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Messages - NWR_insanolord

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1
General Gaming / Re: 2023 NWR Forum Awards - Best Indie Game
« on: December 05, 2023, 07:36:16 PM »
The only thing that would keep me from picking Dave the Diver here is questions over the definition of indie. It's one of my favorite games this year period, and almost certainly in my overall top 5 alongside the big hits from Nintendo.

2
TalkBack / My Time At Sandrock (Switch) Review
« on: November 02, 2023, 07:03:35 PM »

Life in the desert isn't bad.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/65372/my-time-at-sandrock-switch-review

It’s become something of a meme when Nintendo Directs come around to count how many of the games shown involve farming. Suffice to say, the Switch has no shortage of such titles, from Story of Seasons to Stardew Valley to Harvestella. While it can sometimes seem like too much, the genre is clearly popular, and My Time at Sandrock, the follow-up to another Switch game, My Time at Portia, really stands out from the crowd.

While My Time At Sandrock involves farming, it mixes in a number of other concepts. At the outset you come to a desert town to be their new “builder,” a person in charge of crafting various items and machines for the townspeople. You gather resources that can be processed into different components, which then can be assembled into more complex machines. Budgeting time and stamina, mining, chopping wood, and fighting animals is key to maintaining the supplies you need to keep your operation running.

Resource management is the main focus of My Time At Sandrock. Beyond the raw materials, the various machines you use to process and craft items take time to operate, and it can be tough to juggle those and keep projects on track. Each machine also requires fuel and a water supply, and as suggested by the desert setting, water can be hard to come by. It can be kind of stressful in a fun way to try to keep all those plates spinning. I’d spend most of the day mining in the abandoned ruins for the ore I need to build my next project, then rush back to my workshop to get that processed before heading into town to socialize. In truth, the most important resource to manage in this game is your time.

There’s also a combat element, with a surprising amount of depth and different weapon styles, including melee and ranged combat. I tended to prefer using the guns, which means keeping up with crafting a steady supply of bullets, but mixed in the sword and shield for close-range fights. There are several dungeon-style areas to traverse, as well as beasts in the overworld that can be killed for materials.

The main story involves a series of missions where you fix up the town, a desert outpost that appears to be on its last legs when you arrive, with a lot of things in disrepair and people wanting to leave..The big projects you build will advance that story, but a lot of what you do day to day is commissions: building smaller items for the other people in the town. These allow you to make some cash and build up your personal relationships, and it’s fun to interact with the various personalities in Sandrock. The dialog for the villagers is voiced, which helps add to the atmosphere and makes the town feel more alive. In addition to building friendships, like many games of this type, there are a number of eligible bachelors and bachelorettes you can romance.

 

The main issues with My Time At Sandrock, at least on Switch, are mostly technical. The frame rate dips, and there’s a fair amount of graphical pop in. That’s not a huge issue in this kind of game, but what’s more annoying is the load times. There’s a pretty long load time when entering the game, which I found particularly frustrating as this is the kind of game I like to be able to pop in and play for a little bit in handheld mode and that means I have to sit there waiting for it to start each time. While it’s not as bad once you get in, the short delays when in the menus can be irritating in a game where you spend a lot of time navigating menus.

Despite the technical issues, My Time At Sandrock is a very engrossing game with a satisfying gameplay loop. The town and characters are very charming, and it’s very easy to end up repeatedly saying “I’ll just play one more day.”


3
NWR Forums Discord / Re: I REMAIN YOUR GOD IN ABSTENTIA
« on: October 06, 2023, 08:08:41 PM »
Emphasis on absentia, considering this is Crimm's first post outside of TalkBack and Podcast Discussion in over a year and a half.

4
I've been thinking about this and still need time to collect my thoughts and put together a list, but I'll jump in and agree with the general idea of what Khush heard about Battlestar Galactica. That show was incredible for a while, but seemed to lose focus at a certain point, and the last season or season and a half weren't up to the same standard as the earlier parts. I still liked the show and watched all the way through, but not sticking the landing is probably what's going to prevent that show from making my list.

Did it also end on a cliffhanger or unresolved? When I was typing that, my mind suddenly recalled a sketch on Portlandia in which two people had binged the show but then felt it needed an ending so they tracked down Edward James Olmos and then had him star in their own made up ending for the show. That's what sort cemented the image in my mind that it could be a unresolved journey.

Granted, it's been a little while since I've watched it, but as I recall it had a pretty definite ending. It was somehow simultaneously too sudden and dragged out too long, and kind of weird how they did it, but it was a clear ending.

