Volgarr the Viking.

1: (Fuck yeah 4 months in I have 'completed' a game...wooo!) Animal Crossing New Horizons (Switch) 90 hrs

Yes there's no completing this game, but I have paid off all my home loans, had my KK Slider concert and seen the credits roll, so I'm calling it a completion, and at 90 hours played so far it's more than probably any other game I play this year! And I'm certainly not stopping playing any time soon, gotta get the house sorted
Super chill, easy to pick up and just potter around for an hour or two after work, to de-stress from corona bullshit. I have loved all the other games (though I didn't play the Wii one) so I was probably never going to dislike this. I will say however that the constant dialogues and lack of simple Quality of Life options (batch crafting, the ability to turn off the fucking puns after EVERY critter catch) drag this down to an [8]

32. Q-YO Blaster - Switch (30 mins)

Credits have rolled, so in it goes. Horizontal forced scrolling shmup that's currently 89p, which is a ridiculous price for a genuinely competent shooter. Has multiple characters and weapon choices from the off, which presumably makes it fairly replayable, plus two difficultly levels, presumably for mortals and Gods. I went for beginner and had a blast. The power ups, pulse and super weapon all work well, the bullet waves aren't irritating and everything soaks damage & explodes in a meatily satisfying way. Probably deserves a [9] for the price, but I'll go with an [8] as it's usually closer to a tenner. Really enjoyed it.

17. Splasher (Switch)
If Super Meat Boy did a sex with Splatoon, their offspring would resemble this. One of the Ubisoft Rayman people was heavily involved in this and there's a good hunk of that thrown in as well. Mostly very good. 2D platform your way past saw blades, lasers, slime and other familiar obstacles. Your guy has a cannon that fires water (to clean paint), red paint (to stick to walls and ceilings) and, for the final third of the game, yellow bouncy paint which is great fun. Combine these for enemy kills, light puzzle solving, and boinging and sproinging all around the place and dying frequently. It's good and from the hard-as-nails, compulsively addictive, one more go, holy fuck thank god that bits over, Celeste and Meat Boy sub-genre. £4 or so at the moment. 

Complaints - It's not as tight as Celeste or Meatboy, slightly over-sensitive on the controls for my tastes. Little mid-air course corrections can shoot you off in the wrong direction. It's mostly fine but means if you don't get a jump bang on, you've got less chance of intuitively saving yourself, slightly less fluid than the top-tier examples. Plenty of times I nearly nailed a landing but instincitvely readjusted towards the middle of a platform and ended up over-correcting off the edge. 

The checkpointing is a bit off as well. There's 22 stages divided by three or four checkpoints. The rough pattern of each of those is mild segments through to really tough segment, checkpoint then back to mild. So you end up spending most of the time rattling through the same mild segments to have another crack at the tough bit. Once you've played Celeste or dealt with the almost telepathic checkpointing in Rive, it's less tolerable (although in fairness both of these games were made after). Some of the collectables you only need to pick up on the first run, some you need to do everytime. So you end up repeating a lot of side-stuff that you've already got, or just getting sick of making the same tricky detour and leaving it. 

Neither of those issues would stop me from recommending it. The final few levels, it gets properly tough throughout. Run and fire bouncy paint at the floor to boing into the air and fire red paint mid air to stick to the ceiling, but now there's a time activated laser that will fire in a couple of seconds of detecting you, so run across the ceiling firing sticky paint at it as you go, then jump off then ceiling through a narrow gap to fire water at a activation switch to bring up a platform which you'll need to bounce off onto a wall that you have to run up but there's a moving cannon spraying drops of acid at the wall so you'll need to time it right but there's an enemy closing in on the platform you're on so you've got to get that first. If you get past all that there's a small platform where you can stand still for a second and catch your breath, before the next hellish sequence and maybe, hopefully, a checkpoint after that. Ah you jumped a split second too early. Try all that again. 
[8]   

3 - Hellblade
Great sound design, some really good visuals, mediocre fight mechanics and decent puzzles. With about 7 hours it's not too long, and it's worth to see the end, I enjoyed that. Play with headphones.

