What are you playing on your Switch?

Yeah, if you quit it loads you at the start of the room I believe, so it's really easy to jump in and out of. I've done it when I mashed through the mystery 3rd floor guests boons and accidently accepted the first one (which is useless if you have full death defiance)

I need to go back to it especially at this time when I'm basically playing backlog till PS5.

Tomorrow on my day off maybe.

How far have you managed to get Mas? Got past the first boss yet?

Yeah I beat what I would say is the first boss

I tend to play Hades in small bursts, but this is the norm for me with rogue-lite games as I just like having a game you can always jump on and play at any time.

Played the 10mins demo of the Cloud Control Version and I'm very impressed from it.

As Control didn't run well on consoles natively but of course the demo doesn't go far enough to where you'd have lots of enemies etc on screen to drop FPS

Buy/Play Hades. It is very good. Not much more that needs to be said really.

Balladeer wrote:

I have also started playing Just Shapes & Beats.  It's a bullet hell rhythm game and I'm no good at bullet hell and hoped there'd be more rhythm game than bullet hell and DEAR GOD THERE IS A LOT OF BULLET HELL

Hug the bottom of the screen, they can't get me there...

I did mention it was, I do think it's easy to get used to though and once you get in to it it doesn't feel like there's that much in the way of bullets.

No More Heroes.

I like the original on Wii which I beat a few times, but it's nice playing the game handheld with buttons and with a much smoother frame rate. It is a pretty barebones port and it's not perfect technically, but I can't complain too much when they also ported NMH2 (bumping it up to 60fps) and I can't imagine they had a big budget especially considering they're also developing NMH3. It's still pretty polished.

I'm really tempted by No More Heroes but I'm already struggling with a backlog.

Treesmurf wrote:

Balladeer wrote:

I have also started playing Just Shapes & Beats.  It's a bullet hell rhythm game and I'm no good at bullet hell and hoped there'd be more rhythm game than bullet hell and DEAR GOD THERE IS A LOT OF BULLET HELL

Hug the bottom of the screen, they can't get me there...

I did mention it was, I do think it's easy to get used to though and once you get in to it it doesn't feel like there's that much in the way of bullets.

I've got a bad habit of ignoring seemingly obvious qualms when it comes to buying some games it seems, especially eShop games. Oh well. I switched to Casual Mode for the first boss because sod doing all that again without a checkpoint. I like what they did afterwards though.

Creaks is another one where if I'd paid more attention to the genre I might not actually have picked it up. My brain presumably went 'platformer, from the chaps behind a game I liked, good reviews - well, good review'. It's more of a stealth/puzzle game than a platformer, and while not bad it feels a bit 'generically indie creepy' thus far.

Oh absolutely use casual mode if it helps, the fun in the game isn't down to the challenge for me, it's more the spectacle of it all.

I've not been playing much, but I went to see my family on Monday for a couple of days (given that we've not seen anyone outside for weeks I reckoned we were okay ) and my sister had a great time working through my eShop library!  She played:

• A Short Hike and loved it. It's like a chill BotW crossed with Animal Crossing, which is basically ideal for her. She is playing BotW but likes good writing and doesn't like puzzles.
  
• Machinarium, and she liked the design anyway. Not sure she has much patience with the point-and-click genre's oddities, and as mentioned above she doesn't like puzzles much.
  
• What The Golf?, and... I'm not sure about this one. She found the par challenges frustrating (her and everyone else), but got a fair amount out of it once she realised that she didn't have to do them to progress.

Then we played UGG in two-player mode, and although it is much weaker on a replay she was falling about. Genuinely heart-warming to see. Oh, and the whole family gathered around for some games of Mario Kart. They even beat me a few times! After I'd given myself enough handicaps.

In summary: being able to take the Switch around freely to other people's households again can't come soon enough.

Nice! I remember being that guy with my Switch at many occassions. Here, pretty much everyone I ever spend time with has their own Switch . . .

Balladeer wrote:

In summary: being able to take the Switch around freely to other people's households again can't come soon enough.

Not the Switch but I've not seen EofGiz for a while and next week when I'm on holiday was planning to go up with my PS5 but now that's not a thing, so hopefully can do things like that again soon.

