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#4756 FieryBirdyThing

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Posted 26 February 2021 - 06:47 AM

I managed to complete Donkey Kong Country 3 to 103% yesterday, which concludes a little thing I had going since last year, where I ended up obsessively playing the classic DKC and DKLand games to the point of completion. DKC3 is very much an underrated game in the series. I understand that it may not be considered as good as its predecessors, but it's still a fun game - despite the odd level that has a really terrible level gimmick, such as Lightning Lookout, Poisonous Pipeline, or Koindozer Klamber - with a surprisingly vast world map, fun characters, and some very nice tunes.

 

Spoiler

 

I'm also still playing Miitopia as a 'chill' game. I recently added two new Miis to my adventures: Lion-O (warrior) and Dexter (scientist), so now my Miis have even more friends to go on quests with.


Edited by FieryBirdyThing, 26 February 2021 - 06:53 AM.

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#4757 Rambly

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Posted 13 March 2021 - 03:51 AM

I managed to complete Donkey Kong Country 3 to 103% yesterday, which concludes a little thing I had going since last year, where I ended up obsessively playing the classic DKC and DKLand games to the point of completion. DKC3 is very much an underrated game in the series. I understand that it may not be considered as good as its predecessors, but it's still a fun game - despite the odd level that has a really terrible level gimmick, such as Lightning Lookout, Poisonous Pipeline, or Koindozer Klamber - with a surprisingly vast world map, fun characters, and some very nice tunes.

 

oh god, Poisonous Pipeline is probably one of the laziest levels in all of game design history, hahaha.  like, they legitimately had zero ideas for that level, it's just another pipe level, so they just arbitrarily reversed the controls.

 

yeah, it's not as good as its predecessors, i don't think.  there are some really great levels here and there, tho, and i'd say maybe like 90% of the game is still fantastic.  up until the last world i think it's seriously sitting in a position to rival DKC2, but then all those gimmicky levels are just ugggh.  also, i really like the music -- i legit think evelyn novakovic can hold her own pretty reasonably well against david wise, and might even be better at the more downtempo, ambient stuff.

 

what DKC3 can definitely lay claim to is being the prettiest DKC game.  holy cow, that game is gorgeous.  especially the forest levels and the palettes.  uggh, slay me.

 

i'm (re-)playing Mega Man X2.  there's occasionally some annoying stuff in that game, but overall the level design is still really solid and the robot powerups are fun.  airdashing rules and i'm still always surprised at how cleverly they manage to hide stuff.



#4758 Nicholas Steel

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Posted 16 March 2021 - 09:43 PM

Did you know that for the Donkey Kong Country games on the SNES they decided to have the music engine send data to the SPU without giving the SPU any kinda meta data? They just tell it to start reading data from a location on the ROM at the start of each level instead of doing a proper initialization of the SPU when changing music track. This saves a handful of kilobytes of RAM in the SPU hardware so they can store more data in to the SPU's 64KB of RAM, enabling them to have better quality audio samples/more sample variation per song than normally possible.

 

Normally you'd have a bunch of instructions about the music assets to send to the SPU, Rareware instead had a list of starting addresses (one for each level) and would simply start feeding data from those points to the SPU without telling the SPU anything about the data. This was kinda dangerous since there's no safety mechanisms to prevent a crash if any invalid data ends up getting sent to the SPU (whole game would crash).

 

Also I prefer DKC 1 & 2's visual aesthetic.


Edited by Nicholas Steel, 16 March 2021 - 09:45 PM.


#4759 FieryBirdyThing

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Posted 21 March 2021 - 08:46 AM

Been on a Super Mario 64 kick lately. After finally completing the game on 'Mar10 day', I'm now playing the DS version (using the 3DS, it plays much better). I had started it a few years back, but was surprised to realise how far I'd gotten. Just unlocked Wario today, so the hunt for the stars can continue in earnest. ;)

 

Also started Ori and the Will of the Wisps a few weeks ago. I'm currently at the Wellspring area. It's such a beautiful game.


