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Splatoon and the last day of Wii U online

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I’ve enjoyed my time with the Wii U. Most of its best games have since migrated to the Switch, although often with cuts made to fit the single screen. Playing Assassin’s Creed III with a detailed map available at a glance was revolutionary; Kirby & the Rainbow Paintbrush felt very natural to control. Nintendo Land remains a go-to party game to this day, with the asymmetric multiplayer of Mario Chase and Animal Crossing Sweet Day causing heart palpitations like nothing else. Its compatibility with Wii games concretes its position as an essential part of my gaming setup.

One of the more radical games on the Wii U was Splatoon. As you will have seen from previous posts, I quite like first person shooters, but I’m not very good at them. Particularly online – I have neither the speed nor accuracy needed to grace even the top half of a final leaderboard. I still play them, but they can be a dispiriting experience.

Not so with Splatoon. It’s not first-person, for a start, and the objective is not to kill other players, but rather to cover the floor with your particular paint colour. You can target others – and if you splat them they do explode in your paint colour, causing a satisfying area of coverage – but you can also spend the time covering up the other team’s painting efforts and undoing their hard work. There are various weapons, ranging from large paintbrushes and rollers to sniper paint rifles, and you form a random team of four each game. This means that different people can play it in different ways, and everyone contributes to the game in the way they feel best able to.

I favour the paint roller, which lets me cover large areas but does leave me exposed to people coming in with paint guns – so I try to avoid confrontation where possible.

I haven’t played the game as much as some, who have sunk hundreds of hours into it, but I have played both the offline and online games a fair bit. I’m up to level 16 now, playing almost exclusively on the unranked mode (I never progressed past C+ in ranked). And 16 is where I will stay.

Last night saw the closure of the Nintendo Network for the Wii U and 3DS. All online games on those consoles no longer function – the errors vary, but errors there be. To mark this I spent an hour playing Splatoon for the last time, and the lobbies were full of others doing the same. I played eight or nine games in total, and I was reminded almost immediately of how the use of the gamepad to allow you to jump around the map led to a fluency that’s missing from Splatoon 2 and 3 on the Switch – being able to jump to help a teammate without having to switch view is amazing.

I think I won the majority of games, but I suspect that’s because many people were online not to compete but to commemorate.

I spent most of my time on Splatoon, but did also visit Mario Kart 8 (I finish with an online score of around 2800), Wii Sports Club, and Super Mario Maker’s 100 Mario mode. I’ve downloaded a bunch of courses for future use on Mario Maker as well.

There is a replacement network being launched called Pretendo, and at some point I will try to configure that – but it’ll require a mod for my Wii and 3DS and I’ve not got around to that yet. I think it’ll also mean a reset to my progress on a number of games, which I’m loathe to do.

Farewell, Nintendo Network. It’s been fun.

Pikmin 3 Deluxe: completed!

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I knew the Formidable Oak was to be the last level, but I wasn’t expecting quite how different it would be. Travelling to the top of the tree, I found Olimar being tended to by a strange gold being. This was, of course, the boss battle; I jumped into the clearing, and faced up to the newly-grown golden blob.

I had come prepared with a varied party – 20 of each pikmin. In the end, this wasn’t needed, because after a short pounding with red and rock pikmin, the golden blob died and dissolved into the ground. This was probably the easiest boss in the game. So, let’s get Olimar back to the Drake and we can set off home.

Of course not. Nintendo don’t do things like that. The final boss is always the most difficult bit. As soon as I’d entered the tunnel off the tree platform, I was ambushed by the golden blob again – who then started to chase me. I had to get pikmin to carry Olimar behind us, while I navigated a labyrinth of enemies and hazards.

This seemed to go on forever, and on the first day I lost a large number of pikmin (about 40!) to enemies I wasn’t expecting. The golden blob also kept catching up with me, and each time it did I had to attack it to release Olimar anew. However, I realised after a short time that there were things I could do to make the path to the exit easier on subsequent runs – pushing down ramps, lowering bridges, even exploding a barrier right next to the start – and so on the third day I had a quick, clear run through the inside of the tree.

With that done, a final boss battle took its toll on my army – I’m ashamed to say it took me far too long to realise I had to attack the cubes it sent out with the appropriate elemental pikmin – and for the first time in the game I noticed that the crew were also taking a little damage. With only 45 pikmin left in my party, and all but one yellow pikmin having been drowned when I threw them into a ball of water by mistake, the golden blob fell for the last time.

