Welcome to another Video Game Round-Up! I’m three days late, but that’s only because I played a ton of games this month! So many! I even finished playing 9 games and got three new platinums! Yay, me!
There was a lot of various video game news from Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony, and Sony finally revealed the price and release date of the PS5, but the pre-order situation was terrible and I don’t have one yet. Boo. But I’m sure there’ll be a lot more chances to get it, and if I don’t get it on release day, I will get it soon afterwards (though I really hope I can get it on release day).
But enough about that, let’s get to the ridiculous amount of games!
Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Switch) - This game finally stressed me out a bit this month. As I created my character at the beginning of August, I had a lot of bugs, fish, and ocean creatures to catch (to fill out my Critterpedia) and there were a lot of bugs disappearing at the end of August. I really had to hustle to grab all the dang stags and beetles that were leaving, and I caught my last bug, the Horned Hercules on the evening of 30 August. Phew!
I don’t have a lot for September (I caught most of them last month), but I’ve still got the Blue Marlin to catch, which I’m sure will be hard as hell.
But also! We totally spruced up our island and now we have a curiosity shop, a pasar malam, and an arcade! Whee!
God of War (PS4) - My quest for the platinum began and ended 2.5 years after I originally beat the game, and I did it! I methodically went through all the regions grabbing all the collectibles I needed (mostly Odin’s Ravens, but some realm tears, artefacts, lore markers, and a Jötnar shrine), while also finding and beating any Valkyries along the way (we’ll get back to them in a bit). I also had a ridiculous amount of treasure maps to complete, which I didn’t even realize :P
By far, the most annoying thing to do was getting enough Mist Echoes in Niflheim to open all the treasures inside. I had to do like three or four complete rounds, which I didn’t even know you could do until I read a guide. Instead, I kept trying to backtrack to take my Mist Echoes with me and then dying to some stupid trap I couldn’t get through because I mistimed one thing or another, thereby losing all my Echoes. I hated this, but it had to be done, not just to pop a trophy, but also to get the last Frozen Flames to fully upgrade the Leviathan Axe (which popped another trophy).
The Valkyries, on the other hand, were the most fun. When I decided I was going to try for the platinum on this game, I knew the Valkyries were going to be extremely tough. I beat one 2.5 years ago when I originally played the game in normal difficulty, but it took me a couple of hours. I decided I didn’t want the hassle of hours-long battles every time I found a Valkyrie, so I dropped the difficulty to easy. Most of the eight Valkyries took me a couple of tries in this difficulty setting (I think I only beat one first try, and one took me like seven tries), but the Valkyrie Queen was some kind of nonsense. Even on easy difficulty, it took me a good 4.5 hours of real time to beat her. She just kept smashing me in the face over and over and over again. Even after I learned her moves and tells, I would still screw up and she would smash me in the face again. But oh man, how good it felt when I finally did. I jumped up and shouted and Felicia shushed me because it was like one in the morning and our neighbors already hate us.
This might be the platinum I am most proud of (Uncharted: The Lost Legacy (PS4) is stiff competition, though, as I had to beat that game like three times, once in ultra hard mode, to get the platinum).
Paper Mario: The Origami King (Switch) - I finished the game! Yay! This was a very fun and very funny lite RPG with a pretty interesting battle system (which I’ve talked about before). The ending is bittersweet, but I won’t say why to avoid spoilers. I will say that there’s still a fair amount for me to do in the game: find not-bottomless holes, find missing Toads, find hidden question mark blocks, and find hidden trophies. There’s no real reason to do any of that except to get 100% completion and get a bunch more puns. I will probably do this eventually because my collecting habits extend to video games :P
Ghost of Tsushima (PS4) - I beat it! These are the kinds of open world games I really like: compact and narratively compelling. The map isn’t super huge, and it’s incredibly beautiful to traverse, and the story about a samurai learning to be a ninja to save his homeland while all his samurai friends and family believe he’s breaking an unbreakable bond. I won’t spoil stuff, but this way more emotionally engaging than I thought it would be.
I love this game a lot, but I have some complaints. Chief among them: how are you gonna put the Mongols in your video game as the main antagonists and then have zero horseback combat? Mongols are famous for their amazing horseback combat skills, but every time Jin Sakai rocked up on some mounted Mongols, THEY GOT OFF THEIR HORSES TO FIGHT HIM. WHY? WHY WOULD THEY DO THAT? The live-action Mulan is a terrible movie, but it at least has some pretty sweet Mongol horseback combat.
Secondly, why are most of the haiku so awful? There are a bunch of spots around the open world where Jin can write haiku while thinking about a specific topic. Mechanically, this means picking the three lines of a haiku (5-7-5 syllables) from three different options for each line. There are sometimes “correct” options in that there are three lines that legitimately line up to make a decent haiku, but if you pick the “wrong” first line, the rest of the haiku isn’t going to be great. But guys, even if you pick all three “correct” options, it doesn’t guarantee a good haiku.
