Content from Last 48hrs

Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury I've been wanting to play this one for over a decade at this point, since first hearing all the praise it got when it initially came out on Wii U. At the time, I only had a 3DS so I settled for playing 3D Land instead. This and other ports from previous Nintendo consoles were a big part of what finally made the Switch so appealing to me. I've been wanting to buy one for at least a couple years but had been holding off because it always seemed like the successor was right around the corner. Anyway, 3D World was about as great as I expected it to be. I love how it feels like an evolution of the old side-scrolling games. On the 3DS version, I had done basically everything including replaying all the levels as Luigi once I unlocked him but this time I'm drawing the line there. I beat the game, then beat the post-game worlds and collected all the green stars and all but 5 of the stamps. The last 5 stamps require replaying all the levels as the other characters and there's an extra 4 characters this time. Maybe I'll come back and do it at some point but right now I have other games to play. Bowser's Fury was a neat little expansion. It's kinda cool how they managed to build a mini open-world Mario game from the building blocks of 3D World, which was very linear. It did feel kinda limited by it but it was still a ton of fun. I basically played through the entire thing in one sitting. I got the first 50 Cat Shines and rolled credits, then took a short break and came right back to get the other 50. I was under the impression that there would be a secret ending after getting all 100 but as far as I could tell it was the same. Bowser just had different hair during the fight... But yeah, not a bad way to spend an evening. And it definitely whet my appetite for a proper 3D Mario game, so I'll probably be playing Odyssey sometime soon.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 I'm about 90 minutes into this and I think I might be hooked. I'm not normally a videogame story or cutscene guy, frankly I just don't care and don't really have the time to do so. That said, the games first hour was some of the finest storytelling I've ever seen in a game and damn near drew a tear out of my tired old eyes. As others have no doubt said, the game's combat is where it makes it's money, and whilst I suck at it, I can see that; I usually run away from turn-based combat, but this does so much around that core idea that it barely feels like a turn based thing at all. I'll be sticking with it for the foreseeable, and if it does become a bit too hard I might just knock the difficulty down to get through the game and enjoy the story; not something I usually bother with.

DOOM: The Dark Ages This one is fun eh? So for context I really enjoyed my time with DOOM (2016), and then bounced off Eternal so quickly that I damn near gave myself whip-lash. I went into this expecting very little, and leave it with DOOM TDA being some of the most fun I've had with a shooter in quite some time. 4/5 - A must play. Deep Duck Trouble (Staring Donald Duck) I'm not going to assign a score to this one, because, well I'm not sure it's fair to the game given I'm playing it some 30 years after it originally launched. DDT is was Sega Master System game (that I believe was also pushed out on the Game Gear). It's one of the first games I've got memories of playing (and sucking at) with as a kid and I wanted a big ol' spoon of nostalgia shoved down my throat. I had a brief but fun time with the game, although as you may expect, time hasn't been kind to it. It's got some pretty horrific slow downs, the platforming is mediocre at best and the enemies aren't exactly difficult. That being said, it looks gorgeous for a SMS game, it's got some real cute animation and sprite work and the soundtrack is kinda catchy. Took me around an hour to beat (using save states) and I'll likely come back to it again and again in the future.