PWB December

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Zelda Breath of the Wild - the credits are literally rolling as I type. I fucking loved this game. I could talk for a long time about why but simply the world is beautiful and a joy to explore.

Not sure what I'll play next. I've really enjoyed losing myself in a long game so I might just do that again. I'm going to hold off on Tears of the Kingdom for a bit. Persona 4 has possibly been in my pile of shame for longer than Zelda. I'm kinda tempted to try Ocarina and Majora's Mask on the 3DS though. It's been years since I played Ocarina and I've never finished Majora's.

Maybe I'll just go finish Donkey Kong Bananza

Want
Hyrule Warriors
Metaphor
Clair Obscura

Any of those, preferably for less than £40.

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Hot on the heels of finishing off Outer Worlds 2, I've immediately gone back to The Outer Worlds, which seems much larger than its reputation had led me to believe. There are at least two planets on the system map I've not even unlocked yet, and I've not been a slouch about missions. It's not quite as good as the sequel, mechanically—there are so many quality-of-life improvements in the UI alone—but the world and the characters are top-notch.

There's a game preview (read: early access build) of Whiskerwoods on the PC GamePass which had seemed right up my Timberborn-loving street, but it's a little clunkier and more opaque in its systems and I'm struggling a bit to juggle all its demands.

Want

Really curious to see a price point for the Gabecube to either tip me over into an impulse purchase or laugh heartily and write off the idea of ever getting one.

Play

Atelier Yumia - I totally forgot Metroid is out in like 4 days so, erm, well done. This is a game I think I can sink time into in ways that aren't story related though so it's fine. This seems like a cool, unique Atelier game but it's not what I ould point a newcomer to the series to (that would still be Ryza) because it'd overwhelm the shit out them, the map size feels like it came right out of Elden Ring.

Sakura Wars 2 - Should beat this in the next day or two and then agonise at when/if the third and fourth game get fan translated, made a bit worse by everyone saying the third game is the best by far. The fifth is already translated over here so I could jump to that and then the soft reboot for the PS3 game. But as for as the second game goes, one of the best games I've played in 2025.

Sektori went to bed at 5am and stayed up till 8:30 to play this, oops. Laser focused on the campaign mode which has you fighting waves in a randomly shifting arena until a boss. I like the other modes but if I went into them I'd have to readjust my mindset. Also, this game looks pretty nutty visuals wise, deserves a special mention imo.

Want

Metroid Prime 4 - Staggeringly bad trailers aside, I can't deny I'm looking forward to this. The talking guy who points out if you haven't saved and missed a pickup sounds potentially disastrous depending on how much he's in it but bike sections potentially look like the worst part if you ask me, I dunno', I wish I was buying this without stuff like that in the back of my mind but I suppose I should at least play the damn game first. Give me Echoes Remaster and I can at least have that.

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🤐 🤐🤐🤐🤐

I tried the demo of Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity. I like how it's got so much stuff from the main game, but I'm not sure it really grabbed me.

After that I loaded up Ocarina of Time 3DS and I'm having fun with that. It's been a long time since I last played it so I think I'll see it through. I can't imagine it takes too long to beat.

Echoes of Wisdom is that rarest, most wonderful of things: a brand-new Zelda world to explore.

I couldn't work out why that was engaging me SO much until I looked at the release timelines, and worked out the last time I had a chance to explore a new Zelda world.

Tears of the Kingdom re-uses a map we spent hundreds of hours in, so we can discount that. And following on from that, Breath of the Wild is wonderful (favourite game ever?) but it doesn't feel like a Zelda game. There's a very specific brand of Zelda ambience and cosy exploration feels that BotW is missing. Link Between Worlds uses the SNES map, we all know that one back to front. Skyward Sword didn't have an overworld.

And so we're back to Twilight Princess. Which came out almost 20 years ago. 20 years since I landed in a brand-new, Zelda-feeling Hyrule and wondered what was around the next corner.

So Echoes of Wisdom might not be the best Zelda game. It's probably not the best Switch 2 game I'll buy this week. But it's recaptured a feeling I thought I'd lost forever. It's a warm Christmas-day hug of a game.

Well now I'm going to have to play that too!