Finally, and this isn’t a complaint as much as it is a personal disappointment, but there weren’t enough foxes or Jin butt. I demand more foxes and Jin butt!
Seriously though, this game is great, and I platinumed it.
Detention (Switch) - We started playing this again because Felicia thought it’d be a good idea to play this on the first day of Hungry Ghost Festival. AND IT TOTALLY WAS!
By this point, you all know our story of when we first tried playing this game, but let me retell it anyway because retelling stories is like my favorite thing to do (just ask Felicia): I thought Detention was a historical game about the Communist crackdown in Taiwan known as the White Terror (this is not technically incorrect). What I didn’t know was that it was also a horror game. So, when we started playing, there was an immediate creepy vibe, but I kept assuring Felicia this wasn’t a horror game. This was a historical game. Then we got to a part where there was a literal river of blood blocking the exit from the school, and Felicia said, “How is this not a horror game? There is a literal river of blood right there.” And I said, “Maybe it’s a metaphorical river of blood alluding to the 2/28 Massacre that started the White Terror?” Readers, it was not a metaphorical river of blood (though I still contend it was alluding to the many people who were murdered during this period). Shortly after this, one of the characters dies mysteriously, we encountered our first ghost, and we encountered our first jump scare, at which point Felicia nearly threw the Switch off the bed.
We started playing it again from the beginning, and armed with the correct knowledge of what this game was, we were still scared silly, but at least we knew what we were getting into. The ghosts are drawn from Chinese folklore, and are damn creepy. You can’t beat them in any way, shape, or form, you can only hope they ignore you by holding your breath at the correct times and occasionally placing offerings to distract them. The puzzles are incredibly inventive, and the story is really quite gripping. These are the kinds of horror games I can get behind!
We beat the game in 2.5 sessions, and weren’t all that scared by the end, as it finally became what I always thought it was: a historical drama. Vindication! It has a fantastic story of neglect, betrayal, revenge, and atonement, and if you can handle horror fiction, I highly recommend it. Buy it if you can, as developer Red Candle Games needs as much help as they can get after their near total ban thanks to China’s special mix of authoritarianism, nationalism, censorship, and troll farms.
Alone With You (PS4) - This was a pretty good game! It’s a sci-fi dating sim (sort of) where your five options are four holograms of probably dead people and a HAL9000-style robot with no body and no real name (though we’re calling him Penta because his icon is a pentagon), and it was my fifth Adan Plays Through His Backlog game. The main gameplay loop is going to various buildings on a nearly dead planet to scavenge supplies. These supplies are used to fix a spaceship so you can leave said nearly dead planet. As you visit these buildings, you learn more about the four people who are now holograms. I like this game a lot and will eventually finish it. And before you say, “Oh, we’ve heard you say that before, Adan,” I direct your attention to the following two entries.
AER: Memories of Old (PS4) - I finished this game! I think all told, this game is about 5 hours long, but maybe less for others (I was somewhat confused in the initial hour or so on stream). It’s a very gentle game about flying, puzzle-solving, and exploration, and I enjoyed it a great deal. I also ended up platinuming it, almost by accident. There was one trophy I had to look up, which required revisiting a certain place multiple times to find a specific character, but luckily I had already been doing that and only needed to visit one last time. Otherwise, I would have had to play a lot of the game over again. Everything else popped thanks to exploration! I love games like that :)
I recommend this game to anyone who likes gentle, non-violent games. It’s available on most modern platforms, including PS4, Switch, and XB1, as well as PC, Macs, and Linux machines.
The Almost Gone (Switch) - I finished this game too! This game’s even shorter, at about 3 hours. I loved all the puzzles in this game (even the stupidly simple ones that took me far too long to complete, and the stupidly hard ones that took me even longer), but the story is the real draw, I think. It’s a story of a very dysfunctional family with generational mental health issues that were never properly addressed for a variety of reasons, except maybe by the unnamed protagonist, but only after their death, possibly at their own hand. It’s a very apropos game to play during Hungry Ghost Festival (especially as there’s some kind of black goo chasing you around), though I streamed it before Hungry Ghost Month started. Still, more games about death!
