Video Games

31
Mar
2018
Solomon Rambling Plays the Binding of Isaac:  Afterbirth+

Solomon Rambling Plays the Binding of Isaac:  Afterbirth+

Computer Troubleshooting

My current laptop was a desperate purchase.  My previous laptop, a Dell, had crapped out earlier that day, deciding it no longer had any energy to power the screen.  Because Murphy’s law is a callous, calculated bitch, my device up and died at the beginning of my workday, leaving me white-knuckling my desk and staring into the black abyss that was my blank monitor.  The mountains of paperwork I needed to finish would inevitably avalanche into the rest of my week unless I addressed the problem immediately.

The Dell had supported me all through college and into my second year of work.  I probably could have salvaged it, but after seven years, Old Yeller needed to go.  Besides, fixing a computer would be much more time-consuming than outright buying a new one.  The only fatality would be my next paycheck, but that was a problem for Future Solomon.  The Present Solomon needed to relieve his nervous breakdown and get on over the Best Buy.

I bought my current HP laptop because the screen was big, it had a disk drive, and the price was exorbitant enough for me to believe I was getting a fancy product.  I didn’t ask an employee for help, partly due to my distrust of salespeople and partly due to an intense fear of store employees.  I could’ve done research, but that entailed work and did not satiate my need for instant gratification.  As such, I walked out with my HP laptop 20 minutes after having entered Best Buy.

My laptop was intended for YouTube, iTunes, and Microsoft Word.  Websites and video recording software were not even dreams at the time, but here we are.  To its credit, my HP accomplishes most of my computer needs; it just also happens to need half an hour to fully boot.  Skip that 30-minute warm-up, and the result is a stuttering video.  What I had intended to be a simple video ended up being a two-week long affair as I waited for Editor One to throw together something to make-up for my computer’s faults.

His additions have certainly helped the video feel presentable, but the glitchy sections remain.  It wouldn’t sting as much if I didn’t think the video was one of my stronger works, but hell, that’s life.  Continue to direct all feedback and questions my way, and feel free to send any viruses to my HP to make it hobble more than it already does.

Posted by Solomon Rambling in Video, 0 comments
18
Mar
2018
Solomon Rambles About Curiosity and the Cat

Solomon Rambles About Curiosity and the Cat

Night in the Woods

Richard’s Scary Busytown

Some games are best played having no prior knowledge.  Be it Doki Doki Literature Club, Gorogoa, or Genital Jousting¸ the less you know, the more intense your surprise and delight (and perhaps horror).  Night in the Woods is one of those games.  I heartily recommend it.  If you enjoy expansive stories driven by their characters, stop reading and buy the game.  For those of you expecting a traditional game, read on, but those who get a kick out of light novels or point-and-click adventures, Night in the Woods is worth your time.

Be ignorant.  Spend your money.  Have fun.

Now that I’ve scared off none of you, let’s get to rambling.  I don’t intend to throw out spoilers left and right, but I truly believe some things are best enjoyed with virtually no context.  Night in the Woods offers a refreshingly deep narrative often not seen in video games, so much so it feels like a mutant hybrid between a game and literature.  Admittedly, this beast is a little ugly in places and does not quite move as quickly as purebred books or games, but it still is one of the most exotic creatures you will find on the Nintendo Switch.

What is it?

Your protagonist is Mae Borowski, and the story takes off just as she returns to her derelict mining hometown, Possum Springs, after suddenly dropping out of college.  In her two-year absence, the town has not so much changed as it has stagnated and decayed.  Businesses are failing; most of the young adults are leaving for better places; and the remaining residents deal with low-paying jobs and the humdrums of everyday life.  If this isn’t horrifying to you yet, treasure your innocence, my sweet summer child.

Gameplay revolves around the daily routine of your typical 20-year-old anthropomorphic dropout.  As Mae, you will adventure around the town, interacting with locals by engaging in small talk or learning about their lives.  Every day ends with you hanging out with your friends—Bea, Gregg, and Angus—who take you out to go party, visit the mall, or smash up cars with baseball bats.  All this may sound quaint and homey, but something’s afoot.  Mae and her friends find a severed arm outside a local diner; she begins experiencing increasingly strange dreams; and people become more insistent to understand exactly why Mae dropped out.

