This is a special weekend in Splatoon 3, it's the Big Run Event! our goal here is to save the stage that'll be used in the Grand Festival from the invaders. In Big Run, it's unknown what the waves will be in each match but it is known what score you need to get the three rewards. so my main goal is to get one of the three rewards and to also get this month's Salmon Run item too.
What makes this Big Run interesting is that there's a second target to aim for. Globally, the players are tasked with getting 700,000,000 golden eggs. In the video i suspect this is the main reason why this Big Run felt so easy, in terms of the difficulty of the enemy and in how easy it was for us as a team to get over 100 golden eggs in a match.
For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the Nintendo Switch game BAKERU, from the developers Good-Feel.
There had been a lot of positive buzz about this game and i was keen to play it. it had been compared to the PS1 and N64 platformers and that's an era i grew up in, playing games like Croc.
It's clear that this is a purpose made demo. i wouldn't be surprised if this was used by video game outlets for their preview coverage. there are 5 different things that we can do in this demo and we did them all in this video.
I started with the video that gave the basic story and what we're going to do. it's fun, but there's no gameplay there. the second part was the "Easy" Tokushima stage. this serves as a tutorial of the game controls and some basic concepts. what caught my attention was how good it all looked. the music was fun, and not a stereotype of Japanese music, and the controls felt responsive. it's difficult to say if this is how the tutorial will work in the final game, but what we have in this demo is maybe a little too basic. many games offer small video clips of gifs to help show some concepts in action. that's not the case here.
The next stage i tried was in Osaka and this was a giant robot vs. giant robot in a city sized ring fighting stage. the combat was fun, it continued to look and play great, but the balance felt a little off. i was beating the enemy robot comfortably and then unexpectedly it got good and made it a harder fight than it had been previously. Next is a shoot'em up stage but not in the traditional side scroller style, whether that's vertical or horizontal. this time it was in the style of Space Harrier! i didn't feel that this was that successful as it was surprisingly difficult to judge where the enemy was in a 3D space. but it was still cool to play and like the rest of the game it was a great looking experience.
The final stage i tried was the "Normal" Aichi stage. this was very different from the Tokushima stage as whilst that was in an open environment, the Aichi stage took place in a city environment. i could also feel the change in difficulty, too. i'm a little concerned that stage difficulty might be something that we ourselves can't change and that some stages will just be harder than others. in a game that felt like it was trying to be as accessible as possible, it would be a weird choice to gate keep the game's story due to the players ability.
This demo for BAKERU is great. choosing to showcase 5 different elements of the game is smart, but it's also smart that it clearly shows that there are still others not yet seen. i would've liked a little more story, but that's not the point of this demo. after playing this demo, i can say that BAKERU is well worth wish listing. it's impressive that this late into the Switch's life cycle a new game can come along and be this good.
Welcome to Backlog Conquering. This is a series were i play a game from my backlog that i may or may not have played before. the goal isn't necessarily to finish the game, the goal is to play it. that way, i can have an opinion about it.
Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut is a game from Born Ready Games that i've had on PS4 since it game out on the PSN.
Missions 11 and 12 were action packed. it was fun but also hectic. thankfully the fights didn't feel too long and we were moved from target to target quite effectively. Mission 13 didn't quite go to plan. i managed to call out the story, which was a pleasant surprise, but then it doubled down on it and introduced time travel. it got a little confusing as we were being told this whilst also navigating a tunnel system whilst also being time constrained. I failed Mission 13, so there will be at least 1 more video, but it was such a narrow loss. i needed just a few more seconds!
This is all 13 parts of my playthrough of Alternate Jake Hunter: Daedalus - The Awakening of Golden Jazz on PS4. i have cut out the deaths i had and at least one technical issue.
This week's game is a nostalgia pick for me. My sister had an #N64 and we sometimes played games together and Extreme G was one of them. i've been wanting to try out this version for a while and so with bad weather today i relaxed with Extreme G.
Going in, i remembered a fair amount of the game. i talk at the start about things like difficulty, passwords, and how it felt like you had to crash to get around the tracks. but what was the hardest at the start was working out what buttons did what! i don't have a N64 controller so for the first race it was a question of pressing all the buttons and working out what they did. LZ is accelerate, for example. once i worked out what they did, i didn't find the layout too troublesome.
As expected, the memories and feelings came flooding back whilst playing it. turns out i remembered pretty much everything except for the music. there's some wonky UI stuff and odd choices, but for the most part it holds up fairly well. the difficulty was a surprise even tho i knew it was difficult. sometimes i had huge wins, sometimes i was far behind, and yet i couldn't tell you the difference. what was nice tho was the enemy Ai. it often felt like they're out to destroy each other, so when you did catch up with them it was because they were attacking each other rather than rubber banding.
I'd recommend Extreme G if you have Nintendo Switch Online. it's not perfect and there is a learning curve, but there's also enough here to have some good times. the tracks have some alternative routes is a great way to play repeatedly without it feeling stale, as is unpredictable nature of the enemy Ai. I kinda liked how the graphics looked on a HDTV instead of the old CRT memories i had.
For Online Saturday i went back to DRAGON BALL PROJECT:Multi on my iPhone for maybe the last time during it's BETA, and played 6 more games. I did 2 matches each with Vegeta, Goku, and Krillin.
DRAGON BALL PROJECT:Multi isn't well optimised for iPhone so i tried changing some settings before this video to make it better. i never really got a consistent 60fps, but it did feel smoother than the previous two videos. Plus, my phone lasted longer before the screen dimmed before it over heated.
