Got Zombie Army 4 for three bucks. Seems very much worth the investment so far.
Metroid II, the original one for Game Boy. I want to play AM2R eventually but I want to properly appreciate the work that went into it. And I’m trying my hardest to do it, so far successfully, without consulting a map.
So far I have:
- bomb
- spider ball
- spring ball
- high jump boots
- Varia suit
- wave beam (replaced the ice beam)
After more than seven hours I’m starting to go insane, but my stubbornness knows no bounds. I’ve seen every room of the game at least 20 times and probably bombed every single tile. The only place I know for a fact is new is, well, entirely submerged in lava. I’m at an impasse 😞
There is no shame in looking at a guide if you hit a point where progress without one is so frustrating that you’re not enjoying yourself anymore.
Metroid II is my least favorite of the series, but it’s still a solid entry. AMR2 is a very good fan recreation, but don’t skip on Samus Returns on the 3DS if you enjoy Metroid II
Oh I agree 100% on your point about using a guide, but I have this weird fixation on beating it as if I had gotten it on release when I was a kid. The only thing I’m allowing myself is a PDF of the manual that came with it, and no save states. I finally played and beat Super Metroid just recently with the same restrictions (on my childhood SNES and a real cartridge!) and it felt very satisfying.
As for my long-term patience, I have a second monitor and countless hours of long-form YouTube content to keep me entertained through the mundane moments.
I’ll definitely give Samus Returns a try as well. Thanks for the recommendation!
Balatro
I’ve been playing a bunch of World of Warcraft, actually. Even without being a social player I’m having fun with it, for now. I don’t really care about getting the hottest, most recent expac so I don’t have to pay more than the subscription fee for 90% of the game.
I never finished Uncharted 4 so im playing that
I played that one recently. I thought it was a lot of fun
Verrry slowly working my way through Life is Strange.
Split Fiction is so cinematic and even wackier than ITT. I’m hopeful that it’ll have a way better plot conclusion, too, which was one of ITT’s weakest points.
Split Fiction’s gameplay has been great.
Actually, I think Hazelight’s greatest strength by far is presentation/artwork, especially the environment. One of my friends didn’t bother to continue with ITT because the platforming was too basic for him. It kinda feels a little like these games pander to casual gamers quite a fair bit. Like, it’s cool that if one person stays alive, the game keeps rolling on, but the short-term, Zelda-like micro-puzzles in which only concepts sometimes carry over at most from room to room make its gameplay too easy, I think. They could have done more with the
Spoiler
shoot-em-up segment! It was unfortunately just homage, by a few too many minutes.
But dang, all the landscapes are gorgeous. Love the sci-fi sides, although I think the genre-bickering has been getting a bit tropey. We’ll see…
This kind of makes me now wonder how difficult the Plucky Squire is by comparison.
It’s been a little bit since I’ve played any games (life just got busy), but I finally found time to sink some real time into replaying Dark Souls III again. I’m not a pro player and definitely not a speedrunner but I’m about 25 hours into this playthrough (having to kill every boss but no other restrictions or rules), and I’m on Gael. Just need to kill him and Midir and I’m done, I’m pretty happy with how it’s gone. Twin princes took 5 tries, Nameless King and Friede took 2 tries, and I think every other boss was a first try this time which felt pretty awesome. I’m hoping I can do a no death run next time
I played Dark Souls 3 in 2018. I spent over an hour trying to beat the first boss, and then asked my friend for help.
He told me it’s not the first boss, just a tutorial. I had never played one of those games before or since then.
Besides what cod already said there’s also a pretty big shift from slow and methodical gameplay of the first game towards fast and furious one in the third entry.
I like the first two games for example but the third one never really clicked with me, partially because of the fast and spammy enemies that became common in DS3. If you still want to try the series but don’t mesh well with DS3 I’d suggest checking out the first game if you get a chance - you might end up like me.
The second one is also good but it has its own problems that are pretty contentious among DS players so I’d stick with the release order to be safe.
My first souls game was DS3 too. The tutorial boss probably killed me more than any other boss in that game, with one exception near the end. I really struggled with it. I finally did see that game to the end though, and eventually got really into the rest of the FromSoftware games too. When I revisited DS3 a few years ago and did a new playthrough, I was amazed how easy the tutorial boss felt. It was crazy. That’s the fun part of Dark Souls, you get so much better at the game by the end and when you go back to replay you realize just how far you came. Old challenges are like a walk in the park.
Finished Skald: Against the Black Priory, and it was a lovely experience overall. It’s one of those games that knows exactly what it attempts to do, and is very good at limiting its scope and not biting off more than it can chew. I might have liked a bit more agency and player choice - it is very linear for an RPG - but I can see how that would have been a challenge for a small studio and could well have ended up hurting the quality of the experience. As is it’s a very enjoyable ride, full of retro charm, nostalgic music and pretty pixel art but without retro clunk like memory limitations or poor controls and UX. I liked the story and found the writing solid, with a great gloomy atmosphere and some nice cosmic horror touches. The combat and character customization could have been a touch more elaborate, but at around 20 hours the game isn’t long enough that it really becomes a problem.
I’d give it somewhere around an 8 to 8.5/10 and definitely recommend it, especially to anyone who enjoys retro RPGs. It’s quite cheap too, even at full price.
Up next will be Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. I was a little miffed that only the console versions got HDR, but I got the RenoDX mod working and the game looks beautiful. Only just started the tutorial mission though.
The plot of Mankind Divided ends oddly abruptly, which is a real