For the majority of the game, you’re going to be walking and talking.  There are some minor platforming elements for the purpose of finding new residents and dialogue opportunities. Occasionally, you’ll encounter a minigame like the Guitar Hero-esque band sessions with her friends.  Your interactions with others are fairly linear, albeit with some dialogue options with minor impact on the narrative.  There are no complex puzzles, intricate fighting mechanics, or game over screens.  Night in the Woods is a story through and through, and when you’re done with the main adventure, there are two extra stories which explore some of the lore in Possum Springs.

What’s good?

  1. Mae Borowski is endearingly unlikeable. Many of the characters in Night in the Woods stand out as relatable and interesting, such as Bea, Mae’s parents, and Pastor Karen.  However, none of them compare to the fucked-up mess that is Mae.  She is moody, self-centered, and impulsive.  In high school, she bludgeoned another kid with a baseball bat.  As a young adult, she gets a kick out of shoplifting.  Despite this, she cares deeply about her friends, even if she never says the right things.  Depression, dissociation, and anger have made soup out of her brains, and she tries to get by as best as she can.  You may hate her; you may not relate to her, but she is one of the most human characters who is also a cat.
  2. The art and soundtrack are phenomenal. The visuals pop with color, and the town is ever-changing as the weather cycles and the townsfolk prepare for various events.  The bright exterior of the town serves as a solid foil to the trippy dream sequences bathed in purples and blues.  The music complements everything like a tasteful ascot, complete with pleasant bloops, soothing cadences, and moody beats.  That’s my best effort to sound like I know how to critique music, so just listen to it.  Buy the soundtrack.  Hyperlink.
  3. Several parts of the story hit hard and leave a lasting impact, much like student loans. Night in the Woods tackles some pretty intense themes like loneliness, mental illness, and absolute failure and regret.  The horror aspects of the game will certainly unsettle you, but the true strength of the narrative is its ability to unnerve you by revealing the uncomfortable parts of normal life.

What’s bad?

  1. There’s enough snark to feed a gaggle of hipsters for life. Mae and her gang’s witty banter feels appropriate and helps to engage you in the game’s oceans of dialogue, but when every resident of Possum Springs speaks in wisecracks, you begin to wonder if the town’s water supply has been infected with sarcasm, vinegar, and indie movies.  Dialogue blurs and can grate your eyeballs.
  2. Patience, you must have. The story is a slow burn, with many of the horror elements appearing in the final third of the game.  If you run through the game—ignoring all of the residents except your friends—you could potentially finish the story in eight hours.  Much of this time is you walking from location to location, and load times further impede your progress.  A single load screen takes only a few seconds, but because each building and part of town requires loading, those seconds will add up.  Night in the Woods accurately captures many of the experiences of everyday life; tedium is unfortunately just one of them.
  3. As dumb as it sounds, the supernatural elements don’t feel as natural as the rest of the story. Without going into too much detail, Night in the Woods dabbles in eldritch horror and the occult.  In a vacuum, I enjoyed the eeriness, but I also felt like the developers added this fantastical element because they needed a “hook” for a game to tempt people to buy something actually about modern life and mental illness.

What’s the verdict?

Night in the Woods thrives on fan theories and analysis.  The English major in me wants to gush for pages about the hidden meanings and symbolism, but the gamer in me knows when to shut up.  As more developers experiment with video games as an artistic medium, we are offered the experience to tinker with our emotions and beliefs just as much as we do with a character.  Night in the Woods is one such offering, and if you’re looking for a different kind of immersion, Possum Springs welcomes you.

Arbitrary Statistics:

  • Score: 8
  • Time Played: Over 10 hours
  • Number of Players: 1
  • Games Like It on Switch: Oxenfree, Thimbleweed Park

Scoring Policy

Posted by Solomon Rambling in Review, 0 comments
11
Mar
2018
Solomon Rambles About Hindsight

Solomon Rambles About Hindsight

Namco Museum (2017)

Slightly More Entertaining than the National Postal Museum

I’ve always been a sucker for compilation games.  For the price of one game, you get four, six, fifteen, or one hundred smaller ones bundled into a single package.  It’s like getting triplets when you were only expecting one kid, except you don’t have to worry about raising children, crippling debt, and sleep deprivation.  For me, quantity matters so much more than quality, at least until I play through all the games and remember I’m stupid.  Compilation games have ranged from the sublime (the Orange Box/Nintendoland/Wii Sports Resort) to the excrement (any no-name plug-and-play console), so I give myself slack for hoping for a good batch of games on one disc.

