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 On 08/22/2020 at 09:47 PM by KnightDriver See More From This User » |
I've organized this according to my usual routine when I sit down to play stuff on the weekend.
Sales or Video
Nothing interesting in sales on Xbox today, but I watched the first episode of the High Score documentary on Netflix. It covered the beginings of the industry with Japanese arcade games, Atari and Fairchild Channel F. Time was spent with Scott Warshaw, Nolan Bushnell, the memory of Jerry Lawson and those MIT students who bult expansion boards for Missile Command and Pac-Man. It's really good. I can't wait to watch another episode tomorrow.
Retro
I played 90 minutes of Dark Cloud on PS2. This is a neat game with a cool story. A genie is captured by a General and used to destroy your village. A wizard has secretly saved all the parts of the village and sent them all over the world inside protective spheres. It's your job to hunt them down and rebuild the village. Oh, and also destroy the genie. It's an action RPG that feels like a Zelda game. I think they even used the grunt sounds you make when you attack from Zelda. You fight badies in a dungeon, keep your weapons from breaking, and collect the village parts. Then you return to the surface and rebuild with what you found. If you complete a building with all it's original inhabitants you can talk to them and learn about the townspeople and get rewarded with helpful items. I like it. One problem, though, load times. Oh man they were so long in some parts. I couldn't stand it after a while. This game is available digitally on PS4, so I may play it there sometime.
Rewards Quests
I played Battletoads for a while. I think this remake is pretty good. You brawl, ride hover bikes and solve simple hacking puzzles to open doors. The cutscenes and style is totally like a saturday morning cartoon. It's very well voice acted and actualy funny. I got hung up on an electronic circuit board puzzle though and stopped. I got the rewards though.
I played another 90 minutes of Gears 5 trying to get that last achievement I needed. I finished the game but didn't get one. Turns out, I've finished it before, I just forgot. Well, next time I might do some multiplayer or try some specific challenges within the campaign to get that achievement and the rewards points.
The Main Course
Farm Together of course. I built the train station at level 51 and ran some tracks across my lands. I started putting all my houses along the route. I also visited Mark's farm to help him harvest diamonds in his huge money forest. I find myself with time on my hands lately with all farmhands doing the work, so I redecorate, redesign and organize my buildings. The one area I harvest right now are the flower beds. They don't benefit from watering it seems, so why put a farmhand there, but it means I've got to check them from time to time. The beds are getting very large now. Every new quest adds another plant type, and instead of pulling out old ones, I just keep adding to it. I'm thinking now I should put a farmhand in there and limit the size of it all so i don't have to run over there all the time. My new house is almost ready and it has a pool. I think I can manage it all from there. Ha ha.
That "Art of the Atari" book I posted about a while back had a lot of neat anecdotes about the early days of games.
Yeah... load times. That's one thing I enjoy about the Switch, they aren't very long. I think if you're using a disc, there's always going to be load time of some sort. PS2 load times can be atrocious.
I wouldn't mind trying that new Battletoads game. I heard it's pretty good.
Keep on farmin'!
One of the big selling points of the PS5 is its SSD, which is supposedly super fast and meant to cut down on loading times. I remember in the days of 2x CD-ROM drives that if you were playing as Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat 3 on PS1, the game would freeze when he morphed back and forth in order to load the new character.
Dark Cloud seemed to have unusually long load times that varied making me think there was a problem with the disc, memory card or something internal in my PS2. I've never had such weird inconsistent loads on a PS2 game before. I say inconsistent because every time I came up to the surface and the game had to load the town area, it would either come up in a normal few seconds or take several minutes. Sometimes this would happen when opening a sphere in the dungeon as well. So I think it's something strange, but I'm going to see if others have had this problem with this game.
I'm interested in getting the digital Dark Cloud to see how it plays. I'm sure load times are not an issue for the digital version.
Battletoads was pretty fun. You can use your tongue to swing from hooks, pick up flies for health or pull enemies closer. You can also spit gum to freeze enemies. I did a lot of tongue wagging and spitting, needless to say.
Pretty sure I rented Dark Cloud at some point back in the day. I remember liking it.
And yeah, The High Score is great so far!
Funny how Netflix is publishing a lot of fan service films and remakes lately. I guess they know their audience.
I like the High Score documentary, but it started better than it ended. However, I have one more episode left to watch, so we'll see.
I'm curious about that Battletoads game, too. But it looks awfully cartoony. Normally that wouldn't bother me, but the old Battletoad games had a more gritty feel to them, and is what made them stand out.
This is full on cartoon time. I find it weird how gross it is. Rash, Pimple, Zit? You also do a lot of spitting and licking things.
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