Earthbound and Dune 18.08.15

My plans to complete, or at least get through a sizeable chunk of Mario & Luigi: Bowsers Inside Story (DS) whilst on holiday didn't quite come off, the small portion I got through still trawling through tutorials. What I did play I really enjoyed. It's the first Mario RPG I've played, and it's a novel twist on the typical mechanics, adding basic platforming into the mix and stealing and building the rhythm based combat mechanics of Earthbound. It's a slow build, made more bearable by a witty story, playing off the tropes of a Mario game as you'd imagine, Bowser in particular is a much funnier character along with his sidekick Kamek, some of the humour early on is too dependent on breaking the third wall, the first few times funny but the joke wears a little thin as it continues through a lengthy tutorial. Perhaps that's why Bowser is such a breath of fresh air, whereas the Mario Bros play the same roles you imagine, Bowser seems more downtrodden, the story playing on his multiple failed attempts at capturing Peach. The gameplay itself gets pretty in depth even early on, Mario and Luigi are controlled by separate buttons while platforming but they're tied to the same movement, which makes lining up some jumps trickier. In combat your encouraged to spot tells in enemies attacks and counter them by the ever dependable head stomp it also drops green shells into fighting which can cause more damage if timing is right while also building combos up. There's a lot going on, even at this early stage, I'll hopefully keep at it as it's one of those titles that would probably require restarting if I left it too long just to work out what to do (Sadly Bloodborne has already fallen victim to that this year). The only thing I've got against it is a personal thing, I find the shoulder buttons on the form of a 3DS or DS (except for the original silver model) awkward to use, so games which require them don't feel great.

I checked into Animal Crossing (3DS) to find animals annoyed I'd not spoken to them in a week, a jungle of bamboo has sprouted around my house and I got bitten by a tarantula. Way too stressful for sitting by the pool.

Much more to talk about next week, I've taken my first slow steps into Everyone's Gone to the Rapture and plan to have some less ernest fun in Kung Fury: Street Rage and Gauntlet.