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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate (Switch 2): COMPLETED!

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This is great and it is so obviously using Hades as a template it’s not even fair to suggest it’s anything but a clone. But a really good clone. It even mentions about the powers you obtain as being “boons” at one point, which is what they’re called in Hades.

So, in case you don’t know how Hades plays, I can explain for Turtles. You start in the sewers, and face room after room of similar but random layouts and baddies. Beat the baddies, and you get to choose from a selection of random powerups, including buffs, money – which is scrap metal here – or health. Every so often you’ll reach a shop where you can spend the scrap you’ve picked up on more things. Some powers can be upgraded, you can sometimes get combo powers when you’ve chosen two that work together, and you can extend your life bar and so on. You do more rooms, then a boss, and move on to the next chapter in a new location. Die, and it’s all over and you start again from the Turtle Lair.

All of your powers and buffs from the previous run are lost. However, as you play you also obtain other currencies, which you keep after dying and can spend them in your lair for permanent bonuses, like more heath, greater damage, or increasing the likelihood of top tier powerups appearing.

Just like Hades, it’s stupidly addictive. It’s not quite as polished as Hades, and whereas Hades had so much lore and backstory and Greek myths, legends and gods to involve yourself in, here you’ve just got the Turtles and their acquaintances which isn’t quite on the same level. There’s not as much depth to the combat either, and although you can build your Turtle somewhat differently each run depending on the items you choose, it’s nowhere near the same level of difference you can get in Hades.

What it does have that Hades doesn’t, though, aside from Mikey, is that it has a 2, 3 or 4-player co-op mode. I’ve been playing it with my daughter (she’s generally been Donnie, if you’re curious), and it is loads of fun.

We played it a few times before the Switch 2 upgrade pack came out, and since downloading that I’ve noticed almost no difference at all. Maybe slightly faster load times? Although they were pretty quick anyway. It supposedly pegs the game at 60 frames per second and 4K over the 720p and 30 frames of the Switch version but I can’t tell the difference in all honesty. I think maybe lighting and fire effects look a bit better but it was fine before.

Turns out we actually completed the game a few days ago, but there was a tease after 10 or so successful runs (the game says you need this many) that there was more story to unlock so we played a while longer. I’ve since looked it up and actually, that’s it. Presumably the tease is for a sequel or DLC or something because there’s no more story and we didn’t get to find out exactly what Baxter was up to or who the shadowy baddie who kidnapped Splinter is (and no, it wasn’t Shredder).

Luigi’s Mansion (Switch 2): COMPLETED!

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Nintendo were kind enough to give this GameCube game out to people who pay for the top tier of their online subscription service. Back when it originally came out – at the GameCube’s launch – it was perceived to be a disappointment. Indeed, I eschewed it in favour of Super Monkey Ball and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 because it wasn’t the follow-up to Super Mario 64 we all hoped was happening. Of course, I did eventually play it and yes, it turns out it was great after all. But still very different to a Mario game.

Another complaint levelled at it at the time was the length. Nintendo had reportedly “done some research” and found that people wanted “shorter games”. Luigi’s Mansion is, by modern standards, pretty short at about 5 or 6 hours, but that’s still plenty long enough as far as I’m concerned.

Now, some twenty-something years later, how does it stand up?

Perfectly, it turns out. Nintendo’s art still looks great now, even though it’s all 4:3 and SD and running on a toaster. The gameplay is as great as it ever was, and very little has actually aged. One thing that has, I found, is I could not longer control it with the default “invert Y” setting. Why this is, I don’t know. Maybe in time I’ll be unable to cope with anything but the definitely backwards “natural scrolling” mouse/trackpad setting that computer operating systems default to these days. Sad times if so. Anyway, with the Y setting changed I was away.

Everyone knows how to play Luigi’s Mansion – find ghosts, scan their weaknesses, suck ’em up – so I won’t spend time on that. Needless to say, it’s still fun. Luigi’s Mansion 3 obviously improved so many areas of the game (such as everything being more interactive – here Luigi just grinds up against most things going “unngh unngh oohyeah”) but the core mechanics are still sound.

One negative I have, which presumably I had originally but my diary doesn’t go back that far, is the Boo chasing. To properly complete the game you have to find 50 hidden Boos, one in most rooms, and when you do they float off and you have to suck them up. Unfortunately, they have a tendency to escape the hoover and fly through walls. Chasing them when they do this is a bit tedious, but there are some that run off to rooms that although next door, can only be accessed via a full loop of the mansion so it takes ages – especially as they tend to escape again back to where they came from.

That’s all though. Everything else is excellent.

Super Mario Odyssey: completed!

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It seems a little contrived to say it’s completed, really, since I can see that there are over half the moons I am yet to discover, and the game is still throwing new ideas at me each time I play. However, Peach has been rescued, Bowser is defeated, and the world is a better place. I stopped the wedding, which I hasten to add wouldn’t have been legally binding in any case as Peach was not entering it of her own free will. I’ve seen the credits. I have explored the Moon, and I have travelled back to the Mushroom Kingdom.

The inside of Peach’s castle is a clever nod to Super Mario 64, although many of the doors are missing (and my daughter was disappointed we couldn’t go upstairs to see where she sleeps). I have found a number of other rooms around the kingdom, which again look similar to the rooms from SM64, which enable me to fight the bosses again, but I haven’t because I’m more interested in finding new stuff.

