Tag Archives: WiiU

Donkey Kong Is No Joke

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Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze (Switch) Review — DarkStation

I’ve just come back from having my throat and nose swabbed by a woman in a white hazmat suit with facial protection. The joys of suspecting you may have corona symptoms and then needing to be tested to see if this is indeed the case. I started feeling sick on Saturday, although initially I thought I was having some allergy symptoms. Runny nose, watery eyes. I didn’t immediatly make the connection that it could be anything else. Then on Sunday I started feeling like I had a bad cold. Runny nose, constant sneezing, throat ache and coughing. Normally I’d not make a fuzz about it but the climate being how it is these days I couldn’t rule out if I may have been infected with corona at some point last week. So I scheduled a test and went to get it done about an hour ago. I can’t really recommend it. There’s multiple q-tips involved that go way too far up your nose and down your throat. Now I just have to wait 48 hours to see if it is indeed corona or if I’ve just been struck down with a common cold. Time will tell.

Right now I’m in my second week of a two week holiday. I was supposed to go to Spain for a week of lounging at a pool with a cocktail and not a care in the world. Unfortunately due to multpile outbreaks of corona across Europe that vacation was cancelled and left me sitting at home for two weeks trying to decide what I wanted to be doing with my time instead. As it so happens my best friend was off for a week aswell last week. We had already agreed to meet up, you can here in the Netherlands, but I thought it would also be fun if we would start the same game to spend our vacation time on. We both own a Switch and a 3DS and he has some Switch games that I have on my WiiU so there was plenty to pick from.

He decided on Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. A game that had been sitting in my library for a bit, and that I was supposed to tackle over the summer anyway, and one he borrowed from a co-worker with the intent of playing it and returning it as soon as possible. So after that decision was made we both set out to complete the game before the week was over. Initially things seemed to be going well for the both of us and I was already in world number 3 when he started complaining that the game was “too hard”. I had warned him beforehand that reviews of this game indicated that it was no joke and had a few levels that required some pretty tight platforming. Since he had the Switch version of the game though, instead of dropping it he opted to play “Funky Mode” and, not surprising, blew past me once he made the swap over to that. Unfortunately I didn’t have the luxury to switch to an easier mode so I plodded along playing on the normal difficulty. In the end I didn’t have that many issues. Way less than I had with New Super Mario Bros U anyway. I think one of the only levels that really got to me was a level where you’re riding a rocket in the final world. Steering the rocket was a bit of a pain in the ass to begin with and then I had to maneuver my way through really tight corridors with only two chances to hit something and nowhere to replenish a heart once I lost one.
Other than that I really enjoyed the game. It took me back to being a kid and playing Donkey Kong on my Gameboy. I remember being hooked on those games and spent a lot of time trying to get all the stuff I could back then. I made it in the end though and managed to finish the “final” boss and get to the credits yesterday. It was a relatively short game, according to my WiiU log it took me around 9 hours to finish it. Then again I did skip out on most of the collectibles and finding hidden exits to levels and all that stuff. I just wanted to get to the credit roll and call it a day. I know that eventually another world unlocks if you do all the bonus stuff like get all the KONG letters, unlock all hidden levels and all that jazz but I’m not really feeling up to doing that right now. Maybe at some point in the future when I’ve played through some other games and I feel the need to go back and get games to 100% completion. But the tight platforming and sheer determination that is needed to do all that is not something I want to spend time and energy on as of right now.
That being said I really hope that Nintendo will drop a new Donkey Kong game somewhere in the near future. Tropical Freeze was initially brought to the WiiU in 2014 so it’s high time they come with a new entry in the franchise. I’m certain to be more hyped for that than for anything they would bring out with the Mario label.

For now though I’m happy that I’ve finished off another game from my backlog. I’ve been really inconsistent with playing single player games over the summer, even though I had really big plans. I guess life happens. For now though me and my best friend have picked a new game to play through, one of my choice this time. It’s Xenoblade Chronicles 2 on the Switch. A game that I started a long time ago but kind of gave up on when I was 8 hours in. We both started a new game and I’m running around again in the first little town you get to. It’s a vastly different game from Donkey Kong but I feel like I can do with a longer JRPG right now. So I guess we’ll see where that ship strands. I hope that having someone else play the game simultaneously will keep me motivated to play aswell so that we can share our thoughts on stories and fights. Maybe this is what I needed all along to finally tackle my backlog…

Nearing Completion

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Character in field of flowers

