Video Games – Page 16

PZ35/21 – April check-in

So things slowed down in March. I only got through one Zelda game (Majora’s Mask), but also I played it twice, so… Do I get extra credit? The Wind Waker is chugging along at a nice clip, and as long as I make it to the end before April is over, I’m still on schedule. But the games are getting longer, and we’re in Monster Hunter Rise season now, which is probably going to be the focus of most of my video game hours.

Next on the list is Four Swords Adventures, and I’m thinking about cutting it out. It’s just not very fun to play alone. And getting a group together that is actually going to commit to completing the game seems like an impossible task. Plus… it wouldn’t be recorded anyway. So I could just write a story about how I got a bunch of people together to play it off-camera, and you’d never know if it were true or not anyway.

Also, skipping FSA will get me to The Minish Cap faster, which I actually do want to play.

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: March 2021

~ Game Over ~

Control (PS4) – 100% trophies for main game and DLC expansions. Super great game. Strongly recommend, would play again. Probably should continue playing, because there are still incomplete missions…

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D (3DS) – I was enjoying the original so much that I decided to revisit the remake that I’d never finished. Good call, me! MM3D is an incredible remake and I want so badly for a Switch port to free it from the teeny-tiny confines of 3DS Jail. I even went for the 100% clear, which I never do for MM. Too many mini-games; it’s really my only major complaint with this one.

One Step Forward…

I’ve typed a heck of a lot of words about Five Nights at Freddy’s VR over the last few months, and to date, most of those words have been very positive. Unfortunately, today I have to put some words to page that veer just a wee bit in the other direction.

I think it was late December when FNAF VR’s expansion, The Curse of Dreadbear was released for Oculus. Right around Xmastime. For a Halloween-themed DLC pack. Maybe not the most timely of releases, but holding it back for another year to release around Halloween would have been silly. Might as well make those bucks. It’s not as if there’s a whole lot else to for people to buy in the Oculus store. (Zoom!)

But Dreadbear’s issues only begin with the late release. Having been totally obsessed with FNAF VR at the time, I was keeping a close eye on news of when that DLC would drop. Then it did, and the bad reviews piled up quickly. Well, maybe not bad reviews per se, but a lot of complaints in the reviews section about how buying and installing the DLC would wipe your save data. Having a completed save file, I opted to wait it out until there was a patch that would stop the save deletion.

January rolled around, and I checked in from time to time until finally I saw that comment I was looking for: Steel Wool Games had released a patch, and downloading Dreadbear would no longer delete your existing save file! I immediately purchased and installed the Dreadbear DLC and… my save file was gone. All progress: vanished, never to return. I’d have to somehow survive that impossibly hard Funtime Foxy minigame again. So much for the patch.

But worse things could happen. After all, FNAF VR is a heck of a lot of fun, so having a reason to play through it again was actually kind of welcome… is how I looked at it after forcing myself to take an optimistic point of view. When I actually started playing, though, something was off. It didn’t quite hit me until I won my first “food” prize, though, and I was barely able to make out what the item was: after installing the DLC, most of the textures in the game -the entire game, not just the DLC parts- had gone to absolute crap.

While FNAF VR was never going to look as good on Oculus as it did on PC-powered VR systems, it was certainly passable. Things were a bit smudgy here and there, but none of it was outright bad. Now, though? Now it looks awful. And this is coming from me, a guy who really doesn’t care all that much about graphical fidelity. But the downgrade has had a major effect on my enjoyment of this video game, since all I can think about now is how much worse it looks. Suddenly that Funtime Foxy level doesn’t seem so bad, because it’s all pitch-black most of the time.

I don’t think that the grossly deteriorated textures will be a long-term problem during main gameplay, as I’m sure I’ll just get used to them. But it’s a really weird thing that happened, and I can’t fathom why Steel Wool Games would have changed them in the first place. Maybe they needed to scale down the texture resolution to keep the file size under some arbitrary limit? The game didn’t have any major performance issues before the DLC, so I doubt it has anything to do with that. It’s mind-boggling.

All that said, I’m going to continue playing FNAF VR. I mean, I haven’t even started on that DLC that I paid for yet. I’ve just been playing the main game again to restore my completion percentage to 100. It’s still a lot of fun, and I still can’t play for more than like 10 minutes at a time for fear of my heart exploding. It’s just too bad that the experience had to be soured a bit.

PZ35/21 – March check-in

I scratched The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Oracle of Ages, and Oracle of Seasons off the list last month, which is pretty good, I think. That puts me about a month ahead of my timeline, and that’s important. The more Zeldas I can carve my way through before the release of Monster Hunter Rise, the better.

I’ve still been recording my playthroughs, though they’re getting to be quite a bit longer now. OoT actually should have been fairly quick, except I played the randomizer, which led to lots and lots of wandering and backtracking. All part of the fun, though! And at the current rate, we’ll be seeing A Link to the Past and Link’s Awakening running in parallel throughout March, so the OoT videos won’t even start going live until April comes around. I’m probably going to have to start publishing three Zelda videos a week to get these all out by the end of the year.

An interesting little oopsie that I made was placing the Oracle games before Majora’s Mask. I cold have sworn that Wikipedia told me it was that way when I was checking the timeline, but that is not the case. Majora came first. Oh well. It’s not like anything important was actually hinging on me playing these in perfect release order.

