Ushi No Tane Forum

I started Banjo Kazooie recently and I got to the 6th world (Freezeezy Peak can do away with those sniper snowmen). Not sure if I'll continue it at the moment or stop for a bit. Just haven't felt like gaming. Either that or wanting to clear my backlog.

I did attempt to start up Kynseed, but my cat stepped on my computer's on/off button and shut it down.

I could just have a feeling of wanting to play games that aren't out yet; SMTV, SMT Nocturne, Cyberpunk 2077, and Rune Factory 5 come to mind.

Edit: Well, I wanted to play something easy and quick to do, so I finished up Brothers.

Ugh, finished Chaos;Head. What in the bloody hell was this game? I feel like I was just forced to watch an otaku's power fantasy fanfic. The buildup for the incredibly half baked ending was not worth my suffering through. Again, whatever the connection to Robotics;Notes better been freaking good.

I think I need to play FFXIV for awhile to cool off after how angry I am for wasting so many hours of my free time on literal garbage.

I'm almost done Persona 4! There's only one more dungeon to go, so I'm hoping to finish it before the end of the month. After that I'll move on to Persona 4 Dancing, which will be a nice change of pace, and maybe tackle something short before committing myself to Persona 3 Portable (which will hopefully go quicker than P4 since I always play portable games much more consistently than console games).

Other than that, it's been mostly a lot of Tetris and a bit of Tomodachi Life, neither of which are on my backlog. I tend to gravitate towards Tetris when I'm stressed so I guess I'm starting to feel the pressure of my online classes more.

Also looking forward to the Crown Tundra DLC, though! Which reminds me I need to get to work on my history assignment so I can finish that before it comes out... Time to stop distracting myself!

I brought Hometown Story after procrastinating for years. The game luckily isn’t expensive, even though it’s so niche and rare. I’ve heard mixed-to-negative things about the game but I REALLY love Little Dragons Cafe and there’s so little info on HS online,

I haven't been able to go back to Monster Hunter Stories. A game I was barely enjoying shut down on me and destroyed 1-2 hours of progress (not a HUGE amount...I do actually save relatively often, but not obsessively enough that every hour is protected) that finally made me feel like I was getting caught up, and it just...finished me on it, I think. I'll have to set it aside long enough that I no longer get that feeling of hopelessness from it, lol.

The story and characters remain only 'okay' in that game, not exactly the stuff of literary genius or much originality of any kind. I was playing mostly to collect things, and I'd just gotten 3 new eggs, including a rare one, and they were lost, of course, along with the bothersome sidequests I'd just finished, and...meh. No, I can't go back to it.

At this point I will just work on getting Bamboo Bluffs fixed up for my brief little 'party' on the 26th, and the next day Cold Steel IV will release. I dunno when I'll actually receive the game, but I'm just gonna wait on it without worrying about playing anything else, right now, with my big cement block of a head. Could play a touch of Genshin Impact, but ya know...I don't actually like Genshin Impact, lol. No real story there to follow, so I've no motivation. I like finding new statues and opening the map further (like finding towers in BotW), but that's about the only thing I get into. Not enough to go on, for me. So I'll just sit and wait for Cold Steel, for now, and try to think of hobbies I can prepare to take up to keep me sane during winter.

I'll also for sure have Cafe Enchante on Nov. 5, as I'm getting it digitally. I hope it doesn't arrive before CSIV!

It's a shame, Kiki, but I get you. It's hard to continue with a game you were just 'ok' with, and then losing progress ontop of that? Yeahhhhh. I do think the 2nd game looks really good though. We'll have to see more exploration / how battles handle, but the it looks more cinematic and serious + having actual english voice acting and not just gibberish (it's technically 'Wyvern speak', but I digress) is a nice plus.

Crown Tunda releases tomorrow and I'm still having issues caring. Isle of Armor was just OK and I'm still irritated that I can't get my Pokemon off of GO after this long. I'll play it to finish Pokemon Shield and remove it from my Switch if anything. Not too big into hunting down legendaries I really don't care about. I'm kinda burnt out on Pokemon as a brand rn, but I will admit that if the next entry is a Diamond/Pearl/Platnium remake, I will be all over it. I'd love to reexperience that game that sucked 400+ hours of my teenage life away looool.

