I played through the Kirby and the Forgotten Land Switch 2 expansion/DLC finally. I thought I’d get it right around my birthday at the end of August, when it came out, and play it immediately, but I was super hooked on Final Fantasy 14 stuff then and had my friends over, so I didn’t really need something to do at the time. Now, though, as I’ve been taking a break from FF14, that made it into the number two spot on my list, right after beating Donkey Kong Bananza. It took a couple nights, maybe five to seven hours total, to get through all of the expansion and find out what was contained within that Star-Crossed World, but I had a fun time doing it. I was incredibly out of touch with the game and it took a few attempts to really get back into the swing of it since I’d forgotten how most of the power-up systems and abilities worked, but I quickly figured it out again. It also helped that one of the abilities is basically the most powerful one you can get and while the utility of the other abilities might make them more useful in the right circumstances, about ninety percent of the expansion involved me using the Morph Sword power. I did look into upgrading it, once I remembered how all the currencies worked, but it didn’t really need an upgrade and the only way to get some of those special currencies is to run the boss rush type tournament things again and again and that’s not exactly my idea of a fun time. Especially because I’m still pretty rusty at the game, even after beating the expansion, and would struggle to take on some of the more difficult fights I did back when I was at the height of my power towards the end of the core content.
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Mixed Emotions About Doing Different Activities Instead Of Final Fantasy 14
Not playing Final Fantasy 14 for a few days has been a weird experience. I wrote Monday’s post about taking a break from FF14 before I actually put it into effect. I stayed up pretty late on Sunday night to wrap up the Dawntrail expansion and solidified my decision to take a break betwen then and writing my blog post the following day during breaks at work. Then I left work early so I could participate in my Monday night Ultimate raid practice, spent a few hours making alternate characters on my now-open server to combat my anxiety, spent a few hours last night working on the final raid in the Alexander Savage raid series my group is doing, and then spent another hour and a half after that hanging out online and unlocking an activity that I was planning to do tonight. I haven’t really played all that much less than normal, at least looking at it on the basis of daily participation. I did, however, stop playing FF14 every night with time enough to still do other things before bed, which I didn’t used to do. And tonight I’m not actually doing the activity I unlocked because I was at work until my personal cut-off time (8:30pm, a time I will not work past except in the case of emergencies) and had to do my grocery shopping after that because my car is going to be trapped in my apartment’s underground garage for a few days while the parking lot is filled up by the roofing company that will be spending the next few days replacing the rooves of my apartment building and the one next door that shares a parking lot. So I got home super late, ate dinner late, showered late, and was too miserable and tired to want to hop online for thirty minutes or whatever. So I’m writing this instead.
Continue readingDonkey Kong Bananza Has A Lot Of Post-Game Appeal
I do not think I’ve ever played a game where I’ve been faked out about the actual end of the game as many times as Donkey Kong Banaza has done to me. There was the ending the game told me was coming from the very beginning, there was the ending I expected from not long after the start of the game, there was the ending after that which I didn’t really expect but thought was kind of fun, there was the ending immediately after that which was exciting and a little over-the-top (in a fun way that very much fit with the game up to that point) and now there’s a new ending I’ve yet to reach that might just be setup for the DLC? I don’t know. It’s impossible to tell what this ending might be other than a pretense in order to let you continue playing the game [this is exactly what it was]. I don’t really know. I’ve got more game left to play, after all, and the story for this part is thinner than ever so I can’t really guess at anything beyond the clearly stated reason everything is continuing to happen. It’s a wild, silly experience that hasn’t damped my fun at any point. The entire series of sequential endings was a joy. The only downside to all that was how much more time I spent playing the game before I finally went to bed. I did expect to be done with the game after a single night, though, so now I’ve clearly got at least a couple more nights of it to go yet. Then I can do the Kirby DLC and, after that, finally start Final Fantasy Tactics. Or whatever other game has come out that feels more urgent.
