Dipped out of AC Odyssey when I realized that exploration is kinda pointless when so many of the game’s little landmarks have you do the exact same two or three things in them.
Exploring the pyramids and tombs in Origins was great! The tombs in Odyssey are like, a tile set of the same maze pieces rearranged over and over again, filled with snakes. Every time.
I did do a (1) mission and had a good time, though. Forgot how much I liked the writing when I was busy checking off The List.
So! Other than that:
Started The Outer Wilds. Even though every planet is small enough, it’s a pretty daunting experience. I fell through a planet’s core and teleported to the shattered remains of another planet, and read the laments of the extinct (?) alien species you’re studying scrawled on the wall of a broken piece of the planet, just before my oxygen ran out. Cool stuff.
Then I started Luigi’s Mansion 3, which is incredibly charming and goofy. It’s shockingly good looking? Art direction and some pretty incredible animation goes a long way. Wish they’d spent as much time on the aiming controls, though.
Continuing to hunt S ranks in Ace Combat 7 and balance that against running the plague star event in Warframe.
I’ve been streaming the former at https://mixer.com/TheGrimCorsair966 on Tuesdays and Thursdays around noon PST. It’s pretty rare to give a flying flip about S rank hunting but these games always bring out that desire for me, and tbh, they generally aren’t all that hard to S rank for me, so it rarely ends up feeling like a chore.
The latter is just too good a source of Forma to pass up as a bunch of good runs over the event will set me up with forma for better than a year, generally.
Had a rare video game day with my partner yesterday.
Started Zelda: Wind Waker for the first time in 14 years. I adore the game. I think its pacing might be wack. The Forbidden Fortress is kind of a disaster and really throws the game’s opening off. First dungeon is tight, though. Playing the original GameCube version and the controls are weirder than I remembered! Good, but just different from the kind of standardized movement we get in 3D third-person games after the century’s first decade. My partner doesn’t really play 3D games, but she adapted alright and enjoyed it more than I thought she would, I think.
But then we went and played Super Mario Bros. 2 Japan, which I’ve never beaten. We made healthy use of the rewind feature on the Switch, but we played through all 32 stages, plus world 9. I’d heard of it but had never seen it. World 9 rules. It’s my ideal sort of video game secret reward.
been playing a ton of warriors orochi 4. The new magic treasures thing is really cool and adds a lot of fun to combos, and there a ton of characters I really like. Bummed they took out the unlockable recolors and costumes in favor of boring paid dlc. At least let me get some recolor variety Koei!
i’ve been playing everyone’s fave ps4 exclusive days gone. the game was heavily criticized for being derivative and yeah… it is. it wants badly to be an open world last of us and honestly sort of succeeds. it’s nothing spectacular and is the kind of bad pizza(meaning it scratches an open world action game itch and has a reasonable level of quality) that i expected it to be.
as you complete story missions a little meter that tracks your progress fills up. had a good laugh at the “reconciling my past” meter filling up.
I recall hearing it actually sold really well. Medium Quality Games win again! I’d probably try it out at least for $10 just to see how the zombie crowd stuff is.
My favorite thing I’ve seen of the game is that one clip where a guy is walking through the open world and the game spawns a crowd of monsters on top of the player out of nowhere for no discernible reason.
I love the idea of building a bizarrely long sidequest chain out of this, like someone shows up to watch you play the game and they’re like “what’s the lead guy doing … yelling at his mom? is this a … flashback? … is he supposed to be doing something else?”
if I were in charge of EA or Ubisoft every game would have an extremely tonally off and weirdly involved reference to portnoy’s complaint
noah caldwell-gervais said in his horizon/days gone comparison video that the game basically feels like a netflix original series. it just draws out conflict and character development at such a glacial pace to fill time.
also spoilers: you eventually find your wife who you spent all game searching for(including bits where you visit her memorial and talk to her… lol) and it’s extremely anti-climactic. she immediately starts giving you quests
there isn’t really a movement of Black videogames that I’m aware of but I think it would be worth setting up the whole inverted castle bit just to make you fight Richard Roundtree at the end because he’s guarding William Marshall
as Lana says, “70s in spirit / 90s in your state of mind”
Played a few Genesis games from my collection yesterday, since we have a working Model 1 now and the sound is correct:
Desert Strike: Still really neat, exactly as hard as I remember, and the cutscenes are even dumber and funnier than I remember since I always skipped them as a kid. Main thing is there’s not much density in the levels (fixed in later games imo)
Gaiares: Genesis R-TYPE where shooting your core forward absorbs weapons from enemies. Cool mechanic, took me a little while to learn, might play it again.
Herzog Zwei: Still love this game. Soundtrack is still a banger.
I feel self-conscious playing these games and being bad at them, since I was pretty good at Strike/Zwei as a kid, but I definitely wanna spend more time with them.
i legit need more strike games
desert/jungle/urban/soviet/nuclear pentalogy not enough
future cop: lapd is pretty great, but still i hunger for more
army men air combat games are sadly mechanically inferior (not bad overall, tho)
what else, what else…
why are arcade racing games and top-down helicopter combat games both dead genres ;_;
renegade ops! forgot about that one, i’ve put many hours into that game. i like it, but being in a land-based vehicle (mostly? fully? trying to recall if you get to fly at all. i want to say you could get an upgrade that made you fly? bad memory…) definitely hits different parts of my brain. i also felt like it was a lot more navigating (driving around on roads) than you really had to worry about in most of the strike games, but that connects with it being land-based versus air-based. i enjoy the game a lot but i think it is meaningfully different from the strike games which in their prime really lean into the helicopter fantasy that i don’t get from other vehicles
edit: this is part of my beef with future cop too. mechs are probably cooler than cars tho
i’ve never played brigador, will give it a look! thank you!