I think I'll start Robotics;Notes sometime next week depending on where my days off fall. It's really the only thing in my backlog, but I did buy Rune Factory 4 Special to help feed my Rune Factory bug that hasn't gone away since seeing the RF5 trailer. I also re-added Yokai Watch 1 & 4 onto my Switch because Level 5's NA branch went belly-up, so we likely wont ever see these games localized at this point. Disappointing, but I imported them for this exact reason. The World Ends With You is also still sitting on my screen, still yet to be opened. My wrists have been super sore from work lately, so IDK if I'm up to more pain trying to play it, but we'll see.

Other than that.... *sits down and waits for the eventual CSIV playthrough movie to pop up on youtube*

I hope I can keep myself amused til November 20. FFXIV content is either replaying old stuff or grinding new stuff while Genshin Impact is entirely a mood based game for me.

Yeah, it sucks, cuz the game was okay, and I would have finished it. I like being able to cross games off as finished. But the only chance I have of picking it up again is if I say 'screw it' to all sidequests and just decide to plough through the rather uninspired main story. The sudden shut-down ruined any drive I had to actually clear up any sidequests ever again, lol. (In MHS, that is.) I feel like I got punished for doing my chores properly. (-____-)

I wish I knew how I felt about CSIV coming up. I LOVED I and II...all-time faves...but III didn't really win me over. It was okay, and I like the new class VII members, but I wanted to stay with the story I was already in, not swap to a new focus in cast. I lost a bunch of my emotional connection to it when so much shifted between II and III.

I still love Rean and Falcom is still making a great story with good gameplay, it'll be very interesting and fun at many points, I'm sure, but...yeah. That urgent connection I had to it before wasn't there for III.

Looking forward to the probable silliness of Cafe Enchante. (Kinda still dreading AoC, though...it's gonna hurt my feelings!)

Have started on Brain Age for Switch. Dr. Kawashima is still a jerk, but I don't really care. Unfortunately, the game for some reason does NOT register my 4's as a number, or my 6's. Every other number is okay. I figured it out, though...don't give your 4 ANY tail, and make sure to make your loop on the 6 connect lower down, so that the loop is quite small. Looks weird, but at least then they register. Funny, though...I don't even have messy handwriting. It's not especially pretty, but no one has ever had any trouble being able to read it. I guess the game is just very narrow-minded about how people are allowed to write 4s and 6s.

This made my brain age artificially old, cuz I spent many, many seconds trying to get the game just to understand my answer. Not that I would have scored well anyway...but it definitely would have been better, probably by about a decade.

I do have cruddy short term memory, which is why I got the game, but it also seems to wake my brain up a little more and shake the perma-brain-fog brought on by winter, at least for an hour or so.

Well, I have to go out for a walk and a photo shoot, then do a few kitchen chores and make some beef barley soup before doing some exercises and signing back on to ACNH to go to Shan's costume party, so I've got stuff to get to. Though really, I'd rather take a nap, lol. Yesterday was gorgeous, but today is COLD. And damp. Can't forget the damp!

Look at me adding to my backlog I bought Moonlighter on the Switch. It's on sale rn, including the DLC, at 13 USD.

I haven't made a lot of progress with SOSFOMT; although I did unlock the elevator and have reached floor 100 of Lake Mine. The goal now is to reach the bottom before winter is over. I expected going down 50 floors at a time would take a while irl but it's actually not so bad -- I took around 30mins. It's not so much of a chore too if I listen to podcasts while doing so haha

I've been replaying Ace Attorney 1 as well; I'm at the final case with Ema, on the 2nd investigation day now.

---

Backlog status

Uwaa...finally got word from Amazon.ca this evening. Cold Steel IV isn't set to arrive until November 4 or 5. (Release is October 27th.) Boo. Well...I've waited, what...just over 6 years to reach the end of this series. (Technically, though, I think there are loose ends not tied up until Hajimari, which we may get next year. But the bulk of the story surrounding the central cast should finish with IV.) It doesn't seem sensible to get antsy now.

Narf. I don't mind horribly, but Cafe Enchante comes out on the 5th. And then Age of Calamity comes out on the 20th. Why do games always pack together like this, leaving you 3 months without anything to play and then one month with more than you can handle? Feels like that happens more often than not. But I don't have any other must-buy games for the rest of 2020, just two items high on my consideration list. I can finish Cafe Enchante in 2-5 days, most likely. I should be done it by the 10th at the latest. I doubt I can complete CSIV in under two weeks, but it's not like I have to hurry to start playing Age of Calamity on release day. Plus I'm betting it won't arrive on time either...it's such a huge game, GB-wise, that I ordered it in physical, since I don't want the burden of downloading and storing, what, 16GB?

