What Did We Play Yesterday?

Continuing to whip my way through HoD. I found these White Dragons particularly cool. They wrap around the columns and jump from one to the other. They are described as "are the fossilized remains of a long-necked dinosaur animated by a demonic force" which is kinda goofy but whatever.

The castle layout in this game is not great, as I've mentioned before, and sometimes there are long lulls between save points. The game sort of gets around this by having a quicksave feature that saves all stats/progress, but respawns the player at the last save room on shutdown/restart. So if you do some crazy backtracking for an item (hint: you will) you could utilize this feature to avoid having to trek alllll the way back. The GameBoy Advance had a software-based sleep system, but it's not utilized by this title.

Milestones in Time Wasters, including encountering whatever the hell that thing was (I was paranoid the core would blow up and one-shot me, but it didn't) and unexpectedly beating the game with Ravebow. I also unlocked a few more captains, including Wolfgang (who has multiple drones) and Doc (who starts with my beloved stasis field). Looking forward to digging into those.

I lost about an hour of progress in HoD (boooo) so I had to replay this part of the castle, but that gave me a chance to revisit the room Juste feels compelled to decorate. Most of the level design and enemies aren't memorable, but some of the skeleton creatures have interesting designs. The skeleton spiders are pretty cool, but they never attack--they only retreat. Another oddity is the floating eyeballs... they won't hurt you if you walk right through them.

Time for Time Wasters! Unlocked Ravebow, whose lasers are a mixed bag at first but can be upgraded into satisfying passive weapons.

In a bit of a metroidvania mood and played this new-to-me GBA game with Jonta Guitar's and sorrow's color hack. This is a fairly mid game more on the metroid side with dual castles and a few quirks. At one point, Juste stumbles across an empty room and decides, "This room needs decorating." The enemies pretty standard but there's a legitimately creepy "Scarecrow" that are bouncing impaled dudes.

Angel at Dusk remains trippy and incomprehensible. If you want to vibe with bodyhorror, it cannot be beat.

Decided to give Gunlocked another try. I have enjoyed some shmup survivor-likes, like Time Wasters, but the pacing on this one is off. I played a round, but it didn't grab me.

I was in a Digseum mood and ended up beating it after about 3 total hours gameplay. Lots of satisfying clicking at the end there, and it doesn't overstay its welcome.

Gave 20 Minutes to Dawn a spin. It's a twin-stick survivors-like with minimalist graphics. I enjoyed playing it, but it didn't grab me the way VS does and the twin-stick aspect created a bit more overhead than I generally want while I'm chilling with this type of game. I'm not sure if I'll play it again.

I gave Yoku's Island Express another go. On paper, this pinball metroidvania should be up my alley, but I've bounced off it twice now. There's nothing wrong with it except some minor control issues, but it fails to capture my interest again. Maybe next time it will stick.

I got my kid Cat Quest III. We played the first and second games together (the first they watched me play, the second they were old enough to play along with me in co-op). This time, they wanted to play on their own.

I liked Cat Quest II but felt it overstayed its welcome. The difficulty scaling wasn't good, and the level of grinding to 100% too much. The cat puns grated after a while. Cat Quest III is shaping up to be a really nice sequel. Firing canons from the pirate ship is fun. There are lots of small improvements, and the simple premise (You're a pirate! Yaaar!) is welcome. My kid beat it after several days, and per HowLongToBeat this one is on par with the original for length.

I don't think I've ever actually seen a satori, but I got the chance when I made an offering at a cherry blossom tree. I also unlocked the fourth fairy, and traveled up Mount Doom to get the fire armor. Unfortunately, I kind of hate the Eldin Canyon region for reasons I can't entirely articulate, but the Mount Doom areas are consistently my least favorite to explore. In this game, the roast-obsessed Gorons freak me out, and the landscape tends to be pretty desolate and unfun to traverse. It's just a big blugh all around.

I also made an armor upgrade ingredient list csv and it is quite awful. I think it encapsulates one of the problems I have with both TOTK and BOTW, which is that there is Simply Too Much Stuff. Nintendo designed a 200+ hour game and I'm not a 200+ hour game guy at all. I never have been, but my willingness to pour hours into these types of games has decreased as I get older.

Thus, my fire for Zelda wanes. According to Backloggd I've been playing about 5 weeks, and I consistently get Zelda fatigue after about a month or so, so this is more or less on schedule. I'm not sure exactly how long I played, since Nintendo refuses to be forthcoming about such things, but it's 60+ hours which tends to be the upper limit of what I'm willing to spend on an open world game. In the past, I've had difficulty returning to these games without starting fresh, but I'm hoping this here blog slaps hood will make it easier to jump back in if and when I return to it.

It's tough for me to gauge exactly how much I've accomplished, but my loading screen lists 52/152 shrines, 91/1000 koroks found, and I've got 14/40 hearts and nearly a second stamina wheel, and completed 2/4 (I think?) temples. So I've completed somewhere between a third and half of the game, which is much farther than my other playthrough. I think blogging helped me play as long as I did, because it was easier to remember where I'd been and what I'd seen.

I definitely enjoyed it more this time, but modern Zelda games are still a very mixed bag for me.