What are you playing this weekend? 2026-10-02
Played Castlevania (from the Anniversary bundle).
I was afraid the game will be highly difficult, but it felt okay, at least in the start. Anniversary bundle didn't add rewind feature or multiple save states, it only has option for a single save state that is overwritten next time you save. Which I think is a good thing, otherwise with the number of deaths I faced I would probably have used those features to cheese through. As it is, I would save at the start of the stage then reload that when I die, giving me unlimited lives.
I cheated this rule in 3 places. 1st is stage 15, the run before the boss is very difficult died many, many time there. So saved the game on last screen instead of stage start. Secondly on stage 17, just before reaching the last stage there are ton of enemies falling down and jumping around and they kept destroying me. So in an effort to reach the final boss with full health I saved there and reloaded multiple times to cross that without taking any damage. The last was on the final boss. One of the two bosses where I died a lot.
I also had to use a guide to finally complete the game. On my first playthrough I reached the stage 15 (there are 18 total) and got stuck at the boss. Even after uncountable deaths I couldn't figure out how to kill it. After looking up online the guide recommend a strategy that makes it super easy to beat the boss, but that required a different secondary weapon which I couldn't get in that stage, so restarted the game.
So, other than those 3 difficult places, as long as there are unlimited lives, the game isn't super difficult. I know it sound a bit contradictory, but unlimited lives has become a normal feature these days so I am just counting it as a quality of life improvement, rather than an inherent game mechanic. But since the game doesn't have unlimited lives, and those places do exist in the game, it is a very difficult game.
Still, recommended for any one who doesn't mind such old games and want to play one of the classics.
Started Pikmin 1.
Other than the demo for Pikmin 3 I haven't played any Pikmin game, but thanks to the demo I had the general idea of what the game is about.
This first game is time based, you have 30 in-game days to complete the game, and each day doesn't last too long, so you have to manage your time well. These kind of time limits always gives me anxiety, so I am following an guide which mentions what I should pick each day, so that game ends in 21 days, leaving 9 days for margin of error. I am not exactly aligned with it, but trying to stick as close to it as possible. For instance, I missed an item on a particular day, but then I got an extra item on another day, so kind of balancing it out.
I have just finished day 7 and have picked up 11 items (out of 30), but I lost over 100 pikmin killing an enemy and recovering a piece of ship in the last day. Hopefully it won't effect me too badly otherwise will have to spend a day just farming more Pikmin.
It's a really fun game, but I wish there were no time limits, I could just take my pikmin and explore the whole map collecting everything. I have heard the later games don't have such limits, or atleast they are much more relaxed, so looking forward to playing those.
That's all for this week, as I wasn't in mood to play any of the existing games. I switched to these ones.
I would like to add one thing about Monster Hunter Wilds though, which I didn't mention last week. The game has amazing cut scenes. The story is okay, I don't think people play these games for the story, but the story cut scenes are really good.
The game has it's share of issues though, for instance it has such a convoluted way to play co-op. You do missions separately, and only get the invitation to join other when the fight starts, and once the fight is over everyone is back to wherever they were, waiting for the next fight. There are also apparently different type of parties, including one that allow you to roam the open-world together, but I think that doesn't allow you to join each other's missions. There are also some lobbies and squads. Each does something that other things don't do. Pretty confusing overall.
Game is good though. So worth playing even with all these issues.
What about all of you? What have you been playing and/or plan to play?
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Have to finish Pro Philosopher 2. If you ever hated how Ace Attorney is two hours of Maya being stupid before you get to the fun cross examinations, this one is more to the point. Rather than solve a mystery, you’re just cornering governmental philosophers using their own arguments and values.
I don't have that problem with Ace Attorney, but the idea sounds intriguing. Going to check it out.
Breath of the Wild, I'm at the last boss battle and then waiting for Switch 2.
Good luck with the final boss, and congratulations on getting Switch 2! Which game are you looking forward to playing first?
Thanks! I'm definitely going to get the new Mario Kart World and debating whether to get either Zelda Tears of the Kingdom or the new Zelda Ocarina of Time.
BotW and TotK have similar main map, so my vote will be to add some distance between both games and get Ocarina of Time, but that's just me, and everyone plays differently.
I don't have much experience with BotW (only TotK) but from what I've seen they're both REALLY similar, so I'd have to vote for Ocarina too.
What guide are you using for Pikmin? I keep putting it off for the same reason but a good guide might get me to give it a go.
I've been playing The Witcher 3 remastered. I played the main story a long time ago but never the DLCs so started a full play through again
I am using IGN https://www.ign.com/wikis/pikmin/Walkthrough . Mainly just look at the timeline, or take a look at the map to get the idea which star is what item.
Where are you playing The Witcher 3? I loved the game when I played it on Switch, but all my friends keep saying that I should play it on PS5, so now that I have been thinking of replaying the game, I am wondering if I should buy the remaster on PS5, or go with the free Switch 2 upgrade that I got.