Maybe I can pack them all in without too much overlap. But I have December to wrap up any spill-over. I haven't been able to finish games all that quickly, this year, and I'm not getting any faster as we get further into winter.

Long time no post!

This year has been pretty dead for me in terms of gaming. :/ (Still enjoying watching other people play games though!) I am back to my playthrough of A Link Between Worlds, at least. The plan is to finish it before election day (I'm American) so I can start Ni no Kuni on the day of and ignore the « Cow Poopoo » show that every news adjacent outlet will inevitably turn into for the whole night. Hooray.

The only real gaming 'news' I have is with Ring Fit! I'm finally to the second to last world in adventure mode. No spoilers, just proud of myself. I've never been this consistent with exercise (in my entire life). It's been really funny over the year watching people I chat casually with or follow on socials slowly take notice of it.

(I also just saw this...that Ring Fit has outsold physical copies of Breath of the Wild in Japan? Holy « Cow Poopoo »? )

Congrats on the consistent exercise Miko! If I knew Ring Fit was coming out and was gonna be good, I would've gotten the full Switch instead of the Lite I'm trying to get into an exercise routine recently too; need to shave off this fat I've accumulated in quarantine T.T

Wow, finally nearly finished; I'd heard that at half an hour a day, you could complete Ring Fit in about 3 months, but that really does not seem to be true. I lost interest in it, tbh. Not the exercise itself, but the story mode started to annoy me, lol. I hate the repeating loop. It's like, why should I even fight Drago (or whatever his name was) another time? I'm gonna beat him, and then he's gonna fly away saying how I haven't won yet, and then I'll chase him again only to run into 3 more goonies or obstacles, lather, rinse, repeat.

I shouldn't think of it that way, since it's only sort of a game...it's really an exercise program...but the game part got to me, to the point I felt annoyed while using it and then got fed up.

~

Okay, have you guys seen Carto? I really feel I must have it. I loooooove the art style. It's the way I feel pixel art should look in 2020. (Please note: Carto is NOT pixel art.) To me it looks like pixel art that has been...de-pixellated. Teeny chibi little character sprites moving around on a world map like a game from the late 80's, cute and simple, but also clear and beautiful. The pine trees look like gigantic feathers! I love, love, love it. I can't draw, but it makes me want to. I feel like I could draw feather trees, and gumdrop bushes. It's deceptively simple like that.

I love the map mechanic, and the music, though incredibly simple almost to the point of silliness, makes me feel sleepy/relaxed. (The sleepy part admittedly may just be my default state.) It releases tomorrow. I do not have time for any games in November. Cold Steel IV could, in theory, arrive any day now due to releasing tomorrow, and Cafe Enchante I will definitely have on November 5. And then Age of Calamity, of course. NO spare gaming time in November. Doooooon't get Carto, me! Don't say, 'Oh, it's only a 5-hour game! Cold Steel isn't due to arrive for 8 more days!'

...

I want it.

EDIT: Completed the Tumblestone demo today, too. It was fun. Not sure I want to keep playing it to higher and higher difficulty, though.

@Pachi: Aw, thanks! :D It really is a shame that Nintendo didn't work out (no pun intended) some sort of way to make sure Switch Lite owners can play too. I've heard talk lately (completely rumor) about Nintendo maybe making some sort of dongle for Lite owners to use to connect to a TV. Would be nice.

@Kikki: Yeeeah...I do wish they'd thrown another proper 'arc' into the story. EVERY boss fight being 'win the fight/lose in the cutscene' loses its appeal really fast. (It doesn't help that an Adventure Mode workout takes longer than anything else either.) For the most part I've only stuck around to see if I could make it to the end...and to see if there was any sort of NG+, actually. I've still only got about half of the clothing options unlocked.

Edit: I've been thinking about it...and I may have the time to beat issue figured out! Roughly guesstimating based on how much time I've spent in game vs how much of Adventure Mode I've beaten, I think the half hour a day is of 'exercise time'. Which makes the whole thing SO much longer...but I guess it's supposed to be a long term thing. Haa~

And as an aside...I'm still watching through the gameplay video of Carto - how cute! Really interesting hook for a game. May have to watch a review of it. Really cute art style, hopefully it runs well on Switch. 2D animation is a big resource hog, unfortunately.

I've only seen two reviews of Carto on switch so far, and they are glowing. The biggest criticism either had was that a couple of the puzzles were a bit too vague. And this may interest you...the writer for Carto also worked on Celeste. (And Guacamelee 2, which I don't know.)