It's especially galling considering the Switch has so many top local multiplayer games and that's just not a thing right now.

Buskalilly wrote:

Nice! I remember being that guy with my Switch at many occassions. Here, pretty much everyone I ever spend time with has their own Switch . . .

That must be good too though, right? Get a bit more of a game out of them. I literally have to remind my parents of the buttons for Mario Kart every time they see me... Also I'm guessing with things a bit more relaxed for you, local play's still a possibility?

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Sword of Light

I'm enjoying it. It's nice to be playing an official translation of the game. There's a simple charm of this game that I like, and it retains a lot of what makes later titles good.

The disappointing thing is that the new features they added don't go far enough, or weren't that well considered. Doubling the speed of enemy turns is welcome, even if it does speed up the music. They could take way too long. But the only other toggle is doubling the speed of the whole game. That's everything, including the music and menu navigation. So it's not exactly ideal.

That really is the biggest issue for me - the game is just a bit too slow and the solution for it isn't very good. I can double the speed of everything if I mute the music but I don't want to do that (even if it is the same music on nearly every map).

I think it was found that the game is actually using an emulator that was used on the Wii U, and that would explain the dark filter it has. Not really a issue for me as I didn't even notice it until someone pointed it out, but it seems as if this localisation was made for Wii U and was just shelved. What a way to celebrate the 30th anniversary of one of the more relevant Nintendo IPs.

Balladeer wrote:

That must be good too though, right?  Get a bit more of a game out of them.  I literally have to remind my parents of the buttons for Mario Kart every time they see me...  Also I'm guessing with things a bit more relaxed for you, local play's still a possibility?

Oh yeah, it's great. We've had some cracking sessions with Smash, Mario Kart, Monster Hunter and Pokemon with a whole bunch of us, and smaller multiplayer moments with Matt, Matty and Rob are pretty common. Also, because most of the folks I spend time with are the guys from my office, and we never closed for even a day even when Japan was at its most locked down, I've basically never had to stop. We always figured if we can sit in a meeting for an hour, we can sit and play games for an hour, right?

Sounds legit. Of course, if you were still here you'd be instantly destroyed for meeting in a way that doesn't directly help the economy.

Kriken wrote:

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Sword of Light

...

I think it was found that the game is actually using an emulator that was used on the Wii U, and that would explain the dark filter it has. Not really a issue for me as I didn't even notice it until someone pointed it out, but it seems as if this localisation was made for Wii U and was just shelved. What a way to celebrate the 30th anniversary of one of the more relevant Nintendo IPs.

I'm shocked, shocked I say, to read that Nintendo's been quite lazy with a rerelease of an old game. Shocked I tell you.

I've been playing a mixture of things. Tokyo Mirage, Just Shapes & Beats, Raji, those two meh platformers... It's definitely a period between big games for me (even though the next big title I'll actually get has already been released), but there's just so much to play in so little time!

Balladeer wrote:

Sounds legit.  Of course, if you were still here you'd be instantly destroyed for meeting in a way that doesn't directly help the economy.
 

Yeah, Japan hasn't needed to be so strict because people aren't cunts.

Sam & Max is a properly good point-and-click adventure isn't it? Really good funny stuff, and not as overthought and convoluted as many in the genre can feel. I'm very much enjoying bashing through it with The Lady.

Been playing Hades all the way through to my tenth successful run, it's such an excellent game and I'm at the point now where I wanna read up as much on it as I possibly can just to appreciate it even more.

With the credits rolling on that though its given me the chance to return to Age of Calamity properly, there's not many more impressions that I can share really, I would say I'm finding the characters a lot more likeable than before thanks to the extended stories.

I'm digging Age of Calamity, but been too busy and tired for much gaming lately. I want to finish a few things though, and then Hades is very high on my list, along with a couple of other Indie darlings I want to check out before I listen to the TCGS GOTY show.

I've finally started FE three houses and I can already tell I'm going to fall in love with this game! I've gone for the Waifu house first but i plan to do runs as the other houses anyway!

Oh, every house if full of waifus, trust me.

Buskalilly wrote:

Oh, every house if full of waifus, trust me.

This is quickly becoming apparent