Another quiet month as far as games played. Still focused a bunch on Mahjong Soul, slowly getting closer to Jade Room. I did play a few games, and went back to Balatro a bit because it’s so fucking good. And I tried a fun little thing that I’ll quickly comment on.
Big focus this month will be on all the presentations that happened… I’ll just talk about 3 of them because nothing else was worth talking about. In fact one of the 3 is also not worth talking about, but dunking on Lizardman is worth.
Skald: Against the Black Priory
Skald is a classic style computer RPG in the style of the classic Ultima games. It features turn-based combat that is very similar, as well as overall adventuring and questing that is very similar.
This ends up both looking and playing great, though in the end I found it to be both really hard combat-wise (and some of the enemy AI would sometimes glitch in some areas, where I’d get a quest to do something but the enemies I had to talk to would instantly attack me), combined with the actual progression being too linear.
Still a fun game worth checking out.
Monster Hunter Stories
I’m semi-new to Monster Hunter, with Rise being the first one I gave a proper chance to (the only one I tried before that being Freedom on PSP and it just didn’t click with me) and ended up loving it. I played Stories 2 and that was super fun, but I did skip on the first Stories the first time around, so I played it now instead since they ported it to modern consoles. I actually had a massive issue at first, with loading times being literally 30+ seconds every load screen (even battles)… Well it turns out my micro SD slot on my Switch is messed up (it’s in 1-bit mode for some reason, I either need to replace it or just make sure the current connection is solid). Oops! So I moved the game to the console memory for now and that load time issue was fixed.
The game is pretty good. It’s pretty much exactly like the sequel, just with different areas and slightly different monster selection. The combat still has the selection of attack type, and if you counter with the correct type you get extra damage and defense, and if your monster uses the same type as you and it’s a counter, you completely stop the enemy attack and deal even more damage. The monster collecting I still find a bit slow because of how long it takes to get eggs from dens, and then it takes so long to level up new monsters (unless I’m missing something).
A good time overall.
Fun idea: Playing PC games from my phone
I bought a controller thing for my phone and installed Parsec on both my phone and PC so I can run any game from my PC and play it on my phone. I used Retroarch for my initial testing (making this a cool retro game device), but I can just play whatever now. Works great within the same network, the input latency is pretty much not noticeable. I haven’t tried it from an external network yet, but it’s pretty cool, works great for my usage and if it works from work during lunch breaks, even better. I went with the Gamesir X2S because it was like half the price of competitors. The thing itself feels a bit cheap-plastic-y but not THAT bad, it has hall effect joysticks so it won’t drift, nice buttons and it holds your phone really well (I have a Google Pixel 8, so additionally I’ll say the camera bump doesn’t impact usability). Some cases might be too big for it though, mine was so I need to take my phone out of its case to use it. Once you do connect through Parsec, your phone and controller is detected as an Xbox controller, so it should work on any game that is Xbox Controller compatible.
My only complaint with apparently all of these phone controller things (like the Backbone and Razer Kishi, which were my other options) is that the USB-C port on them is only a power passthrough, so all it enables is to charge your phone while using it. I was hoping to do something cool like plugging in an HDMI cable to hook it to the TV, but nope, not a thing because it’s not a full passthrough connector. I tried casting my phone to my chromecast instead, but the latency was like 0.3 seconds from input to action, which is a LOT. Basically unplayable, which is unfortunate. I hope other similar controllers in the future start including that function. At minimum so I could plug in my IEMs at the same time (which I have a USB-C plug for).
I really did all this because I was heavily thinking about getting a Lenovo Legion Go (because Best Buy was selling them at a pretty large discount recently), but I figured I’d try out a cheaper solution first, and this isn’t too bad, surprisingly.
E3 Commentary
We sure had ourselves a Summer Games Fest. Good thing Microsoft and Nintendo were around because Sony’s presentation from May combined with Summer Games Fest was… really bad. So here’s my impressions for each of them.
Summer Games Fest
Finding highlights for this stupid show by professional idiot Geoff Keighley was pretty hard. A highlight CANNOT be something that was already announced, and especially cannot be a trailer with no new information. Some previously announced game getting a release date, that can be a highlight if it’s not a fucking year or more away. A cinematic trailer for a previously announced game, no. Even a gameplay trailer, it has to be REALLY good to be a highlight, and even then I kinda think it would need a release date.
So what were the highlights? Civilization 7 (though it showed basically nothing of the game). Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero because it got a release date. Fatal Fury: City of Wolves. Mighty Morphing Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind. Killer Bean was a huge hit on the twitters though I kinda question that right now, but I feel I do have to mention it.