Retro collections—a specific breed of compilation games—have been more hit-and-miss for me.  These games inherently prey on our nostalgia glands, sucking our monetary life force in exchange for a highlight reel of our childhood.  Sometimes, these nostalgia leeches can create a symbiotic relationship with us, like with the Sonic Mega Collection or Rare Replay.  In the case of Namco Museum, the relationship feels slightly parasitic, like the bond between an overweight man and a tape worm too lazy to do actual harm.

What is it?

The Namco Museum franchise has been around for over two decades now in an effort to reproduce Pac-Man more times than Nintendo re-releases Super Mario Bros. (with Skyrim being a close third in this race).  This rendition of the museum offers 11 “arcade classics” for you to feed unlimited virtual currency and vie for a high score, either locally or online.  Every game (except Pac-Man Vs.) features a “normal” and a “challenge” mode.  The former is self-explanatory whereas the latter creates a unique scenario in-game for you to master.  Apart from this, you’re given a slew of customization options, similar to those you would find in the ACA releases.

In this batch, you have Pac-Man, which is a lot like Pac-Man Championship Edition if it was made in 1980.  There’s the gory beat-‘em-up, Splatterhouse, in which you fights ghouls, possessed furniture, and stiff controls.  Galaga and Galaga ‘88 give you your vertical shooter action while Sky Kid crashes and burns trying to do the same thing from a horizontal perspective.  Rolling Thunder 1 and 2 offer enough run-and-gun gameplay to make you want to play better renditions like Contra or Gunstar Heroes.  The Tower of Druaga provides you with a walking simulator; Tank Force allows you to shoot things from an overhead perspective; and Dig Dug rounds out the package just to make sure you can recognize at least one more game by name.

Pac-Man Vs. stands as the single-most defining trait that separates this “Switch Museum” from past Namco Museums.  Oh wait, never mind; it was also in the DS version.  Well, this one is a fancy HD version of the original Gamecube game which made use of the GBA link cable.  Offering asymmetric gaming before the Wii U could bomb on arrival, Pac-Man Vs. tasks one player to gobble up pellets as Pac-Man while up to three other players pursue him as ghosts.  The Pac-Man player sees the whole maze (using one Switch system) while the ghosts have limited fields of view (using another Switch system).  Whoever devours Pac-Man takes control of the yellow bugger for the next round, and rounds continue until someone hits a score cap.

Note:  Two Switch consoles are needed to play the full-version of Pac-Man Vs.  You can play the game on one console, but with this setup, everyone is a ghost, and you all compete to catch Pac-Man more times than your friends to reach the score cap first.  Fortunately, you do not have to buy another copy of Namco Museum to play this game; a free download on the eShop allows the second Switch to join other local Pac-Man Vs. games.

What’s good?

  1. Pac-Man Vs. is awesome, provided you have two Switch consoles. I purchased Namco Museum solely for this game, which was a foolish idea, but hey, I’m able to play Pac-Man Vs.  It’s not quite the rambunctious romp I remember it to be, but it still is the Mona Lisa of this Louvre.
  2. For high score junkies, you have multiple arenas to throw up your name. It may take you tens or hundreds of hours, and you may lose your job and house, but at least people will know xComet69x is the very best at Tank Force.
  3. If you eat, breathe, and shit nostalgia, Namco Museum has 11 games of pure retro goodness. Sure, nothing is remarkable about this collection, but you don’t care.  You still live in the 80s, and anything that doesn’t have scan lines or pixelated graphics isn’t worth your rose-colored attention.

What’s bad?

  1. For those of you without nostalgia, there isn’t much here to enjoy. None of these games have aged particularly well, and their simple concepts are quick to grow repetitive and boring.  Being that these are arcade games, expect cheap deaths and infrequent checkpoints.  I’ll admit that I may be overly critical of these games, but when I’m given a game like Tower of Druaga (where the timer runs out faster than your character moves), I struggle to see how anyone but diehard fans can enjoy the classics.
  2. This museum is rather bare-bones. Older iterations of this series have included more games and more tweaks to the gameplay.  Pac-Man Vs. is great, but when this is the major selling point of this rendition, I can’t help but feel Namco phoned it in with this entry.  We’ll ignore that the series in general is just a bunch of phone calls.
  3. A Joy-Con/Pro Controller can’t replace an arcade cabinet’s joystick and button set-up. I’m not an arcade purist, but even I can tell these games are best played like they were in the arcade.  Nothing recreates the old-school glory of Galaga like hunching over a cabinet, both hands resting on the controls, with the stench of sweat and teenage angst wafting through a darkly-lit room.