Now that the rambling’s done, I think I’m through enough games now to start ranking them. I don’t really expect my top four to move all that much, but it’ll be interesting to see how the the less-beloved entries stack up after playing them all back-to-back-to-back-etc. I’ll probably add narrative at the end of the year, but for now, it’s just going to be a list. Watch the darn videos if you want context!

Link’s Awakening
A Link to the Past
Ocarina of Time
The Legend of Zelda
Oracle of Seasons
Oracle of Ages
The Adventure of Link

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: February 2021

~ Game Over ~

Vader Immortal: Episode 1 (Oculus) – It’s cool to hang out in the Star Wars universe for a while, but there’s not a lot to do there, and the combat isn’t terribly satisfying. Which is a problem when 95% of the game is 40 levels worth of combat challenges.

Contra (NES) – Would you believe that I’ve never played this game before? And that it took me about 50 lives to get to the end. Thank goodness for that Konami code. Fun game, though. I see why it’s so highly regarded.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Wii) – Have I mentioned enough times how much I like this randomizer?

Nintendo Direct 2.17.2021

It’s been a while since we’ve gotten a “real” Nintendo Direct. Lots of indie showcases and partner directs, but I can’t even remember when the last Nintendo-focused video came out. Guess it was a COVID thing? Whatever, Nintendo’s got a big, new commercial out, and I’m going to write words about it. Like I do.

Super Smash Bros Ultimate – I can’t believe it’s finally happening! Pyra and Mythra are excellent Smash candidates, and long overdue, if I might say so. Not that I’m poo-pooing the DLC characters we’ve seen thus far, just… I really like Xenoblade. I haven’t really looked for The Internet’s reaction, but I have a feeling they won’t be too happy about more anime swordspeople.

Fall Guys – It’s probably too late; Fall Guys’ 15 minutes seems to be over. And I just never really cared. I’ve had it on PS4 since launch (it was free with PS+) and haven’t ever played it.

Deflated

When Balan Wonderworld was first announced, I heard people on the internet getting excited about it. But I never looked into it myself. A 3D platformer directed by Yuji Naka? Ehh… I was maybe 50% interested.

Then Nintendo showed some footage in a partner showcase or something, and I was much more intrigued. It looked like a lot of fun, and the colourful, cartoony visual style was a huge seller for me. I started to strongly consider a purchase.

Then Square-Enix released a demo, and I played that demo, and I will probably never play Balan Wonderworld again.

PZ35/21 – February check-in

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, or if you know me in person, you’re probably well aware that I tend to get really excited when I start up a project, only to fizzle out and drop it completely before long. It’s a fault in me, I know and accept this, and I don’t think it’s ever going to change.

That said, how goes my plan of playing through all of the Legend of Zelda video games? If we reference the original document, it actually turns out that I’m ahead of schedule. I finished up through Link’s Awakening in January, and probably a lot of that has to do with the fact that the four original Zelda games are relatively short. There’s even video evidence to back up this claim! Though most of it won’t go live for months…

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: January 2021

NEW YEAR, NEW YOU!

Except not. Still addicted to video games. I don’t expect that to change.

~ Game Over ~

Mega Man X (SNES) – It’s become tradition for me to play this on the morning of New Year’s Day. Still trying to clear it in under an hour. Still always choke on at least one of the final bosses. This time I got killed by Sigma and then also Wolf Sigma. Choked twice! I’m getting rusty!

Picross S4 (Switch) – I solved every damn puzzle. Sometimes twice because the Mega puzzles are still hard-mode repeats of the standard puzzles.

Runner 3 (Switch) – Incredible music, weird and wild art direction, and abusively hard gameplay. Even with the difficulty options at the absolute minimum, I was not able to clear every stage. In my defense, the ones I couldn’t beat are labelled “Impossible.” Enjoyed it for the most part, but some of the stage mechanics are just mean-spirited.

How I Would Fix Zelda II

You know how there are those games that you remember as being impossibly hard when you were a kid, only for you to revisit them as an adult to discover that they really aren’t so hard after all?

Yeah, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is not one of those.

Zelda II is great departure from its big brother, changing the overhead view to a (mostly) side-scrolling perspective, trading in Link’s array of tools and weapons for a list of spells, and laser-focusing on action over exploration. There’s still exploration, but this version of Hyrule is significantly more linear than the last. Also, Link has experience levels and lives now, for some reason?

The most jarring change, however, is that Nintendo ratcheted up the difficulty level to 11 in this sequel. Maybe even to 12. While The Legend of Zelda isn’t an especially easy game to begin with, Zelda II makes it look like an absolute cakewalk. Zelda 1 doesn’t really bear its teeth until Level 6, but there’s a good chance you’ll be killed -possibly multiple times- on the short hike to Zelda II’s first palace.

Having recently completed a full, not-Game-Genie-enhanced playthrough for the first time, I’ve had a lot of time to ponder exactly what it is that makes Zelda II so darned unforgiving. I’ve compiled a list below of a few changes that I would make if I were given the opportunity. No massive shifts, just little tweaks that I think would go a long way in making the game feel a little bit more fair.