikmin 3 has enough great ideas. Captain swapping tickles the brain and I like aiming with the wiimote. Most of all, it’s bingo battle where there are a surprisingly large number of ways to win. Make a BINGO with collected items. Defeat the enemy captain. Capture the Victory Macaron. It’s so so good
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Mobile game quick impressions:
Slash Quest has your player character find a talking sword and go on a quest to return it to its rightful owner, the Queen. You always hold the sword out in front of you and your only inputs are to rotate and to walk forward by holding a button. In practice this feels a lot like driving a car. You fight enemies and interact with objects by swinging the sword around awkwardly. The game is cute-ish (mechanically, the aesthetics and the writing/music are doing very little for me). I need the game to start throwing more curve balls at me soon or I’m going to get bored.
Kid Cosmo is a Netflix game that’s a tie-in with The Electric State, by all accounts a fairly mediocre movie based on the concepts of Simon Ståhlenhag. The framing device here is the protagonist is gifted an alternate universe Gameboy of sorts, with a three dimensional projected screen and a touchscreen in place of the buttons on the lower half. You play the game Kid Cosmo on it while the protagonist (an 8 year old with a genius level IQ burdened by other people’s expectations and perceptions of him) and his sister (eternally exasperated by her brother but also never gets the benefit of the doubt from her parents so she’s still a sympathetic character) bond over their shared interest in the game. The music has been pretty nice in the game proper.
Kid Cosmo is an isometric dungeon crawler/puzzle game, the type where nothing moves unless the player character does. It’s fairly simplistic thus far but seems to be growing in complexity nicely. The game console framing device has provided a few cute moments and wrinkles. (For example, the anxiety of trying to reach a save point before the batteries die).
Right now the game’s setting has only just been alluded to at all (Wichita, Kansas, 1985 in the alternate universe). Dad won’t let robots pump his gas at the gas station. Chris, the protagonist, wishes to one day have a robot that can be his friend because he’s awkward with people. Idk if there’s context I’m missing from not having seen the movie. The writing isn’t great so far so the meta-narrative thing is carrying all the weight.
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Playing through it ~2.5 times in co-op with my kid, with me completely responsible for making any progress, I’d say Luigi’s Mansion 3 is a huge pain in the ass more than it is boring.
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I’ve never played New Vegas but can you nuke Vegas in it? is it possible to destroy New Vegas? can I use a surviving nuclear bomb to reduce the casinos to a smoldering pile of rubble?
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I’ll give you bingo battle (never did play it myself, but I have heard loads of people rave about it…) but I always found the captain switching a bit tedious and something about 3’s level design felt a little too much like wandering through narrow, overlapping corridors rather than the more open feeling areas of the first game. Also the stakes of collecting fruit just never felt as pressing as the ship parts with the day limit to me… Never quite found the dialog between the three captains to be as compelling as Olimar’s little end of day logs either. Also the Wii version of 1 has wiimote control too 
Different strokes!
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I think you can bring about Vegas’s ruin as one of the major endgame goals, if memory serves. I don’t think out-and-out nuking it is an option, except with a mini-nuke, which tragically will not impact the underlying infrastructure or any of the buildings.
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At this point, I consider Bingo Battle more important than any Pikmin single-player campaign. Dandori is not a replacement at all.
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What’s the deal with 4’s multiplayer? Is it just the dandori shite?
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Dragonsweeper - free game, Minesweeper as a roguelike. Thanks to @anothergod for mentioning it in the itch thread : )
Lovely presentation, lots of little gameplay quirks to puzzle out (or fish them out of the game’s comments section ^ _^).
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20% through Armored Core 1. My 100% mission success rate goal died quickly because I’m lazy, but I’m doing well. It’s at about 80% right now.
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the henry stickmin collection: classic stick figure flash game-y goodness, a little fiddly with achievements, but janky in an endearing way
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Ye it’s just dandori. There’s co-op as well but it’s like Mario Galaxy, 2P is just a cursor.
More Pikmin 4
I got to the human house and I like it a lot as an environment, it feels a lot different from the usual stuff. They have to go and ruin it by having the enemy version of your dog harass you while you trying to get on with Pikmin shit. You can kill it to give it a timeout but you can’t actually permanently remove it which is just frustrating. Feels like the game doesn’t really abide by its own rules sometimes when it just wants to annoy the player. Human house comes with photorealistic pictures of dogs which look nothing like the local fauna. Pikmin 1’s implication, that the world you go to is Earth, has always felt like more of a cute little wink rather than something the setting embraces. You go straight up onto a kitchen counter in this and there’s a stove that is just perpetually on. Why is the gas supply still running if the planet is apparently abandoned by humans? Why is it so clean in the house? Why are these drones (floating platforms) still flying around? I think the series desperately wants to be an abstract videogame game with Mario rules but it’s put itself in a bind with the setting which it has apparently no interest in. Even Kirby explains this in Forgotten Land so why is it such a non-subject in the slightly more plot-focused game where everyone yammers all the time. Like why not just have an abstract planet that the explorers have brought the Pikmin to? Does the IP bible require it be set in someone’s backyard?
I was getting a bit worried that there was no way to actually grow the specialised Pikmin (purple/ice/white/flying) but have finally happened upon an ice pikmin onion which gives me some hope for late game cleanup. I get the impression there’s a lot you can do to just 100% and grind through and that the actual MSQ doesn’t require so much? I found Olimar’s bunker and I’m not sure if that will just simply unlock the final area and then I’m gonna be done after a big boss fight? The pacing of the game feels weird since the percentage progress indicator has almost nothing to do with what you do on the surface, and everything to do with Dandori and dungeons. It’s almost like the actual world areas that you go to are surface level hubs that contain the real meat of the game (namely abstract dungeons and time-attack).
There are so many people back at the base camp now that it feels like the explorers themselves could form a unit and kill some of the smaller animals without the aid of Pikmin.
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This was like the perfect setup to introduce the presence of a life-size human being. They’d be one of those prepper-types who horded a bunch of resources and built up their own home while the rest of the world died. I was picturing the home having an upstairs like in Chibi-robo. You’d stumble upstairs into the bedroom, discover this person and it would be horrifying! It would have been perfect!! 
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I’d also be happy with the reveal of a human-sized Pikmin and then we cut to credits.
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Oh that’s… that’s good!
This fantastic thought basically confirms my ongoing suspicion that anyone could make a more interesting Nintendo sequel than Nintendo themselves…
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And it has human lips!
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Keep going! I’m writing all this down!!
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I always felt like olimar and co. live in a langoliers dimension: a single moment in time with all living creatures extracted. this would explain how the earth exists without any recognizable creatures but also little obvious decay. they are the creatures that clean up and devour the moment so that new moments can be made. every time they revisit earth, it’s a new moment captured to be consumed.
this does not explain the endless gas supply.
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Well I rescued Olimar and got credits but it turns out this is a sort of Ending part 1 and there’s still another whole third of the game left because your dog got Pikminified and the only way they can leave the planet safely is to rescue the vet who’s two areas deep. I think I’m good for now. Will probably come back when there’s less to play and I have a big podcast backlog.
I do think the night sections were fun thanks to glow pikmin just autorecalling when done. It is essentially tower defense though and I don’t want to do the hardest version of it. Trying to optimise in Pikmin is very fun. Having to optimise is kinda miserable.
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