Yeah, when they introduced the Switch Skyward Sword port and Aonuma was like “The origins of that game you all actually like, Breath of the Wild, can be seen in Skyward Sword,” I was like, “Yeah, sure, dude.” But having played through the game now, I can actually see what he meant. Which is interesting, too, because that’s the most nakedly linear Zelda (whether it’s actually less linear than, say, Twliight Princess I’m not sure) planting the seeds for what would become the most nonlinear Zelda since the first one. Maybe ever.
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im still playin totk for like 15 minutes every day, i feel like im just sorta killin time waiting till i actually have a couple hours of undivided free time to actually finish it. even though i still find the depths irritating, i have mostly just been trawling around down there. it really does make the game way more of a lawnmower sim, in ways that the overworld/sky islands do such a good job of avoiding. but whatever, i got nothin else to do (in those 15 minutes every night)
the good thing about it is when i actually do resurface on the overworld, it’s like a great big breath of fresh air. what a relief…
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Somewhat sad the three hour burst of beating each of the two new Mario Kart DLC cups on all five difficulties has come to the end.
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I had a lot of fun with SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters Clash back in the day.
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Replaying Armored Core 6 since nuking my save. It stays good. Currently in the back 4/5ths of my first run through. I get bodied here and there when I get fancy, but so far it’s been fun.
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being able to play doki doki idol starseeker on a handheld is greatly endangering my ability to do literally anything else
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Ok! It’s not that complicated tbh.
I think the art direction and character designs are the best they’ve ever been and even work to the limitations of the Wii.
Skyward Sword has my favourite version of link and zelda, and the best unique characters (groose!!! Ghirahim!!!). The charisma of the characters and their designs also contribute to Skyloft being the most warm and delightful hub world.
I like the motion control combat in all its simplicity. It’s not amazing but i wouldn’t accuse any 3D zelda game of having great combat, I think they’re holistic games that try to be greater than the sum of their parts.
All of the dungeons are really cool and, I’d argue, just uncontroversially good among 3d zeldas, especially the well known standouts like the Ancient Cistern and Sand Ship. Bosses are similarly mostly pretty awesome as moments of spectacle with a few exceptions.
The silent realm challenges are absolutely peak, and I love any challenge in a game that forces you to remember that the levels are spaces, and think of them as such, rather than filtering out things that are uninteractive or seemingly irrelevant.
Lastly, the premise of being a DISTANT prequel means that the game isn’t slavishly devoted to all the same zelda iconography and world building, which makes it a little pocket of fresh air in the same way that, say, Pokemon White 1 feels to return to.
I could write a list about as long of the things that don’t kick ass about this game but I think it’s more interesting to focus on why Skyward Sword is uniquely special 
it genuinely is my favourite zelda that I’ve played.
Edit: I’ve only played the wii version! I’m not in the business of buying games I already own lol.
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JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R (PC/Steam)
Decided to try online first thing, insta-matched in a non-rank match which surprised me given that there’s a recent Steam forum thread saying the game is a dead wasteland online; immediately got rolled by a player looping a long OTG juggle combo. ^ _^
Get ready to grind for tons of stuff PER the nearly 60 characters! (1 or 2 of the 7 paid DLC characters are still to come.)
You can change the position of the manga-style “SFX” Japanese type that pops up at dramatic moments, per character and taunt or whatever.
The 3-on-3 “Knockout” VERSUS mode plays like classic KOF, which I appreciate. Heck, the game’s “Assist” mechanic is very similar to KOF 2000’s “Striker” system.
A certain small set of characters have horses, it sounds like. This fighting horse RULED.
Get ready to grind the arbitrary rules and hidden objectives–you can spend a small amount of in-game currency to reveal them ‘p’–of the 112 All-Star Battle mode battles to unlock boatloads of the locked stuff! OpO
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Started playing Little Goody Two Shoes on Switch. Have barely scratched the surface of it yet, but my attempts to survive the first day have been constantly thwarted by goofy deaths.
First I got chased by a ghoulie that reduced my sanity to almost nothing, so when I spoke to a friendly spirit afterwards I died of insanity.
When I finally got to the second day, I inadvertently triggered a bunch of cutscenes including a musical number before I’d had a chance to eat breakfast and so immediately dropped dead from hunger, sending me back to the previous day when I’d last saved.