5
Nintendo Gaming / Re: Not a hater but... (future prediction)
« on: October 05, 2023, 11:50:23 PM »
I think Adrock's got the right idea here. This is probably a DS to 3DS situation. A largely iterative hardware improvement (outside the 3D screen, which was admittedly pushed pretty hard), that was successful in its own right, but not to the crazy degree of its predecessor.

6
I've been thinking about this and still need time to collect my thoughts and put together a list, but I'll jump in and agree with the general idea of what Khush heard about Battlestar Galactica. That show was incredible for a while, but seemed to lose focus at a certain point, and the last season or season and a half weren't up to the same standard as the earlier parts. I still liked the show and watched all the way through, but not sticking the landing is probably what's going to prevent that show from making my list.

7
General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2023! (Forums Aren't Dead Yet?) Edition
« on: August 03, 2023, 12:23:39 AM »
I just finished up New Super Luigi U a couple weeks ago, I wasn't thinking, I could have just dragged my feet a little bit more and it would have counted for this. Anyway, my first plan right now is to finish the main campaign of Super Mario 3D World, after I believe doing Bowser's Fury for last year's Backlaugust. I'm already fairly deep into it, I into the Bowser world now.

8
TalkBack / Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes (Switch) Review
« on: July 26, 2023, 03:38:57 PM »

A good match for Switch.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/64380/might-n-magic-clash-of-heroes-switch-review

When Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes originally released for the Nintendo DS way back in 2009, the idea of combining an RPG with a match-3 puzzle game was still relatively novel. Now, fourteen years later, that game design is well-trodden territory, but this still stands out from the crowd, with some interesting wrinkles and a lot of depth that keeps things interesting over the full course of its campaign.

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes starts with a couple simple concepts. You move your units around a grid, matching three in a row vertically to attack or horizontally to create a defensive wall. However, a wide variety of character-specific abilities and different unit types keeps the gameplay feeling fresh. Attacks take multiple turns to charge up, with more powerful attacks generally taking longer amounts of time, and this adds layers of strategy for linking and combining attacks to be more powerful, but also gives your opponent time to try and counter them.

The meat of Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes is its single-player campaign, which tells a story in different parts from the perspective of multiple characters. The story itself isn’t really anything special, but the structure of switching between characters, each with their own abilities and completely different sets of available units, adds welcome variety in a genre where games are often prone to becoming very formulaic. Each character class has its own set of standard foot soldiers, as well as special units with more powerful abilities. There are a few areas where the game feels its age a bit, such as the lack of an autosave and no ability to quickly get out of a battle, but the campaign remains fresh and interesting throughout its 20-plus hour run.

In addition to the campaign, you can initiate a quick battle from the main menu featuring any combo of characters and units. There is also multiplayer, both local hotseat play and online battles. Online play can be done via private rooms or just random battles. Online play, in my experience, works very smoothly, getting in and out of battles fairly quickly.

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes has held up very well despite many similar games coming out in the intervening years. It offers a high level of depth in its battle system that keeps you coming back, and is especially well suited to the Switch’s handheld mode that makes it easy to say “just one more battle.”


9
It does kind of sound like a list given by someone after you ask them "How many retired baseball players can you name from memory?" Some greats, and then some random guys that just sprang to mind as they were struggling to keep going.

10
General Gaming / Re: 3rd Annual NWR Four on Four
« on: April 07, 2023, 04:38:38 PM »
I've been playing Galaxy 2 lately as well, so I suppose I'll jump in. Give me a bit to come up with what other games I want to do.

11
Nintendo Gaming / Re: What's Next For The N64 Expansion Pack?
« on: March 07, 2023, 11:27:25 PM »
They're not even running that low, there are games they've announced are coming to the service that aren't there yet, plus more in terms of first party releases that haven't come out yet.

12
TalkBack / Dust & Neon (Switch) Review
« on: February 28, 2023, 04:02:32 PM »

Blast robots and collect loot in this twin stick roguelike.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/63018/dust-n-neon-switch-review

This generation of gaming, particularly in the download arena, could be described as “The Roguelike Era.” What was once an obscure gameplay style has seen its elements make their way into a wide variety of titles, with varying degrees of success. Dust & Neon combines that formula with another well worn idea, the twin stick shooter, but brings enough creativity to the table to stand out and feel fresh.

