What Video Games did you play this week? (2024 Edition)

[the_joker]

Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom will be releasing soon, so I felt like playing Link's Awakening as both games have the same visual style. I also never played the original game. Maybe I could at some point, but I didn't get it on the 3DS eshop, and I don't want to play it on NSO. Maybe I could emulate the game?

Anyways, perhaps the most notable aspect of the game is Zelda herself being completely absent, and the game also isn't set in Hyrule. She only got mentioned once at the start of the game, and that was it. There is a major female character named Marin, and she seems to have taken a liking to Link as she shares a few tender moments with him. She even got to accompany him at one point in the game and make a few comments about his actions.

Another noticeable feature is the sheer number of Mario characters appearing including Goombas, Boos, the plants, and others I've seen but can't exactly identify. Marin's father Tarin resembles Mario, and maybe that sort of explains Marin and Tarin's name. There's also a Yoshi doll from a minigame. And a female goat character sent a "picture" of herself to a pen pal, with that picture being of Princess Peach. Even Kirby himself is in the game as an enemy complete with his inhaling ability.

As for the game itself, I like the game well enough. Like with other Zelda games, the progression is linear, but you can still travel to most parts of the map with certain dungeons only being accessible after acquiring certain items. And the dungeons themselves are pretty much giant puzzles.

I got stuck a few times about where to go next or how to to progress in a dungeon, but I eventually was able to progress after some wandering around and looking at the map, though I did look up a guide at one point in a dungeon because I had to get a metal ball to a specific location and couldn't figure out how to do so after so much wandering. However, I couldn't help feeling a little bored when taking too long to figure out how to proceed because enemies don't take long to respawn, and even though I could just avoid them, I still need to put up with the relatively slow movement speed and screen transitions. And if I ended up going to the wrong location, backtracking can take a while. A few more fast travel points probably wouldn't hurt. Personally, I was able to find an ocarina (and this game predates Ocarina of Time) as well as complete a series of trades after going around the map, but those discoveries were accidental. I don't know if I'm just too impatient, if the game it's based on is too old, or if I'm just getting too old.

The game does somewhat provide hints with "memories" to recall certain previous conversations, and I'm more than certain this wasn't in the original game. This makes me wonder how people who played the original game figure out where to go or what to do next especially if they couldn't recall all of the text being thrown at them. They either had to write everything down which may or may not be tedious, or they wandered around and eventually stumbled onto a solution.

 

[wonderfly]

What video games did you play this week?
8/12/24:


New Releases this week:

Madden NFL 25
(coming to Playstation 4 and 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, and PC)

Farewell North
(coming to Xbox Series X and S, Nintendo Switch and PC)


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So what have you played this week?!?

 

[the_joker]

After I beat Link's Awakening, I found another location that opened up another fast travel point for me. That would've been helpful during the main game, but whatever. I guess I really just wanted the walking speed to be a little faster. You can also win various Mario figures to display in Mabe Village, and I couldn't resist trying to complete that task. I still don't know what's up with all of those cameos, but the Mario and Zelda teams should probably consider doing more collaborations.

Lately, I've been playing Scarlet Nexus, and the first thing I noticed when starting up the game was the lack of options for choosing between resolution and framerate. It looks like the game is able to hit 4k60 almost all the time on modern consoles, though I don't know if the game has been patched to be constantly 4k60.


This does make me wonder what the resolution and performance are like on previous gen consoles.

I'm enjoying the game so far, and the biggest standout would be the flashy and fast-paced combat. There are 2 player characters in Yuito and Kasane with their own storylines, and I chose to play as Yuito first. Though the 2 characters encounter each other more than a few times and even duke it out as often as they fight together. Both of them have telekinesis, and with the way the game plays, I'm wondering why there has been no game featuring Jean Grey. Regular telekinesis was fun, and there are "special" telekinetic attacks you can use such as ramming a train onto a group of enemies or riding on top of a bus through enemies and then slamming it on top of them. Brain Crush finishers are fun to watch due to being over the top. All those are helped with the triggers on the Dualsense intensifying the feel of those attacks. To keep the combat flowing, you have to alternate between using physical attacks and telekinetic attacks, and I like that the game lets you immediately follow up with a physical attack by having the character move up to an enemy after hitting them from a range, and the vice versa can also be done. However, the physical follow up range is limited, so it's not impossible to miss an attack. And all this isn't getting into your teammates who have their own superpowers such as fire, invisibility, or super speed, and you can use their abilities to augment your attacks. There is one pretty major gripe I have with the teammates, which is that their own damage output is lousy. You'll be doing 95% of the damage, so teammates are essentially useless during combat and boss fights outside of using their powers. At least active teammates have their powers last longer when used, but I still would've liked the game to treat them as actual teammates instead of selectable buffs.