I’m so, so terribly close to getting all my battle jobs to level 80 in Final Fantasy XIV that I can almost smell it. Right now my Gunbreaker is just shy of level 78 and I need to do most of my roulettes still this reset, which I’ll probably do tomorrow since it’s already past midnight and I’m really sleepy right now.
I’m hoping I will be level 80 by the weekend, get my Amaro mount and then drop the mad grind that I’ve been on for the past two or three weeks. Granted I could have gotten this milestone a lot earlier but I’ve been on hiatus in FFXIV a bit so it didn’t happen when I originally tought it would.
Being in the middle of the first week of another two week holiday though means I have ample time to get this done while also steadily working away at leveling my crafting jobs with the “new” Dwarf beast tribe dailies. I’ve gotten my Carpenter to 80 so far and my Weaver isn’t far behind. Seeing as I never really enjoyed the whole Ishgard crafting grind I’d rather opt into leveling my crafters this way, slow and steady wins the race right?
I also need to find a new sort of “daily” routine when I don’t have any more battle jobs to level. I think I may just stick to doing ex-roulette for now and the weekly clears next to the crafter dailies. I want to gear up my jobs and the only way to do that is to get through the latest content. I may do a bit of level roulette on my tanks for the achievement but I’ll see when I get there.

Next to completing a long standing goal in FFXIV, I’ve also been making more progress towards filling up my Pokédex in Pokémon Sword. I’m now down to needing only 38 more Pokémon for the base dex completion and I’m going over to my best friend tomorrow who owns Shield and trade a bunch of version exclusives with him. Which then leaves me with only a handful of Pokémon I still need to catch on my own. Yay! After that I’m going to turn my attention to the Isle of Armor and the Pokémon there so I can get my awesome crown and be ready for the Crown Tundra DLC that’s not too far away now either.
If I manage to complete this Pokédex it will be the first time I’ve completed a Pokédex in a Pokémon game ever. The closest I came to achieving this feat was when I was still a kid and playing my copy of Pokémon Blue. I was up to 146 Pokémon caught for the dex but for some reason I resetted my game after that, much to my regrets. Afterwards I’ve never come close to completion again, with the best try on Pokémon Black but that were just so many Pokémon.. That I basically gave up after over 70 hours played.
In Sword I’ve clocked in around 65 hours now, making it the game I’ve put the most hours in on my Switch by far. I dare take it even further and say that if I cross the playtime I had on my copy of Pokémon Black with Pokémon Sword it will be the single player game that I have spent the most time on of all time.

Finally I’ve been slowly working through my backlog again. The latest title that I’m working on is Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. Me and my best friend both own a copy of this game, me on my WiiU and he on his Switch. I figured it would be nice to go through the game at the same time so we can share our triumphs and frustrations. Little did I know that he would be way more frustrated than me. Even so frustrated that he has switched from normal mode to Funky Mode so that the game was doable for him. I don’t have this luxury on the WiiU and as such I’m playing the game on the original difficulty level. I’ve made it up to the boss of the fourth world, meaning I only have two more worlds to go after I defeat it. I’ve not really been doing a completionist run so there are a lot of levels that I have yet to unlock and a lot of collectibles to get. However my main goal is to just see the credit roll so I’m not really fussed about skipping these. I just want to stripe another game of my backlog. And with the tempo I’m going that should be doable by the end of the week aswell.

All in all it feels nice to be completing so many things at once. It’s mentally rewarding and it gives me the chance to set new fresh goals afterwards! But first it’s time for some much needed sleep.

Summer of Platformers: #1 New Super Mario Bros U

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Sparkling Waters world, before the worst platforming nightmares

It’s a time! For the review of my first game of my Summer of Platformers. And really, would there be any surprise if I kicked off with anything else than the icon of platforming himself? Yeah I didn’t think so either.
To say that this game has been one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve had in a while would be an understatement. I’ve cursed and raged and almost threw my WiiU gamepad across the room. Nonetheless I finished the game today and it’s been a wild ride.

Initially I thought I had picked an “easy” game to start out my Summer of Platformers with. I mean, Mario is generally a kids game right? There is no way that I’m bad at a game aimed at kids. Hell I think my best friends’ seven year old kid would probably have a good time going at this game. Boy was I wrong.
I’m not sure if it’s the WiiU controls, you’re kind of forced to play it with the gamepad as single player, or if I’m just this rusty when it comes to platformers but I seriously considered just putting down the game and not look back at it instead of pushing it through to the end. I had one game over, which means I managed to go from over 30 lives to 0 somewhere during the final few worlds of the game, and I actually used the “Super Guide” function to play through two levels that were just so frustrating that I couldn’t do it myself. As such I have slightly cheated in finishing this game but what’s done is done. I have skipped getting a lot of the star coins and I’m definitely not touching the super special world that opened up after I defeated Bowser. I’ve watched some gameplay of that on Youtube and immediatly noped the hell out. I mean, I can’t even get through all the regular levels without help from the Super Guide, imagine me doing levels that require super clutch platforming skills.

