What are you playing?

[kamikazekeeg]

With going more casual with Pokopia now, I decided to start delving into some Switch 1 replaying as I decided to play Breath of the Wild to enjoy how it is on Switch 2 and it's so nice. I had dabbled a tiny bit with emulator and BOTW a few years back, didn't play much, but it's nice to have better visuals and framerate.  I think it's a pretty steady 60 frames, with some dips, but I'm really glad I waited till now to replay the game.

And since I want to play the new Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, but not planning to buy it right this moment, I decided I'd for now see if Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity got any small boosts despite not having a Switch 2 version.  It does get a boost, Age of Calamity ran pretty rough before, but Switch 2 locks it to a very consistent 30 frames.  Not perfect, but an overall better experience than in the past and I might just play this for awhile too as I think I'm making this a big Zelda year.  Replay Breath of the Wild, replay/play more of Age of Calamity (I can't remember if I beat the story before or not and never did any of the DLC), maybe get around to Tears of the Kingdom or Age of Imprisonment, and then be ready for the Ocarina of Time remake that might be in November.  I've been really craving some Zelda for a while now and I haven't played anything since Tears of the Kingdom, which was 3 years ago.

[ssj4yamgeta]

For about the past three weeks, I've been playing the hell out of Dragon Ball Sparking! Zero's new expansion, Ultra Limit-Breaking Neo. I almost never buy DLC anymore, but I made an exception here. For $35 it adds new story routes, 33 new playable characters, and a new roguelike game mode where you can level up your characters and create different builds with them. It's a lot of fun, you can do some hilarious stuff like turn a low-tier character into something capable of wiping the floor with the strongest characters in the game. One character I was very happy to see in the new batch is the GT version of Vegeta, which is the best visual redesign he ever got. After the two new modes added earlier this year via free updates, and this new DLC, the game is a solid 9/10. The one big flaw it still has is the lack of a quick pick-up-and-play mode, like an Arcade Mode where you select a character and automatically go through 6-8 fights and get an ending scene. Every single mode in the game right now requires you to go through at least 3 menu screens to get to the action. The new roguelike mode in particular has an obnoxious number of menus you have to go through (around 5 or 6), some of which just feel redundant. I have no idea why the mode shows you your non-interactive stats summary a second time before it actually lets you play, when it just showed it to you two screens earlier. There badly needs to be a mode where you just select a character and jump in without having to fiddle with settings and various confirmations.

[kamikazekeeg]

Wasn't sure if I wanted to get Donkey Kong Bananza or Star Fox next after Pokopia as I figured I'd wait for the Age of Imprisonment since I was already replaying some Zelda games and went with Donkey Kong Bananza as I figured I'd get a lot more time out of it and so far it's pretty fun.  While I've played a number of DK games over the years, mostly just the SNES games, DK64, and I think Tropical Freeze, I wouldn't say I'm the biggest fan, I was always more of a Mario guy if I had to choose.  This functionally takes the idea of Super Mario Odyssey and goes "What if you could just punch literally everything?" I know there have been games with the ability to just carve into the world, but are more about resource hunting and spelunking, where this feels more like what I remember of the Red Faction games, where you could like carve up different routes and tackle things in different ways.  Since you can do sonar claps to find stuff through the ground, sometimes I'll just dig through the ground and pop up next to a banana to find out that I could've gone another direction or how it factors into the ability to get certain things.

It does the thing I didn't love with Super Mario Odyssey, where there's a bajillion of the main things to collect (Gem Bananas) rather than having a smaller, easier to find selection of them.  Some are more clear, are a part of the questing, given direction, objectives, part of challenges, but others are just buried in the ground, so you spend like 70% of the game, especially once maxing out Sonar (I did it as early as I could), spamming R1 to see fossils and banana's through things.  Having to find...500 banana's or however many there will be by the end of the game is not nearly as satisfying at it being like...200 or so that are strewn about in a more enjoyable way.  Though I guess that would somewhat undercut the digging mechanic, which can be very satisfying.  It's never not enjoyable burrowing into the earth or causing lots of stuff to explode.

Overall, it's great to see a real good 3D platformer these days as the last one I really enjoyed was Astro Bot.  My only real big negative is that all the bosses have sucked and are super easy.  They look fun, but take zero effort to fight.  I hope that changes.