What You've Been Playing This Week

[QualityChimp]

Away for a week and got a bit further on Link's Awakening.
Interestingly, my son seemed to have gotten to the 2nd dungeon, got stuck and stopped playing when he first had it.
However, me playing it and overtaking him spurred him on to play more and get past where he was.
Nice to chat with him about it in the day with him scooting along the sea front, asking me questions about it, but having to remind him I was about 15 when I played it, so not far off his age (10)!

I think he's pretty close to finishing it.

Apart from that, I dipped into Muramasa Rebirth on the Vita (thanks, [MENTION=9465]Brad[/MENTION]!), which was lovely.
Gameplay is decent, if a bit frenetic, but I love the animations. The lead character runs about and puts her sword behind her back.
Just look how gorgeous it is!

[fuse]

I gave Muramasa a decent shot at the time, but as with a lot of the Vanillaware games I found the art is far more impressive than the mechanical stuff going on underneath. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim was their first game I actually finished, which was a half RTS and half adventure game, which actually played to their strengths much better than a character action-type game.

[importaku]

Muramasa is a stunningly beautiful game, wish they would remake it for switch it would be perfect for that. Have it on wii but my console sounds like a jet engine when the disk drive spins up.

[QualityChimp]

I gave Muramasa a decent shot at the time, but as with a lot of the Vanillaware games I found the art is far more impressive than the mechanical stuff going on underneath. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim was their first game I actually finished, which was a half RTS and half adventure game, which actually played to their strengths much better than a character action-type game.

I can totally understand this. A few times I mashed the buttons and everyone was dead, not really knowing how I did it, but did start being a bit more tactical as I improved, but never really felt like it was all part of my skills.

[Cassius_Smoke]

Hades.

I started the game thinking 'ill probably never get to complete this, but its fun.' to clearing it today. Only once mind, pretty sure you have to clear it 100 times to get the true ending.
It's amazing how it all clicks and you progress to kicking serious ass.

[QualityChimp]

I played some more Soul Calibur VI (or whatever number we're up to) and tried the story mode.
I quite like it and it's nice to flesh out the backstory of the characters, but at times you just want to get on with the fighting.

[BaronSqwelch]

Signed up to gamepass so I'm hitting all the Microsoft exclusives I've missed. Gears 5 horde mode is great, but found finding full matches to be an issue!

Also downloaded Destiny 2 to see if all the achievements autopop like the PS5 version trophies did. They do indeed 😆

[importaku]

Been playing dungeon & gravestone on switch this evening that weird micraftesque looking dungeon explorer. Jesus it's brutal, you die at any point while in a dungeon kiss goodbye to your gold and any items you found as well as your level resets when you leave the dungeon too.

However any exp levels you do gain you get points for and those are not lost. There's a skill tree in the menu that you can unleash these points on from expanding your stats to increasing inventory space in various ways as well as opening spell slots there's an obscene amount of items to find but the game is evil as it tells you NOTHING. You are never told what any item does so you have to either save your precious items and not use them or you risk losing one by wasting it. While i was dieing by the bucketload i spawned into another town one that was weird as it had red rivers i discovered the shop sells WAY better items than the regular town but i didn't have enough to buy anything so i went back into the dungeon but died only a few floors in and ended up back in my regular town with the useless item shop.

However i discovered you can goto the item crafting guy and he will craft slime liquid that you get for killing slimes into something called a guiding bead appartently these will allow you to warp between the different towns you find as you repspawn after dieing. After murdering a stationary tree underground it dropped something called tree serum i discovered theres a dieing tree in your town that can be revived with this serum which will grow a random piece of food. The food can be eaten to give yourself a random stat boost for one dungeon trip.

There is so much in this game that i have no clue about and the furthest i have gotten is to floor 12, it's so hard but you do make progress thanks to the level up points been kept so you do slowly get stronger but it has that risk of do you try one more floor or totally bail assuming you can find a guy in there to send you back to town or you had the brains to buy a warp portal crystal before you went in. Also a interesting mechanic of sometimes monster will drop a coffin if you manage to get back to town with it you will find the body of the monster you killed in it which you can then inhabit each monster has various stat boosts so i have been popping in & out of bodies as i get them.