Capture from the ending credits

It took me roughly 10 hours and 30 minutes to defeat Bowser. I’ve never once gone back to do a level when I thought that I wanted to get a coin that I missed and I didn’t necessarily stop and do all the Toad Houses for bonuses either. There’s definitely two hidden levels that I haven’t unlocked that I know of and probably even more. As such I consider this playthrough a “main story” run only. Looking at the numbers on howlongtobeat this puts me an hour above the average game time for people that only beat the “main story”. I’m putting this in quotes mostly because it’s a Mario game and as such it doesn’t really have a story beyond “go save Peach.. again”.

I can’t be all negative about this game. For a game from 2012 (God has it been that long?) graphically it still looked pretty fine. I forgot that the WiiU wasn’t necessarily a piece of junk hardware and the games that Nintendo developed for it look pretty decent still. It was a true Mario game with tons of colourful characters and silly music. I do always feel bad that I have to beat up all of Bowser’s kids before I get to kick his ass, then again they are in cahoots and are making my life difficult so in a way they deserve it right? I also have to say that I enjoy the flying squirrel suit and the levels where I could take advantage of that were more of a breeze than the ones that required really tight platforming. The Yoshi levels were interesting aswell, especially after I found out that Yoshi will eat almost everything when it comes to enemies, significantly reducing the difficulty of some of those levels because of it. On the flipside the moment something would touch me that shouldn’t Yoshi would chicken out, causing me to have to run after him and getting myself killed in that process more than once. Wuss dinosaur.

All in all I’m happy that I picked this game to start off my challenge with. It’s definitely on the harder side compared to a Kirby or Yoshi game. It felt immensly satisfying to finish it though and I’m already thinking about what I want to tackle next. It also helps that I finally feel less guilty about owning a WiiU after beating this game. I’ve had it for a while now and it’s finally getting the love it deserves. For now though this game is going on the “completed” pile and I doubt I will return to it anytime soon. Maybe when I’m drunk and every other game I own in my library has somehow been deleted.

Peach has been saved. Bowser has been sent off.
Number of games completed for my Summer of Platformers challenge: 1.

Summer of Platformers

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I am an avid Reddit browser. I enjoy the petty drama over at some subs and I think some of the gaming subs are okay aswell. As such I can keep myself entertained for hours on end just scrolling through hundreds of posts in the evening. It’s also the reason I shouldn’t take my phone to bed with me anymore because this is simply what keeps me up at night.
Anyway. On the Nintendo Reddit someone wrote a post about wanting to do a Summer of Nintendo challenge where they would tackle their Nintendo backlog this summer and it would span every Nintendo console they owned. This looked like a really good idea to me but looking at the games I own for all my Nintendo consoles (WiiU/Switch/3DS) I would never be able to fit all of that in a single summer. I have multiple long RPG’s to play through and those alone would take me forever to finish. Case in point me taking months to finish up the Final Fantasy 7 Remake.

However I did want to start tackling my backlog and as such I was suddenly inspired to tackle one of my favourite gaming categories: Platformers. I own a lot of those. It was what I grew up with on my SEGA when I was little, and I enjoy the genre till this day. I have numerous platform games both physically and digitally and for now I want to focus on completing my physical games. There are some that I have completed (and with that I mean I have seen the credits roll) and as such I have excluded them from this challenge. I purely want to focus on all the games I haven’t completed yet and bring those to a credit roll. Again, I’m only tackling my physical games for now since they’re just easier to keep track of than all the stuff I own digitally. So without further ado here’s a picture of all the games I’m planning to tackle.

This may not seem like that many games but according to Howlongtobeat completing all these games will take me roughly 200 hours in total. For this estimate I’ve used the metric of Mainstory + Extra’s since I do like to go off the beaten path and grab all the extras in a level when I can. It’s not a priority and I’m not going to go back specifically to get coins or crystals or whatever when it takes too long or is too frustrating but I do like to find most of the hidden stuff when I can. My main objective in all of these games is to defeat the “final” boss and see a credit roll. For some games it means that the game actually ends there but for some games it means bonus worlds are opened up to conquer afterwards. Depending on how much time that takes and/or how difficult it is I may tackle those aswell.

