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Been using them for a few weeks and I'm so glad I got them. I've gone from lifting 5kg to 11kg already, and I feel pretty confident that they're going to last me a good while. If I had the space I'd invest in a bench, but until then these are going to serve me very well indeed.

Went over some railroad tracks a little too fast, scraped the ground a little bit from the bounce and broke the undercarriage splash guard/air deflector...

Donkey Kong Country Returns HD Holy shit, I figured this one would be solid but I wasn't prepared for how much I was going to love it. I've always enjoyed Mario games but the DKC trilogy is the one that I played the shit out of as a kid. So when I first started this game and that familiar music started playing, the nostalgia hit me pretty hard. This game does a fantastic job of feeling and playing exactly how I remember the DKC games. Except for one thing. Maybe this is just another sign that I'm becoming an old man but I found this game challenging as fuck. It was always fun and rarely got frustrating but I don't remember the SNES trilogy being this hard. A part of me really wants to keep playing and go for 101% completion or however much it is this time but I've got way too many games to play lol. Maybe I'll come back to it at some point. I'm also really looking forward to trying out Tropical Freeze as that seems to be the one everyone is constantly giving high praise to. I'm not sure what to expect as DKCR already made such a strong impression (and I kinda want to say is now in my top favorite games of all-time), so I don't want to set my expectations too high for the sequel. Anyway, the last couple weeks have been pretty great. Being able to binge 3D World and this (and put close to 50 hours into Breath of the Wild) was a real treat. I was already planning to take some time off from work in the early summer but timing it with the Switch 2 release was the best move I could've made. Getting back to work on Monday, though, so I won't be able to keep going through these games as quickly anymore.

One of the things that made me want a Switch was how all the classic titles are now part of NSO instead of having to purchase them individually. Having access to all these classic titles at all times means I can go through some series I've barely touched before. I'll probably do Kirby at some point but the main one I'm looking forward to doing is Metroid before playing Metroid Dread. Excluding the Prime games, I should be able to play everything except Other M, which it doesn't sound like I'll be missing much. Anyway, the point is I decided I didn't wanna do the Game Boy version of Metroid 2, so I hunted down a copy of the 3DS remake on ebay. And while we're on the subject of classic games available on NSO. I simply couldn't resist the nostalgia of playing these games with their original controllers, so... I'll probably get the NES ones as well at some point to complete the set but those are actually Joy-Cons, so I'll need a charging stand or something to actually be able to use them.

Me and my brothers have been looking for something to play when Rocket League is down, and we think this may be it. And I snagged this on Steam because we're going away for a week with the kids and if we have 7 days of solid rain and don't have a way to keep them busy I may top myself.

