Category: /b/

Well, the buggiest game that I played in 2020, anyhow. It was actually released last year. And I have no intention of ever playing Cyberpunk 2077.

A Knight’s Quest is a game that I’d had on my Switch wishlist for a while, since it looked like a fairly decent Zelda-like. I bought it in June when it went on sale for a decent price, but then didn’t play it until December, due to an overloaded SD card. I can’t say I feel overly strongly about this in either direction. It’s perfectly fine. Kind of like what you would get if you wished for a GameCube-styled game that mashed up a Zelda knockoff and Mario knockoff.

But this isn’t a review. Oh, certainly not! This, my friends, is simply a round-up of every bug and glitch that I’ve experienced while playing this game. Let’s start!

1. Right off the hop – you can control Rusty (the main character) during the first cutscene after the intro sequence. While an in-engine scene is showing Rusty waking up on a beach after being washed ashore, you can mash buttons to have the actual player character version of him run and jump and swing his sword. If you’re lucky, you might actually run him into the camera’s view. I’m seeing double – four Rustys!
2. Not long after you “gain control” of Rusty, you’ll probably wade into the water and learn that he can’t swim. Like in Zelda games, he’s supposed to void out and respawn on the most recent solid ground that he stood on. Except one time when I jumped off the pier into what I thought was shallow water: Rusty drowned and voided out, only to respawn… in the water. where he drowned and voided out again. And again. And again. And probably would have continued to do so forever, until I paused the game and quite out to the main menu. It’s worth noting that the game only auto-saves, and only when you move between areas. Don’t take any unnecessary risks, kids!
3. Sometimes if you have Rusty jump onto a weird surface, like the back of a bench, he won’t be able to find his footing and get stuck hovering over it in his falling pose. If you can’t move him off the object somehow (which is surprisingly likely), he’ll simply die and void out after a while, as if he had fallen out of bounds. Today’s lesson: don’t try to stand on the backs of any park benches. They’re apparently quite deadly.
4. Remember how I said that manual saves are not an option, and the game only auto-saves when transitioning between two areas? Well sometimes, if you’re really lucky, the game will just crash in that transition instead of, you know, loading the map and saving. Hope you didn’t just come from exploring one of the bigger maps!
5. You can buy or find pickaxes to mine specific rocks in the environment to gather valuable ores. Nothing new, this is video games in 2020, after all. What is new about it, is that sometimes when you mine a rock, you get nothing for your trouble but a pickae is still removed from your inventory. These rocks are supposed to give you exactly one ore per visit to that map, then respawn once you leave and return, so it’s not as if you just didn’t find an ore that time. No, sometimes the game is just bugged and steals a pickaxe (or five) from you.
6. Occasionally, you’ll be walking along, and Rusty will sort of randomly float up slightly off the ground, as if there’s some invisible geometry below him. It also counts as unstable ground, so if you can’t wiggle him back to solid footing fast enough… see note 3.
7. Taking damage in battle will very rarely cause certain unfortunate “status effects” like: Not being able to use magic while holding the block button. Rusty becomes entirely unresponsive until he gets hit again. Rusty goes into T-pose and can’t do anything but hover around a bit until he gets hit again.
8. If Rusty ever takes damage from anything while airborne, be it an enemy attack or an environmental hazard, he’ll go into a ragdoll mode and flop to the ground. Several things can go wrong at this point. The funniest one is when the ragdoll physics mess up and Rusty goes flying into space as if he took a hit from a Skyrim giant. The more frustrating one is when Rusty flops to the ground and becomes completely unresponsive until he gets hit again – and if there’s nothing around to hit him… hopefully the last auto-save wasn’t too far back.
9. At one point, textures on some environmental objects disappeared, leaving said objects covered in a grey checkerboard pattern. Fun!
10. I don’t know if it could be considered a bug, but one of the boss fights is so poorly designed and frustrating that I can’t imagine it was made that way intentionally. Either somebody missed something during QA, or Sky9 Games just didn’t give a damn that it’s an awful experience.

This should, by no means, be considered a complete list. I’m sure that there are plenty of other bugs that I either didn’t encounter or weren’t significant enough to remember/write down. And to be fair, most of the bugs that I did encounter were mere annoyances at worst. It was only the game crashing coupled with the inability to save manually that really gave me a lot of anxiety. I was super lucky that it only happened (twice) while passing through areas. If it had happened after, say, completing a dungeon? Probably would have chucked the game in the bin right then and there.

But that didn’t happen and I played A Knight’s Quest all the way through to the end. Hooray!

Yep. It’s over. And what a year for blogging it’s been. Or, not blogging. Since I didn’t do almost any until the last few months. I have a handful of year-end-type things to come, and the first is actually provided courtesy of Nintendo.

This year, Nintendo created a fun little widget for their website that shows some basic stats on all the Switch games you’ve played throughout 2019. Or, most of the Switch games, anyway. More on that later. First, let’s have a look-see at the dirt it’s got on me.

Generally speaking, I have no idea how accurate any of these stats really are. 699 hours? Sure, okay. And that includes probably over 150 if you combine the time logged on Fitness Boxing and Ring Fit Adventure, so that makes me feel better about that really big-looking number. Though really, there are roughly 2,920 hours of “free time” in a year (assuming you spend 8 hours a day at work, 8 hours sleeping, and 8 hours free), so spending 24% of it on Nintendo games ain’t so bad. I like when percentages make me feel better about my life choices. (Let’s not consider how many hours PS4 and PC games would add to that tally.)

Moving on, 63 different games played is probably pretty on-the-nose. I could go back over the Monthend Wrap-Ups to put it to the test, but ehhhhh that would be time consuming and I don’t really care. Maybe later.

As for the specific days when I played the most? November 23 is due to Pokémon Shield, no doubt. Easy. I’m actually surprised it wasn’t on launch weekend, to be honest. The days in July and August, though? Those are tougher. In July, I must have spent like a whole day playing Picross S3 or something, because I really don’t know what else it would be. That would also tie in with the individual game rankings. And the date in August I’m pretty sure must have been one of the days I was on vacation and stayed up all night playing Dragon Quest Builders 2. Yeah, there was more than one of those. I really loved DQB2.

So here’s where I really want to pick: the top 5 games played. Fitness Boxing and DQB2 absolutely belong there. Pokémon Shield probably earned its spot as well, even though it came out really late in the year. IGT says I’ve played for just over 63 hours. But I really wonder if Picross S3 and Final Fantasy IX belong. I played a lot of Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate in 2019, and I think that Ring Fit Adventure probably should have cracked the list as well. Heck, I’m pretty sure I spent more time with the Youtube app open after falling asleep than I did playing Picross S3. I adore Picross and all, but it doesn’t take me very long to burn through those games. But maybe the YouTube app wasn’t counted? Who knows!

Anyhow, that’s what Nintendo’s robots picked up on me, and who am I to argue? I’ll have some of my own numbers coming in next month, so stay tuned for that!

Oh right, and Happy New Year!!