Last Sunday, my friend came over for a few hours. He wanted to check out my 3DS, and i gave him
Kid IcarusHe said "wow!" during intro video of the game, so i guess Iwata was right in the end.
He got the hang of controls easier than me, being right handed and everything. He played most of the Viridi level (probably the most visually stunning level in the game) and died in the middle of TPS segment.
I also keep thinking about "switch the dialogue off" option that you get after beating the game. It's probably easier to concentrate fully on the game to pull of higher difficulties and/or beat some hard treasure hunt challenges with no dialogue, but i feel like i miss the banter a lot.
He also played a bit of Gunman Clive, Ducktales and because it got him all nostalgic i mentioned i have that Contra game that is very similar to NES game and we can play it together. So we played some
Contra 4. So good.
Find Mii IIIt's annoying how limited this game is. It's free and i don't mind it much, but it's quite fascinating how limited they made party management in these games. Sword - magic - next and that's it. You can't even view your party fully before battle starts. When battle starts you might want to use poison magic or buff magic first, but if respective cats are in the tail of the line i have keep pressing next rotating the line to get to them.
II is still much better than I because they added team ups and potions. Team-ups are great addition, i've got fifth level green Iwata and it's very handy when i get green cat to pair him with it. Didn't do much with potions, because when i start a battle i am already all out of coins i get from daily walks.
Overall, both games feels like F2P bullshit mobile games, only they extorts streetpasses and footsteps from you instead of actual money. You can only play them a few minutes a day and they're about as shallow these IAP infested mobile games.
Ducktales: RemasteredLove it. When i watched Quick Look i thought i will hate super long cutscenes, but i ended up loving them. They added to nostalgia feeling massively and added even more character to already colourful game. Cutscenes even managed to get emotional when Scrooge
decides to give up all treasures to save his nephews closer to the end.
Have absolutely no beefs with design of the game, people may call it outdated, but i play NES games all the time and this game felt more natural to me than many modern games i played in the last two years.
Spending your money in gallery feels like monkey work. Why do i have to press a bunch of buttons to get all these hundreds of individual art pieces one by one? It's still a cool thing to have, i just wish it was all there in one piece without the hassle of buying everything individually.
The biggest problem for me is spotty hit detection (?). I'm not sure if it's by design or it's a bug, but it seems you can't kill enemies by pogo jumping when they're in certain animations. Like when skeleton starts to stand up, and you jump on him during that animation, YOU will take damage instead of him. It just feels weird.
Game is pretty hard, i remember how in the first two days i set it to hard and couldn't beat a single level, on third day i gave up and set it to normal.
Pikmin: New Play ControlWhen i got Pikmin 3 i played about an hour of it and then stopped because i wanted to play previous games first.
I beat first game and started second one. It took me one weekend and two workdays. Watching
speed run helped me a lot, guy was getting four parts in one day, i felt good about myself when i was getting two parts in one day! Before watching this i didn't even used horn/march ability, but it's actually crucial. Pressing A so much to do mass attack is annoying.
Camera rotation in P3 felt too jerky, almost gave me motion sickness. First thing i noticed in first game that camera controls much more smoothly.
In diary it's quite funny how serious and no bullshit Olimar is despite his cutesy appearance.
Took me awhile to get the trick for the final level, i think i wandered around it for a good hour or so...
Final challenge has that humming background noise which with lively tune makes for a unsettling eery feeling, similar to how Majora's Mask town music feels in final hours.
It took me three game days to beat final level. At first i tried to set up bridges and fight final boss, but it became apparent that defeating the boss might take entire day. So i set up bridges in one day, went to sundown and had entire next day to defeat final boss.
That boss is hard. Took me like four or so replays. I guess you're supposed to feed him bombs (or yellow pikmin carrying bombs, heh) and when he swallows it and it detonates inside, shocking him for a few seconds, and then use LOTS of regular, no-bomb pikmin to do usual tackle attack while he's dazed.
Anyway i beat him, he gives up the final piece of the ship (piggy bank! really?) and i'm out of time. Had to use third day just to pick up the last piece.
Interesting that ending video showed me entire bestiary and there were monsters i never saw, i looked them up and apparently they're only available in certain locations for limited period of time, don't think it's worth replaying some levels just to see them especially when i know they're still in sequels.
Monsters in Pikmin get scary at times, but these two bonus monsters were especially unsettling: smoke monster that comes crawling to your base and leaves poisonous trail behind it and that rock thing with eyes.
Overall, Pikmin 1 feels kinda barebones in presentation, options and content, but it's still a great, charming game. It feels like that time constraint mechanic was put in to force player to replay levels again and again and inflate playtime that way. And it worked, i think i replayed every day at least two times, first time just for reconnaissance and to plan my actions in second playthrough.
Pikmin 2: New Play ControlJust started this. Played until day 4.
Right from the start, from the intro logo game looks tremendously better visually. Intro has different seasonal variants and even the game's logo is alive. Lots of options in main menu compares to measly three in first game -- i didn't even checked them out yet, but i guess it should tell you this game is more fully featured than first.
Jump in production quality between 1 and 2 was huge. Starting cutscene looks much more elaborate, the entire game looks much better.
I like Piklopedia, it pretty neat that you can interact with illustrations in it by throwing carrots and controlling camera.
They've also touched on a game mechanics a bit, like plucking pikmins from the ground takes less time because you have two characters and throwing pikmin feels a bit faster.