Seems interesting so far though, the ye olde European country town Catholicism + witchcraft themes gives me a “What if Valerie and Her Week of Wonders was a 90s Shoujo anime” vibe.
Also been playing Yakuza 3 remastered since I had blazed through Armored Core 6 and needed something to tide me over until Like a Dragon Gaiden. I’d forgotten how rough this one feels compared to the later games. The camera movement is all weird and springy and restrictive, and running feels more floaty or something. That plus the Okinawa blue skies make me think of this game as more of an upscaled Dreamcast game than a PS3 game.
I know Gaiden is out now, but I want to take my time with this since I missed a lot of side stuff last time while trying to race through 3,4 & 5 (AKA the Mack Trilogy) in time for 6 years ago. I’d forgotten a lot of the goofy stuff with the orphans, like Riona being a racist and Taiji running into the strip club in a panic when bad stuff happens at the orphanage. I hope they bring back the kids and ol’ Mame for Gaiden or LAD8 so we can see how they’ve been doing all these years.
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So apparently 7 years ago on this very forum I played through the original DROD game and did a LP of my way through it. I even dug up the link:
Behold all the broken images and despair~
Anyways I decided it is finally time to play the final game of the original four I got in a bundle ages ago, DROD: The City Beneath. I am not LPing that game, although I did consider creating a topic to jot down my random thoughts while playing mainly because I had a good name for it (“DROD: Journal to The City Beneath” as the second DROD game is named “Journey to Rooted Hold” and I like references no one will get). Basically that felt like work and I just wanted to play the thing, so random comments in here will have to suffice.
Here are basically the quick hits of what to know about it:
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DROD is a puzzle game where you have to make your way through a few hundred rooms and kill all the various creatures in them to pass them. It is built on a “you move, then everything else does” system, you get lots of different behaviors and mechanics that lay atop one another to create some very interesting situations, and the people who design these games are generally very good at doing just that. Click on that link if you want a more in-depth mechanical intro.
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The City Beneath is generally considered to be the hardest of the five canon DROD games (much like a ZZT or such there is a massive fan scene with hundreds of fan made holds which range from rather easy to one step short of impossible). The only other contender for hardest would be the most recent entry The Second Sky, but I discovered a shocking fact when I saw Mauve post their completion screens of these two games: they completed TCB in 37+ hours with 35,036 kills, and TSS in 43+ hours with 8,567 kills. Yes, 6 hours longer with only 20-25% the number of kills. Basically expect a lot of battles of attrition against constantly spawning enemies in this one, which at the least is a bit mentally draining.
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This is one of a few puzzle games that legit scares me a bit. The first DROD game I played, Journey to Rooted Hold, was much earlier in my puzzle game rediscovery over a decade back and was legitimately just at the limit of what I could figure out/handle. I had to look up help on 3 or 4 rooms in it which is something I rarely do, very few puzzle games pushed me as hard as it did. By all accounts this game is a full level of difficulty beyond that (the devs list JtRH as a 3 out of 5 difficulty and TCB as 4/5, again with only some of the crazier fan made ones getting a 5) and while I’ve played many more puzzles games over the past decade plus… there is a very real chance I have bitten off more than I can chew.
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I have taken two steps to make things easier for me (well three I guess with the no LP deal). One, I am playing the game in the updated engine (basically each DROD game is released with a new engine and the old games often end up back-ported into them, sometimes losing their original tiles in exchange for lighting effect and the such). Normally I’d stick with the original but that game has no ability to undo moves while the newer engine gives the player unlimited undos and I respect myself enough to give myself that break. The second is that I am playing simultaneously with a longtime online friend (and occasional SB poster) who dropped that game halfway through ages ago and is picking it back up so that we may cheer and support each other hopefully past the finish line. Only took us several months to get our schedules lined up for it!
That’s it basically. I started it up tonight (well technically yesterday but there is a shocking amount of talking/story at the start that took up all my time then) and didn’t get that stuck through the first two areas. A new thing introduced early on is a switch that shifts any one-way arrows back and forth 45 degrees when you step on them and it turns out I have a poor ability to visualize that without triggering and watching it first. Also the tutorial showed that there are now three distinct types of mud (long story short: bane of my existence in these games) and switches you can step on that switch them from one type to another and I legitimately shuddered at the evil potential that portends. Basically my current DROD anxiety level is at a 5 out of 10.