Another World (PS4) - This is a PC platformer originally released in 1991 that just destroyed me. It was featured in episode 6 of Adan Plays Through His Backlog. The controls are not great: the same button is used for running and shooting, and you have to be not moving to shoot, and it’s difficult to jump properly while running. There’s a point-and-click sensibility to the game in that some of the puzzles are so ridiculously difficult, I can’t imagine how anybody beat this game without the internet to help. Also, the checkpointing is terrible. I ultimately gave up on the game because after the rush of figuring out a water-based puzzle (the worst kind of puzzles) and having to run and jump to get to the next part, some alien shot me and the game put me back to before the water puzzle! I noped out of that after an hour streaming and started playing the next game in the Adan Plays Through His Backlog series a week early. That said, I think I will come back to this at some point, but not on stream because it’s too embarrassing having to look up a guide while live on the internet :P
Arise: A simple story (PS4) - I played this game on two sequential episodes of Adan Plays Through His Backlog (6 and 7) because it was so good (and Another World was so annoying). This game is really great! It starts with the main character’s death (who we will call Sven from here on out, even if that’s not actually his real name). We then find Sven in Limbo as he searches for his wife, who died a few years before him. This is a puzzle platformer with a time manipulation mechanic similar to the also amazing The Gardens Between (PS4), but with a lot more plaforming (obvi). Every level is based on one of Sven’s memories with his wife. For example, the first level is based on when they first met as children. The art in the levels is super great, but there are a bunch of memories you can find in the levels with even better art.
I’ve not finished this game yet, but I can already tell the story will make me cry in both sadness and happiness.
Monster Prom XXL (Switch) - Because we finished Detention a lot faster than we thought we would on the third stream, we decided to play a half-hour game of Monster Prom. This is a really fun and funny dating sim featuring very vulgar monsters, like a drug-addled ghost, a nerdy sentient computer, and a really, really mean business-minded gorgon! Our favorite is the fan-fic writing great old one, but getting her to come to monster prom with us is really hard! I discovered this game on Eurogamer’s Pride stream, along with other queer-friendly games like Dungeons & Lesbians (PC) and Stone (Switch), which also look super great and I need to play.
Marvel’s Avengers (PS4) - I started my playthrough of this after finishing Ghost of Tsushima and it was surprisingly fun! I was worried after playing through the Beta, but the campaign turned out pretty great. Kamala is super fun to play, as her love and astonishment of the Avengers is infectious. That said, the combat often gets repetitive, with AIM robots and armored goons endlessly spawning until a seemingly arbitrary objective is met (which I understand is basically every video game, but others tend to hide it better). The post-game stuff is especially same-y as you are literally playing the same levels over and over to get various points and credits and such. I stopped pretty quickly.
Still, Kamala is the best, and the single-player campaign is quite substantial! I look forward to more narrative-based single-player mini-campaigns when new heroes are introduced.
Control (PS4) - The best game of 2019 got its last story DLC, and it’s a very late sequel to Alan Wake (360). It was awesome! A lot of characters from Alan Wake returned for this, most of which I didn’t recognize because I never played Alan Wake :P But the DLC does a really good job of bringing everyone up to speed with the conceit that the events in the original Alan Wake was an Altered World Event that the Federal Bureau of Control investigated. In fact, they investigated the town of Bright Falls on three different occasions.
As usual, I grabbed every trophy and found every note, and was incredibly happy to discover that the Blessed Organization hinted at in the notes from the previous DLC The Foundation is a real thing! It is a paracriminal organization that is purposefully creating altered items and unleashing them on the general population. I really hope they show up in the sequel that the end of this very fun DLC teased (I am of course already salivating for it).
Close to the Sun (Switch) - Felicia and I played this on stream, thinking it might be our new spooky game to play after we finished Detention, but it turned out to not be very good. There are a lot of jump scares (and because we are chickens, we jumped at every single one of them), but it all feels far too much like Bioshock (PS3/PS4) without the shooting and mutant powers. The game starts us on Nikola Tesla’s huge cruise ship that basically operates as its own nation, where something has gone horribly wrong. The story, which is what initially drew us to the game, starts out interesting, but then gets dumb real fast thanks to some really dodgy writing. Also, Jack the Ripper is in this for some reason? Look, there are some legitimately interesting ideas in this game, but the writing isn’t great, and its two main mechanics (puzzle-solving and running) get old real quick.
Assassin’s Creed II (PS4) - The 8th episode of Adan Plays Through His Backlog featured 5 different games from the Assassin’s Creed series from five different eras of the series’ history. I played each one for about 30 minutes. The first game I played on stream was the first in the Ezio trilogy, which takes place in Renaissance Italy. The controls for this were the most annoying, which makes sense as this game was originally released in 2009. I have to hold down like three different buttons to make Ezio free run across the various Italian cities, and he often goes the wrong way because games made longer than like 3 years ago all play like butt :P
Nevertheless, I continued playing this game on my own time because when I first bought all the Assassin’s Creed games on sale after loving the heck out of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (PS4), I had the beautiful idea to play them all in order. So after I finished this, I started on Brotherhood (PS4). Revelations (PS4) will come after that to complete the Ezio trilogy, then so on and so forth.
