I don’t play Splatoon 3, but I am rooting for Mint Chip!

Booo, down with Mint Chip! Up with… whichever team I end up picking. (Maybe even Mint Chip!)

Thank you! Bowser’s Fury is a fun experience, and the open-world concept is a cool one. I actually bought this Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury pack on the strength of Bowser’s Fury alone, after reading people speculate that it might be the future of the 3D Mario series. I’m not sure how it would scale to a full game, though… I guess it might also be a little less “whoa dude” in a post-Mario-Odyssey world, since some of those levels were almost such environments in their own right (desert level comes to mind here, with its town area and other areas). The

is equal parts cool and annoying, with the way it gets less avoidable as the game progresses. But on the whole, it’s good stuff… I haven’t even looked at the main title yet, and I feel like I’m close to getting my $40’s worth.

What has the TMNT experience been like for you? I’m a little frustrated at all the button-combo moves I can’t seem to memorize, but that might just be a me-thing. Still having fun with this one, even with the struggles.

That’s the plan, I want to take my time, there’s no game that I wan to play in the moment (besides one missing chapter in Celeste) so yeah, I think I’m going to explore everything that’s left.

That’s a good start, haven’t thought about the dlc but yeah, perhaps is a good idea to leave a couple of things to do and explore at that moment.

Thanks for the Chiaki recommendation! I tried it very first day the steam deck arrived, I might play few games this way when SO steals the TV.

Regarding Ni No Kuni, first time I played it I liked the story, but the combat did not click with me (dropped it about 6 hours in). Never played pokemon, so it might be that I’m just not used to that kind of gameplay.

Great Ace Attorney is… well, great. I played the first AA trilogy few years back and liked it a lot, so I knew I would like this games as well, and it definitely delivered. Which collection are you planing to start with? I would suggest the first trilogy, although you can’t go wrong with either of these.

Forspoken is a tough sell. I personally find it fun to play, combat and world traversal are the highlights for sure. The story, while it has it issues, is not as bad as people on the Internet are saying. I would say that if you liked the demo, you would also like the game itself. Not worth the 70$/80€ asking price though.

Haha right!

I missed that there is a percentage after beating the game, will have to check when I get home.

I am probably also quite low. I feel like I have skipped over a lot of the map because I would constantly use the towers or just teleporting to the sky islands to glide directly to locations instead of traveling over land and discovering stuff…

Yeah mine have really gotten in to Minecraft this year and while searching for other games I remembered Story Mode and that I never finished all episodes.

I’m going to move on to Pikmin 2 next. We are waiting for 4 but my wife is definitely going to get in there first!

Yeah it is a good one, graphics are a bit dated, bur the game is super complete. I read some reviews of the newer games, but these appear to be repackaged mobile games, with the pay to play features stripped. The newer games also lCk management features that RT3 does have.

BOTW and TOTK are both 30 FPS - unless you played it on PC or Steamdeck emulated or something

I am a massive Final Fantasy fanboy so, my totally unbiased opinion, it is a masterpiece. The story made me cry like 6 times. It’s excellent story telling. The game play is engaging. Not terribly challenging but it could be for folks less familiar with action games. There are ways to decrease the difficulty on a few different axis by equipping certain accessories. The side quests can be a little fetchy but I think even the worst ones add some depth to the world. There’s plenty of optional bosses too. It’s my personal game of the year although Tears of the Kingdom is probably more deserving overall for more broad appeal and polish.

There are two versions of Runescape - old school and RuneScape 3. RS3 is the older of the two. It’s been the natural continuation of the game with a controversial overhaul of the combat system to make it more traditionally mmo adjacent. Old school started in 2013 from a back up copy of the game pre-2007 when the change occurred. Jagex now runs both simultaneously. Old school is the game you would remember if you played back in the day. It’s bigger than ever. At any given time there are well over 100k folks playing. Regular new content and updates. It’s amazing.

I’ll probably start with FF1 and go from there. I’ve played them all before in other versions so I might as well go in order.

I’m really liking Squeaky Clean Sprint! And the city tracks from Tour are pretty cool too.

Wow, I did chose Mint Chip haha 🫠 I really like cookies&cream, so it was the closest to that. Also, having played Splatoon since the first one, I shall follow Callie/Marie’s catchphrase, “Stay fresh” haha 😆

FE engage is great. It feels really strategic, compact maps with powerful terrain effects and chokepoints to take advantage of, units don’t have a lot of movement, positioning and formation can let you do a lot of cool plays.

The new mechanics, chain attack and break, are very powerful and interesting to play around both on player phase and enemy phase.

The Emblems have some really powerful effects between AoE dance, AoE warp, a billion range nuke, +500 movement on one of your characters, and some other combat steroids. There are a lot of options and I think the game is fun on any difficulty.

The story… uhhh, I liked when the Fire Emblem: Engaged. The plot is very generic and pretty much the same as a plurality of previous fire emblem plots. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

Have you played the rest of the series?

I did, and it’s a good thing because CS4 and Reverie depend a lot on you having played both Zero/Azure and CS1-3. Not a lot of Sky connections on the recent games though, just a few returning characters.

And I want to play the whole series from start, so not playing any of the later games until I have finished Trails in the Sky 😀

I’m one of the renegades that don’t think playing in order is truly necessary. Sky has only one plotline that gets carried into Zero/Azure and CS1-2 is mostly self-contained, so it’s perfectly fine IMO to play these out of order. Yeah, you lose some references and gets some spoilers, but nothing that will ruin the fun from the older games if you play them later.

In fact, I believe I went Sky 1-2 -> CS 1-3 -> Sky 3 -> Zero/Azure -> CS4 -> Reverie, and the only time I truly felt “yeah, I should have played the earlier games first” was during the Crossbell section of CS3.

How are you enjoying the game?

The beginning was kinda mid because it starts with Lloyd’s route in Crossbell and that part feels like we’re just rethreading the plot of recent games, but gets much better once you open the other two routes. C’s route being an all-new cast is really great in making the game feel “fresh”, so much that I wish the game started with that one instead of having us go through the early sections of Lloyd’s and Rean’s route first.

It also has a very strong “Sky 3rd” feel, which is good because I think that game is really underrated. The Reverie Corridor is almost Phantasma 2.0, and each of the main routes seems more streamlined than the average game with this series, with less sidequesting and more focus on the main story.