For now the plan is to start going through this backlog once I’m finished with the FF7R. I expect this to be somewhere in June which is also when summer starts. My goals is to get through all of these by the end of summer, which is September 21st. All in all this would mean I would have to complete a game per week. With the average game time per game being somewhere around 12 hours that’s not actually too bad. Furthermore there are a few games here that I already started to play and, if I still remember enough of the game, will pick up where I left off. Most notably these are Yooka Laylee and New Super Mario Bros U. Thus shaving off a bit of gametime there. For the rest I will probably start fresh and work my way from there.
Together with playing the games I will also aspire to make a blog post about every game I’ve beaten. They probably won’t be professional type reviews but mostly posts about what I thought of the game and if I enjoyed it and how long it took me to beat it. So I will have something to look back on later!

So yeah, this is my plan for this summer. Let’s see how it turns out!

Backlog Anxiety

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The inspiration for this post hit me as I was doing dishes and getting ready for bed tonight. So while in theory I should be already asleep right now, instead I turned on my PC and felt like I needed to get this out of my system.
First off, I resisted the urge for about three days before jumping onto the Zelda remake bandwagon. I was interested in buying this game but the €60 price tag was pretty steep. Luckily I remembered that I could get this game with the special Nintendo Online membership vouchers, which would bring the price down to €50. I managed to snag the coupon for a reduced price thanks to some Gold points so I’ve paid €48 for this game now. I’m still not sure if it’s worth that price but it’s €12 less than what I would’ve paid otherwise so I can live with that.

This is not really the main topic of this post though but it does add to a growing problem I have. I have eluded multiple times to the pretty big backlog of single player games that I’ve been accumulating over the past few years. It started mostly with 3DS games and then PS4 games afterwards. Then I got a WiiU three years ago and started getting games for that. Fast forward to 2017 and I bought my Switch and am on already quite a collection for that console aswell. Yesterday as I was going through my WiiU games to enter them into a catalogue I realized that I’ve owned this console for pretty much 3.5 years and I’ve not finished a single game on it. Much to my own dismay the game I’ve played the most was Breath of the Wild, with 7.5 hours played, followed by Mario Kart 8 at 5.5 hours played. All my other games, and I have around 16 or so, have sat on my shelf or in my TV-cabinet as good as untouched for that time. This made me realize that even though I love to treat myself to new games, the latest Zelda and Oninaki last month being case in point, I somehow fail to actually play most of them. My regular pattern is to buy a new game, get around 2-5 hours of playtime in and then I put it down and never pick it back up. The fact that I managed to finish Oninaki within 3 weeks of buying it was actually a pretty uncommon thing for me. Picking up this Zelda game now.. I can only hope I like it enough to actually finish it before it goes onto the pile of “2 hours played”.

I’m not sure why I do this but it doesn’t really help to stop my backlog from growing. On top of that I realised that, when considering all the games that are there and waiting for me to be played, I’m actually feeling really overwhelmed and anxious. I have no idea where to start. I literally suffer from the inability to make a decision because there are just too many things to choose from. I have tried time and time again to pick a game and just sit down and finish it. Hell most games aren’t even that long, I could probably finish them, and with finish I mean defeat the endboss or final level, within a week or so. Yet somehow I look at my pile of games and I just freeze. I can’t seem to get myself to do what I want to be doing. And it’s not about the games themselves not being my preference. Hell when I just take the time and sit down and actually play I have a lot of fun no matter what I’m playing. That also explains the roughly two hours of my life I’ve already lost to Zelda tonight just getting through the first dungeon and into the second area.

So yeah. I feel guilty. I’ve added another game to an already huge pile and all I want is to be able to actually start taking a bite out of said pile. I’ve finished more solo player games this year than I have in a very long time, Kingdom Hearts 3/Yoshi’s Crafted World/Kirby Star Allies/Oninaki, so I know that I can do it if I just sit down and play. I think one of the only things that have helped me in the past was when I had no access to my MMO’s. I’ve made so much progress in games during vacations where I was away from my PC and PS4. I remember putting in quite a lot of time in Ever Oasis on my 3DS when I was on Mallorca and Octopath Traveler on my Switch when I was in Norway. When I don’t have the MMO distractions calling to me I find it much easier to sit down with a game of choice and just play it. And so I find myself logging into Final Fantasy XIV or the World of Warcraft instead of picking up a game from the pile which I’ve now easily spent over a thousand euro’s on. And it gnaws at me more and more to the point of just feeling anxious about it. Which is obviously a bad thing.

