It’s time for another Video Game Round-Up! Another month of being mostly stuck at home due to some medical issues (seriously though, I’m okay :D ) meant that I got to play a lot of video games! Here they are in mostly chronological order with some ramblings after each one.
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages (3DS) - I actually started playing this months ago, thanks to the Virtual Console on the 3DS (I also got the companion game Oracle of Seasons, but haven’t started that one yet), but I put it down because I actually got stuck in one bit. One of the puzzles was just too esoteric for me to figure out, and unlike the “Grumble, grumble...” bit from the original Zelda game, there was no fever dream to help me figure out it this time. But I picked the game up again, tried to get past that puzzle, failed again, and then cheated and looked for the answer online. Thank you, online walkthroughs! I am now proceeding apace, safe (and ashamed) in the knowledge that if I get stuck again, I know where to go :)
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (Switch) - I did the Super Mario Odyssey-themed puzzles, which were pretty fun, but didn’t really give me anything new expect I got to revisit some of the worlds in Odyssey in puzzle cube form. However, I also did a few of the Toad Brigade levels, in which you need to get Captain Toad and his three Toad buddies to the end point together. Lose any one of them, and you lose the level. Those were a bit different, but you know what? This whole game is awesome and charming as hell.
Kentucky Route Zero (PC) - This game is fantastic, and I can’t even put my finger down on why. It’s basically a point-and-click adventure, but there aren’t any real puzzles to solve. I mean, I guess there are, but not in the tradition of old-school point-and-click adventure games. And there are dialogue options, like you find in a lot of the more immersive modern RPGs, but they don’t really affect the story in any way. Honestly, this is really just a somewhat interactive story in which you occasionally input something here and there, but really you’re here because this story is amazing. And it’s kind of a difficult story for me to properly describe, but by sister from another mister Laura Hudson wrote about it two years ago (which is what originally piqued my interest in the game), and she does a better job describing it than I ever will.
My God, this game.
There are five acts total (the fifth one is not yet released), and I completed the first three. The whole thing is just an amazing experience, and the music is fantastic! There is awesome bluegrass music throughout the game, plus an amazing synth pop song in the middle of Act III called “Too Late to Love You” that legit made me cry. You can listen to it here.
Trials Fusion (PS4) - This is a fun little physics-based game in which you try to get your motorbike from point A to point B as quickly as possible without crashing. Every track is on a, well, track, and you don’t have worry about turning or anything like that. All you have to worry about is keeping your balance (forward and backwards) and making the necessary jumps. It’s kind of addictive in the sense that I wanted to get a gold medal in every track and skill event, making me try each track over and over again until I could do it without crashing out (that damn Big Air level almost killed my right thumb, index finger, and wrist as I tried a billion times to get the gold medal; ps. I totally got the Big Air gold medal). I will admit, however, that crashing is often more fun to watch than a clean run. I got this game for free a couple months thanks to my PSPlus membership, and while I enjoyed myself and would recommend it to people into this sort of thing, I’m still pretty happy I didn’t have to pay for it :D
Madden 18 (PS4) - I got this cheap a couple months back because Madden 19 was very close to coming out. This had been my usual pattern with sports games: get the previous version cheaply around when the new version came out. But I hadn’t actually bought or played a Madden game since Madden 09 (PS3), so it’s been nearly a decade since I played some simulated American football. And man, it friggin’ shows. I have no idea how anything works anymore, and I need to relearn... well, I was going to say I need to relearn how this game actually controls, but what I really need to relearn is the game of American football. See, I hadn’t actually watched an American football game in about two years. But I have purchased the NFL GamePass so I can watch every game I want online, so this ought to help me relearn the game and not be so terrible at playcalling, and running the ball, and passing the ball, and tackling somebody... Yeah, I’m pretty bad at everything. I still haven’t tried the story-based sorta-RPG bit called “Longshot” because I wanted to get better at the game first, but I enjoyed the same bit on FIFA 17 and FIFA 18, so I assume I’ll enjoy it here as well.
Iconoclasts (Switch) - This is a fun platformer that I am super in love with, mostly because it is crunchy as hell. And by that I mean, almost every action you take comes with a satisfying clunk or crunch sound effect. It makes everything you do feel more solid, and I love that. The story is set in a world where only certain people are allowed to be mechanics, and you play as a woman who totally mechanics the hell out of everything her poor village needs mechanic-ing, even though she’s not supposed to be. I haven’t gotten too far into story, but there are awesome pirates, evil corporations, and military personnel named after colors. It’s pretty great and everyone should play it.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (PS4) - I got this game a looooooooong time ago, but I didn’t play it because the girl wanted to watch me play it. She finally had some time to sit down and watch me play, and we both fell in love with it. The visuals are stunning, complete with the most expressive eyes I have ever seen in a video game on the main character Senua. I love the way her lover’s head occasionally breathes through the bag it’s in, I love how the weird monster swordsmen move, and I love love love Senua’s face at any given moment. And I haven’t even gotten to the sound design, which is friggin’ glorious. If you’ve never heard of this game, please, read up on it, and if you don’t plan on ever playing it yourself, go watch a playthrough on YouTube. You’ll be a better person for it.