That’s it, nothing else was interesting. 43 games were shown and only 5 can vaguely count as highlights. And even the highlights aren’t that interesting. When a retro-ish Power Rangers beat’em up is one of the biggest highlights in your show, you know you fucked up. This show was SHIT.
There were other shows around this, like Day of the Devs, Future Game Show, Sexism Show… I only saw bits and pieces, and none of them seemed to have anything interesting. The biggest highlight that I even noticed from these was Abyss X Zero. That looked cool. And one of them had the release date for Demonschool apparently.
Thank fuck Nintendo and Microsoft had shows because man, the gaming industry needs something. Geoff Keighley needs to stop, and companies need to stop working with him. It clearly ain’t working out for anyone.
Microsoft Showcase
After the absolute nothingness that was Summer Games Fest, my hype for the Xbox Showcase was at a 0. But they promised 30 games, but outside of a few vague rumors, I was expecting very little to stand out. And starting with a fucking Call of Duty game is not how you lead a show that ends up being good… Or so I thought. Because right away we’re hit by the biggest motherfucker of them all, Doom. And it looked beautiful. That alone made it a great show, but there were a few other highlights.
So to me the big highlights were Doom: The Dark Ages (which just looks fun as fuck), Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (a cool new western-developed JRPG), Gears of War: E-Day (it’s Gears, if you like the cover-based shooty stuff, nice), somehow Perfect Dark (the trailer had the issue of Joanna Dark not looking at all like Joanna Dark (she was attractive in the previous games), so it took until further into it for me to even notice it was Perfect Dark… but the gameplay looked really interesting), and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 got a release date. What’s important to note about these highlights is that they’re all major games, unlike the Summer Game Fest which had a Power Rangers beat’em up as its biggest highlight.
And outside of the highlights there were still some interesting things like the Metal Gear Solid 3 remake gameplay, the Indiana Jones gameplay looked maybe good, the remake of Age of Mythology, a 2024 release target for Avowed so that’s probably out soon, I think people were excited for that State of Decay 3 trailer… and probably other small stuff that didn’t click with me at all. This was overall a solid show.
Not that there weren’t lowlights. That Dragon Age Veilguard trailer was an extreme level of fucking awful (and follow-up gameplay reveals were pretty disappointing too). That South of Midnight gameplay trailer looked crappy (that low framerate cutscene thing looks really bad and the actual gameplay wasn’t particularly interesting). I think the biggest issue is that a lot of the stuff shown was 2025. The only things for this year are the shitty-looking Dragon Age, Avowed (which has no specific date) and basically some DLC. Really disappointing for this year.
Definitely a huge step up from the Summer Game Fest.
Nintendo Direct
I had pretty low expectations for this one, partly because the only believable Nintendo leaker at the time, Pyoro, had almost no information for this at all and the 4 things he did leak for this weren’t that interesting (2 of them only appeared in the japanese direct, one was a collection), and one of them was something he jumped to conclusions about and said the wrong thing (he likely saw images of the Zelda game and assumed it was another remake because of the graphic style). Of course he ended up unraveling the source of his leaks (Nintendo employee that had access to select back-end eshop stuff) and he’s gone now, and whoever else had that same source are probably done as well (if there was anyone).
So Nintendo could help Microsoft save this “E3” season, and they did a pretty solid job. This show was very good, I think I underrated it at the time.
The big highlights were Mario & Luigi: Brothership (completely unexpected since Alpha Dream is obviously not around anymore), Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake getting a release date, Dragon Quest 1+2 HD-2D Remake being announced, Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero (a sequel to Phantom Brave, 21 years later? … yeah I’ll take it), the Marvel vs Capcom arcade collection, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (you play as Zelda, and it has its own unique gameplay style… that’s very cool), and of course our first look at Metroid Prime 4 which looks great and is coming in 2025.
And there were some more minor highlights like Super Mario Party Jamboree, Ace Attorney Investigations which includes the sequel that never got localized, The Hundred Line Last Defense Academy, Romancing Saga 2 remake, Donkey Kong Country Returns HD (full price which is a bit much but the game IS great so you should get it if you never played it) and Fantasian Neo Dimension. There were other things at varying levels of okay (or for specific fanbases, like the Hello Kitty game).
There was just a lot of stuff here. This show was very solid, and again all the highlights are pretty big games and not, you know, a 2D Power Rangers beat’em up. Just Nintendo showing everyone else how it’s done.
Really makes me wonder when Nintendo are planning on getting the Switch 2 out/revealed because there’s still some heavy hitters left for Switch, which is different than how they tend to deal with end-of-life consoles (Wii and Wii U had basically nothing in their last year of life before their successors).
Leave a reply