Sno

I only had two disconnects in all of the Splatfest games i played, which was shockingly solid connectivity as far as this game goes, but i saw a lot more of other people on either team disconnecting, though i never ended up in one of those "everybody but two people got dropped" games that people are talking about in random places on the internet. I played in the early hours of the splatfest though, it seems like Splatoon's connectivity gets considerably worse during high activity hours, there's definitely some server stress factors to consider here. Even when i got on again later at night though, it still seemed mostly fine to me. In general, i seem to have a better connection on the game that most people do, and i still find that level of intermittent oddity kind of unacceptable. Even in the best case scenarios, the netcode in Splatoon is kind of its biggest failing. If this was a Halo game, people would be making videos breaking down the mechanics of what's wrong and demanding that Bungie fix it. (Totally a thing that happened, and totally a thing Bungie fixed. Multiple times on multiple games even, Bungie was good about that stuff.) That all said, i'm sure a lot of it can probably be traced back to the Wii U strongly encouraging use of a wi-fi router, and people setting up that router and their system in contexts that have terrible signal reception. Edit: CATS LOST?! BOO! BOO AT THIS POPULARITY CONTEST. We even had more victories, but lost significantly on popularity?!

There's apparently over 800 new items in this update. Some of that will show up in existing worlds, but a lot of it is tied up in the new biomes and the new expert mode. (Which is a toggle at world creation that makes that world more difficult, it seems balanced for large multiplayer groups or already developed characters.)

So Comcept and Keiji Inafune just announced a project called Red Ash, meant to be a spiritual successor to Megaman Legends, and it's showing a not inconsiderable list of development talent returning from those games. The Kickstarter page. Oddly, there's a second Kickstarter page for a Studio 4C tie-in anime. The game project's a little slim on concrete details, it's all very high-concept. The way this thing was launched is a little unusual too, there was no lead-up or announcement as far as i'm aware, it was just sort of put out there. It's also happening too early to receive any real bump from Mighty No 9, which it is ostensibly tied into. I mean, but if this has the potential to more or less be the game Keiji Inafune has been trying to get made for years and years, that's exciting, i'm excited. The Legends series has always seemed to be the thing that man was personally super passionate about.

It just seems like it builds a party out of your faction members and then once that party is matchmade it additionally goes and finds a party in the opposing faction to match you against. Despite being in the same party for all of those games i was definitely playing against different dog teams after every match, i don't think i ever once played against the same dog team twice in a row.

This makes me chuckle. Kind of curious to see how that goes down.

The big 1.3 update that just went live is, i am told, one of the biggest overhauls Terraria has had. Loads of new biomes in newly generated worlds, a new "expert" mode with tons of different loot and a significantly greater challenge, proper support for steam matchmaking, cloud saves, and achievements, etc. Loads of other little mechanical improvements i've noticed, like the overhauled fluid physics. (The new version seems like it might be a tiny bit crashy though, some of the new worlds i've generated seem to cause Terraria to CTD on longer play sessions, but not all of them have and none of my old worlds have.) Anyways, that all seems like a good reason for a thread resurrection. So yeah, Terraria's still pretty rad with its weird hybrid of minecraft and metroidvania sensibilities, there's just now a whole lot more of it, and overhauled matchmaking is way, way overdue. Rather, the presence of any matchmaking is long overdue. You seemingly don't even need to fuss with port forwarding anymore.

That is something i had completely given up hope of seeing. I am happy to be wrong, definitely super excited. Also, Namco's putting out Tales of Zestiria on Steam. I guess that's fairly in line with the growing japanese games presence on Steam, but fan-favorite Tales of Symphonia is being offered as a pre-order incentive, which is fairly odd both for the obvious reason and that it's also never been on PC before. (Well, it will be offered as a pre-order incentive. It isn't yet, it's one of those dumb FILL THE PROGRESS BAR schemes.) I have to imagine that Tales of Symphonia will also be available individually at some point. I guess i think this is a cool thing though, that these games are coming to the PC, I've always rather liked the Tales games despite their many shortcomings. Japanese developers being so PC averse was one of the reasons i mostly stuck with consoles last gen, seeing stuff like this show up on the PC is making the XBO and the PS4 look increasingly less appealing.