What’s the verdict?

Just like every shopping center has a Starbucks, every console needs its Namco Museum, and this Switch version is just about as indistinguishable from its cousins as the downtown Starbucks is from the mall Starbucks.  Unless you fondly remember six or seven games from this compilation’s library, this entry need not be on your wish list.  Eleven games for $30 is not bad, but you could also use that money to buy two or three games with more depth and content than all the Namco classics combined.  The classics should certainly be remembered for their impact on the gaming industry; playing them is not as necessary.

Arbitrary Statistics:

  • Score:  5
  • Time Played:  Over 5 hours
  • Number of Players:  1-4
  • Games Like It on Switch:  Party Planet, Pac-Man Championship Edition 2

Scoring Policy

Posted by Solomon Rambling in Review, 0 comments
10
Feb
2018
Solomon Rambles About T-Rated Bloodshed

Solomon Rambles About T-Rated Bloodshed

Fire Emblem Warriors

Attack of the Clones

A brand name can indicate the quality of a product.  In the grocery store, Lucky Charms gathers more buyers than the store-brand “Lightly Sweetened Oats with Magical Marshmallows.”  In the video game world, a name alone can forecast a review score.  Anything with Mario attached to it will sell millions and earn high ratings, unless that Mario brand is attached to “Party” or a sport other than golf.  Conversely, if a game carries the Sonic name, we expect disappointing sales and some bizarre gimmick which screws up any hope of a Sonic comeback (excluding Mania).

Now let’s combine two big brands:  Fire Emblem and Dynasty Warriors.  The first one is known for immersive stories and complex gameplay, and the second is known for repeating itself more times than an NPC in Skyrim.  Put those two together, and you get next great Hyrule Warriors sequel, right?

Nope.  You don’t.  You just get a mediocre Dynasty Warriors with a palette swap.  Hyrule Warriors won me over, convincing me I enjoyed playing the same stage 50 times to level up all of my characters.  Fire Emblem Warriors (FEW) struggled to keep me engaged throughout my first play-through.  Because I have never played a single Fire Emblem game, the Fire Emblem brand did little to enhance my enjoyment of FEW.  Even if the brand was more familiar to me, it would not be enough to cover up monotonous gameplay packaged in a lackluster presentation.

What is it?

Like other Dynasty Warriors game, in FEW, you take on the role of the only competent soldier to ever grace the battlefield.  Scores of enemies stand in your way, but you’ll wipe them all out with simple combos by mashing the X and Y buttons.  You also have an army backing you, and they will magically die or succeed off-screen.  Most missions will task you to conquer keeps by vanquishing slightly beefier enemies until you can fight the beefiest commander and win the battle.  However, while you’re capturing keeps, the enemy is doing the same.  As such, you’ll have to backtrack and defend your positions as your soldiers figure out the pointy end of their swords.

Of course, you’ll get to wage this war with your favorite Fire Emblem characters like Marth, Wannabe Marth (Lucina), and Father of Wannabe Marth (Chrom).  Each hero has a certain weapon class which make up the world’s most violent game of rock-paper-scissors:  swords beat axes, axes beat lances, lances beat swords, and spell books kind of suck against everything.  During each battle, you can switch between three characters, pair two heroes together (allowing for tag-team attacks and specials), or delegate responsibilities to your teammates (such as protecting keeps, healing allies, or attacking enemy captains).  Compared to Hyrule Warriors, FEW requires a little more strategy to clean up the battlefield.

A hefty story mode features the royal twins, Rowan and Lianna, as they progress through a fan fiction writer’s wet dream while learning the value of friendship.  A sizable “History” mode is included as well, allowing you to re-experience classic Fire Emblem battles through the Dynasty Warriors hack-and-slash gameplay.  These historical battles do not offer new maps, but they do provide alternate mission directives not seen in the story mode.  Outside the first few story missions, FEW offers couch co-op to let you wage war with another efficient fighter.

What’s good?