Continue readingTrying (And Failing) To Spend More Time On My Switch 2
Two and a half months in to Donkey Kong Bananza (it turns out that games take forever to play through if you mostly ignore them and play Final Fantasy 14 instead), I’m almost to the end of the game. I’ve gotten almost all of the Bananas, most of the fossils, and almost all of the unlockable cosmetics/stat boost items. The only things I’m missing are from the area I’m currently exploring so it’s only a matter of time before I get those as well and then fight the final boss. There was a bit of a twist at the end that changed a bit of where I thought the game was going and how it was going to end, but I’m here for it. I’m ready to dive into whatever is coming my way, regardless of whether or not I expected it from the start (though there were hints if you knew enough about the Donkey Kong franchise). Plus, once I finish that, I’ll have the freshly released DLC to play, too. And the Kirby and the Forgotten Land expansion to play, too. Plus Final Fantasy Tactics (which comes out the day before this is scheduled to post) and then probably some other games after that. I’m going to really need to start splitting my time more if I’m going to play all these games! That, or focus down my Final Fantasy 14 stuff, wrap that up, and then take a break from it [which is where I’ve landed as of editing this the day before it posts]. Both are probably good ideas for my well-being, but the latter is growing more and more appealing as time goes on. Not because I’m not enjoying myself or anything, but because I’ve spent nine months sitting in my “office” (a walk-in closet) and it would be nice to spend some time in a more open sapce.
Continue readingSome Pokémon News And Updates To Pokémon Olds
There was a Pokémon Dirtect last week Wednesday (or the day I started writing this post). It covered a bunch of stuff, as the Direct series of videos are wont to do, but most of it was not of particular interest to me. I’m sure that the news about the TCG games, introduction of some new lifestyle gamification applications, and updates to existing lifestyle gamification apps were very interesting to the people who enjoy those things, but Pokémon Sleep (as a representation of the gamification of sleep) still kinda skeeves me out and I’m not particularly interested in finding new ways to give the Pokémon Company more and more data about me and my life. I could probably write a blog post about the upcoming Pokémon Legends: A-Z and how that looks interesting, but I’m not excited enough by it to really write all that much about it. I will say that it is interesting to see how the Legends series is growing and that my initial suspicion, that Legends Arceus was an early release of the tech they were developing for the games that eventually became Scarlet and Violet, was essentially correct as we see it finally come to it’s full fruition in the demos we saw of Legends A-Z. We probably would have gotten to that point with Scarlet and Violet if the Switch had better hardware, but it did not and now new Pokémon games will have the strength of the Switch 2’s hardware behind them. As will Scarlet and Violet, apparently.
Continue readingDonkey Kong Bananza Is All The Reason You Need To Buy A Switch 2
Donkey Kong Bananza is everything I wanted it to be and more, so much so that I have no qualms about saying that this game is justification enough for buying a Switch 2. I have not had such an immediate and strong attachment to a game since I played first played Breath of the Wild back in 2017. Even as much as I love playing Final Fantasy 14, my first month with the game was full of fits and starts where I was not sure that I’d grow to love it as anything more than something I played with my friends. With Donkey Kong Bananza, I was hooked from the first instant I got control of DK and my time with the game has only increased this attachment. I’ve had a whole weekend to play this game (I planned to write this a week before posting it but time got away from me (which has nevertheless worked out the best for this review)) and I can firmly say that you will not regret your time with this game. You also don’t need to have any particular attachment to the franchise, knowledge of the history of Donkey Kong, or even gaming experience to enjoy this game. This could be your first video game ever and you’d probably have an incredible time with it, assuming you enjoy this kind of open-ish world collectathon adventure experience. That’s the one caveat about this game: you need to like collecting things to really enjoy this game. If you dislike or feel stressed by collecting things, there really isn’t a lot of other stuff in this game for you. You’d probably still have fun, but the way that collection drives so much of the experience would probably repel you. If you’re indifferent to or neutral on collecting things, then I think you would still have a great time with this game. You don’t need to be a “Collecting Things” sicko like me to have a good time with Donkey Kong Bananza, but it certainly helps.