I HAVE BECOME THE CAT KING. YOU MAY REFER TO ME AS CAT KING SNO. So if you get in a good party during the Splatfest, stick with it. The faction vs faction nature of it means there's no party shuffling across the teams. Once i had already been playing for a bit, i landed in a really great party that did not lose a game, it was a 20+ game winning streak, we rocketed through the longest Splatfest rank and all became kings and queens. (Which seems to be the maximum achievable rank in Splatfests.) I looked at my group's Inklings in the hub after i eventually bailed out and their ranks were i think A-, an A+, a B- and me as a B. It didn't feel like anybody in particular was carrying anything though, everybody had strong games and weak games and everybody knew what they were doing and how to back each other up. Splatoon really does feel like it supports interesting coordinated team tactics quite well, Nintendo seems to have created a game with a potentially very high ceiling, i'm very curious to see the 4v4 parties playlist whenever that goes up. (The game's wonky netcode will probably limit how competitive anybody gets with it though.) As for the Splatfest as an event... I mean, it's Turf War with marginally more static teams, but no option to join friends. I guess i'll have earned some super seashells for upgrading gear when all of this is done? Nintendo does go all out for making it feel special though, with all of the unique music and the significantly reconfigured hub, nevermind that every map also has a night time variant for Splatfests. Also, miiverse posts are everywhere. There are fireworks in the sky that take the shape of miiverse posts. Also, wow, the kraken nerf is frickin` great. I was able to completely halt the approach of a kraken on several occasions with my dual squelcher. Incidentally, sure seems like there's a whole lot more bubblers in play than before. The ink resistance nerf is really severe too, but not so severe that i want to use something else instead of it. Also, I didn't get to play the tower game type when that went up, and i guess i can't while this is on. Splatfest seems to entirely replace the other playlists and matchmaking options.

Any games that used the Super FX chip are games that Nintendo seems to flatly refuse to try and emulate despite 3rd party emulation groups having been able to do so for years. Regardless, it means you can't buy stuff like Yoshi's Island or Star Fox. (I will argue that the SNES Star Fox is the only good Star Fox game, it's a legitimately great rail shooter despite the limited technology, and Yoshi's Island is probably among Nintendo's very best and most creatively unrestrained platformers.) Square's games tend towards noticeably absent, generally believed to be because they have a lucrative business re-releasing those games on their own terms, but games like Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Super Mario RPG, and the SNES Final Fantasy games are all as essential to the SNES as any of Nintendo's own games. (Some of these are available on the Wii's VC, but it looks like none of them are available on Wii U VC. I'm also going to throw out some special attention for Secret of Mana, that's probably my favorite in that bunch.) Those are probably the ones everybody would agree on to some degree. The SNES has a ridiculously massive library of great games though, i could go on listing off personal favorites and it probably wouldn't look anything remotely like another person's list of SNES favorites. There's a fair argument for the SNES being one of the strongest platforms in the history of the medium.

So the story in this game kind of hit me pretty hard. But Talos Principle is also a game, and i feel like there's a strange discordance between what it's saying and what it's doing. Before getting to that, though, i do want to say that i think it's a tremendously good puzzle game. It's definitely in the same ecosystem as something like Portal, as a very mechanics focused first-person adventure game, but it obviously doesn't have a sexy core conceit like Portal. Moving around crates and connecting lasers are all very old-hat game design, but Talos Principle gets absolutely devious in the ways it has all of those disparate mechanics interact with each other, it grows to some pretty preposterous rube-goldbergian setups towards the end of the game. Talos Principle also does some absolutely brilliant usability things like the snap-to jumping that keeps you from having to fuss with imprecise first-person platforming, it goes a long way to preventing scenarios where you feel like you could make things work if only the physics and the environmental space were a tiny bit more cooperative. For the most part, i felt like it was fairly clear when something was going to work or wasn't, i felt the game was pretty clearly readable. Back to that initial point, there is kind of an overriding mundanity to the proceedings that strongly clashes with the narrative urgency you're presented with. Perhaps it's very much intentional, like the early parts of both Portal games, you're a rat in a lab, but Talos Principle never really goes beyond that. Even puzzles that have you seemingly subvert the mechanics of the games, the star sigils, are ultimately presented as just being another intended facet of the simulation. You're completely a slave to the simulation until you suddenly aren't upon your final ascent up the tower, until which it's all just good times in puzzle land reading about how dire the world "out there" is. It maybe wouldn't feel so strange if the game wasn't as long as it is, because it feels actually super long for a game of this type, it almost overstays its welcome. Also, definitely the weirdest implementation of the asynchronous multiplayer mechanics from Dark Souls i've seen yet. So you find buckets of paint and can pain QR codes around the world with bits of dialogue determined by what you've accomplished and what you've said in your conversations with Milton, and those QR codes will appear in the games of people on your Steam friends list. There might also even be streamed player ghosts? I'm not sure about that one. Super weird to see in a puzzle adventure game, either way. I love this game though. I think it's one of the very, very best adventure games i've ever played. I would recommend it without hesitation. I sort of hate the "Hoho! Croteam makes all those dumb shooters and has now made a SMART game" that has been surrounding Talos Principle, i think it makes some strange assumptions about the value of adventure games versus other genres and also about the effort that goes into creating an entertaining shooter, but i can't deny that it's surprising to see this game come from Croteam. Certainly, it makes Croteam a far more interesting developer capable of much broader range than i had ever before assumed. Edit: Also, i was super amused to not only find Croteam's predilection for dumbass easter eggs intact, but also find it worked into the narrative as something other AI's in the story acknowledge as baffling components of their simulated world.

