This week has all been about playing games I know I like, my time with video games has been limited so I didn't want to waste any time getting to know a game, oh and I played a bit of Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck (Megadrive) mainly to try to appease my three year old daughter, watching a Mouse struggle with platforming controls and beat up bugs with his cape did nothing for her though. I've never been more proud.
I played quite a bit of NBA Jam (Megadrive) on my recently recovered original machine, with the volume slider and everything. The glorious thing about this machine is the foresight I must've had as a nine year old and have the scart adaptor for it, no fiddling about with an RF lead for me! I've spoken on here about this game before and for good reason. Along with Micro Machines (1&2), Dune 2: The Battle for Arrakis, Streets of Rage 2, James Pond 2: Robocod and Sonic the Hedgehog It's a game I know I can start playing and know I'm going to have a good time with it. Theres a whole load of nostalgia swaying this statement but I'd say (quietly) that the Megadrive is my preferred 16bit console, even though NBA Jam is supposedly superior on the SNES. In the game itself I swayed from a habit of a lifetime and played as the Timberwolves for a bit. Abandoning the perfect balance of Stockton and Malone for some new pairing, the only benfit I could find was one of the duo was pretty awesome at getting 3pts from all over the court. I lost a lot of matches but still had a good time with it.
I played a load more of Puyo Puyo Tetris (Switch) in particular the story mode, the one thing holding this mode back a bit is that it has some pretty lengthy cutscenes with a bunch of dialogue, not ideal for a commute or my inpatient nature. I skipped through most of it to get to the meat of the game and intriguingly by doing this found the jumping from space to the streets of earth and fighting dogs, robots and twins more interesting for it. Anyway whatever's going on I can confidently say that the reason I come to a puzzle game is not the story so I'm happy to have some strange doctor dog shout insults at me while I play. What the story is excellent for is the introduction of the variations of gameplay in the game. I was at first happy to stick with Tetris, a game I know and love, but as it slowly introduces the concept of Puyo Puyo, a more competitive, combo based puzzle. Certainly more frantic and then the idea of playing Tetris against an AI playing Puyo Puyo (and vice versa) where the upshot of getting the higher scoring moves (like 2, 3 or 4 line in Tetris or a combo in Puyo Puyo) is making the opposition have a harder time of it then finally the most ingenious addition a version which sees short bursts of each, maybe 20 seconds? then the board switches to the other puzzle game (in centre of the screen is a frozen image where the last board has ended) its a really hard thing to describe and probably sounds way more intimidating than it is. All I can say is its great fun and really tense and in the short space of a turn things can end up looking really bad and its hard not to look at the frozen board in the centre with a sense of dread for which the board switches again. I'm having a lot more fun with the game the more little bits I find of it and as a value proposition it seems like a fantastic thing. I've sunk countless hours into it and am still only 11% into the story.
I had a brief go on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch) which has fallen by the wayside of some great games coming out for the system. I'll get back onto it more seriously at some point, I'd hate to not complete this wonderful game. This week though I was interested to see how my Wolf Link Amiibo would interact with the game and once I got round the overly complex process of enabling Amiibo with the game then working out Amiibo was another slot on my Sheikah Slate I pressed the little wolf statue on the controller and into the world popped a pretty neat representation of the statue following me about and killing the wildlife. I'd go as far to say its the best use of an Amiibo in a game and pretty much what I'd assumed they would've done when they were first announced a couple of years back. Who knows maybe its a positive sign?
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