Dust & Neon tasks you with going through a series of wild west-themed levels, shooting robots and collecting loot. The most important thing in a game like this, before you factor in any of the details, is that those core shooting mechanics feel good, and Dust & Neon nails those. Cover can be used, and there’s a handy combat roll that helps you avoid enemy fire, but it’s mostly just moving and shooting. The one unique thing about the combat in this game is that you have to manually reload your gun, and I mean press the button to reload each individual bullet. This is a bit jarring at first, but as I went through the game I came to really enjoy this. It adds a level of tension where you always have to keep an eye out for how your ammo is holding up, and find the right opportunities to reload. In hectic moments I was running wild and hammering on the Y button to be able to finish off the oncoming hordes of enemies.

Where the roguelike elements come in is that over time you build up experience that can be used to permanently upgrade your character even after you die and have to be cloned again, as well as items that can enhance your base stats to give you better starts. While it’s accurate to call them roguelike elements, this is very much on the lighter side of that type of thing. The penalty for dying isn’t that steep, especially once you unlock the ability to rebuy the weapons you had when you died, which happens very early in the game.

Apart from those upgrade components, the main thing you collect in Dust & Neon is guns. At any given time you can carry one pistol, one shotgun, and one rifle, with many different types of each scattered around the levels and in the shop. These vary in terms of power, accuracy, chance of critical hit, and clip size, with that last one being very important given the reloading mechanic. The only problem is that once you find a really good gun, you don’t have a ton of incentive to try different things.

The levels you play through are pretty straightforward, with a handful of different objectives that can keep things from feeling too similar. There are also boss fights in each major region that pit you against powerful enemies with unique patterns that reward you with major upgrades to your base. One of these is Tonics, power-ups you can buy that are only in effect for one or a few missions that can help give things a different feel at a point in the game where you might feel like you’ve seen everything. Even with all that, though, the game does sometimes feel repetitive, as most games of this type can.

Even with that repetitiveness, the core mechanics feel so good that I really enjoyed jumping in for a few missions every now and then on a regular basis. Dust & Neon manages to combine several common game tropes in a new and interesting way, with a surprisingly fun reloading mechanic that makes it stand out in a crowded field.


13
Nintendo Gaming / Re: Not a hater but... (future prediction)
« on: February 07, 2023, 07:26:15 AM »
The results of the last fiscal quarter are out, and the Switch has officially passed the Game Boy to become Nintendo’s second-highest selling system ever at 122.55 million units. It has a real shot to be #1, needing 31 million and change to pass the DS, which seems doable at this point. 

14
Nintendo Gaming / Re: Upcoming Switch games! What's on your wishlist
« on: January 10, 2023, 06:43:23 PM »
Not a lot standing out for me early this year. Zelda's obviously the big name, but I never really got that far into Breath of the Wild, so I'm not really in a hurry to buy the new one right away. I didn't like Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but based on Matt's preview coverage for NWR it's sounding like Engage might be more my speed. Beyond that and maybe Kirby, nothing on that list is really jumping out at me.

One thing not on the list that will probably end up being my most played game of the year is MLB The Show 23. Last year's was a really good port that I sunk a ton of time into, and I'm already itching for baseball season to start.

15
Nintendo Gaming / Re: Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet
« on: January 05, 2023, 03:41:12 AM »
I definitely didn't ban you, and Khush already said he didn't, and I don't think anyone else with the power to do so is actually paying attention to the forums, so maybe it's some kind of tech error.

16
TalkBack / The Punchuin (Switch) Review
« on: January 03, 2023, 01:27:00 PM »

A fast-paced puzzle game with surprising depth.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/62525/the-punchuin-switch-review

The match-3 puzzle genre is one of the most well-worn styles of game, to the point where it’s easy to overlook new entries that pop up on the various digital shops. It takes a lot to stand out in that crowded field, but The Punchuin and its action-focused twist on that genre is well worth your time.

The Punchuin starts with the standard premise of a vertical playfield with blocks continuously falling from the top. But this time, instead of moving the blocks themselves, you’re controlling a penguin with boxing gloves, the titular Punchuin, who jumps around the level pushing those blocks around. Each level has a specific number of color matches you have to achieve to clear it, as the blocks steadily fall and build up.

The mechanics are very simple. If you punch a block, it moves three spaces over, unless it hits something on the way. Punching a block that’s right up against something else bounces it one space toward you. Nailing the specific moves you need to get blocks lined up can be tricky, and the quick pace of play creates a hectic but exciting race against the rising tide of blocks.

The Punchuin keeps this formula fresh by mixing up the level design, with different types of terrain within a level, like hills and bottomless pits you have to navigate, which changes some of the strategies involved. There are also ice blocks that you have to break, which can contain coins to purchase upgrades, or power-ups that help you clear things within the levels.