Edited by FieryBirdyThing, 22 March 2021 - 02:24 PM.


#4760 klop422

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Posted 22 March 2021 - 10:55 AM

Got Super Mario Maker 2, cos it was on sale and I had like £20 on my eshop account (including gold points). Beat Story mode (not every level yet) but haven't really done much else (been busy). Still, it's been fun and I'm looking forward to getting enough time to copy in some of my levels from back in the day, playing SMBX



#4761 Eddy

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Posted 26 March 2021 - 01:16 PM

Been on a grind with Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 which dropped on Steam the other day. I'm addicted already and it's just as fantastic as the first game, perhaps even better in some areas. But my god, enabling a specific difficulty setting makes this game absolutely unforgiving. Amazing for the challenge, but I'm progressing through the story at a snail's pace at this rate lmao. Can't wait to generate a lot of memes with this game :P



#4762 FieryBirdyThing

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Posted 21 April 2021 - 05:09 AM

Been playing quite the mixture these last few weeks. Still playng Ori. It's still a beautiful game.

 

I've also been playing Yoshi's Island a fair bit, recently. That is, both the SNES and GBA versions.

 

Other games I've been dipping in and out of include Yoshi's Story, Fast Racing Neo, Star Fox Zero, Star Fox 64 3D, and the Twilight Princess version of Picross. Just been depending on my mood, really. :P



#4763 klop422

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Posted 22 April 2021 - 12:43 PM

I've also been spreading myself thinner than usual. I'd been playing a lot of Octopath Traveler - finished everything except the bonus ending (and it's kind of looking like I might end up just not doing it). I've been watching ProJared stream Final Fantasy IX and playing along there (I think my in-depth thoughts are in this thread, a couple pages back. They're mostly unchanged).

 

I also got lucky and found a guy selling a 2DS for £35, with Pokémon OmegaRuby and Pokémon Blue preloaded. Funnily enough, i already had a cartridge of OR for when I found my sister's 3DS again (or got my own), but the price was too good to pass up (I'm still working out what I want to do with this extra cartridge). For the sake of playing my own game of OR but not losing any of the Pokémon (on any of the files), I went and subscribed to Pokémon Bank, but the way the 3DS eshop works now means you can only put money in on the website, in £10 increments (cos the 3DS is so old apparently). Anyway, I took some of the leftover money and bought myself the Pokémon TCG game on virtual console, and that's what I've actually been spending most of my time playing.

(tl;dr: a bit of Omega Ruby, and mostly Pokémon TCG for the Game Boy Colour)

 

Also played through half a world of New Super Mario Bros. just for fun. Been a few years but I remembered where all the star coins were.



#4764 TheManHimself

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Posted 14 May 2021 - 05:16 PM

I went back to my hometown to help a friend move, and the gas shortage has me stranded for the last week, so I've gotten back into the nightly multiplayer rotation from 5 years ago --- Golf Club, MLB The Show '15 (I guess I'll update someday), and Mario Kart 64.

Beginning to get the itch to stop playing games and spend that time on Zquest though. Hopefully I won't be stuck here much longer.



#4765 FieryBirdyThing

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Posted 20 June 2021 - 08:31 AM

For quite a while, now, I've been playing Legend Of Dark Witch on 3DS. It's quite a fun little Mega Man-style game (essentially MM with magical anime girls instead of robots). I understand there are sequels, so I might have to try those out sometime, too.

 

Otherwise, I've been using various Picross games to chill to, between sessions of Ori And The Will Of The Wisps and Super Mario 3D World.



#4766 kurt91

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Posted 17 July 2021 - 09:50 PM

Let's see...