If you know what you're doing, less than two hours, but for a first playthrough, probably anywhere from 6-10. Maybe more if you try to do 100% on a blind run.

I wasn't actually sure what's available for the SNES on the Wii U VC, so i looked into it and found that it's a disappointingly slim selection. It's unfortunate to see how much of what could be considered "essential" for the SNES is absent, but of what's there i'd recommend: Axelay, as you suggest, is pretty damn rad. It's also a pretty uneven game, the mode 7 levels don't really hold up very well, but it's definitely one of the SNES's standout shmups. Megaman X - X3 are kind of essential SNES games, imo. (The first one at the very least.) Megaman 7 too, i'd argue, i think it's a pretty under-appreciated entry in the classic series. Earthbound, of course. It really is as good as people say it is. Definitely check it out. The DKC games, but only if you're interested. People are so back and forth these days about whether or not those games hold up. Super Mario World and A Link to the Past are definitely another couple of essential games. I still think the original F-Zero is a ton of fun. (Protip: In addition to leaning into those sharp turns with the triggers, tap the accelerator rapidly to turn even more sharply and without losing speed.) Uhh... Cybernator's real cool, i like that game a lot. Kirby's Dream Course is maybe the best minigolf game ever made. I wouldn't really recommend anything else there, but a lot of that's going to be my own biases and interests, so maybe somebody else will step in with more. For real though, there isn't a lot there. (Looking into it though, the SNES wasn't very well represented on the Wii's VC either. I guess it was just less noticeable amongst other platforms being fairly well accounted for.)

Yeah, it kind of totally does, especially if you want to think about abilities in the character progression, such as hacking and telekinesis, as akin to how the traversal mechanics of a metroidvania open up access more equipment for you. Fundamentally though, the normal arc through the game, created by the pass codes and key cards you set out to track down, has you winding back and forth through SS2's believably constructed environment in a fashion not dissimilar at all from a metroidvania-style world design. You constantly revisit old areas to engage with new avenues, System Shock 2 is one big interconnected environment. (Plus a few slightly smaller and more linear ones.)