Gaming Goals June 2019

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Seeing as how April and May have been really weird months for me I refrained to do anything gaming goal related for those months. But June is rolling around and with it I will have access to my PC again so I feel like I can start writing up some goals again for me to attain.
I have pre-ordered Shadowbringers and it comes out at the end of the month so once that date hits my focus will probably be completely on FFXIV and getting through the first few weeks of the expansion. However we are still four weeks off when that happens so in the meantime there’s a bunch of stuff I hope to achieve!

FFXIV

  • Level Goldsmith to level 70 and Alchemist to 50 (atleast)
  • Finish off leftover quests

WoW

  • Get up to speed with latest content
  • Play Classic beta?

Other games

  • Make significant progress in Kingdom Hearts 3
  • Beat Kirby Star Allies on the Switch
  • Make significant progress in Pokémon Let’s Go Eevee on the Switch
  • Make significant progress in Paper Mario: Color Splash on the WiiU
  • Pick a game to play on 3DS

Hopefully I can get really far with leveling my crafters in FFXIV. I will try to keep up with the job quests as I level up but I’m not too bothered if I let it slide. I can always finish those up later. If all goes well I’ll only need to level 4 more crafting jobs past the Ixali dailies by the end of the month, hopefully to never return to them again. I’m quite looking forward to getting my character to be an “omnicrafter” and I’m planning to definitely push up my gathering and crafting jobs to level 80 early on in the Shadowbringers expansion.

With my PC back in the fold I’m definitely going to resub to WoW and play my Paladin or Mage and continue leveling my (Void Elf) Hunter for the Heritage gear. Next to that I hope I may get a Classic beta invite so I can get a chance to sniff the flowers when it comes to that. I’m not actively seeking to play Classic but I might stick my nose in and see if I enjoy it. I’m not 100% sure what class I’ll be rolling. I’m having major doubts between Nelf Druid and Human Warlock. I’m not interested on playing Horde side for now.

I’ve set some really ambitious goals when it comes to non MMO games. There’s just so many games that I’ve started over the years and never finished that I feel like it’s time to carve out blocks of my week to work on that. My main focuses are the games that I’ve been playing in more recent times and complete those, after that I can start reaching further into my backlog and pick up other games to play. I’ve left Monster Hunter World off this list for now, even though I am playing it in bits and pieces. The game hasn’t really hooked me fulltime yet but I do enjoy it for what it is.

All in all I feel these goals are definitely obtainable throughout the month. With a 3 day weekend coming up aswell as having a bit more structure in my evenings it frees up game time, that I definitely eagerly will grab.

A (slightly) Disgruntled WiiU Owner

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I’ve been mulling over whether or not I want to write this post. With the recent announcement of more WiiU ports to the Switch, and me reinstalling my WiiU again to play games, I feel like I want to get this post out sooner rather than later.
I am well aware that this is a debate going on within the Nintendo community and it has split the community into various camps. I find myself to be in the digruntled WiiU owner camp mostly, but the reasons may differ from what I’ve seen online so far.

What is it all about?
Nintendo has announced their line up plans for the Switch multiple times. From the get go it was clear that they were going to reuse some of the things from the WiiU to target a broader audience now that the Switch was launched. I myself hopped on the bandwagon for Mario Kart 8 DX, mostly because it’s one of my favourite franchises, it had bonus tracks as default that you had to purchase as standalone packs on the WiiU and being able to take Mario Kart with you anywhere and be able to play with anyone was super appealing. Later on we got Pokken Tournament DX. I wasnt too phased by that since I’m not interested in that type of game but I could hear the community grumble a bit. Luckily with Arms and Splatoon 2 Nintendo showed us that they were more than capable of bringing us new IP’s and also sequels instead of direct ports. Even though by all means Splatoon 2 is half a port, I still picked it up because I’ve never gotten Splatoon on my WiiU. Notice that I’m not counting Breath of the Wild as a port seeing as it was a simultaneous release for the WiiU and Switch and I personally chose to get it on WiiU.
Fast forward a bit and more ports of WiiU games are announced. We are getting Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze and Bayonetta. Two great WiiU titles that should have gotten a bigger audience than they did. Nintendo realized this and chose to bring these games over to the Switch as ports.