 

I've been playing Persona 5 Strikers. It's pretty fun, not nearly as much of a Musou game as you'd think. The levels feel more like dungeon crawling, and it's more like a typical action-RPG except that encounters when you attack enemies can be anything from two or three rather strong opponents or a massive legion of enemies to deal with. And the legion of enemies aren't your typical brain-dead attack-fodder, either. Play it on Hard mode, and they'll crush you with special attacks. I honestly died in the tutorial after getting stunned with a lightning attack and stun-locked when three generic (as in, so generic they aren't even SMT demons, but Shadows still in their cop/guard guises) decided to gang up on me in the corner while I couldn't move and beat me to death with police batons in what looked like a parody of police brutality. Battle start to my death took less than five seconds, and I remind you, this was the tutorial.

 

I've played the PS2 version of Persona 4, but I've finally gotten around to buying a copy of Persona 4 Golden on Steam. Added something called the "Persona 4 Community Enhancement Pack", which is a combination of extensive bug-fixes, as well as quality-of-life improvements and some features back-ported from Persona 5. For example, in Persona 5 you could get a massage after going into a Palace so that you could still do a real-world night-time activity in the same day. By completing Dojima's Social Link and getting the normally-cosmetic-only "Coffee Mug" item, you're able to get the same effect by using it to drink a cup of coffee.

 

I finally bought a Switch a little while ago. Ended up getting it just a couple days before they announced the OLED model. I knew with my luck that something like that was going to happen, and I put off buying one for the longest damned time because of that, but since the only real improvements are a slightly bigger screen with no increase in resolution, speaker quality, and a better kick-stand that I don't really think I'll use anyways, I'm not overly upset. I bought Crash 4 and Breath of the Wild alongside it. I've gotten to play BotW twice since then, my little brother who normally doesn't play anything that isn't a first-person shooter apparently fell in love with the game. In only a couple days, he completed all four Divine Beasts and took down Ganon. Then he got the last of the memories and took down Ganon again after hearing it gets you a different ending. (pointless since he accidentally skipped the first ending and never went back for it, so there's no baseline to compare the different one to) Now he's hunting Lynels for high-end gear, even though he doesn't have anything left to use it on, and he doesn't want to try Hero Mode since he doesn't like the early-game feeling of everything is going to kill you. Meanwhile, I got to complete the tutorial on the plateau, and found a horse.

 

Crash 4 is just as crushingly difficult as I expected. I mean, it's not that bad if you're just playing each level start-to-finish, but the entire point of a Crash game is Gem collecting. I've just barely beat N.Gin, and still need to mop up a few missing Gems from the preceding levels before moving on.

 

Pretty busy, considering I'm usually the type of person to focus on one game at a time. Though, I'm spending the summer at my grandparents' house where there's no real internet and the entire house is a dead-zone for phones. (It's dial-up on a barely-functional router. I can see text-based sites like here, but no YouTube and no cell-phone apps.) I'm using Duolingo to practice Japanese for when I return to college in the fall, but I have to go to the far reaches of the property to get a functional connection, and Washington's been going through a massive heat-wave over the last few weeks. As in, people in Spokane have been dying due to the heat. So, going outside to find a connection is not a pleasant task.



#4767 FieryBirdyThing

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Posted 07 December 2021 - 11:59 AM

These last few months, I've been replaying each of the games in the Crash Bandicoot N-Sane Trilogy, up to and including getting all the gems (bar the 'all gold relics' gem in Crash 3 - I'm actually a good chunk of the way through to getting that one, but I'm not sure if I want to put myself through some of the more punishing levels for it). This also included finally getting the 'all crates' gems for the two extra levels (Stormy Ascent and Future Tense). Surprisingly, I've also found that it's possible to get the good ending on this version of Crash 3 without the aforementioned 'all gold relics' gem, so yay for me, there.

 

I've also recently downloaded the three GB/GBC Game & Watch Gallery games on the 3DS. I'd already played the first one as a kid back in the day, but the other two were pretty much new to me. Since those years, I've developed a new appreciation of the original G&W games, and it's been fun playing them in both the Modern and Classic modes (although some games are more interesting/fun than others, obviously). Overall, a fun little set of games.