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Snoozefest by Dr. Dos
Dr. Dos’s contribution to this Oktrollberfest was a riff on the classic ZZT world Nightmare, where some malevolent entity traps you in a dreamworld unless you can gather the scattered pieces of your consciousness. (I feel like a higher-than-average proportion of the games I’ve played this year have a guy trapping you in your dreams as a villain — not quite sure what to make of it tbqh.)
Anyhow, you start off in this vaguely Magicant-looking hub, and each of the doors takes you to a different activity you have to finish:
There’s a room with a shooting puzzle, a weird room with centipede heads that seems bizarrely easy, a room where you have to outrace a bullet, a room that is an excruciating combo of two of his previous Oktrollberfest entries, a quiz room, and this room where you proofread some song lyrics:
The quiz board was entirely ZZT Lore. A couple of the questions gave me quite the chuckle:
This game does suffer from the game jam scope curse, where in order to make the deadline the author decided to take a hatchet to the game at the last minute and (more crucially) also decided to call out that fact in the game itself (though perhaps that fourth-wall breaking style is also present in the game this is riffing (I don’t know, sorry)). Still, what’s there is pretty nice. After all, I doubt any other games in the jam are gonna have me solve an algrebraic equation under a time limit.
The trolliest troll I ran into while playing this wasn’t even the fault of game itself — it was actually some bizarre bug in the DOS version of ClassicZoo (latest version) where objects weren’t excuting the #shoot command, rendering two boards entirely incompletable. Switching to the Windows version of ClassicZoo fixed the issue entirely. I have no idea what the deal was there.
Verdict: Due to my experience in the previous paragraph, I have no idea how this actually fares as a trollgame. Oops.
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the board is internally named Naps are a lot like Homestar Runner iytai (iytai = if you think about it), so that tracks
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Hey, Steve!
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Playing more Biomotor Unitron, a mech RPG. You start the game by picking your character and whether you want to be a boy or girl, with the girl version being your partner. They end up in your garage helping you fix up and upgrade your mech
Speaking of upgrades there’s…raw materials and tools that are needed to craft upgrades. Upgrades are like things such as arms, and these unlock new attacks. You battle in the area against other mechs, or wander around the world in your mech fighting monsters. I think the goal is to become the top guy in the mech battle arena. idk how much if this I’m going to play if I can’t look at the lizard guy all the time.
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DROD: The City Beneath day 2
I am a bit thrown off as the levels aren’t numbered, so far at least I make my way around a map and go through specific locations. I believe Gunthro was like this as well, but some of these places lack the results screen one traditionally gets when clearing an area. The last area I was at I cleared all the rooms and instead of a staircase elsewhere I was rewarded with a conversation, and then had to backtrack my way back to the sorta overworld so no results screen. I just like to know how long it took is all.
The early game as is typical is each area introducing a new mechanic, and in this case these mechanics are new to the series as a whole for the most part. I mentioned the rotating arrows last time, this most recent bit was built around “hot” tiles. Basically either you or the enemies can stand on these tiles for a single turn and be fine, but standing on the same tile for two straight turns will cause you to burst into flames. You can step back and forth between two of them endlessly and be fine. Beyond the roaches a couple other enemy types are reintroduced here: eyeballs who move at you when you cross their line of sight, golems who crumble into a pile of rubble when killed and the type of snake that can only be taken out segment by segment by attacking the tail. Each are played against the hot tiles in different ways, you go through a dozen or so rooms each which has some different variants and combinations (including a few rooms where you must leave your sword behind) and eventually the area is complete and one gets back to the amazingly present story.
What sticks out early on is that things feel rather fiddly already. This is built into DROD as making moves in a precise manner is what much of it is about, but already there have been involved bits of having to manipulate enemy behavior to move them in very specific ways and generally that only becomes a thing later in as opposed to this early on. It may just be a side effect of the new mechanics focusing on that and having to be introduces early on, but I’m curious what that will mean as i move deeper in.
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When it comes to Zelda there are plenty of great choices. From Crystalis on the NES to Ys on the PC Engine all the way to Darksiders 2 on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.
You can have a great time with Zelda every time, even on non-Nintendo Systems.
I hear you can even play Link To The Past on your PC!
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i wonder what the best Zelda Classic scenarios are
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God I played the hell out of this game back when. Couldn’t tell you anything about it now! Just that I recall it being a pretty good time. I think the sequel has been fan-translated since then, I oughta give it a go.