What are you playing on your Switch?

How

the FUCK

are we back

on this topic


Anyway Murder by Numbers is good and the rest of y'all should join Mas in giving it a go, so long as you don't hate Picross.

gjones wrote:

Wow.

Hollow Knight is good isn't it? I was up until 3am determined to beat a boss (that one with the needle on a string) and whilst challenging, it was SO rewarding. I never really explored the Metroidvania genre outside of Steamworld Dig, but Hollow Knight is something special. I heard it was good, but 6 hours in, I can't wait to chip away some more.

Glad you're enjoying it GJones! It really is something quite special, albeit I seemed to love it a bit less than most.

Because deep down, Mas knows he's a wrong'n. He wants to be punished, he needs to be punished. He's like a murderer who leaves clues and notes for the police. He wants to be caught. On saturday nights, he goes to gay bars and pays big burly men to give him a kicking. Its not a sex thing, its just for the guilt. And yet, despite it all, he can't let it go. He can't turn away and slam the door.

to both Balla's reaction and Drunka's post there.

RE: Hollow Knight - 100% agree on the rewarding element. There's an optional late-game platforming challenge that I've spoken about in the game's thread that I spent far too long trying to get through, but the feeling of success at the end of it was such a treat. Balancing the frustration factor and the sense of accomplishment is like walking a tightrope, but I think Team Cherry nailed it with their game.

JayMoyles wrote:

to both Balla's reaction and Drunka's post there.

RE: Hollow Knight - 100% agree on the rewarding element. There's an optional late-game platforming challenge that I've spoken about in the game's thread that I spent far too long trying to get through, but the feeling of success at the end of it was such a treat. Balancing the frustration factor and the sense of accomplishment is like walking a tightrope, but I think Team Cherry nailed it with their game.

I've just read through the whole thread - Jimbob actually said he'd probably end up playing it 2 years later but it turns out it's me! I love everything about the game so far and it's perfectly suited to the Switch Lite.

I'll second that people should play Murder By Numbers, I enjoyed the characters and story as much as I did the Picross, it's up there as one of my favourite eShop games.

The Hollow Knight talk is making me want to play it again, it's one of the few tough games I've never been frustrated with because I knew with enough practice I'd always make it through. I'm in the same boat with not playing many Metroidvania games in my time but Hollow Knight being so good has put me off a bit for fear they won't match up.

Speaking of Metroidvanias, I saw a lot of people playing Symphony of the Night recently so I assumed it must be on that Castlevania classics collection that launched not too long ago . . . nope. Just the linear Nintendo ones.

Still worth getting that collection when on a sale for Super Castlevania IV and Bloodlines (The Mega Drive Castlevania).

I'm still very tempted. I just want to have a bash at a few Castlevanias to enhance my enjoyment of the anime.

From what I can tell the anime is based around Castlevania III which is on that collection. The series does have bits of SOTN which is where I know most of my Castlevania knowledge from, and some Curse of Darkness also seems to being mixed in but I've never played that one.

I know it doesn't really help you at the moment but can't be that expensive to track down a PS1/2 and SOTN in Japan, unless you play it on mobile as it's available on mobile stores, I feel those are the cheapest options.

An official port of Symphony of the Night is on Google Play for a few quid. That Anniversary Collection is the dog's bollocks though.

All this talk is really making me struggle to remember why I didn't love Hollow Knight. Don't get me wrong, I liked it a lot - solid 8/10. Just, no more really, and I'm not sure why any more. I remember being irked at how some areas were hidden behind almost undetectable breakable walls; at the Watcher Knights; at the Deepnest; and at having to do the run-up to the Soul Master every bloody time... but these were all just irks. Maybe I just didn't like the grim ambience, effective thought it indubitably was and dotted with hope and cuteness.

I think it might be one of those games that, unlike JRPGs, gets better with distance. You remember the ambience and the bosses and the exploration, and the frustrations don't seem so big a deal.

I didn't fall in love with Hollow Knight either. I spent a number of hours on it and will probably go back and try it again, but it never particularly sunk its claws into me.

Mandibles, surely.

masofdas wrote:

From what I can tell the anime is based around Castlevania III which is on that collection. The series does have bits of SOTN which is where I know most of my Castlevania knowledge from, and some Curse of Darkness also seems to being mixed in but I've never played that one.

Yeah, III and SotN are all you really need to get to enhance the Netflix show. I don't know if that PS4 collection with Rondo of Blood and SotN was ported across to anything else, but that's worth a look if it's on a platform you can get access to, Buska.

Some reason that's only on PS4 but on Xbox One you can play the XBLA verison of SOTN, also oddly the Xbox One might be the system with the most Castlevania games on it because of that, I think I've got like 11.

I done the first 10 levels of Jet Lancer this morning and it seems like a decent shoot em up so far, though I'm hoping the difficulty starts to ramp up a little bit more.

I saw someone bitching about a difficulty spike on twitter. Don't know if that's good or bad news . . .

It's mainly how the game is set up for you to dodge enemy fire to get a multiplier to boost your score but apart from a couple of bosses this barely happens in those levels I've played, so you end up destroying everything fairly easy but not getting the best score possible because the multiplier isn't active long enough.

Ah, that definitely sounds like an early-game thing.

Continuing to plough through Hollow Knight. Sunk 23 hours in so far and definitely lots left to explore. I've only just reached the City of Tears but I am definitely a slow Metroidvania gamer. I'm always lost and about to give up, but then I stumble across an area I've yet to beat or boss that I know is manageable, yet keeps getting the best of me. It's one of those games where you get destroyed on the first go, return and get a bit further each time, eventually taking them down. The only other game I've felt this amount of satisfaction from is Ninja Gaiden on the old Xbox. Punishing, yet fun and ultimately fair.

That sounds like Dark so....*get's backstabbed*

Also continuing on the difficulty topic Jet Lancer has definitely ramped it up a bit, hard to say if it's unfair at the minute though. .

gjones wrote:

It's one of those games where you get destroyed on the first go, return and get a bit further each time, eventually taking them down. The only other game I've felt this amount of satisfaction from is Ninja Gaiden on the old Xbox. Punishing, yet fun and ultimately fair.

You know what else it sounds like you'd love?

He might like that but I know as someone who likes Ninja Gaiden & Got Gud at that but very different to how & why.

I got realMyst. It's about time I played this game, given it's status in the history of videogames. that I still have Witness flashbacks (in fact, a bit of my Animal Crossing island is a bit Witness-y).

I can't wait to not know how to do any of the puzzles! Although a couple of initial thoughts:

1. I assume this is true of the PC version as well, but, realtime 3D aside, there are definitely some "dawn of CD-ROM" graphics left over
   
2. Not sure about the controls - it's sort-of-standard two stick FPS, but the right-stick is also the "mouse cursor". When you click on something with buttons on it, the game automatically slides you into a face-on position to press the buttons, which is a good thing. However, the instinct at this stage, based on all other console games, is to use the left stick to move the cursor about (think about any game you've played with a controller that has a pointer on the screen). The left stick is still registered as the move function though - so you just walk away instead! i.e. it's been ported so that the left stick is always WASD. Again, I don't know if the PC version's like this, but I assume there that the mouse and keyboard are the default controls anyway.

I've seen a speedrun of Myst which is hardly any good for gaining any sort of impression of the game, but I've always thought it looked intriguing. I guess my concern is that it'd pale in comparison to The Witness which is essentially a modern take on Myst anyway.