While I enjoyed the game very much (even with its janky controls that constantly have me yelling at Ezio for not doing a super simple jump or wall climb because I didn’t press the correct button at the correct time), and I platinumed it (more on that in a bit), there is a horrible bug near the end of the game that crashes the game and corrupts the save file. Luckily, I had another save file from just one mission in the past, so it wasn’t a huge deal, but it crashed every time I got to that same part. The fix was to uninstall the game and then reinstall it, which was easy, but time-consuming. It did fix the bug, and I didn’t have to abandon the game (or worse, start all over from the beginning, which I’m pretty sure I would never have done).
The platinum was pretty easy except for having to look for 100 feathers with no map or way to track them in-game. I had to use an online guide to make sure I grabbed every feather, and it took forever.
Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (PS4) - The second Assassin’s Creed game I played was the pirate one, featuring Edward Kenway. The controls are a bit better here (I need to press one less button to free run), but I still had a lot of issues controlling Edward (so I yelled at him a lot). I played until Edward got his Assassin’s robes after a shipwreck, and sailed to Kingston. This game introduced the very popular sailing mechanic that has been a fixture in almost every game since.
Also, I got to play a little in the present sections, which are in first-person, and feel super weird.
Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate (PS4) - The third Assassin’s Creed game I played was Syndicate, the game set in London during the Industrial Revolution, and my favorite of the five I played. It stars the Frye twins, Evie and Jacob, and while the controls are easier still, I still can’t seem to control the direction anyone goes. Maybe I’m the problem? Nah, that can’t be right.
I played a bit with both twins, but I stopped just as they got to London, so I didn’t get to explore the city at all. I’m really looking forward to that, but since I’m playing these games in order of release, it will be quite a while before I get back to this one.
Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China (PS4) - This is a very different Assassin’s Creed in that it is a 2D platformer. This is one of three smaller games in the Chronicles sub-series finally featuring non-white protagonists (with the exception of Connor in Assassin’s Creed III). I liked the half hour I played a lot, though I know a lot of people don’t like this sub-series so much for some reason. It’s obviously super different from the usual AC games, but that’s okay because it turns out you can have all sorts of different kinds of games for different kinds of people, even in an established series. Speaking of which...
Assassin’s Creed Origins (PS4) - Look, an entirely different kind of Assassin’s Creed! This takes place in Egypt and was the first AC to basically be an RPG with loot. Again, I only played a half hour of this, but it felt the most like Odyssey (which makes sense because it came immediately after Origins). I will say, Bayek looks amazing with his dreads and his beard. I look forward to playing this (which again will take a long time because I have like 30 other AC games to play through :P ).
Death Stranding (PS4) - Hey, what a weird ass fucking game! Hideo Kojima’s ridiculous game after his very public falling out with Konami was this, a game that is 100% fetch quests and escort missions, the two most obnoxious type of video game missions. But somehow, the Kojima weirdness keeps it from getting boring. Also, a video game about a mailman being the most important person during a horrible pandemic, trying to put a fractured US back together? That shit is too real right now. Sure the horrible pandemic in the video game has something to do with the veil between life and death being torn asunder, but frankly, doesn’t every pandemic do that? I’ve only played this for about 6 hours on stream so far, but I am surprisingly enjoying it. I don’t usually like fetch quests or escort missions, but I’m willing to put up with them for Kojima’s insanity.
The Bard’s Tale: Remastered and Resnarkled (PS4) - The 9th episode of Adan Plays Through His Backlog featured The Bard’s Tale, a game I was afraid wasn’t going to be very good, but it was pretty fun! The humor is quite funny (though occasionally not PC), and the Bard is voiced by Cary Elwes, which is awesome. It’s a top-down hack ‘n’ slash adventure game with the really cool ability to summon all sorts of creatures and adventurers to help fight various fantasy creatures (and sometimes old men dressed as fantasy creatures). I’ll get back to this eventually because it is pretty fun and funny.
Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (PS4) - I’ve only played this for like two seconds, but it starts immediately where AC2 left off, with all the same stuff I had at the end of that game. That’s a fun change of pace as sequels usually take away all the fun toys from the first game. I’ve only played this for about 30 minutes, so I don’t have much to say about it, but the controls are still difficult and wonky. I am looking forward to continuing this :)
And 22 games later, we’re done! That might be the most video games I’ve ever played in one month! Streaming is letting me play and get through a lot more games than before, which is great. It’s nice to have a block of time to play games almost every day. Next month, I’ll play more Death Stranding, more Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (and maybe even start Assassin’s Creed: Revelations), and also some old school 3D Mario games :D
Until next month, play more video games (like 22 of them)!
No comments:
Post a Comment