Now this is where it starts to wring
As a WiiU owner myself I’m happy that Nintendo recognizes that games like DKC: TF and Bayonetta are deserving of more love and that they want to bring them over to the Switch. Hell if you don’t own a WiiU it’s great to be able to pick up these games and play what you’ve been missing out on! The ports themselves are probably just fine, you get more polished images and maybe a few extra modes. If you don’t own these games I strongly recommend to pick them up. However….
Nintendo is releasing these games at full prices. Me, being the WiiU owner that I am, already own these games. There is zero incentive for me to rebuy a game that I already own for a new system. And certainly not at full price. Just for comparison, DKC: TF is only €25 right now because it’s a Nintendo select so it’s easily picked up for WiiU owners. The Bayonetta special edition (which contained both Bayonetta 1 and 2) cost me €50. Seeing as these are marketed as new games for the Switch they will be expensive. I’m sure as hell not going to rebuy a game that I already own, that gets little to nothing special added, at full price. It may be nice to have the portability of the Switch for these games and they may look better but it’s simply something I refuse to do.
And I’m not the only one.
It also saddens me a bit because instead of focusing on new games in the series (with the exception being Bayonetta 3) they release ports and then hope people will be happy. I rather get an entirely new Donkey Kong game than a rehash of one I already know and have. The same can be said for Pokken DX and MK8 DX. I much rather would have had an entirely new Mario Kart game. I know that ports require less resources and I know Nintendo wants to keep people’s attention so they probably feel the pressure to bring as many games to the system as they can. Which is fine, but I feel like they’re going about it in a less than ideal way.

Ofcourse I’m not a big publisher and I know these games will sell well, even for people that already own their WiiU counterparts. But it still feels like they could have put this time of porting into focussing on bringing the Virtual player to the Switch, do something about the My Nintendo rewards for Switch (which they have finally announced!) or just give us more customizability. And maybe take a look at the Switch E-shop and get rid of all the shovelware games.

I guess I’m just a bit salty about not being able to look forward to a lot of actual new games. I know that Kirby Star Allies will come out and I will definitely pick that one up, aswell as most likely Project Octopath Traveler and Bayonetta 3. I’ve also not nearly finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2 or Super Mario Odyssey so I still have tons of hours of playtime to get out of my Switch without even having to look at the ported games. But where my 3DS library is full of amazing games I feel like my Switch is falling behind… And that’s not what I hoped it would do.
I just really hope Nintendo picks up on the mixed messages when it comes to porting games and devotes more time to develop sequels instead.

Sunday Summary: Jan 22-Jan 28

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I’ve been doing some new things since the new year that I’m very pleased with. One of them is stop eating at restaurants when I’m actually full. I used to eat untill my plates were empty, three courses long, because I felt it would be a waste of money otherwise. Now not only do I feel the need to empty out the table/plates, I also don’t order three courses anymore. I feel like it’s much worse to come home after having a really lovely night and spend the time in bed in agony because of feeling nauseous or having stomach cramps from overeating.
Another thing I’ve been doing is taking general notes of what I’ve been up to during the week so I can translate that into a blogpost. Most of these things tend to be gaming related, since this is a gaming blog after all, but I also take note of significant real life things so I can incorporate that into my Sunday Summaries aswell.

So without further ado, what have I been up to this week?

In MMOs
I’ve been leveling a lot in both World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV. After dinging my Miner 70 I’ve picked up Fisher and leveled it up to level 44 this week. I’ve hit a bit of a rough patch, namely the 35-45 levels but I hope I can get through that next week and push my Fisher up to level 50 atleast. From what I can tell the level 45-50 bit is already less painful and in Heavensward if you just fish for the Leves the leveling shouldn’t be too bad either.
Since I got a bit bored with Fisher though I’ve turned my attention to some battle classes again, and mostly Summoner. When I picked her up this week she was sitting just shy of level 59. Right now I’m halfway through level 62 and steadily making my way towards level 70. As added bonus my Scholar automatically levels along with it, meaning that when I do hit 70 all my Healing classes will be max level. When I’ve had some downtime inbetween running roulettes and beast tribe dailies I’ve picked up my Black Mage to run some Palace of the Dead. She’s currently level 51 and I really want to get her to 60 fast so I can get rid of the level 50 set. All in all I feel like I’m picking up the pace of leveling in FFXIV again and this makes me very happy. However this week also marked the official death of my static group, meaning I probably won’t raid in the next patch. Or atleast not cutting edge. I will probably try to pug some groups and see how that turns out. For now though my focus is on leveling mostly.
In World of Warcraft I’ve not done that much. I’ve been doing some dailies on my Warrior and logged my Paladin here and there. I didn’t even do any of the Timewalking Dungeons yet this time around and I’m not sure if I will before reset. I have however picked up leveling my Shaman again and she’s currently sitting on level 102… Where I’ve stalled out due to having to do the quest for the Enhancement and Restoration Artifacts. I know I will have to bite the bullet at some point and I probably will… If only to be able to continue with the Class Hall Campaign.