Thank you. Will give that a whirl when I'm next brave enough for Pikmin. I'm on Series X for Witcher. Got the game of the year edition a while back for £8. So much game for that price.
I'm was actually considering the opposite, grabbing a used Switch copy and getting the Switch 2 version for portable play. But instead I'm just launching Xbox remote play from my Steam Deck and pretending it's real portable
The Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom Switch 2 edition.
Nice! Have you played the Switch 1 version before? If yes, how are the changes?
Either way, a great game, enjoy!
Busy week for me.
Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope: Still playing this one though not much. The game is definitely good enough tho to remain in permanent rotation. It's still fun and the pickup-and-play nature fits the switch really well. That's something you don't get with most other xcom likes that have you develop your base first etc.
Fire Emblem Fortune's weave: definitely a big game that I'll have to invest more time into. I have played this game the most this week ever since it arrived, but man, I don't really jive with it :(
It's not bad, but so far I'm puzzled why I heard so many rave review about this. Also, holy kojima is the amount of cutscenes insane. I kinda regret the 70€ I spent on this...
StarFox: Hey, I managed to clear this off of my backlog. Also not very far into this one yet, but it's alright. Never played any other StarFox games before. The default scheme was kinda weird since in third person I don't think inverting the Y axis made much sense, but when I wanted to change it after the tutorial I had already become so accustomed to it I had to change it back to inverted hehe.
JustDance: Well, I dug out my ol' VR headset today, so I don't know how much I'll be dancing in the future lol.
Games on my backlog I wanna get back to:
Zelda TOTK: Great game, limited hours in the day ><
Super Mario Galaxy: Kinda playing this one on and off. Controls can be a bit weird, and maybe I shoulda gone for oddysee instead, but here we are.
Games on my backlog that'll stay there:
Pragmata: Pragmata is the Dark Souls 2 of Resident Evil. No I won't elaborate further.
Misc
I've also been enjoying the classics on NSO a lot. Sometimes I feel like I bought the world's most expensive gameboy haha. I am kinda saddened by Pokemon Pokopia. It was a fun game to play, but I never feel like I want to get back to it. The pokemons are so heccin cuute tho but idk.. to quote Scott The Woz "I respect the game more than I like playing it"
That's a nice set of games. What don't you like about Fortune's Weave? Not every game is for everyone so it can happen. This is why every game should have a demo.
There's waaay to many cutscenes. It's like having to watch the MGS4 ending cutscene after every combat encounter. And then, after the slog of story exposition, the combat is just fine. But it doesn't manage to stand out in any way from any other grid based turn based game I've ever played. It's really just generic. I know I'll have to stick with it for a long time to come, but the first couple hours do not make a good first impression.
Yeah, just saw a comment by another user, brsklf, below. They have the same issue. You'll apparently have to stick with it for quite a while before game gets "better".
Donkey Kong Bananza for me. Been trying to play more for a while but got a childfree weekend.
Also I looked online i'm about halfway through the game and I have no clue whats happening, but I like smashing stuff up!
Smashing up stuff is the fun part! They do explain the story as you descend, but that's just an excuse to smash stuff up!
Crazy week. Spent two whole days at a company event, got home absolutely wrecked yesterday, thinking... "OK, let's take it easy, relax, avoid stress next few days"... only get a bunch of hard crashes in my personal PC this morning, suspecting a dying SSD. :/
Playing Afterimage!
Another metroidvania. It's definitely a flawed game, but I'm enjoying it a lot. Might even end up rating it as a "flawed gem".
The maps in this game are absolutely massive, the biggest I've seen in this genre. They are this game's biggest strength, there's so, so, so much to explore. If your goal when playing a metroidvania is to just chill and run around opening areas, finding paths and opening treasure chests you'll have a blast.
At the same time, those huge maps conflict with other design choices - the game has a "soulsvania" system where you have to collect your soul or lose XP every time you die, which would be a massive PITA if not for the game being absurdly easy. The lack of guidance ("just keep going east") makes it easy to get lost and keep exploring areas at random, which hurt the sense of progression and pacing, and the fast-travel system which would be "OK" in other games feels inadequate for this scale.
Sorry to hear about your PC, specially with how the prices are these days a new SSD is going to cost an arm and a leg.
Afterimage is on my wishlist, it looks good, hopefully the good outweighs the bad. Looking forward to your final review of the game.
After a lot of debugging I think it's not a disk issue but rather a power management problem. Made some configuration changes and so far it looks stable... let's keep monitoring.
Most likely the final review will be positive.
Long time Fire Emblem player.
Fortune's Weave is in a very odd spot where I am starting to have fun with it but I couldn't decently recommend it to anyone, because getting there involved a slog through mostly awful dialogue and almost nothing else.
This game is actively trying to prevent you from playing fire emblem for the first twenty hours. I was desperately looking for stuff to do, and the very confusing map certainly doesn't help. You can totally take a wrong turn and just waste your alloted time achieving absolutely nothing. Not my idea of fun.