  1. Key changes bring some brains to a typically mindless experience.  By being able to give orders to your heroes, you can feel in control of your army rather than just your playable characters.  Swapping characters helps you to aid your helpless grunts more easily if your territory is being threatened.  Protecting your keeps is all the more important with the introduction of half-assed permadeath.  Let your heroes fall in battle, and you can’t access them again until you revive them with a small mountain of money.
  2. Cutting through swaths of enemies is mindlessly cathartic.  Sometimes being shallow feels great, and the Dynasty Warriors franchise is a master of brainless gameplay.  Massacring small nations of people would be even more satisfying if your attack combos weren’t locked behind material-farming requirements.
  3. If you like it, there is a lot of it.  With over 20 chapters in story mode, five History maps (each with multiple battles), collectibles, and S-rankings, FEW can devour tens of hours of your free time.  This is an estimate because I couldn’t be bothered to play more than 15 hours.

What’s bad?

  1. Mindlessness soon bleeds into monotony.  There are no sub-bosses to be seen, and enemy commanders require a few more whacks than the typical grunt.  Maps are reused and aren’t that remarkable to begin with, and after spamming X and Y for hours, arthritis begins to set in.  The biggest insult is that many of your playable characters are carbon copies of each other apart from appearance and stats.  Any sort of originality the game had fades as you fight the same enemies on the same maps with the same heroes.
  2. The voice acting and writing in FEW make Hyrule Warriors look like a Pulitzer-winning masterwork in comparison.  Understandably, no sensical plot could explain why all of Fire Emblem’s greatest heroes are on the same battlefield, but just about any fan could have written something better than the sticky-sweet clichéd mess they gave us.  Add in cringeworthy overacting and wacky one-liners (which repeat incessantly, mind you), and you’ll be screaming “double damn” every time a character speaks.
  3. Co-op is a poor man’s version of single-player.  Hyrule Warriors’ multiplayer was not a paragon of multiplayer greatness, but at least you could complete the entire game (with top rankings) with a friend.  With FEW, the enemy count tanks when another player joins, and due to this, an S-ranking is virtually impossible on some missions.  Disregarding rankings, with two people, you’ll be lucky to face 10 or 20 enemies at a time compared to the single-player’s 100.

THERE’S NOBODY!

What’s the verdict?

With the definitive edition of Hyrule Warriors coming to the Switch in the near future, there is little reason to pick up Fire Emblem Warriors unless you’ve played the Zelda version to death and back.  I imagine I would have enjoyed the game more if I was more familiar with the Fire Emblem brand, but then again, I doubt even a Zelda theme could have saved this game for me.  Simplicity and familiarity can absolutely improve a video game’s playability.  FEW just happened to be as stupidly familiar as driving on a straight, empty highway.  It can be fun occasionally for an hour or two, but any more than that, and you’re stuck in Wyoming.

THERE’S NOTHING!

Arbitrary Statistics:

  • Score: 6
  • Time Played: Over 15 hours
  • Number of Players: 1-2
  • Games Like It on Switch: Hyrule Warriors:  Definitive Edition, Fate/EXTELLA:  The Umbral Star

Scoring Policy

Posted by Solomon Rambling in Review, 0 comments
04
Feb
2018
Solomon Rambles About Odysseys Without Odysseus

Solomon Rambles About Odysseys Without Odysseus

Super Mario Odyssey

The Perfect Game of Maddening Minor Issues

As I get older, I steadily lose the gifts of youth.  Exercising produces fewer results but more pain.  My ability to eat dairy is hampered by the potential for stomach aches and angry poops.  I no longer want to pretend I’m old; instead, I act older than I am to justify the amount I complain about my health.  For video games, I’ve partly lost that spark—that childhood innocence—that made each game an adventure of exciting new experiences.  Few games during my semi-adulthood have recreated this childish glee.

Super Mario Odyssey reignited the child in me and reduced me to a giggling, smiling mess.  I squealed when Cappy possessed iconic Mario enemies.  I marveled at how soot, sand, and water clung to Mario.  I explored for the sake of exploring, not to find a Power Moon or complete an objective.  The finale of Metro Kingdom, the final showdown against Bowser, and the last secret kingdoms all surpassed my high expectations.

The child in me was in heaven, likely because the real me died a little at some point while playing Odyssey.  Like Breath of the Wild, Odyssey is a must-have Switch title.  Heaps of people have praised it and written about it, to the point where I don’t have to work and write a traditional review.  Instead, this article will explain how a platformer prodigy is 0.5 points away from a perfect score and 0.5 points away from causing the fandom to murder me.  I present you 10 minor issues with Super Mario Odyssey which angered me enough to withhold the 10 score.

This is the Header for the 10 Minor Issues

1.