In Other Games
I’ve not played that much outside of my MMO’s to be honest with the exception of Yo Kai Watch 2. Even then I’ve spent maybe 2.5-3 hours playing it so it’s not that big of a deal. However in console land there have been some changes. I picked up the N2DSXL Pikachu edition which has gotten me more hooked than I would have initially thought. Maybe it’s also nice to not have a home menu littered with games that are distracting and maybe it’s due to the fact that it’s new and I adore it but I’ve been spending all my Yo Kai Watch time on that handheld as opposed to my 3DS. It’s also because I have to change the system language to English to be able to play it properly (Yo Kai Watch in Dutch is awful) and I don’t want to switch back and forth on my main handheld all the time. Making this Pikachu edition an ideal middle ground.
I’ve also taken the time to reinstall my WiiU. It’s currently sitting in a corner of my room, close to a power outlet, and I’m planning to mostly play on the gamepad. Seeing as I like lounging on bed in the evening anyway it’s a perfect solution and I will finally get to work on that backlog a bit, starting with Breath of the Wild.

In Real Life
It’s been a busy week for me last week when it came to real life stuff. They have officially started building the apartment complex where I will be living on Wednesday and they had a special event with all the buyers of the apartments. It was a nice little gathering, slightly ruined by the rainy weather. We’ve buried a treasure chest with messages from people in it so that when these apartments eventually get torn down and they start digging they’ll find messages from 2018. I loved the idea and my message is certainly in there.
On Friday after work we had a dinner with the department and a ton of ex-colleague’s as a sort of goodbye for everyone who left the past 6 months. It was also the official goodbye dinner for my old manager. We had a really nice evening filled with good Mexican food and laughter and afterwards a few of us relocated to a bar to have some drinks. We all greatly enjoyed seeing eachother again and we’re planning on making these dinners a bi-annual thing. Just to see eachother again, hear what everyone is up to and because we have such an amazing atmosphere in this team it’s really a joy to meet with them.
This also meant I was home late and quite exhausted. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world though.
As for the weekend. I’ve been doing my usual chores and I’ve written down my planning for next week. I’ve gotten a bunch of gaming magazines from one of my ex-colleagues on Friday and I’ve been reading them aswell. Other than that I’m following the LCS and am slowly picking my way through all the things I own and cleaning them out. It’s an ongoing project and one that needs doing because 1: I own too much stuff and 2: I don’t know where half of the stuff I own is. It also helps me in narrowing down the stuff I still need to buy in the coming year for my apartment, so it’s a win/win situation overall.

The Backlog Part 1: Consoles and Handhelds

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game coll

Although I can’t really boast the size of the massive game collection shown in this picture, I have quite an impressive backlog of games of my own. Owning two consoles, a PC and a handheld I have accrued quite some games over the past years and I haven’t played much if at all of any of them. I mentioned it in my previous post that I’m notoriously bad with playing through my games, and I’m really not joking. I’ve actually gotten to the point that I’m now forbidding myself to buy any new game (unless I already have it in pre-order) untill I have finished atleast some others that I have decorating my shelves or my harddisk.
I’m really embarrassed by the awesome game collection I do own and that I can’t really tell anything about most games because I simply haven’t played through them at all. Ofcourse I also own some games that you never really “finish”, mostly being MOBA’s, MMO’S and TGC’s but you can boast about atleast achieving some stuff there by defeating X boss, attaining X rank or even levelling to max level. Especially in MMO’s I see max level as the real big achievement, seeing as I’ve started so many chars in so many different MMO’s and never leveled them past the level 20 or 30 point.

This year I made a gaming goal list, which mostly consists of goals for FFXIV, my main MMO. However I really want to start working through the catalog of games I have lying around, and just so you guys get a glimpse of what this means, I made a list of stuff that I own. Because this post would become a monster if I would list everything in one go, I’m keeping this first post to console and handheld stuff. Part two will be about PC games, MMO’s and other “neverending” games. I also want to take a look back at my older game collection and share with you games that I have owned since my childhood, many of which I have actually finished but keep around for nostalgia sake, so that will be part three.
Let’s start out with…

Playstation 4
My first “next gen” console, decorating my room since 2014. I have about 15 games on that, not really counting the free PS plus indie ones since most of them are garbage that I never download anyway. So let’s take a look shall we?

