By Jake Rushing
Jake Rushing – Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild (Switch), Super Bomberman R (Switch), 1-2 (Switch), Xenogears (PSOne)
Alright so I have been playing mostly Legend of Zelda this month so far. I can’t get enough of exploration, having seemingly endless ways to go about for exploring, etc. It’s a game that I want to heavily invest my time into so bad. But I need to focus on other things, so I need to focus on Zelda for only review purposes. So far, I’m on a quest to complete all of the shrines, go through the main dungeons, taking care of other important quests, and do as many side quests as possible. I want to put a stop to it and take a break after reaching a halfway point of some of the important quests. Thankfully, I have beaten half of the dungeons, went through 44 shrines, and gotten past the halfway point of another important quest (that I won’t spoil on here). So I’ll work on beating it halfway this week.
I want to test some other capabilities of other games, such as 1-2 Switch and Super Bomberman R, so I’m going to put focus on those two games for the remainder of the week.
As for Xenogears, well I have pretty much dropped the ball on that game since Zelda came out. I can’t guarantee that I’ll get to that game, but we’ll see how things go.
Sean Willis – Zelda: Twilight Princess HD (Wii U), Lego Worlds (PC)
Playing a bit of the latest Zelda game Breath of the Wild I unlocked the Twilight Princess tunic via the amiibo functions and had to play one of my favorites again. Seemed I never updated the heart count on my Wolf Link Amiibo though it is a bit disappointing that only hearts carry over. In Breath of the Wild I seem to play with as low amount of hearts as I can manage, just cause it gives me the option but Wolf Link now has plenty heh. Well he feels like cheating in the game anyway so not a big deal. As for Twilight Princess it was on of the last more traditional Zelda games and likely some elements in Breath of the Wild came from it. The HD textures look nice but repeat a lot, models look all eye splitting jagged at a high resolution without the Gamecube’s blurry anti aliasing but eh least the game is mostly intact with a few extras. Heck returning to the old hunting scope in a “stand still and shoot arrows” thing is kinda tough after getting used to the smooth controls of Breath of the Wild and rupees are kinda useless end game but eh, this is just one of my favorites regardless. On Gamecube I completed it all minus the Poes since I missed one and I had to go visit every location with a guide to check if I had missed it, at night, in tight locations. It’s fixed with a counter now so, time to finally finish the entire thing 100%.
Lego Worlds was released and out of Early Access not too long ago. I’ve played a good bit of it during its early phases and found the way it generates lego based terrain rather well, interesting. It’s a shame they don’t use this terrain generation in other Lego “insert movie license here” games as it always seems weird to have non lego objects in the games. They can clearly make everything out of legos so really, nothing holding them back. The game is mostly exploring and finding things, build wherever etc, but they sure added a ton of polish before release. There are quests to do if you talk to some characters and generally lots of things to unlock. Everything is Lego branded too without a single licensed anything so I tend to like that. I grew up with regular plain ol Legos not all these Batman legos so I like the sorta classic style it has. Though I really wish vehicle building was a thing. Sorta makes me want to play Lego Studios again but that old game is rather clunky these days sadly. Least one can always build a giant mansion, on a cloud, with a moote filled with sharks instead of water. They seem to have DLC planned so hopefully some updates and extra content will really step things up a notch. Game has a lot of potential to be even bigger and I hope they keep the DLC coming for some time.
https://youtu.be/RRQDqurZJNk
Terry Randolph – Horizon: Zero Dawn, Overwatch (Playstation 4), Wonderful 101 (Wii U)
From learning to steel my reserve in not purchasing every game that looks interesting to me (and, consequently working on eliminating my debt from this hobby) I’ve come to acknowledge my slow pace of playing games, especially because I put way more on my plate than I probably should. That said, Horizon: Zero Dawn has been a game that has kept me hooked in as a gamer to the point where my desire to play Overwatch instead has to be really high to get me off it. I’m not sure how far I am overall, but I can definitely guess I’m at least over 10+ hours of play, and roughly 25% completion.
I also need to finish Wonderful 101 within these next two weeks to return it to my friend. It’s been two years or so (maybe three) of borrowing it.