#4768 klop422

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Posted 28 December 2021 - 09:55 AM

Lots of stuff lol
 
So I got into anime in May or so, led to watching some really great shows. Ended up on Steins;Gate in, like September or October. Seriously one of my favourite stories ever. That led to me buying the Visual Novel on Steam (as well as the Linear Bounded Phenogram spinoff and Steins;Gate 0). Went through all three of those (the Visual Novel is even better) and the anime of S;G 0 (where I actually prefer the anime adaptation, but that's apparently a controversial opinion). Won't go into too much detail here, since all I can really talk about with Visual Novels is the plot, i.e. spoilers.
Suffice to say, Steins;Gate some of the best thought-out plotting and character-writing I've ever seen. It's a bit of a slow burn, but do yourself a favour and either read it through or watch the anime (yeah yeah, this is the wrong thread for that). (Also, some of the best bad endings I've seen, too - all of them serve a narrative function that complements the main story. It's one of the best arguments for the validity of Visual Novels as a narrative medium). The visual novel for 0 is less good (imo), but still worth a read - and the anime is definitely worth a watch.
 
And then I found out that it's actually part of a larger meta-series, the Science Adventure series. So I've been going through them sequentially.

Went to Chaos;Head first (after S;G 0). Frankly, not a big fan. It's gory; it has, like, two good characters (and the main character, while well-written, is not one of them); it spends way too long on both 'ooh look at me, I'm an evil scheming villain'-type scenes and scenes involving a detective, who, while personable, is far from engaging; the plot moves at a snail's pace until Chapter 6 (of 10), and, while it does finally pick up for the ending bits, a bunch of extra backstory is stuffed in for the side characters (one of whom we pretty much just met); and the way the choices and endings are set up is complete nonsense. I'll put that in a spoiler, but I won't give many details.

Spoiler

That said, there is an updated rerelease from like the year after, but that one hasn't been translated (I had to buy this one off a Japanese site and use a translation patch to play through it). And, credit where credit is due, the game is immensely good at creating a creepy atmosphere.

 

Anyway, Robotics;Notes was next, and that one is amazing. The way the endings work is dumb here too: Depending on some choices you make (which aren't even really plot-relevant and are actually hidden away, basically), you skip to chapter 6, 7, or 8 at the end of chapter 5, but the story still works sequentially, so if you skipped to chapter 8 (like I did at first), then you're just lost as to why certain things are the case (characters who were arguing are now friendly, etc), and you have to read all three of those to arrive at chapter 9 and then get to the end. It's fake interactivity, basically.

But the story is incredible, and there is a really well-done choice at the end of chapter 9 (between a bad ending and continuing the story), so I can forgive it :P. Also best ship in the series.

 

Currently reading/playing Chaos;Child (a thematic sequel to Chaos;Head - mostly different characters, but it follows on from the events, more or less), and enjoying it quite well. Vast improvement over C;H, at any rate - except in terms of atmosphere lol. At least so far.

 

So, uh, yeah, visual novels are a thing I'm into now. Would recommend all the ones I listed (even Chaos;Head, if only for context in the later ones - might be worth waiting for the rerelease to be translated, though). I'll have to see where I go from R;N DaSH (R;N's sequel). That's still like a month away, though, probably :P



#4769 Bagu

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Posted 30 December 2021 - 06:28 AM

I'm currently replaying Secret of Mana, in a 2 Player (1 CPU) run, together with my Girlfriend's son.
He already finished it, in a 1-Player run.
...emulated by zsnes (I love it!!!)


Edited by Bagu, 30 December 2021 - 06:29 AM.


#4770 Titanium Justice

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Posted 30 December 2021 - 03:00 PM

A couple weeks ago I managed to finally snag a copy of Wind Waker for Gamecube, so I've been playing through that for the very first time and its been great, though part of me does suspect that the HD version will be ported to the Switch sometime soon after I beat it. :augh:

 

As for Christmas, I got Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition, Super Mario Odyssey, Death Stranding, Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled, and Tekken 7. I think it may very well be the most physical games I've ever gotten in a single Christmas. Hopefully it should be enough games to last me for a good portion of 2022.     




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