Demi-fiends Assemble!
June has been a quiet month, I beat Shin Megami Tensei III only to discover that I’ve lost patience with the old gameplay and then I played Marvel’s Avengers to see if it’s as bad as they said: TLDR it is, but for the 3,5€ it cost me it’s pretty good.
Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne HD Remaster 
For the record, I played the PS2 version but a lot has happened since then (ohmy, I'm an old man) and I'm afraid my tolerance for certain game mechanics is not as high as it was then.
I really like the plot and especially that "get your own life" feel because there are no mission markers or a mission report to follow, or anything we're used to by now. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and in fact losing this feeling of being led by the hand is one of the things I liked the most. But that also means you can easily miss a lot of things, because nothing tells you what ending you're destined for depending on what you answer at what times if you don't use a walkthrough. It's pretty dark in that and it can get a little frustrating to realize that you've closed the door on an ending just because you clicked on the wrong answer.
About the graphics… It's a 'Remaster' to call it something because they haven't even bothered to fix the animations in 4:3. And better not to talk about the "HD" textures.
If you play on high difficulty you should know that the rhythm is orthopedic to the max: every 5 seconds you jump a random combat (the rate of enemy appearances is absolutely delirious). I wouldn't have needed to suffer this torture if I had known that for the achievement of beating the game in that difficulty you only needed to activate it in the final fight… My advice is to do it that way 😅
The control is also a bit orthopedic because it is not designed to be done with dual joystick (in fact it keeps the mechanics of rotating the camera with the bumpers).
And, finally, what made me abandon my mission to get it 100% done was that, after spending a good while with Dante's damn mission, being chased and frustrated at every step with his incessant chase… by the time I get it I died with a simple Mudoo attack from a random enemy. Thus losing all progress and hope of ever playing the game again.
Yes, you guessed it, you won't see me playing a Souls (I bought Demons Souls on PS2 and 2 days later I gave it to my brother).
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Action game with the quintessential Marvel franchise - what could go wrong? Well, I guess it went wrong trying to turn it into a game as a service that in the end only serves to repeat the same type of missions ad nauseam.
And that's what I see as the big problem with this game, it's repetitive to the point of boredom. At most there are 3 types of missions and the long missions simply put the three types together and repeat them until you die or fall asleep.
But the good thing about this game is the story mode. There's nothing groundbreaking, but accompanying Kamala on her journey of discovery as a heroine as she rescues heroes who resent the world from their own misery is a good hook. And following up with Katie Bishop blaming Tony Stark for not making her an Avenger when they had the chance is also cool.
The gameplay is usually to go back and forth across a large stage looking for your target and beating the crap out of everything that moves. Then you have tasks like "defeat 30 enemies of this type but we won't tell you in which missions they appear" to stretch it out like chewing gum.
Oh well, and it has a few bugs. More than once I've had to restart a mission because of objectives that didn't update and you couldn't advance. And, well, some graphical glitches with the explosions that sometimes left you a little blind.
But, as I said, for 3,5€ the story mode is enjoyable.
The rest was to play a bit of Two Point Campus while downloading Avengers and… yes, I confess, I clicked on the banana… but it counts as completed game/thing!
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Two Point Campus
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Banana