  • Knack. Actually finished this one (as in defeated the last boss) so not really counting that. I stilll have a ton of trophies to unlock though, hence it’s on the list.
  • Thief
  • Final Fantasy X/X2
  • Final Fantasy Type-0
  • Ratchet & Clank
  • Tales of Zestiria
  • Disney Infinity + All Star Wars playsets + Inside Out playset. I consider the playsets the things to finish really so technically these all count as separate games.
  • The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
  • The Division. Again I feel like I technically finished this. Reached max level, grinded out good gear. Just not much to do in the game right now. I’m only 4 or 5 trophies short of getting my first platinum. Something I do really want though.
  • Destiny. I have one max level character there (my Warlock) and I have actually played a lot of endgame, so technically “finished”.
  • Driveclub
  • Fifa 16

All in all my Playstation catalog isn’t that horrible. I do consider some games “fiinished” but monsters like the Final Fantasy and Tales games I haven’t really set foot in much. I am slowly working my way through Ratchet and Clank though so that’s a thing. The only game I really regret buying on this list is FIFA 16 since I haven’t even played 10 minutes of it..

Next up: Nintendo! I own both a 3DS and a WiiU now, with the WiiU being very very new. Even so I acquired a lot of games. Splitting them up for the list!

WiiU

  • Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze
  • Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two
  • New Super Mario Bros. U + New Super Luigi U
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker HD
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD
  • Xenoblade Chronicles
  • Yoshi’s Woolly World.

Of the above mentioned games I really only played a bit of Yoshi and Windwaker. As said, the console is brand new so not having played much isn’t that horrible… Right?

3DS

  • Animal Crossing: New Leaf. I did play some, but never really got into the game. One of those games you don’t really finish either.
  • Big Hero 6: Battle of the Bay. Only just got this one on a discount. Haven’t played it.
  • Bravely Default
  • Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D. First World played through.
  • Kingdom Hearts 3D
  • New Super Mario Bros. 2. First World played through.
  • Pokemon Alpha Sapphire. Played for about 12 hours I’m past the 6th gym and recently picked it up again.
  • Pokemon X
  • Super Monkey Ball
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Completed the first 3 day challenge, almost done with the second.
  • Pokémon Blue. Technically finished this when I was 10? I had 148 Pokémon and had beaten the elite four like… a lot.
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. See Big Hero 6.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Picross. This one is 100% finished!
  • Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer. This came with my new 3DS and I did actually play it a lot.
  • Epic Mickey: The Power of Illusion. First World and Second World played through.
  • Earthworm Jim
  • 3D classics: Kirby’s Adventure
  • Sonic the Hedgehog Triple Trouble (Virtual console)
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (Virtual console)

So yeah. I have a decent Nintendo backlog, but a lot of these games I have actually played more than I thought. I sunk quite some hours into Pokémon. Pokémon X I have restarted a few times, but with gaining a lot of legendary Pokémon I’m determined to see it through. For the rest I have made decent starts in both Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. In both games I have atleast beaten the boss of the first world and in Donkey Kong I’m halfway through the Second World. Off all the games in my backlog I have been actively playing my handheld ones the most, thus the most progress in them.

All in all this part of the list alone contains 38 games, most of which I have barely touched. I really do want to start going through this huge backlog though. It’s so much money invested and so little time gotten out of it. The easiest ones for me will probably the 3DS games since I actually play them a lot on the train. For a game like Mario I manage to do 1-2 levels every train journey, so that’s 2-4 levels per workday. As far as the RPG games go, I defeat a bunch of trainers in Pokémon and make small steps towards my end goal. These bite sized chunks are really nice for me and it also helps with finishing games. I also feel like it’s easier for me to pick up my handheld and just lie down on bed and game a little. I often don’t feel like starting up my consoles or PC to play anything, especially when I’m tired.

So yeah. This was the first of a three part post about my “big” game collection. It’s nice to see it all listed, gives me a nice overview but also shows that I have quite the spending habit. I really wish I could say that I have played through a lot of these games, but the reality is I just really haven’t. And that’s such a shame. I do hope that I can clear out this backlog a bit throughout 2016. If I plan my gametime right, I should be able to do it.

Stay tuned for part two: PC (Steam) Games and MMO’s coming later this week!