Also for some reason that map has dungeons in which they replaced tactical FE battles with "quick" battles that are neither quick nor fun. Shadows of Valentia did the dungeons with tactical battles, it worked. Fortune's Weave dungeons feel like they're just designed to waste your time.
Now the game's finally opening up a bit and giving me actual stuff to do... Even surprise me a bit with good fights. Absurd that I took so long though. I never felt that way through Three Houses, sure it already had a huge activity planning aspect but you never had to wait long to get into actual gameplay.
Yeah I feel you. I’ve just gotten to the part where the game actually opens up a bit, but hot damn was it a non fun road to get here.
I’ve just gotten limited dungeon experience but it’s really not quick and not fun.
Imma throw a hot take out here: FF13 did dungeons best. Not having to worry about healing after battles made the dungeons much more challenging AND the combat is more fun.
I think you accidently replied to a wrong comment.
I haven't read any reviews for the game but saw the scores, so wasn't expecting multiple people in same week not liking it.
Would love to hear if your recommendation changes as you progress further in the game.
You're right, my client makes it a bit hard to see where comments begin and end, and I got confused with all the separators.
I'd say the game is "already" kind of growing on me. Now there are more real battles on the map, with some variety, a few secondary quests (not many yet) and a few times I even went unprepared on some stuff and had to back down and rethink my strat.
But I'm 30 hours in, I am still not a huge fan of the map mechanics and I still hate the dungeons and their bastardized combat system (fortunately they seem mostly inconsequential, you have to look for them, and chapters end with real battles). That's why I say it's a very hard game to recommend, even if it seems to get better I don't think that game respects the player's time. Especially not at the beginning.
100%, this game feels like it's on the wrong console. Having to sit thru hours of cutscenes for minutes of gameplay feels antithetical to the Switch nature (even if I'm a rather recent convert and I might be entirely mistaken but I don't think I am). I can appreciate that Nintendo wants more serious* games on their Switch console too, but it feels wrong when you just want to pick up yer Switch for 5 minutes and get locked into a 30 minute cutscene.
I don't really mind games with a lot of narrative, I have a few even on Switch 1/2. But they have to be written well.
I wouldn't consider Fortune's Weave an attempt at being "serious", it's par for the course for a FE game, and it even has the annoying silly characterization of Awakening and later games (not Awakening stupid, but close at times). It's just way too much dialogue, and with terribly clumsy exposition.
By the way, which story did you start with ? I took Leda's, I am kind of worried they all begin like that.
I took Leda too. The story and dialogue is really nothing to write home about. I don't have the reference frame you have tho, as I've never really heard of Fire Emblem before FW was about to release at all. Also, by serious I didn't mean "serious" serious but narrative heavy, I just forgor the proper term when I wrote that hehe.
I mostly use it on desktop, but summit is a good android client, if you want to check it out.
Thanks for the update, will keep this in mind when I play it.
It's interesting to hear about that side of Monster Hunter Wilds. I have 230 hours on record and I have never touched any of that. You're playing a very different game from me, it seems!
I'm still finishing off the map in Fallout 3. Turns out, the qualifications for a place to be marked on the map are a lot lower than I expected! A lot of them are areas I've passed by in the past because there simply didn't seem to be anything worth looking at and, well... there really isn't. But it's on the map! I have two more areas to visit, but I'll have to navigate the metro systems to get there...
I finished the Soul Society chapter in Bleach: Rebirth of Souls. I said last time the story is way more detailed than I expected, but I had no idea how far this would go. Apparently, the developers had so much fun with it they added one-off comedy segments the way the Anime would to stretch for time. There's absolutely no reason to dedicate any time to a board game tournament between Captains but I have no choice but to respect how audaciously stupid it is!
In Monster Hunter GU, I fought Nibelsnarf and Iodrome. Nibelsnarf is interesting, but I have to conclude that I will never be friends with any monster that spends a significant amount of time diving through sand. Get up here and fight me! Iodrome was as expected, a Velocidrome that poisons. Not much to say here. This weekend, I'll tackle Daimyou Hermitaur. In preparation, I looked up how to detonate Barrel Bombs because the last time I tried to just hit them, I took a lot of damage myself. I'm pretty sure in New World games they can't damage you, but I also rarely used them. I assume breaking that shell is going to be difficult without them, though.
Hehe, now I am going to brag, "I know things in the game that someone with even 230 hours don't know!"
BTW I haven't looked it up, but I have just beaten Arkveld in the story, and I still can't find a way to capture monsters. I know this existed in previous games but there is no way to make traps, at least none that I could find, though my Palico do use a thunder trap sometimes, but that is completely random and depends on it's mood.
Is this something that is going to unlock on future? Or I just missed something and should look up how to do it in Wilds?
Capturing works exactly the same way it always has. Trap Tools combined with either Nets or Thunderbugs. I think you are indeed missing something that should be obvious, but let's be honest: menus have never been the series' strong suit.
Thanks. Just looked it up, and you get the option in mission 4-1. I am still on mission 3. So should be getting it soon.