I'm still only a few hours in, and so far I agree with Al's early impressions that this is great. I'm scared to continue, in case the quality dives off a cliff.
I saw today that this got a 4 in Edge, largely because of the gender politics of having male soldiers mansplain to a silent Samus. Which seems like a pretty batshit take, but I'll reserve judgement until I've played more.
The extra characters are truly awful, though. A gobsmackingly bad idea that goes against everything that makes Metroid unique. I genuinely can't understand how they made it into the final game, approved by so many clearly talented devs.
Hitman. I've played this across 3 consoles, Game Pass and PS Plus, and never actually owned it. Finally picked it up for 15 quid on PC, and annoyingly you can't sync your console progress. But I found a beautiful thing called Peacock, which is basically a custom, private server where you can choose what items/starting locations etc you've already unlocked. Plus you don't have to deal with the official servers. So I've input my console progress (mainly Mastery 20 on all of Hitman 1, plus the first 3 levels of Hitman 2), and it works like a charm.
It suits the PC so well. From precise mouse aiming to tiny item pick ups (being closer to a monitor is a godsend), PC feels like its natural home. Plus it's nice finally owning such a brilliant game.
Fallout New Vegas. I bought this for a quid (PC gaming is brilliant isn't it), modded it so that it actually works, and I'm having fun. I bought this in preparation for the second season of the TV show. I've just reached Novac (excellent sight gag with the motel sign), and I haven't really found any interesting locations yet… it's all desert so far. No vaults, no real side quests. I'm assuming they're coming, because I remember that stuff being in Fallout 3. But it's fun nonetheless.
Banjo Tooie, on Switch 2. I'd forgotten how mental this game is. It's fun, but it's massively overcomplicated. It can take hours to earn a single jiggy, as you trek across four different levels and multiple characters. Definitely peak N64 collectathon, but I'm having fun regardless. Side note, the Switch 2 CRT filters are excellent. They're even era appropriate. The SNES filter has the gnarly blur that early 90s TVs had. The N64 one is subtly different, more in line with later CRTs. It's lovely.
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.
Do they have any of that early Metroid bullshit where you have to bomb random corners without any signposting?
I physically recoiled at that photo.
This is my Christmas Day game, so I'm sure I'll leave my thoughts in a few weeks…
Mr Party Hat