It's fun but one i need to be in the mood to play as it's so punishing.

[QualityChimp]

My mates and I were hankerin' for a return to Red Dead Redemption 2, so Monday I did the 5Gb update, then last night I dipped in again.

Just trying to remind myself how to play, really.
Loads of ways to earn cash, gold and XP and I've tried a bit of all of them, so whilst you're trying to do one job, something else will pop up!

Checked my stats and the longest streak of playing it was 60 days! Thanks, Lockdown 1!

It's quite funny to go from the pandemonium of GTA Online, to the sedate pace of RDR2.

The game still takes my breath away with how beautiful it is.
Last night alone, I cantered my horse ("Hoof Hearted") into a forest as the sun was setting and the dappled light was streaming through the trees, or the sun rose on a misty morning, bathing everything in a muted glow.

I heard a cougar and went to investigate. I found it and tranquilised it, only for the bleedin' Legendary Ghost Cougar to appear and maul me to death!

I'm looking forward to doing a few missions with mates again, but I can't express what a beautiful game it is.
If you let it breath and explore the map, it really is an amazing experience.

[Atticus]

I really must overlook my frustrations with RDR2 and give it another go.

In an effort to play from the collection rather than buy buy buy teh shiny I’ve gone back to Valhalla. It’s a beautiful game … there’s just so damn much of it.

[Paddy]

I'm pressing on with Sen no Kiseki IV but the game doesn't care one iota about how much spare time you have (every element of the game's story/side missions are always detailed in full). I get the feeling I'm nearing the end but if its annoying like SnK II it'll have a really great ending, then tag another 15-20 hours onto the game before it'll let you wrap things up.

I'll finish it but I'll definitely need a palate cleanser after this Lol.

[briareos_kerensky]

All Trails of Cold games drag towards the end...in fact many of Falcom's turn-based RPGs and action games do that. At leat Trails IV is not as bad as III in terms of pacing.

[Paddy]

All Trails of Cold games drag towards the end...in fact many of Falcom's turn-based RPGs and action games do that. At leat Trails IV is not as bad as III in terms of pacing.

I know what you mean Briareos. I understand why there was an epilogue at the end of ToCS II but did not expect it to be the length it was after what to me was an excellent run to what I thought was the game's final boss that preceded it. As it stands the epilogue fell flat though I appreciate it was an opportunity to have the characters from the first two games come together one more time.

Even though there are more hours for me on the in-game clock for ToCS IV the pacing has generally been better. Its quite a stark contrast when I played Ys VIII some time after ToCS III and felt the former respected my time much more with getting a lot done in 2-3 hour sessions though that game does slow things down a little later (it works though given the game's generally high pace traversing and discovering more of the island).

[briareos_kerensky]

Yep, the Ys games feel more rewarding.
Tokyo Xanadu is another game that drags a bit towards the end, but not as badly as the Kiseki games; I felt that Hajimari was a bit better than Trails IV in this regard (though some parts were slower than others, including the last dungeon), and that game had the very tall order of serving as an epilogue for Crossbell and Trails.

I think the problem with the Kiseki games in general is they have so many characters, events, plots and subplots that is very hard to keep tracks of and difficult to give everyone the attention they deserve and properly conclude all the storylines.
In Trails III's and IV's case, it doesn't help that they were supposed to be one game, but Falcom decided to split them.

[importaku]

Been playing more tsuri spirits today, was reading up on the official site about the Gindaco collaboration as the latest update added the stage into the development menu but you can't play it in medal mode yet only in the tournament mode they said it will be released at a later date for play in the medal mode. Seems When you buy a tsuri spirits takoyaki set box it has a QR code on the package when scanned it takes you to a webpage with the password on which you enter into the game via the password menu to unlock the stage early it's a bonus for scoffing takoyaki. After some intensive searching i found the password, it's .......

たこやきたべたいな

It will unlock the stage in special development mode but it costs 88 medals to purchase once unlocked it will appear in the medal mode randomly between stage transitions like all the others do, seems this was the way the crystal caves stage was originally released with the password been used to unlock it early. There's only the frog pond stage from the arcade machine that's missing from the home version, hope it gets added at some point in the future.

Def works too i captured what happens when you use it.