I had travelled between previous worlds a fair bit, exploring and finding hidden moons, before deciding to go to Bowser’s kingdom to finish the game – only to find I was diverted to a ruined kingdom, and it turns out that Bowser’s palace wasn’t the end point in any case. I played through the last few areas over the course of contiguous days, not wanting to stop until the story was complete; and then I had to keep playing, to find out what Peach was up to, to talk to Toadette, and to see what those silvery cubes were all about. It turns out that they’ve roughly doubled the size of the game after the credits roll – and I’ve not even been to the dark side of the Moon yet.

I very rarely engage in character dress-up in games, but Mario’s outfits are fun to experiment with – and you need to get changed to access some moons, as well as seeing the 2D representations

With that rush to finish, I’ve taken a bit of a step back in terms of playing the game, because I want it to last a bit longer. A fantastic game, which looks even more amazing on the Switch 2.

Super Mario Odyssey: a variety of treats

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The game is so expansive in its scope that it’s hard to know what to write. With Breath of the Wild, and then also Tears of the Kingdom, the game felt huge because of the size of the world, the enormity of the task, and the freedom you had to approach it how you wanted. Breath of the Wild actually prevented me from posting on here for a bit. Odyssey is different – the worlds are smaller and disconnected, the tasks are short and targeted. It feels ideal for a handheld game in many respects, where you can turn it on, explore for a bit and find a couple of moons, and then put your Switch back in the bag as your train arrives at Charing Cross. Yet it also works as a large open world, where everywhere in sight has something that makes you think there’s something new to do, and very often there is.

I’ve been to the city, and formed a band – the 2D sections here were fantastic. I’ve been to a pink kingdom where they make stew. I’ve been back to revisit worlds I passed by quickly before, looking for new moons. There are a few staples in each world – the note paths, the tower of goombas – but even these have idiosyncrasies to vary the game. There are so many ideas packed into every area that I cannot even choose what to highlight.

I have around 350 moons now, and have opened Bowser’s Kingdom. I can’t quite bring myself to go there, though, because it feels too final – I don’t want the game to end, and even though I know I’ll be able to carry on moon hunting afterwards, the fact that some of my lists are barely half full makes me want to skulk around the existing levels just a bit more.

Donkey Kong Bananza (Switch 2): COMPLETED!

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I’ve a mixed history with Donkey Kong games. Donkey Kong 64 I loved, for a while, until it became clear it was a nightmare of repetition and collecting. Donkey Kong ’94, for the Game Boy, is one of my favourite platformers. I hated all the Super NES Donkey Kong Country games with their stupid pre-rendered graphics and terrible physics and collision detection. The evolution of those for the 3DS and Wii, Donkey Kong Country Returns was better, and I completed it, but it wasn’t amazing (aside from looking really nice on the 3DS). I passed on Tropical Freeze because it was more of the same (and, unlike Returns, wasn’t free). But now, mainly because of a dearth of Switch 2 specific games and a super cheap 50% off deal because I bought the Japanese version from Amazon, Donkey Kong Bananza is mine.

Well, it was mine for a few hours but then I had to lend it to my child for a few months because she needed it apparently. Eventually it came back.

My first impressions were not very good. The purple colour scheme just felt weird. The “digging” mechanic, where you can destroy almost all of the environment, didn’t make any sense in a Donkey Kong game, and there just seemed like there was too much to dig. After a couple of hours, I had started to warm to it and by the end, was totally taken by New Design Donkey Kong and the Canon Bursting Addition of Little Pauline. If you ignore everything that doesn’t make sense, then it’s a lot of fun.

Levels are varied, with many reminding me of bits of Mario 64. There’s loads to do, with each huge area (or layer, as the game calls them – you’re slowly digging down to the planet’s core) already full of missions, quests or jobs to do and then having a number of, mostly hidden, challenge doors that include tricky platforming, puzzles, and taking on enemies in a range of environments. You also gain skills, mainly in the form of animal transformations, which can let you reach previously inaccessible areas within levels you’ve already done, so it’s a bit Metroidvania-y in that way. Minor upgrades in the form of purchasable clothing are also available, to buff your attacks, elemental defences, and give you more time in your transformed states.

Controls were tricky at first, mainly because Nintendo have moved the jump button to A when B, or even Y is much more common. The reason is to that X, Y and B can be used to “dig” (or rather, punch) up, forward and down respectively. I did still keep pressing the wrong shoulder buttons even at the end of the game too, so never really got completely used to them.

The gameplay is great though. Punching through everything is actually pretty addictive, even if the rewards for doing so are minimal. You very quickly rack up more gold – the main currency in the game – than you can ever spend. Other things you find, like bananas and fossils are of more use but are rarer. Once you get the upgrade which lets you see where various treasures are buried, it lets you focus on the important stuff so you don’t randomly punch everywhere. Except, of course, I did anyway. Enemies are mostly dispatched by either punching them, or throwing stuff at them (you can rip up chunks of ground to do this) but some are unfazed by “softer” material or need a specific type of rock to expose their weak points first, so there’s sometimes some strategy to the combat rather than button mashing.

The animal transformations feel a bit under-utilised, partly as you rarely need them and partly because they could have just been extra abilities rather than a whole added on mechanism. They’re a bit fiddly to swap to as well, and your time as them is limited, so sometimes – where it was possible – I’d just do it the “hard” way as Normal Ape to save the hassle. It’s also a bit weird having an animal become an ape-snake or ape-zebra hybrid. Video games, eh?

So, not the best early-new-console release, but far better than I was expecting given my history with Donkey Kong games. My main take away from the game is, however, that it clearly wasn’t a Donkey Kong game when they had the idea and mechanics in place, and then needed to fit it to an existing Nintendo character. Nintendo do this a lot and, in this case, it seems to have paid off.