I've been playing Zelda of course, and have been very impressed with it. It's kind of the Zelda game you imagined you played, but it's real. I'm not very far in it, been doing little quests, but I have opened my first "memory" and am moving on from there. Mostly I'm exploring the world slowly and building myself up. It's actually a very neat game.
...Yeh so I went a lil' MIA without meaning to..But I have been semi-active on twitter and my Notebook..I partly blame the Summer humidity..That and getting distracted by my brother sending me this:
I've been playing FFXIV lately, and really enjoying it again. To catch y'all up, I started a new account on PS4 since PS3 ver. isn't supported anymore and I didn't transfer info over in time. It's been a while since I played it, so I needed to play from beginning to see changes anyway. I'm around lvl 40 and nearing the dead end that is the vertical level grind to end game before Expansions, which I haven't purchased yet. I'm spending my free month, with 1 subsc. month to grind endgame for ARR. I leveled up to 30 very quickly, but 30-50 is a really slow grind. Just logging in to do random dungeons for fast XP before pushing story. I've seen it all before.
When the Switch was first shown I was pretty underwhelmed. I knew I'd get one eventually, but from the launch lineup I just wasn't impressed. I already had Mario Kart 8, and Zelda BOTW on the Wii U, so as great as they were, they weren't exactly system sellers to me. So what made me want one? E3 is what made me want one now. Nintendo blew me away at last Junes E3 so I knew I really wanted a Switch. Even through there wasn't a huge lineup of must have games out, I knew there would be here soon enough and I knew the system would be tougher and tougher to find as the Christmas season quickly approached. My dad had agree to let me put the system on his Best Buy card for me and and I'd pay him back each month, so the trick now was to find one. Well within days I found one sitting on the shelf at a local Best Buy. Sadly it wasn't to be since my dad was back home in MA for the next week and a half. He looked for one out there for me, but no luck. Fortunately when he got back, we were tipped off by a BB worker that they would be getting some for the following Sundays sale. So in anticipation, I decided to buy a few games, and accessories to ready myself for my new Switch I was determined to get. Come Sunday morning we waited outside BB for them to open so I could rush in on my bum foot to grab one. Thankfully they not only had 6 of them, but they had them with the colored JoyCon's as well.
I'm sure you've all been wondering what this rapscallion has been up to. Well...
So here I am, Sunday morning not out of bed and watching the last stage of the Tour de France. I was meaning to write this on Friday but I was tinkering with a project that I am still not finished with, and I had a CD Friday trip so I was busy with that. Saturday I was going to write but again I was still tinkering a bit before deciding the weekend is for sleep and being lazy, which leads us to right now. Here I am, watching folks on bicycles finish up one hell of a race. Let's catch up on the non gaming things Chris has been up to.
I started some Fire Emblem Echoes [FEE] the other night. I’m really loving it so far. The game dives right into battles. Fire Emblem Fates Birthright lost me with all the other stuff you could do at the castle. I like in FEE that you can have the dialog run automatically instead of having to hit “A” after every sentence. I was heavily multitasking the other night listening to the dialog and music while I wrote my blog. I really enjoyed that. I want to find time all week to play some more. We’ll see if I can do it around work and school.
Hey! Pikmin demo - Got this through spot pass this week and played it. I really like it. It’s in 2D but uses the pikmin similarly. You use the stylus a lot to send pikmin around the screen. It looks great too. I want to buy it right now, but I’ll have to wait for my rental to come.
I just downloaded it. Apparently this level was not included in the original game because it was deemed too hard. The boy has been playing the game on and off lately let's see if he can beat it because I probably won't be able to.
I started Uncharted last night and almost beat it. Almost all the way through without any breaks. That is how fixated I was on the game last night. Damnit, I want to beat it but have to go to my school to do a TV show lol.