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I'm still playing Final Fantasy VII Remake and it's really the most amazing thing. I can't imagine how daunting it must have been to take on the task of remaking such a beloved classic, and they really went for it: the combat system is entirely different, huge amounts of the game have been expanded upon, and even the plot is far more interesting than you'd expect. Taken purely on its own merits, it's also probably the best pure Final Fantasy game in the last 20 years. A towering achievement.

Also been dabbling a bit with Against the Storm, which as a roguelike city builder is quite unique and is scratching a certain itch while I'm waiting for a discount on Anno 117. This really wants to be played on a PC with mouse and keyboard, but it works decently well on the Steam Deck - I'm less keen on the console conversions.

Want

Keeping an eye on the Steam Machine but it's looking like it'll be a little less powerful and a little more expensive than I would ideally like so until full details are released I'm on the fence about this one.

Bin

I haven't yet abandoned Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment but it's very repetitive and I rarely feel the urge to play it. When I do, I tend to quite enjoy it though. Maybe I just need to devote some preoper time to it.

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The Star Wars Outlaws season pass finally dropped under my self-imposed cost threshold, so I've been back into that a little bit. Haven't actually started either of the expansion quests, though - I'm reminding myself of the controls, because…

I'm still plugging away at Tomb Raider II, though I'm not sure how much I'm enjoying it. I've said before that the first game really nails a lonely exploration atmosphere, but this one doesn't even really attempt that. It has far too much combat, with cultist gangsters emerging from a side hatch every few minutes to ruin your day. And the story isn't just nonsense, it's nonexistent.
Spoiler - click to showLara arrives at the Great Wall looking for this dagger (presumably; she just abseils out of a helicopter and starts killing tigers), and when she wanders up to a big door, a screaming kung fu Italian tries to kill her. Instead, he kills himself, but not before he helpfully namedrops his boss, so Lara can Google him and find out there's someone with the same surname in Venice. She heads there and starts killing people, eventually falling into an aeroplane for no reason, but it's fortunately heading to the world's largest and most trap-laden oil rig, which is being used to look for a sunken ship with another artifact. So of course she heads down there, finds that, and then flies to Tibet, because..?
The most recent games are probably over-written, but it's not clear here, moment to moment, why I'm in these places or what I'm trying to achieve, either immediately or in a macro sense.

On top of that, the level design just isn't very good; overlong labyrinths of dark corridors connecting rooms of unclear purpose, with no sense of where you really are in the level, and very few indicators of progress.

Also, the grenade launcher is rubbish.

Want
My wishlist at the moment is mostly stuff that I think would be good to check out, but not much in the way of "must-haves". 007 First Light is the only thing with a concrete release date that I'm looking forward to, I think.

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Where Winds Meet - I kinda wanted to like this, but I just don't think it likes me. It doesn't explain anything that's happening, there's no sense of urgency or even looming threat. Because it's F2P, there are about nine in-game currencies, and I don't know what any of them are used for.

I tried to play Metroid Hunters for a bit and it's the most painful game I've played in my life, for the godlike boon of precision shooting you pay by breaking very bone in your hand, maybe if I put it on the desk it'd be better but you are basically holding the DS entirely on side with your left hand, using that same hand to press the L button to shoot whilst holding the entire weight of the DS (XL) and aiming with your stylus on the bottom screen, wich is surely not helping with the weight imbalance. I had no issue with the Claw style of holding a PSP to play Monster Hunter, maybe because that was significantly lighter despite you morphing your hand into a monstrosity, but unless you can at least remap shoot to something else I'm not sure how I'd even play this.

Shame because, while it's pretty ugly, the shooting does feel great. I don't really have high hopes for this as a Metroid game or anything, it's primarily a multiplayer focused game and the level design probably accomodates that rather than build an interesting world, but I was interested in meeting the hunters you see in Metroid Prime 3 at least. I had a boss fight with one of them and it was clearly just a bot AI version of a human engagement you'd face in the deathmatch modes, but it was pretty fun precisely because I felt every shot landed was on me and man aging to keep track of his his erratic movements that were unlike the pattern based boss fights of the series.

That sounds like the same control scheme as Kid Icarus Uprising and it was indeed agonising. Shame because that game would have been a 10/10 all time classic if it had actually been possible to play it without causing yourself physical pain.

