Video game talk, anyone?

For anyone that's interested I am indeed playing Link's Awakening

Did his awakening have anything to do with seeing the video for Stand and Deliver?

Divine weapons scale with Faith (as in your damage output for that specific weapon will increase if you level up your Faith attribute) and are advantageous to use in one specific section of the game. 

Ha! Also, yes!

The Last of Us: Left Behind

Like the original game, this is one of those immensely rewarding experiences I have no intention of repeating anytime soon. Or maybe ever. Very glad I did it, but for the sake of my blood pressure I'm going to avoid anything this stressful for a while thanks.

Also like the original game, it sticks the landing brilliantly.

played a couple hours of the TEKKEN 8 beta this weekend, mainly Lili, Claudio and Jun. probably will be sticking with those three to begin with, love my running twooooooooo. the new heat system feels like it was created for new players but in practice i think it's gonna lead to even quicker steamrollings a lot of the time. definitely stung to poke out a feng player into rage before he popped heat and beat me in two interactions. one criticism i read from a pro-player is that you'll need to lab in this game rather than learn through playing and i definitely hope that turns out to be wrong as that was one of the main reasons i spent so much time in T7.

i actually think this may be the best looking PS 5 game so far and the costumes are 11/10

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (2019 remaster)



So, unsurprisingly, this is the 2019 remake rather than the original. * 

And it is a complete and utter delight! It's very, very hard to do whimsy and cuteness without it becoming cloying or sickly but Link's Awakening manages to walk that line almost preternaturally well. There's something just so incredibly delightful about the way the game looks, the overall feel, the sheer quality of the graphics work and the way it all fits together that really helps to bring the island of Koholint to life. The swaying plants, the water lapping against the beach, the statues, all of it just looks remarkable - toylike without simply being childish and cartoonish without just look like that's a short-cut. There's a physicality to the way the graphics look too which prevents them looking "cheap" (for a lack of a better word) and like they have real substance to them. 

And that really does extent to every element of the production - for all that it's graphics it does just look real. Link himself is a completely splendid and fabulous representation and somehow I never got tired of him doing his little somersault-jumps or the munching-the-apple routine or... well, or any of it. Throughout, Link is simply charming and a delightful character to be playing. Even his yells as he falls into yet another pit, guided there so expertly by my cack-handed gameplay, are easy to hear again and again (and again and again - did I mention that I'm somewhat cack-handed?). Every bit of Link's design is deigned to draw the player in and does so expertly.  

Given that this is only the second Zelda game I've ever played, I didn't miss the Triforce, Zelda herself, Hyrule or any of that malarky. This was simply a game that had was what it was and stood or fell on how well it implemented what it wanted to - which is, in this case, to say very well indeed. Orphaned from the usual plot-lines or back-story, here we have a simple(ish) premise. Link's stuck on an island after being shipwrecked and needs to get off it, and to do so he needs to wake the Wind Fish, at which point the island will disappear and he'll be able to leave. Because the island only exists as a dream of the Wind Fish, you seel. The opening scene, done in an almost Studio Ghibli style, are beyond wonderful and I wanted so much more of them. But then you get into the game and that's where there really is no escape because once I started playing that was it - I was in.

The dungeon design feels like it's pitched a little better than A Link To The Past. This might be my unfamiliarity with the games rearing its head but generally speaking I found the puzzles here a little less "random" and pitched at a slightly better level. There's more than enough to keep the player thinking (well, this player anyway) without just becoming impossible or "whoops you missed that one tiny detail early on, go back and do the whole sodding thing again" that aLttP sometimes did. Progress here is linear enough to be easy to keep track of but expansive enough to still feel open-world, which is a perfect balance to strike.

Chickens! God, I love the chickens in this game. Whether it's the little ones wandering round the village or the great big air-lift one you need to complete one of the dungeons, they're just an absolute joy. See also: foxes, the dog-on-a-chain and even the jumping fish that never failed to piss me off every time I stupidly walked into them.

I also loved the fact that there's a help mechanism that can clue you in enough to get you going in the right direction but not so much that it's either too obscure to be of use or too specific to ruin the fun. The telephones (I guess those exist in this world?) are, like so much of the game, just pitched perfectly. This is, I am led to believe, a feature going forward and it's a most welcome one. It takes some of the frustration out of the gameplay without just ruining things.