Onto Zone of the Enders 2 now, I've finished it years ago on the ps2, but since I'm building Gundam again I needed some slick robot designs.

12. Shinobi (Arcade) - 75mins

First time I've played this, it didn't disappoint and has aged quite well for the most part.

Only real negative is some cheap boss fights, but that was standard for most arcade games of the time.

The series only improved from here, but I think this is still worth a play for retro enthusiasts.

7/10

My list

Ooh.  That one's sitting on my Wii U pile of shame...

Considering all the big games are getting (or have already gotten) Switch re-releases, I could probably whip through that pile in a couple of weeks.  Might be time to plug it back into the telly, then box it up for good.

18: Animal Crossing New Horizons (Switch) 5/10

Well I haven't played it in a week and don't feel the need to check in, so I guess that's that!

This is the sort of game where I enjoy reading about other people's experience and seeing what they've done with it.  Unless there's some kind of in game reward for being creative, I don't tend to do anything out of the ordinary.  On top of that I don't really like crafting.  In any case I found it to be really clunky to play, with repetitive text boxes slowing things down further.

My island was kind of functional.  No grand design. I guess it looked okay.  My house had nothing in it except a bed and KK Slider pictures on the walls.  The KK Slider pictures were fantastic and my favourite thing about the game.

Was mostly just checking in every evening to pick fruit to pay off my mortgage and dig holes to get fossils.  Felt like a chore.

Still happy to read articles about people finding quirky things to do with it; it's just not for me.


19: Persona 4 Golden (Vita) 10/10


Loved re-playing this.  This and Everybody's Golf are what I think about when I think of the Vita.  One of my absolute favourite JRPGs.

Enjoyed my time with Persona 3 earlier in the year, and while I'm not sure this has a better story and characters (They're pretty close & I'm leaning towards P4G right now.  That might be recency bias.  But this game does have the best ever kiddie in all video games (Nanako!) and Chie) it's certainly a lot more player-friendly.  The interface is a lot less clunky.  You can directly control all the party members in battle, and it's kind enough to let you re-start not TOO far back if you get killed.  That goes a long way.

Like P3 the draw for me is spending time with the different characters you meet.  Being the best and most selfless person you can be, and helping others to do the same.  It's very touching in places and the series seems to be really good in giving you characters who are worth getting to know.

The dungeons are okay and the battles are quite good but neither are the real draw for me.

It has a good sense of humour on the whole.  Not all of it has aged terribly well (If you want to crack up a Persona series writer, just show them a pic of a bloke in a skirt.  I bet most of them have a Carry On film in their top 10's too) but it did make me crack up or grin a bunch of times.  It has a sweet heart but it's not afraid to be a bit goofy from time to time. My favourite goofy bit is when the gang become a killer pop band for a minute.  

It's a cracking game isn't it.

Started on P5R last night - I saw in another thread you mentioned P5's translation was a bit flat.  Playing it straight after P4G the writing is noticeably weaker, at least early on.  Still fun though.

35. Whipseey and the Lost Atlas - Switch (40 minutes)

Mildly entertaining no frills Kirby type with fairly solid foundation in place for a better game.  With more levels and a bit of extra care tweaking the collision detection this could've been a decent budget type.  I had the six stages done in just over half an hour.  Professional reviews might reach for the phrase 'criminally short', but is it though? (Galaxy brain).  It's eighty nine pence at the moment, short games are far less of a swizz these days than they were when they retailed for £40ish in 1990.  This one reminds me of the Disney types of the era - pretty good while they last.  File alongside but slightly above Squidlit in the ultra budget 8-bit indie platform homage genre I will henceforth refer to as quidlits. [6] @89p, probably less than [5] at full price (£5).

Aye, with this sort of stuff sure. Any talk of 'revolutionary' can stay away from my 10s too; a top score for me is just an exceptionally good game.