Metroid is such a weird series for Nintendo, they invented such a strong gameplay loop it helped to name an entire genre yet they keep fucking around with it like they’re ashamed of the series or something. Other M in particular might be the worst big game Nintendo has ever released. Prime 4 looks like they just wish they’d invented Halo instead.

I'd love a Prime 4 post-mortem at some point (which we'll never get, because Nintendo). Would be interesting to see how much of Bandai Namco's original development carried over to the Retro reboot, who was responsible for the bike, etc.

Retro always seemed like such mature developers. The bike desert thing looks like an obvious disaster that should have been scrapped early on.

No offense to anyone who plays it and likes that part but the only thing more baffling to me than the desert is that there are actually people defending the desert. 🤐

I've moved on anyway, and have started Metroid Prime 3: Corruption for the first time ever, apparently this is where things started to go downhill so I'm interested. The opening on the Galactic Federation ship could be a red flag but I'll let them slip in some world building and lore for a prologue as long as we get back to business in the main game. Using the Primehack emulator for it too so I have full mouse control, which even for a stand-in for Wii remote accuracy feels a bit like cheating and it's not as bad as Hunters but I can feel the Carpal Tunnel creeping in ever so slightly, maybe I'll see if I can get it working on a Steam Deck or something.

I wnt to play Dread but my brother has it.

I’ve got Dread digitally, can I “lend” that to you as you are part of my Nintendo family? I have no idea how these virtual Game Card things are supposed to work.

From what I can see you can't give me access to your copy and I can play it whenever, I think its only for like multiplayer game right? If you could I'd let anyone use my FFT or Advance Wars. I'm sure I'll get the game soon anyway.

After a lot of frustration, I got Prime 3 working on my Odin 2 as well, it looks fucking gorgeous but I can't get the free aim within the lock-on to work so that makes bosses super annoying, really disappointed.

So far MP3 hasn't let up on the abundance of human characters yet as I hoped, which isn't great but the whole sequence of the Hunters and Samus defending the station, where they each in turn show off their little powers before Samus herself has that incredible showdown with Ridley, was very cool. Stopped just after getting Hypermode which seems…insanely OP if all it costs is your health considering you you can get energy tanks in this game, but alright I guess.

Ready to touch down on an alien planet any time now though.

EDIT - also settled on getting it to work on Steam Deck lmao

Apparently you CAN lend people in your "family" your digital games now but you have to have both Switches in the same room to do so. It's supposed to replicate lending the cartridge to your mate, which I guess is fair enough. So sadly unless you fancy popping in for a coffee you will have to source a copy of Dread for yourself.

Additional, midly-reluctant Wants, courtesy of the Game Awards:
Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis: The coverage I've seen has been describing this as a ground-up remake of the 1996 original, but to me it looks more like an overhaul of 2007's Tomb Raider Anniversary - they've definitely lifted Lara's moveset from that game: bullet time dodging the raptor and the flip/somersault along the burning corridor particularly stand out. I'm just hoping they've re-redone the Lost Valley T. rex fight, since Anniversary ruined it. If they're going to do remakes, though, Tomb Raider II and III are right there.

Tomb Raider: Catalyst I'm possibly even less sold on; I like the (older-looking?) Lara, but the India setting and grappling-hook action just remind me of Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, which I really liked, and seems like a high bar to set for themselves.

Very curious to find out more about Fate of the Old Republic, but I expect details will be thin on the ground for a while yet…

Apparently you CAN lend people in your "family" your digital games now but you have to have both Switches in the same room to do so. It's supposed to replicate lending the cartridge to your mate, which I guess is fair enough. So sadly unless you fancy popping in for a coffee you will have to source a copy of Dread for yourself.

Yeah I figured we wouldn't get anything that cool, as lovely as coming round for a cup of Tea is I think I'll definitely get mine back before I finish Prime 3, thanks for the offer though. o7

Very curious to find out more about Fate of the Old Republic, but I expect details will be thin on the ground for a while yet…

https://x.com/wario64/status/1999532677905678543?s=12

You weren't kidding!

Also, is there any reason to not spam Hypermode in Prime 3? The corruption mechanic for using it is so neglible that it might as well not exist, I hit a normal enemy on this planet with like 5 missiles and he tanked all of them, I go Hypermode and plug him with 3 rapid shots and he burns to a crisp. And now way would Samus go through Prime 1 and 2 and think 'yeah, hook this shit right into my veins'.