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.

[kamikazekeeg]

Played the demo for Stupid Never Dies, a rogue-lite action game where you play a zombie who can absorb other monsters powers and get bonus robot body mod abilities to fight his way through the different world layers to evetually eat the boss monster and hopefully save a frozen human girl.  I found it generally fun, the story/characters are very Suda51 coded, over-the-top, silly, colorful.  The action is just alright, I don't know, I felt like I was whiffing a bunch with the attacks, like I was missing a lock on ability, perhaps I overlooked it, I don't know, it just didn't feel as snappy as these sorta action games tend to be.  Maybe it feels better once you get more experienced in it.

Overall it's fun, I don't think I'll buy it right away, but good to consider on a sale potentially, especially since it's coming out in a timeframe that I got other stuff to check out in that end of the year time frame.

[burningdoom]

Finished the Risen remaster. It's literally the same exact game as the original. I didn't see any changes at all. I don't understand why this was made. The original is already in HD even.

[kamikazekeeg]

Was going to try and maybe 100% Sonic Racing: Crossworlds as I've been playing it ever day over the past week and I thought it might be possible as I mostly just have some Rival Park stuff to finish, Time Trials, and Super Sonic Speed Grand Prix, but I looked up farming tickets for unlocks and there's no good farm I guess, it would take forever to unock everything with the sheer amount of tickets you need.  10k for just the aura's, maybe 5k for the horns, probably something similar for the decals, and then I don't know how many are needed for the friendship unlocks, but when there's 23 racers, even if it's just 500 to 1000 tickets each for full unlocks, that's...10 to 20k at least lol It's not fun and from what I saw online, at its best, it's maybe like 100 to 200 tickets per race, which is weeks of grinding.  That's not fun at all, that's way too tedious for cosmetic stuff.

I did find out that Time Trial completions for each grand prix unlocks more music.  Wish I had known that sooner compared to the latter end of my time with it, but I will be finishing all the main racing stuff and just ignoring completion.

*EDIT*
Also started checking out the demo for Final Fantasy: Resonance.  It's apparently an updated remake of part of the Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius mobile game, though I don't feel like you can tell at all when playing, at least in this early bit of the first chapter you get access to.  It's your standard turn based RPG, but it stands out so much with all the real good art. The 2D pixel art is great, there's nice illustrations for the main characters when there's dialogue, there's nice 3D visuals for the main world, and there's real well done 3D visuals for at least the main intro cutscene that has a solid pixel filter over it.  Handles it in a way that doesn't feel aggressive as I feel like some games use pixel filters too harshly and just make everything look either muddy or blurry.

I haven't played much turn based stuff in a while, but this is nice, I might finish the demo since it's the full 1st chapter and then consider picking up the game at some point.  The gimmick is that you get "Visions" that are like the memories of warriors, and that's how they add in all the characters that were in Brave Exvius as a mobile game, being partner characters with unique abilities that you use in battle.  A fun way to have all sorts of Final Fantasy characters show up in a way that isn't obtrusive to an original story.