Another thing I greatly loved - and I cannot really stress this enough - is the music. From the little kids-piano theme of the village to the Spanish-infused Zelda theme on Tal-Tal Heights, the music is a completely integral part of the world and it's all completely amazing. I have no regrets in leaving the Dungeon Theme from aLttP in the past - it still haunts me - and instead we have a wide variety of overground and dungeon themes, each enhancing its location perfect without getting in the way of the action or the primary sound effects. It's a careful, nuanced balancing act that's carried out with great aplomb.

Oh, and the Nightmakres feel better judged as well this time out. A least a couple of the aLttP Bosses just pissed me off. Not in a "I'm not good enough to defeat these" sort of way (well, that too, given my limited skillz) but more that the just didn't feel they were always quite calibrated as they should be. Here, the Nightmares feel challenging enough to defeat but not so challenging that frustration sets in as interest drifts. Indeed, the final Nightmare, inside the Wind Fish's Egg, constantly evolves into new forms, each testing a skill you've deployed against one of the previous Nightmares but here all wrapped up into one final baddie. It's a great conceit and actually makes it feel like the final battle is a development on, and growth out of, what's come before rather than simply being One More Bad Guy To Beat.

And the mini bosses help a lot in that regard too. They give you a sense that you're building up to the final Nightmare, providing you with a challenge and skill-learning monster while still allowing plenty of scope for the Actual Nightmare to be a challenge. This, alongside the exploration of the dungeons, always helps to give Link's Awakening a sense of forward momentum. Not that aLttP didn't have this as well - it definitely did - but Link's Awakening manages it even more adroitly.

That sense of progression is important because if there's one way that aLttP scores over Link's Awakening, it's scale. aLttP is simply vast (considering the hardware limitations) and every last kilobyte is deployed in squeezing as much terrain out of the game as possible. Link's Awakening and the environs of Koholint Island, are a delight beyond measure but there's no getting away from the fact that this is a noticeably smaller realm that the game is being played out in. In a way, that's a compliment to Link's Awakening - I simply want more of it, and ideally a lot more of it - but the smaller world and smaller dungeons do lend a feeling that there's less to explore here (because there is). At least having that sense of forward progression helps to offset this a little.

The dungeon design is universally great though and, silly though it is, I love the conceit of each dungeon's layout looking like the thing it's named after. That's exactly the soft of silly I enjoy and the implementation feels perfectly in keeping for such a whimsical, delightful game. The whole island is a dream so why not apply dream-logic to something like the dungeon layout? It's works incredibly well, even though it's just a small detail.

And small details are exactly what Link's Awakening is good at. From the weird suck-things that sometimes steal your shield if you walk into them, to the plants and grasses, even the library... all the little details add up together to make a coherent, complete world for Link to explore. The sound effects help with this as well, everything helping to produce a unified whole (well, except for the deeply weird "music" that plays inside the telephone hut, which doesn't sound like anything I've ever heard before or am likely to again).

So, yes. Basically I loved this. Adored it, even. It's an incredible game that I just couldn't get enough of. My experience of remastered games is exactly one - this - and it's hard to see it as anything other than a complete triumph. The closing titles go back to the anime style of the introduction as the Wind Fish awakens and flies off into the sky while Link awakens to find himself safe on the driftwood from his boat. It's a rather beautiful ending, as always backed by immaculately-written and produced music, and gives the game a suitable and appropriate send-off. This is something really rather special.

Do I prefer it more than A Link To The Past? Yes I do. And that's really quite something.

Prole's Score: 9.5/10

* I did have a look at the Gameboy version as it's available in the Switch Online store. It looks great for what it is but I'm also glad I played the 2019 version.

VINCENT CASSELL IS IN TEKKEN 8

Don't worry - my daughter used to ask me to help with difficult parts of games up till she was a a tween and now she mostly plays soulslikes.

Pluto's at least tolerable though, right?

My prayers have been answered and someone finally ripped off the greatest video game concept of all the times: the house party from Mass Effect 3. Baldur's Gate got some patch that added a "Six Months Later..." post-script to the game that's basically just the house party thing from Mass Effect 3. It's your crew hanging out, getting hammered, and catching up with one another and it's great. The reason anyone plays these games is because they like spending with the characters and I don't know why more games don't just have "Keg Party: The DLC" for 'em.