The co-op is nothing special.  Others (including some in my family) have enjoyed controlling Cappy, but after Super Mario 3D World, I personally miss having a true cooperative multilayer experience in a 3D Mario game.

2.

Hint art moons were horribly implemented.  Like the memories in Breath of the Wild, hint art presents you with an image that points to one of 21 hidden moon locations in other kingdoms. Inherently, scavenger hunts like these can be fun but not when you have to back out to the home menu and sort through your photos every time you need to see the clue again.

3.

Compared to other Mario games, Odyssey’s controls seem a little loose.  Turning felt a little slippy (leading to some accidental deaths), and mid-air dives too often become fatal ground-pounds because of a slipped finger.  You could argue that I just suck at video games, and you’d be right, but that’s a mean thing to say to people.

4.

Somebody mixed Mario Party with my Mario Odyssey.  Mini games have appeared in Mario platformers before, but Odyssey embraces them with Power Moons and online leaderboards.  Koopa Freerunning satisfies the speedrunners, and the Bound Bowl Grand Prix offers some fun racing.  The other mini games, however, were designed by an individual with an abstract definition of fun.  Walking in a perfect circle, that’s a thing kids do, right?  How about jump-rope?  Let’s have people play it until their thumbs fall off.  Volleyball?  How could I forget volleyball?  Let’s make them hit 100 consecutive returns before they get a Power Moon because I studied game design and this is fun, god damn it.

5.

Motion controls are mandatory.  By now, we understand Nintendo clings to its motion controls like a balding man defends his combover, but that doesn’t justify Nintendo’s tendency to force-feed us their obsessions.  It’s been over a decade since the Wii came out, and I’m sick of doing the hokey-pokey to progress in a game.

6.

Randomly-placed Power Moons don’t make for an immersive or gratifying experience.  Did you walk to the other side of the map?  Here’s a Power Moon.  Do you see that glowing spot in the middle of an empty clearing?  Pound it for a Power Moon.  Did you find that flying sphinx in the sky with a pair of binoculars all by yourself?  Liar.  We know you used an online guide, but here’s a Power Moon anyway.

7.

Odyssey reuses its bosses, something I addressed in my “Padding” blogitorial.  The Broodals make more appearances than an overbearing in-law during wedding rehearsal, and harder renditions of each boss offer extra Power Moons towards the end of the game.

Join Mario as he suffers excruciating pain while possessing his enemies.

8.

There are even more pointless Power Moons.  Toadette offers 61 Power Moons for completing achievements, meaning you will have to speak with her and view Mario’s Power Moon dance 61 times before you’re done with her.  In order to reach 999 Power Moons, over 120 of them must be purchased from shops at 100 coins a pop.  Capitalism thrives in the monarchy that is the Mushroom Kingdom.

9.

You are always in control of the camera.  The camera will slowly follow Mario if you give it enough time, but typically, it’s up to you and your right joystick to keep the camera behind Mario.  Some may like this freedom, but I found myself longing for the camera system employed in every other 3D Mario game.

10.

For the number of Power Moons in Odyssey, the pay-off for collecting them all is meager.  Like Lego City: Undercover, Odyssey is best enjoyed when you’re not focused on 100% completing it.  Collecting 500 Power Moons will fully unlock all stages for you, and this point may very well be the best place to stop.  This way, you can ignore all the excess Power Moons I listed above because, seriously, screw volleyball.

What’s the verdict?

Super Mario Odyssey sought to offer both quantity and quality, and it achieved both.  It is easily the longest 3D Mario game I have played, even if I hadn’t set out for 100% completion.  It rivals Breath of the Wild for the greatest game of 2017, and in many ways, I believe Odyssey took greater risks and more outlandish ideas than its Zelda counterpart.  It simply stretched itself too thin.  No one expects Nintendo to craft each mission as perfectly as the last, and 3D Mario games have historically phoned it in for a handful of Power Stars/Suns/Black Holes.  With Odyssey, the typical handful became a truckload., thus making the game feel overweight.  Don’t get me wrong; Mario’s excess fat is lovely, but a little less flab makes for a healthier game.  

Arbitrary Statistics:

  • Score: 9.5
  • Time Played: Over 30 hours
  • Number of Players: 1-2
  • Games Like It on Switch: Rayman Legends:  Definitive Edition, Yooka-Laylee

Scoring Policy

Posted by Solomon Rambling in Review, 0 comments