Continue readingA World Of Possibilities And Great Music In The Latest Mario Kart
After spending a bunch of time thinking about not having any ACTUAL Switch 2 games and having a weird experience trying to both play the upgraded Breath of the Wild on the Switch 2 while using my brand new 4K TV for the first time, I decided to cut to the heart of the matter and just buy Mario Kart World. For a decent part of my youth, I was a big fan of Mario Kart games. I played tons of Mario Kart 64 and Mario Kart Double-Dash, but I never really got into any of the games past that. I’ve played a few of them and might even own one or two more (I genuinely don’t remember), but most of the magic faded after the those two games. Once they started adding performance variability based on character mass and kart size and wheels and stuff like gliding and wall riding and all that, I just stopped feeling as invested in the game. They became just one more series of games that came out with incremental changes, slightly new features, and a whole load of new mechanics for me to learn. All of which is kind of antithetical to easy multiplayer games or party gaming, which was how I’d been playing all Mario Kart games since I started high school. They weren’t bad, ever, but they just didn’t feel like the experience I’d grown to know and love as a kid. They were closer to other racing games instead, all of them with an optimal strategy for winning based on the mechanics of the game (even if those mechanics could still be upset by the random items you’d get). The looseness and goofiness of my childhood experiences was gone, as was the days of firmly believing that green characters were faster and that yoshi had a slight advantage because of how far forward his face went.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 36
Today sucked. It sucked for a lot of reasons. It started bad, didn’t get any better, and left me feeling like a defeated piece of shit by the time I had the free time to start writing this (aka, take breaks at work). Rather than write about that (I need time to process), I’m going to talk instead about starting to replay The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild at sixty frames per second on a 4k TV. You see, I got a Switch 2 and a brand new TV, so of course the first thing I did when I got both those things set up (in a burst of nearly-manic energy on Sunday evening at 11pm) was plop in my BotW cartridge and load up the SECOND save file that the expanded Switch 2 version of the game gets you so I could start a new Master Mode playthrough. I was prepared to buy the expansions since I figured the at least 600 hours (632, precisely, according to the stats part of the new Zelda Notes acitivty in the Nintendo Online app) I have in justified spending another ten dollars, easily, but I apparently get it for free thanks to having a Nintendo Online + subscription (for those sweet, sweet N64 games, of course). I did have to wait a surprisingly long time for the game to update, but I was able to use that time to delete a number of games that were in the download queue that I had little to no intention of playing anytime soon, so it wasn’t entirely wasted time. Still, it felt weird that the download took so long (though I guess it was making some pretty major display changes) and the weirdness didn’t stop there.
Continue readingSwitch 2 Ownership Is Already Changing Me And I Haven’t Even Unboxed It Yet
I got my Switch 2 yesterday. It was delivered a day ahead of the earliest I thought I could get it (even with paying a small amount extra for expadited shipping), which caused me to scramble to make sure that there’d be someone around to receive the package since the scheduled delivery time overlapped with a physical therapy appointment I couldn’t skip. I didn’t want it sitting out on the stoop where someone might spot it, recognize it as possibly containing a Switch 2, and decide to break their streak of not stealing packages for this one special occasion. It turns out I needn’t have worried. Not only did the UPS driver have the ability to bring it inside, they brought it right to my apartment door, tucking it out of general visibility around the little corner hiding my door from the view of anyone but my across-the-hall neighbor. They also didn’t buzz or knock or anything, so I only knew it happened because I heard a jingle of keys followed by the gentle metal-on-metal clatter of my door jiggling in place. I wasn’t quick enough to thank this delivery person for going the extra mile, but I appreciated their consideration all the same. Especially because of how conspicously inconspicuous the package was. Every possible gap into the box was covered in enormous tape that screamed the phrase “ELECTRONICALLY VERIFIED DELIVERY” or something like that in massive block letters over and over again. The box itself was a non-descript brown cardboard number that was perhaps four or five times as big as it needed to be and the shipping label even avoided any mention of Nintendo save for the incredibly non-specific “NOA” at the head of the return address. Clearly, keeping the package discrete had been a part of their shipping plans for the console, which I appreciated.
Continue readingLiving In A Time Of Luxury (I Bought A TV I Didn’t Strictly Need)
After over a decade of resistance, I finally caved and bought a new TV. I’ve had the same old 57-inch TV (you can tell how old it is since they haven’t made anything in that size in forever) since my second apartment in my current city and, until very recently, I never felt an actual need to upgrade. I was never far enough away from my TV that I wanted it larger (and frequently felt that anything larger was too big for comfort). There was nothing wrong with my old TV, so there was no problems I had to put up with. Hell, it was even one of the last few TVs with both component plugs AND no “smart” features, so I had everything I could want in a TV and nothing more! It was a great model! Unfortunately, after splurging on 4K monitors for my computer, it has been difficult to go back to my old, HD TV and enjoy looking at what feels like a fuzzy picture. I’ve been able to not think about it sometimes, but anything that showed up on my monitors was impossible to enjoy on my TV afterwards, thanks to the noticeable drop in quality. Now, though, I’ve fixed that. I bought myself a 4K TV and a pretty decent one at that, thanks to some good sales. It is, unfortunately, a “smart” TV and it is, unfortunately, a bit too big for the space (as it is a 65 inch TV), but it doesn’t have any “AI” features and it’s a workhorse samsung model, so it should hopefully last me another decade unless some of the pixels start dying on me or whatever happens to “Crystal UHD” TVs.
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