Yar. The quality of a game isn't tied to its price per se, but the score at the bottom of my crappy internet reviews might be.

monkey wrote:

17. Splasher (Switch) If Super Meat Boy did a sex with Splatoon, their offspring would resemble this. One of the Ubisoft Rayman people was heavily involved in this and there's a good hunk of that thrown in as well. Mostly very good. 2D platform your way past saw blades, lasers, slime and other familiar obstacles. Your guy has a cannon that fires water (to clean paint), red paint (to stick to walls and ceilings) and, for the final third of the game, yellow bouncy paint which is great fun. Combine these for enemy kills, light puzzle solving, and boinging and sproinging all around the place and dying frequently. It's good and from the hard-as-nails, compulsively addictive, one more go, holy fuck thank god that bits over, Celeste and Meat Boy sub-genre. £4 or so at the moment.  Complaints - It's not as tight as Celeste or Meatboy, slightly over-sensitive on the controls for my tastes. Little mid-air course corrections can shoot you off in the wrong direction. It's mostly fine but means if you don't get a jump bang on, you've got less chance of intuitively saving yourself, slightly less fluid than the top-tier examples. Plenty of times I nearly nailed a landing but instincitvely readjusted towards the middle of a platform and ended up over-correcting off the edge.  The checkpointing is a bit off as well. There's 22 stages divided by three or four checkpoints. The rough pattern of each of those is mild segments through to really tough segment, checkpoint then back to mild. So you end up spending most of the time rattling through the same mild segments to have another crack at the tough bit. Once you've played Celeste or dealt with the almost telepathic checkpointing in Rive, it's less tolerable (although in fairness both of these games were made after). Some of the collectables you only need to pick up on the first run, some you need to do everytime. So you end up repeating a lot of side-stuff that you've already got, or just getting sick of making the same tricky detour and leaving it.  Neither of those issues would stop me from recommending it. The final few levels, it gets properly tough throughout. Run and fire bouncy paint at the floor to boing into the air and fire red paint mid air to stick to the ceiling, but now there's a time activated laser that will fire in a couple of seconds of detecting you, so run across the ceiling firing sticky paint at it as you go, then jump off then ceiling through a narrow gap to fire water at a activation switch to bring up a platform which you'll need to bounce off onto a wall that you have to run up but there's a moving cannon spraying drops of acid at the wall so you'll need to time it right but there's an enemy closing in on the platform you're on so you've got to get that first. If you get past all that there's a small platform where you can stand still for a second and catch your breath, before the next hellish sequence and maybe, hopefully, a checkpoint after that. Ah you jumped a split second too early. Try all that again.  [8]   

Currently playing this, I like it.  Not far in (only got the red paint gun a couple of stages back), but I'm already worrying about the little guys you have to save.  As usual with anything like this I'm saving the vast majority of them at this early stage, but I've always got half an eye on ditching optional stuff once it starts to get tricky.  How essential are the 154 little guys for progression?  Am I going to get to the final level and discover you can only enter it if you've rescued 140 of them?

That's what I wanted to hear, thanks.

20: Donkey Kong Country 3 (3DS) 8/10

So this year have finally gotten around to beating the SNES trilogy (although have gotten nowhere near COMPLETING them) and have to say I'm very impressed!  I enjoyed this one the most; I think that's due to taking a break after doing 1 & 2 pretty much back to back.  It seemed a bit more creative with the levels, lots of fun little gimmicks for each individual stage.  

I also liked that it had a semi-open over world you can explore with an upgradable vehicle.  Even though I didn't find many secrets it seemed kinda ahead it its time with that.

Not sure if I'm just getting more used to the games or if there were less difficulty spikes, but I didn't need to save scum as much this time!  Although the last set of levels were just brutal and outside of my abilities.  

But yes, great series and could easily see myself replaying them on the Snes mini over the years.  Had them pegged as style over substance and very happy to be wrong.

4. Doom Eternal (Xbox One) - 30/4 - c25hrs
Bigger, better and more badass!  Wait, wrong shooter series...
I liked this more than the first.  Mainly due to what I think are better designed levels.  Pacing is great and the combat encounters are as frantic and adrenaline pumping as ever.  A couple of weak boss fights aside, there isn't much to complain about here.

After I finished the campaign, I went back via mission select and mopped up collectibles and just enjoyed whooping ass while dashing and jumping around and bathing in the glory (kills).  So satisfying.  Started the Extra Life Mode for the final campaign achievement but I think that'll be too much.

Would play again in the future, but for now I'm done.
[9]