Far Cry 5: Living Dead Zombies DLC (PS4) - Hey, this totally did drop! It’s the last bit of DLC for Far Cry 5 (as far as I know), and featured seven self-contained levels of you mowing through zombies. In and of itself, it’s not all that great. I mean, every game and their mothers have a zombie mode nowadays. But Living Dead Zombies sets itself apart by the conceit it’s wrapped in. Basically, every one of these levels are actually movie pitches from Guy Marvel, the weird movie guy you meet in Hope County during the main game. Each level starts with a quick animation of Guy waylaying some unsuspecting Hollywood type (producers, directors, actors, etc.) and pitching them a zombie movie. Then the level you play through is the movie he’s pitching. As you play, you will get narration from Guy himself and the person he’s talking to, which sets up what you do in the level, but also occasionally changes things up as the two characters quarrel or change their minds on the fly (for example, in one level, Guy and the director he’s talking to argue about whether it should be daytime or nighttime, and the level keeps changing lighting in real time). It’s a pretty clever conceit, and makes for some pretty funny dialogue, but the levels themselves were just all right. I think I only played four or five of the seven before installing something else on my PS4.
Middle-Earth: Shadow of War Definitive Edition (PS4) - I did a proper review for this on Geek Culture, but my two main takeaways were: 1) hey, this is a pretty neat addition to Tolkien lore; and 2) hey, this game gets pretty repetitive, pretty dang quickly. I haven’t finished it, and I’m not sure that I will.
Marvel’s Spider-Man (PS4) - This is the fastest I have ever beaten a game (about 36 hours over three days!), and only the second non-LEGO platinum trophy I’ve ever gotten. This is significant as platinum trophies are trophies for PlayStation games that players only receive after getting every other trophy in the game. These trophies can be given out for various things, like beating levels and defeating bosses, or doing a certain action a certain number of times or finding every collectible in the game, or even weird and wacky things like standing still for 30 seconds or riding the subway. I usually don’t care about these trophies (because most of them are too dang hard for me to get), but this game was so fun that I wanted to do everything there was to do in this game, and I ended up getting all the trophies basically by accident. This has happened exactly once before, with Horizon: Zero Dawn (PS4). Seriously guys, this game is just so much fun! I can’t wait for the DLC! And! There are rumors that this will possibly lead to an MGU - a Marvel Gaming Universe! That would be awesome!
Shadow of the Tomb Raider (PS4) - I played and enjoyed the first two games in this reboot trilogy, so I couldn’t wait for Shadow when it was announced. On top of that, the first part takes place in Mexico! Now, while I also enjoyed this game thoroughly (especially the Challenge Tombs), I still have some major issues.
1. I’m not 100% sure why the writers of this game decided to heavily lean on Mayan culture and mythology, but then set most of it in Peru, where the Mayans famously did not hang out in. While there are story (and completely historically inaccurate) reasons for Mayan culture (and even Aztec) culture to be present in Peru alongside Incan culture, I don’t understand why they didn’t just set the game in the Yucatan, where the Mayans famously did hang out. It’s a really weird decision that kept taking me out of the game every time I thought about it.
2. There is an option to turn on native languages, so that all the NPCs speak their native language instead of English (this is Spanish and Quechua, mostly), and then have English subtitles for when these characters speak. This is actually pretty awesome, and I got to hear a bunch of Mexicans and Peruvians speak Spanish in this game. What isn’t awesome is that when these characters speak to Lara, she replies in her perfect British English, and everyone can just understand everybody with no problems. Whut.
3. I understood who Lara was and where she was going before I got the game, but I didn’t realize how much it was going to bother me to play as this rich white lady traipsing around Latin America, literally stealing everything not bolted down by the game engine (often right out of poor people’s homes), occasionally destroying entire towns and then taking off, all because some weird semi-religious cult/paramilitary outfit killed her dad last time. I mean, it didn’t bother me enough to not finish the game story (or go back to try to 100% complete it), but it did bother me.
4. But seriously though, maybe don’t make all the brown people in your game poor, “savage”, poor and “savage”, or poor, “savage”, and dead.
So yeah, this game is pretty problematic, but hey, I can pet llamas, and that goes a long way. In all seriousness though, it is fun game (and it’s quite gorgeous; I could not get enough of all the heads carved out of stone), even if the story is just slightly left of ridiculous, and the politics are just slightly right of tone deaf.
And that’s it for this edition of Video Game Round-Up! Look forward to next month when I’ll probably play more of Shadow of the White Savior - I mean Shadow of the Tomb Raider to 100% completion, some indie games like Undertale, Donut County, VA-11 Hall-A, and more Kentucky Route Zero and Iconoclasts, hopefully some Spider-Man DLC (if it comes out), and the latest in the Assassin’s Creed series, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey AKA the first Assassin’s Creed I will be playing because this one is a proper RPG. Maybe also some of those other games that I mentioned in my last conclusion :D
See you next time! Play video games!
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