June Recap
State of Decay 2
Back playing some more games! I completed 3 this year. I spent most of my gaming time playing Smite again, and took some breaks too, but at the end of May I got into playing Subnautica and beat two more after.
Is anything down there... ?
Subnautica
★★★★★ (41 hrs 15 min)Subnautica is an exploration and resource gathering game. You crash land on a planet covered in water and need to navigate the depths to obtain resources for survival. The game is terrifying fun. It’s very tense and scary to leave your ship. You can run out of air, get lost, get stranded without food or water, or get eaten by a predator. It’s a thrilling experience unlike any other I’ve played, save for only the first day I spent in Minecraft back in beta, sitting in my unlit dirt hut at night while strange, horrifying creatures make terrible sounds outside. This game captures that feeling the whole way through and I heartily recommend it.
I never beat this one as a kid. I’d get somewhere in the basement and then get distracted by other games and never finish. So many people speedrun it that I thought I should finally give it a chance. I found Mario a bit hard to control and am unsure if it was my controller, my poor platforming abilities, or the game. I’ve played other platformers as an adult, mainly 2D ones, and they did not give me as much trouble as this one. The final Bowser fight was awful and took me over an hour to complete. At the end I was not having any fun. I’m glad it’s finally over and I have no plans to ever revisit the game to finish the rest of the stars. I think the game is overrated thanks to everyone’s collective nostalgia goggles.
I need to come back here when I have a way to destroy this thing blocking the door.
This is the second Metroid game I’ve tried, and the first I’ve beaten. I started playing Metroid 1 on the NES but I found it to be one of the worst games I owned because I had no idea what I was doing. I figured out how to kill things and turn into a ball, but when I tried to find somewhere to go I found these long vertical shafts. Traversing them as a kid I was convinced they had no end and so gave up on the game. So going into Metroid: Fusion I very happily surprised that the game holds your hand through the beginning, explaining to you not just the mechanics but also how to play the game correctly. This was hugely beneficial to me and I was quickly finding secrets and unlocking new areas and advancing as intended. The game has some tough bosses and a few tough spots. I’d say it’s rather difficult. But the exploration is a lot of fun, getting powerups to unlock new places to venture. A few issues I had were that secrets are very randomly hidden. You have to hit and jump at every single thing in the game to find them. Not very fun. There’s no way to mark your map to come back, so I had to physically write some poor notes down. The game also doesn’t let you backtrack as much as I’d like because it corrals you so strongly toward the current objective. Finally, a couple bosses were just too hard, especially the final one.
Is this too dark?
After signing up for Xbox Game Pass, I started playing State of Decay 2. It seemed like it would have everything I want: exploration, shooting, and looting. But it somehow fails to do any of them satisfyingly. The shooting is fine against regular targets, but as soon as you have a tough enemy it’s extremely hard to aim and move around. Switching to aimed shots to dodging and slow movement feels very rough and unsatisfying. The looting is okay except there’s not that much variety and you don’t have many options for modifying weapons. Every melee weapon controls the exact same and you can’t mod them at all. Coming from Fallout 4, the guns do not have nearly as many options. I wish the game borrowed more heavily from Fallout 4 and Dying Light for the weapons. With looting it’s hard to see the containers you need to find and I often have to turn off my flashlight so I can see the flashing of the container.
The worst part of the game though has to be the nights. They last nearly as long as day and they are incredibly dark. I get they want some atmosphere, but it’s a bit ridiculous that nights have harder enemies but no extra reward, and you can’t skip them by sleeping! I lost a survivor one night to a mob because I couldn’t see how many enemies there were since it was so dark. I should have scouted the place more, but that’s hard to do in the dark. Once bitten, twice shy. I liked going out at night in Dying Light. In State of Decay 2 I just wish they’d end.
Yeah, 3D platformers always seem to be harder to do well than 2D ones. Even Super Lucky’s Tale (a game from 2017) has a bit of trouble making the 3D platforming intuitive at a glance.
Wait, but it’s the same as all the other Bowser battles; you just have to spin the controller around more to get enough speed to throw Bowser over the gap when the arena crumbles into the star shape. If anything, the problem is that the game is repetitive since it makes you fight basically the same boss three times. I will admit that the whole “rotate the control stick to throw Bowser into the bombs” is pretty annoying and has little to do with the rest of the game, though.
As for the part in the gif, I think the issue is that the camera is under the ceiling; if you move it to the right, it’ll be able to go up and point downward, making it easier to judge the distance between the mushrooms. This is one of those games where you can’t really let the camera do its own thing.
However, I think the most annoying part of Super Mario 64 for me is how it handles wall jumping: you have a split second to hit the jump button when you bounce off a wall, and if I remember correctly, there are a couple parts where you have to do multiple wall jumps in a row. I’m glad this was changed to the NSMB “slide down the wall and you can jump whenever” wall jumps in the DS remake.
I remember having fun with the game, though I’ll admit that I haven’t played it or The Missing Stars in years, and I’ve also had my fair share of games I’ve disliked that seemingly everyone else enjoys.
Yeah, as someone who 100%ed the NES Metroid back when I didn’t have that many games to play, I can say that it’s really repetitive and maybe even not that great a game by 1980s standards. If you’re curious, Metroid: Zero Mission is a complete reimagining of the first game; the basic map layout is the same, but the level design has been completely replaced with actual variety, and the game even adds in mechanics from later titles (like wall jumping and ledge-grabbing), putting it on the same level as Fusion, or at least pretty close. It’s a completely different game from the original. In retrospect, I kinda wish they kept the chibi versions of Kraid and Ridley rather than rehash the Super Metroid versions of the bosses (or at least do some kinda hybrid between the original and Super versions, similar to what they did with Mother Brain).
Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend trying to 100% any Metroid game (especially Super Metroid since there are secrets that won’t even show up when you use the X-Ray Scope).
Can you go into a bit more detail on why they’re too hard? What do they do, and what would a first-time-player’s reaction be? How could they be improved?
…how many E-tanks did you find?
The final Bowser fight was a repeat, but I find it nigh impossible to aim while you’re spinning him really fast so it was usually random if I’d get a hit or not. And after so many throws I’d be low on health or I’d fall off the edge or he’d knock me off forcing me to try again.
For Metroid Fusion, I had 16 E-tanks by the end of the game. The Samus clone fight was insane with the jumping around. I had to get the game into a repetitive pattern to be able to beat it. Maybe that’s intended, but I prefer a fight where I can react to things as they happen. The very final boss I didn’t realize how you were supposed to kill it until I watched a video so I wasted multiple runs getting to it and trying to fire off charged shots when you’re just supposed to spam them. I didn’t know ice beam was an iconic part of the series as a first time player, so I just tried the same tactics I knew worked before. It was somewhat anticlimactic because of that.
Neo-Ridley was also too hard because it does too much unavoidable damage as the grabs last too long. I can roll into a ball but it still grabs me off the ground and does insane damage. There needs to be a place for you to hide in between cycles so that it’s clear what you can do to stay safe during the fight. I’d try to roll away as it moves in, but it’d still usually grab me.
The other fight that sucked was Nightmare because of unavoidable damage. If I go in for shots, he’d end up hitting me a bunch. Not much I could do about that but push through the damage and hope I came out on top. I found it nearly impossible to jump over him when he came at me, so I’d end up eating damage then too.
The best fight was probably Yakuza. It does a lot of damage, but if you go into a ball at the right time you can avoid the attacks and stay safe. It’s tough, but fair.