Nintendo may be one of my favorite video game companies, but they’ve certainly had their share of big mistakes. Most notable ones are things like the Virtual Boy, or refusing to use CDs instead of cartridges in the N64 days. I feel they’ve even made a big mistake pretty recently, and while it’s not as grand of scope as the goof-ups mentioned before, I still think it’s a big mistake. And that’s the way they handled the release of the NES Classic Edition last year. I mean, what a mess! Nobody has been able to get one of those things! It frustrated me to no end! And they’re poised to do it again with the SNES Classic Edition (I really hope I can get that one, though). I was so mad about the whole situation, though, that I went out and bought a competing multi-game console called Retro-Bit Generations.
Alright so I have some breakfast in me, and I think I am ready to type out the random thoughts I had about the games I played over the past week or so. I mean I had an idea yesterday but I didn't get around to putting them on digital paper, and currently I just finished breakfast after a morning trip to the Home Depot. I'm starting to get an idea of where everything is in the Home Depot. Anyways let's start out with what I have been playing.
I guess it is called Uncharted. I always love to call it Drake and Josh because of the excellent Nickelodeon show well Drake and Josh.
Lovecraft is a pretty big name in internet culture, and "Lovecraftian" is a popular descriptor to throw around. Cosmic horror! But while I have read some Lovecraft—most notably the fantastic "At the Mountains of Madness"—most of his work has remained a mystery to me. But this year I finally broke out the massive Lovecraft book I've had for a while and am slowly working my way through it. 110 pages and 19 stories so far. Since it lists the stories chronologically, I'm still in his earlier works. He obviously improves as he goes because if what I have read so far was the totality of his output, Lovecraft would merely be an interesting footnote in horror history. There have been some good stories, specifically those that deal with deteriorating sanity of the narrator—I especially liked "Polaris" where a man stares up at the North Star both awake and in his dream and anguishes over which life is the real one—but mostly the stories have been overly vague in their supernatural elements and predictable in their endings. Sometimes an unexplained mystery can be compelling, as in "The Temple" or the fantastic final line of "The Statement of Randolph Carter," but stories like "The Terrible Old Man" I finished and was like...so? Too many of these early stories are like that, containing the germ of something interesting but failing to flesh it. But on the whole I have enjoyed my time with Lovecraft and, looking to the stories ahead, I'm excited to finally get to the famous stories I have yet to read.
Two games, both of which take place in sci-fy worlds originally created by developers working for Microsoft whose company name started with B. Both offer squad based shooting with jetpacks. Both come from franchises with driving sections that make you feel drunk while steering. Both given praise by critics even though they kind of suck. Today I'm going to answer the unsolvable question: Is Mass Effect Andromeda worse than Halo 5? Or is the king of disappointing 8th gen installments in once great franchises still on top of that turd hill? Let's go over
Somehow I've logged ten hours into Final Fantasy 12 already weird. I forgot how much I liked this game. I've also gained greater appreciation of the battle system, which I originally disliked cause it wasn't turn based like FF10. But I like it now. The new, Japanese License/Levelling system is better too. I like working with classes. I'm sure I didn't maximize the potential of my characters with the right classes, but dammit, that's what grinding is for.
Mark and I played some more co-op in Kane & Lynch 2 trying to get a few more achievements. I was trying to get the one where you have to get the kill on an enemy your co-op partner knocked down but not out. I shadowed Mark and shot at anything he did that still moved. I only got a couple more and was still far from the 30 needed for the achievement. So, I just helped Mark get a few other achievements and just had fun with it. Then I switched to Valkyria Revolution, since it installed so quickly.
So let's recap the current situation: Gym reopens and I'm excited. It's a 1000 degrees outside, so I go work out in an air conditioned room, then I go to the pool where it's a 1000 degrees outside and swim a couple of laps. I sit for a bit to dry off, then jump in the truck for the two minute drive to my house, than into an air conditioned house to take a shower. A couple of days of this and I now have a cold. I'm currently typing this with a stuffy nose, slight headache, and sneezing up a storm. We'll see if I decide to venture out for CD Friday. I also find it funny that I have a cold when it is 1000 degrees outside. Anyways that some personal randomness let's get started with this week's Quick Hits.
It’s that time again. Time for more links to game reviews I’ve written lately over at GamerDad.com! Please click on as many links as you can and maybe even post a comment or like or two. I’d really appreciate it. OK, let’s begin!