A patch is apparently also coming on July 1st. It contains a lot of behind-the-scenes matchmaking adjustments to prepare for the splatfests, but will also contain a number of balance updates! Stealth jump, ninja squid, and ink resistance are all being nerfed. (Stealth Jump and Ninja Squid are both slower, and Ink Resistance will be less effective.) Ninja Squid probably needed it, though i don't actually see how slowing down Stealth Jump will be much of a nerf, and even though i love and use Ink Resistance, right now it's so good that it's the only footwear skill worth using. All of those potentially, but that last one especially, will make aggressive styles of play a little less viable. (I would agree that Ink Resistance is too good as it is, but in addition to nerfing it specifically, i also think the negative effect of enemy ink should be slightly reduced across the board. Enemy ink creating traversal barriers is an important part of the game, but the current implementation is an extremely punishing mechanic that disproportionately affects certain short-range weapons.) Ink Strike has a bug that, as i understand it, causes it to paint more ground than intended when dropped on certain taller environment features. That's being fixed. Not really a nerf, so Ink Strikes will probably continue to be used way too much. (It is not uncommon to see 3 or 4 Ink Strikes happen virtually at the same time at the outset of a match just as people get the first instance of their super up.) Kraken is being nerfed! It will now have a significant knockback when shot at, similar to how the Bubbler works. This desperately needed to happen, the kraken as a lazy panic button has become a massive nuisance online. It reminds me of the problems Halo Reach had with the Armor Lock ability before they patched in limits to its effectiveness. Also, more weapons and maps coming in the next few days. I've also finished up a lot of the fussing around with gear upgrades that i was focused on and have set forth to get deeper into ranked, but... Ranked is not a happy place for me. Losing a string of 4 games when you have, yourself, consistently gone anywhere from 12/4 to 18/6 while the rest of your team is just completely imploding? You can't help but feel salty. My solution has been to, against all instincts, stay with the matchmaking party. The people who suck will be the first ones to drop, and if both teams are made up of good players, you yourself have more of an opportunity to decide the outcome of the match. I need one more win and i'm into B, but just as i was about to play that match, the maps rotated out and... Nope, not going to risk that on Port or Rig. I've been using the .96 gal for ranked and it's been incredibly dependable. Keep sprinklers in obnoxious spots with good coverage, enemies will understand they can't take the hill without destroying it, they'll focus their fire on it instead of you, easy and repeated kills. (The .96 gal is an accurate two hit kill with good, safe range.) All while the echolocator super keeps you aware of any sneaky flank attacks.

Keep in mind that Zero Mission gives you waypoints to follow on the map and that the world is generally more linearly laid out, it's a huge step back from how guided Fusion was, but it's still more guided than Super. (Though, on the other hand, it's missing the x-ray scanner from Super.) If you accept that you lose the traversal mechanics metaphor for unlocking progress gates and just have literal keys to unlock most gates, while also still retaining difficulty gates in the form of the game's bosses, there's a strong argument to make for Dark Souls essentially being the 3D Castlevania we always deserved. It's not as if the world design in Dark Souls is a uniquely Metroid/Castlevania thing though, it's definitely a pretty common element of japanese game design to have intricately gated worlds that twist back around on themselves as part of the intended flow. (I've seen people argue that its equivalent in western design are games born out of the Ultima Underworld tradition, and if you think about how you loop through a playthrough of System Shock 2, it's easy to see the parallel.)

About the dialogue system in Binary Domain: Your responses modify relationship values with the other characters, and based on that the story can play out in some subtly different ways including multiple different endings. I like Binary Domain quite a bit, it's a generally under appreciated game, i feel. One of the issues i think people generally have with it is that it has this kind of superfluous skill system that leaves you with a first impression of the game where all you can really focus on is that it seems to have awful, swimmy shooting mechanics. It gets better, but it's kind of a bad way to start a game that is more third-person shooter than any overt RPG.

Zero Mission strips out a lot of Super's more interesting quirks and mechanics, something true of both of the GBA games, and something that always disappointed me. I mean, and while Zero Mission's stealth sequence is very cool and ambitious, i prefer the purer focus of Super Metroid. I also feel Super's world design is way more interesting and elaborate than Zero Mission, which is somewhat restrained by trying to present itself as a simulacrum of the original Metroid's world layout. Super's definitely also the more atmospheric of the two games, it's dripping with moody ambience. (Though i do dig Zero Mission's energetic cartoon aesthetic.) They're both unquestionably great games though.

Both the NA and EU splatfests are apparently now happening on July 4th. So... Yeah.

