Hurrah for corporate shills!
Red Pikmin painted like one of his French girls.
Red Pikmin painted like one of his French girls.
Many Things
So, I’ve been off on holiday this week and I’ve treated myself to a bit of quality game time. Entirely on the 3DS and Wii-U, now that Nintendo seem to be getting their act together. So without further ado, I’ve been playing:
Gunman Cliver (3DS). Oh Good God, this is good. It’s a side scrolling shooter with power ups, a western theme, and gorgeous ‘hand sketched’ visuals. It’s not a million miles from the less metroidy Castlevania games, and it’s just as unforgiving. On top of all that, it’s available for less than the price of a pint of beer. BUY!
Pikmin 3 (Wii-U). Well worth the wait – it takes everything that’s great about Pikmin and turns it up to eleven. The three new characters (who you can use to control squads) and the touchable map on the Wii-U controller make this every bit as much an RTS as Starcraft is. But with added cute. It’s also very pretty. For some inexplicable reason, there’s no online multiplayer, but I guess you can’t have everything. So far, I’m only about 8 days in, but loving it so far.
Donkey Kong Country Returns (3DS). This is brutally hard. Very very good, but Jesus. Anyhoo, I’m not far into it, mainly because every single level seems to take me a million attempt to do. It does that really annoying thing where it’s incredibly hard but never feels unfair, whereby you have no excuse but to examine your own ineptness whenever you die. And you do. A lot.
Toki Tori 2 (Wii-U). SQUEEEE. Well, that’s what I said when I saw it on the shop. And it’s great – it’s pretty much perfect in every way. Looks, sound, entertainment, challenge, you get the idea. It’s also only 12.99, which I reckon is bargaintastic for puzzles that will make your BRANE ASPLODE.
Animal Crossing New Leaf (3DS). I don’t think I need to say much here because anyone who knows AC will know what I’ve been doing. News of the week, though, is that I made a serious killing on the Stalk Market, thanks to Zomoniac, and have enough filthy bells to make me comfortably well off. Still scouting the Happy Home Academy, still buying fortune cookies, still no banjo. I WANT A BSNJO DAMMIT! I have a stool and music stand already set up and a space where a banjo will go! There’d better be one or I won’t be amused.
Heroes of Ruin (3DS). This is great – it’s my go-to-when-I-have-a-spare-five-minutes game. Think Torchlight on the move and you’re pretty much there. It’s inclined to be a little ugly, but I can forgive that.
Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate (3DS / Wii-U). Surprisingly, I’ve been playing this mostly on the 3DS because I like the controls better. I’m doing pretty well – just ganked my first Rathian (in this version of the game) and am ploughing my way through the four-star quests. I’d like to say I’d finished all the three star ones, but sadly it’s not true – I still have two capture quests (Qurupeco and Royal Ludroth) to do, but I totally suck at capture quests. That’s my job for tonight though – get those buggers done.
Where does Earthbound fit into this list, you ask? Um nowhere because I’d forgotten I had it until I started writing this post (blush). Now that my holidays are drawing to a close, I should really start focussing on playing fewer games at once. Trouble is, with the massive time sinks that are MH3U and ACNL on the go, that’s easier said than done.
Diary of a Witcher : Part 1
I want to hold off on upgrading until the new range of cards is released later in the year. As I've never played the original game I figured I'd play that first while I wait.
It runs on my three screens really well, although there is a bug which means the cut scenes only work if you turn the lighting down to basic. This isn't a disaster as it all still looks lovely. Being an older game I can get good frame rates too so everything is nice and smooth.
The hot waitress |
I visited an Inn and got chatting to one of the waitresses, she seemed hot. The next thing I know, she's outside being hassled by some bandits, so I killed them and walked her home. She told me to meet her in a barn the next night with some wine. That's as far as I've got up to now, I'm guessing if I do as she asks then I'll be getting lucky again! I'll let you know how that pans out next time.
Earthbound (Wii U)
I’ve never played Earthbound before. That’s not really surprising, as it never came out in the UK, and I wasn’t that much of a SNES gamer anyway – certainly not to the point of wanting to import US games.
I didn’t really know that much about the game either, apart from that it was an RPG, set in roughly the modern day, in a relatively “normal” setting, and was absurd. And had Ness from Super Smash Bros in it. Or the other way round. Or something.
Naturally, given all this I knew about Earthbound, I bought it the very second I could, despite the (apparently, according to some) horrendous overpricing. How very dare Nintendo try to charge a ludicrous SEVEN POUNDS for a SNES game that never came out in this country and costs just £200 on eBay? *rolls eyes*
Enough of that. More of the game. Oh the game! Oh, the silly pervy nonsensical game! The game I’m utterly lost in and have no idea what to do next and it just doesn’t matter.
I’ve been sent out on adventure, in the middle of the night by my mother (who doesn’t seem especially concerned for me), whilst my seemingly absent father sends me money on an hourly basis to my bank account to fund my endeavour. My little sister has set up a delivery company, and one of my neighbours invited me into the hole he’d dug under his house to she his “secret”, but I had to come alone. Uh huh.
My dog can talk. Other dogs can also talk. The police are obsessed with roadblocks. I went to the first town, Onett, and had to fight the local street punks and their leader (and his robot) so that the police (whom I then had to fight) would let me explore an area of the map populated with homeless cabaret performers, so that I could reach a cave and finally make it to a giant footprint in the ground which I then recorded the sound of in a stone.
Then I went to Twoson (the second town – can you see the naming scheme?) fighting possessed Retro Hippies and Salary-men before ending up with a mushroom growing out of my head that kept flipping the direction controls around which the doctor couldn’t help me with but a creepy old guy who hangs around the hospital waiting room was happy to give me $50 to buy said fungus. And I bought a mouse.
Then the bike shop man gave me a free bike, and I went to the market which was run by a criminal who wants me to find a lost girl from the local nursery for him, while other characters in town variously say I should meet her and/or she’s been kidnapped. The two roads out of Twoson were impassable, one because the tunnel was full of ghosts which carry you out once you’re halfway through, and the other because a giant pencil was blocking the path (as the game says) “for some reason”. Naturally, a smelly fat boy called Apple Kid and who is one of two inventors in the town, is able to help by conveniently inventing a pencil eraser for $200 and some food.
This allowed me past the pencil, and into an area full of UFOs and sentient trees (that explode) and robots and other baddies. Some of which cause me to catch a cold because lasers. I had to run away after a while because my health and PP (like magic points) were low, and the magic butterflies that appear randomly to replenish PP by “relaxing you” (uh huh) didn’t appear frequently enough to rely upon them.
And I then bought a for sale sign, which I’m unable to sell. And a man stops me every now and then to take pictures of me, asking me to say Fuzzy Pickles. Frankly, I’m concerned there’s no Operation Yewtree in Earthbound, as it bloody needs it. Every other person is a pervert.
All this is how far I’ve got. I’m guessing there are at least another six areas to get to, judging from one of the items I’ve collected, so there’s miles to go yet. And I’ve nobody else in my party either, aside from my dog and the boy next door who left ten minutes into the game.
Earthbound reminds me a lot of Contact (for the DS), which is no bad thing. It’s certainly a lot of fun, and I’m loving the completely nuts story. Definitely going to get me my seven quid’s worth.
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