Pikmin games are always relatively short, and that adds to their charm – having completed this I am tempted to try again, with a shorter time and fewer lost souls. I was never particularly careful with my pikmin, as I knew I always had many in reserve, and most boss battles were won not on strategy but on pure strength. Every one of those 400 deaths was probably preventable.

But before that, there are some side stories to play, and other missions to investigate. Maybe in the future.

Rental (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Rental is (or at least, was at time of writing, who knows what the Terrifying Future holds) a free game on Steam and nothing is more important in gaming than low, low prices. So why the hell not, eh?

Perhaps the best way to describe the game, assuming you can’t see the screenshots here, is What if Animal Crossing was Resident Evil on the PS1? Or maybe, Silent Hill: Sylvanian Families. It has the cute animals and the quaint little house and then Horrors.

As you take your cute little bunny into this holiday cabin, you quickly realise something isn’t right. In full BBC Ghost Watch style, you catch a glimpse of a thing. Or there’s a noise. Or a voice. It’s a bit creepy, especially given all the tweeity in the graphics.

I won’t spoil what happens, especially as it’s so short so, coupled with the freeness of the game, you’ve no excuse not to discover it for yourself, but after some hunting for items it gets even more disturbing and weird. Do you like cute free games that subvert your expectations and turn disturbing and weird? Then you’ll like Rental.

Pikmin 3 Deluxe: I found a raspberry

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In fact, I found all the fruit. Rather than go off to the big oak tree and find (I presume) Olimar, I spent a few days wandering around the other areas finding the fruit I’d missed.

This involved quite a lot of journeying underground, as these were the areas I naturally avoided previously, with a tendency to get lost. It was only at this late stage in the game that I realised the utility of the Go Here function, where you can point to a position on the map and the party will head directly there. This was a godsend with the hidden entrances to underground areas, and also meant that the issue I had with the controls – that my characters would occasionally just stop moving forwards because the game didn’t think I was pressing up enough – disappeared.

There were only a few pieces of fruit that caused me issues. Two were in the tropical area, and required use of a metal box which acted like a seesaw with another metal box – and I couldn’t work out how to get to the second metal box to balance it. In the end it was pure luck that I threw a yellow pikmin over a vine onto a trampoline, and it landed on the box, letting me solve the puzzle. Another piece was at the top of a section which the game enforced a side-on camera for, where I had to work out the order in which to balance another pulley system. And the last was guarded by a big crab, who killed quite a few of my pikmin before I realised I had to use rock dudes to crack his claw.

So, with all fruit collected, I went off to the oak.

I’ve got nine powerups (which I know full well I’ll never use, because they’re limited consumables), I’ve got 67 days of juice left, and I’ve got about 400 of each pikmin type available. Bring it on, Olimar.

Pikmin 3 Deluxe: I found an avocado

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I foresaw one plot twist – that who the crew believed to be Olimar was in fact Louie – but did not foresee the other one, with Louie scarpering as soon as he could, taking our food supply with him. Suddenly there was a fresh urgency about finding fruit, and with the game urging me to chase Louie but me being aware that I was one tropical smoothie away from starvation, I found myself pulled in two directions. Not only that, but shortly after I landed in the Garden of Hope I was introduced to the blue Pikmin, and so I had a third objective – build up the blue population.

I decided to forget about Louie for now, get a number of blues ready, and collect some of the underwater fruit that I’d noticed on the map. Blue harvesting initially went a little wrong, when I was attacked by a frog who killed off five of my then-population of 10, but I got back into it with a vengeance when I remembered that flying pikmin could provide important backup while I walked around the riverbed. Within a couple of game-hours (the notches across the top of the screen) I was up to an army of 50, and went off in search of fruit. An underwater strawberry and orange, building a bridge using submerged pieces, and a wayward plum later, I felt ready to look for the wrongun.

Over the two next days I found more fruit and enemies, building more bridges and pillars, and having to carefully manouvre rock pikmin around to break crystals. And then I found a new boss, bigger than anything so far, who tried to stamp on my pikmin and drown them in the mud. It had no luck, however, because my reds held on tight to its legs before I jumped on its back and threw rocks and yellows at it. Goodbye big planty thing, and hello again Louie – and the captain’s rubber duck.

What looks to be the final area has opened up now, with no fruit to collect; with the juice returned from Louie I now have a buffer of about 45 days but I am minded to collect all the remaining fruit before going on to find Olimar. I mean, he’s been held for a while already, what harm are a couple of extra days going to do?