ODST is completely standalone, and in that sense it's probably actually a pretty great introduction to Halo. Personally, it's also my favorite Halo campaign. Its huge open-ended spaces do a pretty great job of showcasing Halo's enemy types and their AI hierarchy, things like grunts losing morale if their leaders are defeated, or a hunter berserking if its partner dies. It's great figuring out how to respond to those shifting dynamics, or even manipulating them to your benefit. I love the way that series drops you into big unpredictable combat arenas with all of these AI actors carrying out their own distinct set of interactions in relation to other AI's in the arena. Also, none of the other games really ever bother to explain their mechanics either. Did you pick up on there being different damage types and damage resistances? Broadly, it's energy against shielded enemies, ballistics against soft targets, and learning how to exploit that dynamic is key to winning on the higher difficulties. (Then there's also headshot capable weapons and anti-armor damage against armored targets, or against parts of targets that are armored. In absence of anti-armor weapons, and noting that last detail, a lot of enemies and vehicles also have weaknesses, like the back plating on the hunters, or the engine exhaust on the wraiths.) If you mean to play through those games on legendary, you will enjoy yourself immensely more if you learn those dynamics and carry out decisive and informed actions based around that understanding. (Combining a charged plasma pistol with a headshot capable ballistic will be your bread and butter.) That is all to say that hanging back and trying to safely snipe at enemies with a battle rifle is massively counter-productive. (Especially in Reach, where the Elites will actively hide to let their shields recharge from whatever gradual damage you manage to accrue against them. Incidentally, Reach is probably the most fun i've had with a solo legendary playthrough in Halo.) Either Halo 3 or Reach. Halo 3 is terrific all around, it's the best game in the series. It's also the last part of a trilogy, so none of that campaign is going to make sense to a new player. However, it bears reiterating that Halo 3 is so good. Reach's campaign might be a tiny bit better, and it's another standalone story like ODST, but Reach is a notably weaker competitive game than 3. (Which probably isn't a concern here, i'm guessing.) Halo 4 is... I like Halo 4 a lot, but 343's first game is not in the same league as the majority of Bungie's efforts. Only Halo 2 is weaker.

I'm quite certain that what is presently available on Steam is all there is of the game at the moment. A prologue and two episodes, with the core narrative just barely getting underway before a jarring cliff-hanger occurs. It would be easy to be upset about how it's been presented, but honestly, i found myself getting kind of lost in how much quirky detail is crammed into what's there, and i really just want more of it. Swery's dropped a few hints that work is underway on the second "season" of the game, but whether the game is doing well enough on Steam to justify that or anything beyond it is kind of up in the air.

Have they announced any general release window for the game?

Talos Principle was the only game i bought during the sale that was actually on sale for the steam sale. Also, holy shit is that game ever incredible. I am just absolutely floored by how remarkably confident and thoughtful that thing is. I will probably have a lot of things to say about it whenever i get around to finishing it. That game is also very long, it almost overstays its welcome.

Kinda not really? D4 is definitely all the way invested in a few small locations. Keep in mind that you can exit out of the "dream" at any time to return to your apartment though, there's new things happening there after almost every event. Sometimes events even play out across both the dream and apartment locations.

So i love Axiom Verge, and to make a comparison to another nostalgia-evoking game, i think that when it's right on point, it's awesome in all the ways i think Shovel Knight was awesome. (It generally understands what makes the things its pulling from work and is able to extrapolate out on those assumptions in interesting new ways while also playing up some nostalgic vibes.) I don't love it as much as Shovel Knight, though. The boss fights really need to be pointed out first of all, because they suck. They're terrible boss fights. They're big and flashy, but they're built around extremely basic loops with no curve balls to push you to adapt. If you can defeat a boss by standing in one spot shooting and only occasionally jumping, it's a bad boss, and that's almost every boss in that game. These bosses are clearly inspired by Super Metroid's bosses, but those bosses get the curve balls right, the odd tracking projectiles that fly at you from weird angles and push you to keep repositioning yourself during the fight. I mean, but even as simple as these fights are, i wouldn't complain about them if they weren't such colossal damage sponges. There's no excuse for such simple boss fights being dragged out for so long. I think a lot of the weapons are super redundant, it feels like they could have been collapsed into maybe 3 or 4 archetypes with stacking upgrades or something. I have some doubts about how well the progression through the game world flows, but i've been back and forth in random wanderings so much in this playthrough that i have no concept of how everything fits together. I feel like i'd need to do a second run before i could make any real judgements about how well designed the world is. If nothing else though, it's an appealingly enormous world with a ton of stuff to do, it's quite a massive game as metroidvanias go. I think the game has some pretty brilliant traversal mechanics and i think that is where this game succeeds the most, it's hard to take a formula as well worn as a metroidvania and have some relatively unique spins on it. Oh my god that soundtrack is amazing. I generally love the visual aesthetic, the bizarre giger-esque environments and the way some more modern particle and pixel shader effects are layered onto an otherwise consistent retro aesthetic somehow without feeling incongruous, the game looks super nice. I wish the camera didn't zoom out for boss fights though, it sort of ruins the look the game is going for. The "secret worlds" made me laugh, those are wonderful. That's quite an inventive nod to Metroid.

I think D4 is rad and I hope it gets its season two. .