In addition to the standard levels, there are puzzle levels where you don’t have the time limit but have to solve them in a specific way to clear all the blocks without getting stuck. These levels are fun, but can get very challenging. There are also other levels with things like a minigame or a boss fight that use the same mechanic as the main game, but these are less interesting and feel kind of out of place. Unfortunately, the structure of the game requires you to collect gems to progress to later worlds, and you won’t have enough of those gems without completing at least some of those levels.

The Punchuin is at its best, though, in its core puzzle gameplay, and it’s worth fighting through the other stuff to see that. Its unique blend of action-puzzle-platforming is really fun, and easy to jump into and out of in bite-size chunks.


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Nintendo Gaming / Re: 2022 NWR Forum Awards - Best Nintendo Game
« on: December 04, 2022, 04:13:54 PM »
I’m not voting yet because I want to try to play a bit more of a couple of them, but right now I’m leaning toward Mario & Rabbids.

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Movies & TV / Re: Star Trek
« on: November 11, 2022, 10:11:51 PM »
I'm currently finishing up a rewatch of Deep Space 9, and I'm not sure whether I want to go to Voyager or Enterprise next.

I also want to say I recently started Lower Decks and I'm really liking that.

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General Chat / Re: Um, Apple thread
« on: November 11, 2022, 10:02:35 PM »
The 16" model isn't that much bigger than my old 15" one, partially because the bezel's smaller so the bigger screen eats into that instead of expanding the whole unit that much. It doesn't feel that different to me. If you felt comfortable taking a 15" model places I think you'd be fine.

I'm tempted to buy a new iPad myself, as my current one is getting old, and more pressingly, running out of storage. I'm just not sure whether I want to upgrade that or my Apple Watch next.

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General Gaming / Re: The morality of piracy and not buying games new
« on: October 23, 2022, 07:03:44 PM »
I don't pirate anything currently available, but I don't mind resorting to that for things that can't be bought new anymore. That's pretty much my policy across all media, as while I type this I'm watching episodes of a TV show I downloaded because it's not available anywhere legitimately. I would really prefer not to do that, both ethically and because legitimate releases are generally higher quality and more convenient.

When it comes to used games, I've been all digital for a decade now, so that's not really an option. I've rented games sometimes, but usually that's more of an extended demo, where if I like it I'll buy the full game.

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Mine ends in a little less than a month....

I plan on looking into the D+ Hulu adless bundle, or the triple package if my computer continues to skip the ads on Hulu, which it was doing just fine, until this weekend. I can also get ESPN+ in a bundle for cheaper than D+ and Hulu adless bundled, then I might go that route.

I 'm guessing it has something to do with a Chrome update, but i"ve had adless Hulu for years without paying for no ads. Now when I encounter an ad... everything just stops. Not sure how to get past it.

But I believe there was a D+ thread as well.

on the other hand, Netflix is supposed to be launching a Ad Based tier for $6.99mo or something like that. so maybe that will also become an option.

Unless they changed it recently, if you want the bundle with ad-free Hulu you have to start with an ad-free Hulu subscription and upgrade to the bundle through that.

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He can want it to be canon, but it's not. Paramount has been pretty clear over the years that only movies and TV shows are considered canon in Trek. Maybe he meant they tried to keep in in line with the show, similar to how some book writers try to keep their books in line with the canon but they are not canon either.

The game itself isn't canon, but there are a number of cases of things starting out in what's commonly referred to as "beta canon," the books/comics/games/whatnot, and later working their way into true canon sources. Most recently, the Odyssey-class Enterprise-F, designed specifically for Star Trek Online, showed up in the trailer for season 3 of Star Trek: Picard, making it canon.

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General Gaming / Re: Shocktober III: Season of the Witch
« on: October 14, 2022, 11:06:03 PM »
For the theme of this I decided to go back and play more of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow on the compilation they put out on Switch. The only Castlevania I'd really played before was Dawn of Sorrow, with little bits of some of the earlier ones on VC, so I'm pretty new to the series and I've heard this is probably the best one.

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I didn't quite know how to count it, because I didn't play three of these games (Metroid Prime, RE4, and Twilight Princess) until they came out on Wii. I voted for them as played, but technically it wasn't on GameCube.

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https://www.avclub.com/community-movie-update-in-works-dan-harmon-1849601476

What started as a throwaway joke in a faux clip show has become a true prophecy. After years of vague hints the Community movie is actually happening!

All the main characters who remained for the show's final sixth season are officially in, with some hints that Donald Glover and Yvette Nicole Brown may be in as well.

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