The setting is in a society where almost all humans (99%+) have their powers unlocked by a machine, so if you've watched Young Justice, think of awakening the metagene. Admittedly, this is also not too unlike having mutants discover their powers in the Marvel Universe. And this also reminds me of the "10% of your brain" stuff (who the hell came up with that idea?). Honestly, I have no idea if almost all humans actually have powers in the game because you can walk around in the city and just see too many civilians looking completely ordinary. Admittedly, they're not part of the organization that deal with "Others" (the enemies in the game) unlike you and your teammates, so they probably didn't need to show off their powers all the time.

The visuals are pretty stylized and clean, so it looks appealing. It even has a photo mode, but the environments aren't exactly varied, and you'll mostly be in urban or abandoned environments, so no nice photos in some luscious wilderness.

As for the story, it's unraveling slowly as the characters keep getting confused about the turn of events and wondering why certain people did what they did. I'm hoping the payoff will make the wait worth it. Notably, there aren't that many fully animated cutscenes with characters talking in panels from a manga. The game took up only about 20 gb on the PS5 and retailed for $60, so I would think the game had a decent budget.

Apparently, this game somewhat collaborated with Tales of Arise as some costume pieces from that game are available in here (and vice versa with Kasane's hair clip being in Arise). There was even a time when I used the Brain Field power (which is really just overdrive for the character), and a tune from Tales of Arise played whenever I used that power. Too bad the Brain Field only lasts for about 30 seconds, so that tune would always be cut short, though at least you can unlock skills to make it last longer. Turns out that happened because Yuito was equipped with the Blazing Sword. Strangely, weapon skins don't get unlocked until the end of the game, which kinda sucks because I wouldn't have minded leaving the Blazing Sword around.

 

[wonderfly]

What video games did you play this week?
8/19/24:


New Releases this week:

Black Myth Wukong
(coming to Playstation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC)

Concord
(coming to Playstation 5 and PC)


​

So what have you played this week?!?

 

[wonderfly]

Is it just me, or are "noteworthy" Nintendo Switch releases slowing down?

Anyway, I bought and have been playing "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection". We enjoyed "Shredder's Revenge" so much, decided to show the kids what that game is paying tribute to, but "The Cowabunga Collection" contains more than just the arcade "Beat Em Ups" from the early 90's, it also has the games from the original NES and Game Boy.

I did own that original Ninja Turtles NES game, and I remember loving and hating it at the same time. It was always that dreaded water level, I couldn't get past it.

 

[the_joker]

I"m still playing Scarlet Nexus, and I apparently grossly misunderstood the premise of people with powers. They were actually born with them, though machines and experiments could give powers to non-powered humans (called "duds" in the game). There is supposedly some discrimination against "duds", but the story doesn't focus on that idea too much outside of some characters discussing it a few times. In actuality, the characters getting connected to a machine's wires in the beginning was to "connect" their brains so they could access each other's powers, providing an explanation for this game mechanic.

I got to the point where Kasane's team completely joined Yuito's team, and there are a lot more powers to mess with, and you can get skills to select multiple powers, so combat has definitely become more fun over the game, though the lacking enemy variety dampens this to a degree. And there are 9 teammates but only 4 face buttons, which means 1 teammate's power will always be unavailable until I manually switch one out, and that kinda sucks because I like using all of their powers. I think they could've let you press the right stick for the last power instead of having that cancel the active powers, and they could've moved the power cancellation to the left stick instead, but whatever.

 

[wonderfly]

What video games did you play this week?
8/26/24:


New Releases this week:

Star Wars Outlaws
(coming to Playstation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC)

Emio - The Smiling Man: Famicon Detective Club
(coming to Nintendo Switch)

Visions of Mana
(coming to PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC)


​

So what have you played this week?!?

 

[wonderfly]

The summer drought is over! Not that there wasn't the occasional high profile game that came out this summer. But as we get into September (and then October), we're about to get a deluge of high profile games. We'll likely have weeks where we have 3 or 4 "highlights of the week" games.

Looking forward to it!

 

[Antiyonder]

My second Master Ball on Pokémon Go:

 

[Classic Speedy]

I bought Shadow of the Ninja Reborn. Be warned: This is a legit Nintendo Hard game. You will curse while you play this, I guarantee it.

Also bought Castlevania: Dominus Collection but haven't played too much of it yet, outside the Haunted Castle remake which I beat and very much enjoyed, a lot more than the original arcade game.