Elden Ring Nightreign Edit: First time I got a character ending, did another solo run and got the normal ending, now it's easily a 10/10. Wasn't sure how I'd feel about this, I love Elden Ring, but I'm not a huge fan of rogue-lites/likes/adjacent games or multiplayer stuff, not to mention that online has never been FromSoftware's strong suit lol, but I ended up pleasantly surprised, and I think I get the appeal of these games now, though it does have some serious issues. In terms of gameplay, it's really fun, and it's likely to have the same effect on Elden Ring as ER had on older Soulsborne games, I struggled to go back to Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 3 after playing Elden Ring, specially with the lack of jump and QoL stuff like the stakes of Marika, Nightreign introduces: climbing, super sprint, infinite arrows, and most importantly, NO FALL DAMAGE, all of these will be missed when/if I go back to Elden Ring lol. It's also way faster, you're not taking your time to explore, find secrets and farm for stuff, you're running from one place to another, mark it on the map, run there, grab the item or defeat the boss then immediately run to the next spot, repeat until the day is over or your party gets wiped out. The way you level up has been changed to keep up with this, instead of allocating points, you just spend runes to gain a level, points are automatically allocated based on what class you're playing. One thing to consider, being a rogue-style game, you're not going to be winning every run, or clearing every camp, there are places you should try to clear before everything else and there are times where RNG will simply decide to kill your run early, I feel like a lot of the friction that caused negative responses came from people expecting a more linear progression, like "OK, clear the whole map, then beat the boss, then go after the next main boss", kind of thing, and while it can be annoying when RNG decides to mess with you, once you accept this is part of the game, it's not an issue. I had runs where nothing went right, all the drops were pretty bad, and still managed to reach the Nightlord, there were also runs where everything went right, had legendary gear, max healing flasks, and then we still got stomped. The story is pretty decent, not the main thing which is simple, but good enough, I'm talking about the character remembrance stories, each character has their own story, some of them overlapping with the main Nightlord stuff, some independent, though I haven't completed them all, the ones I have have been pretty good, with the best so far being Raider's, some also have a unique ending when you defeat the last boss. However, there are some issues, some which devs have already said will be addressed. The revive mechanic is pretty fun, when a teammate goes down, you just beat the crap out of them to bring them back lol, each time you die you get another tick added to the revive timer, making it take more hits to bring you back, this resets with every boss/site of grace. The biggest problem is the rate at which each tick refills compared to how fast you can deal enough "damage", it's very easy to run out of stamina before being able to clear all ticks, and before you have enough stamina for another attack, the revive timer is back to full. Hitboxes are also super wonky, making it easy to miss with heavy weapons, bows and poking weapons are the best at reviving with heavier weapons being more prone to missing the target entirely. The randomization is also lacking, there's only one map, field and night bosses are pulled from fixed pools based on which Nightlord you pick, and even though there are map altering events, there's only four of them and, as far as I've seen, once they're gone they're gone, though this might be a bug. Relics are underwhelming, relics are items that change your stats or give you buffs or equipment, these are a sort of fixed progression, you get them from completing expeditions and from the murk store (murk being a currency you get from expeditions), their effects are mostly "tiny increase to HP" or "start with some item", I haven't played many other games in this genre, but I do remember Taboo Trial and Duel Princess having some pretty ridiculous items and units, Nightreign needs some stuff like that, the devs played it way too safe with their effects IMO. Many relics also end up feeling useless with the way they combine effects, you can get a relic with three buffs, one might be super useful for Wylder, but the other two end up being completely useless, so that relic ends up never being used because no class can actually benefit from it. Then there's the remembrance skins, remembrance skins are unlocked after completing a character's remembrance and they're by far, the worst of all the available skins, except for Raider, for everyone else it ends up being a game of Spot the Difference lol. The other available skins are pretty cool though. There's other issues, but I don't know if I should count it against the game or if they're just part of the genre, bosses are weak to specific elements and sometimes you'll get a map without a single drop of that element, so you just have to rely on whatever else might be effective, except for the last boss which is immune to most effects. Some bosses are also extremely challenging for certain characters, but again, this might just be a case of "alright, now you know what class to pick next time". Overall, I liked it a lot, but I do hope to see more maps, bosses and skins, in fact, given the more experimental nature of Nightreign, could be fun if they had some more extreme stuff, like an Armored Core themed skin for Wylder or a Sekiro map, fun stuff like that. TL;DR: If you're looking for more Elden Ring, this isn't for you, if you want From's take on the rogue-like genre and are willing to put up with some issues, then it's worth it, specially for $40. Grade: S

Tempest Rising This is a very C&C-coded RTS that just released a couple months ago, and it's a lot of fun. There's two campaigns, one for the Global Defense Initiative Force, and another for the Brotherhood of Nod Tempest Dynasty. Each campaign covers the same time period of a war between the two, focused on an energy resource known as Tiberium Tempest. I quite liked it, though it's a little shallower than I like my RTS in terms of tech trees and stuff (I've always been more of a Starcraft guy myself), and definitely would recommend it for anyone who's itching for a new strategy games. I don't really have much in the way of detailed thoughts, it kind of is just a fun and competent RTS, not really anything standout great, but not anything seriously bad either. Grade: B

I love 3D World + Bowser's Fury so much. Odyssey's also great, they're both in my top 3 3D Mario games.

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.

I call it my "launch backlog".

Holy crap that's a lot of Switch games.

Getting the Switch 1 version and paying for the upgrade is going to cost about the same so I decided to just go for the Switch 2 version. Also, I guess I never posted all the Switch 1 games I bought in the lead-up to the Switch 2's release. Not gonna get individual pics because there's too many of them but here's a pic of the actual stack: Why, yes, I did go overboard... Oh and I just got a copy of Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity from ebay. I'm holding off on Super Mario Wonder and a few more in case they get Switch 2 versions in the near future but at this point there's only a few more first-party games I'm interested in.

I hadn't heard that theory, but it does kinda make sense. I'll believe it when I see it though.

Game Freak has done nothing to earn my faith in them. Hard pass.

I wonder if there's any merit to the idea that given this new game doesn't have the Pokemon IP behind it, they might actually have to put the work in to make it a success. Rightly or wrongly, those Pokemon games sell regardless of quality.

I'd be a lot more hype for that Game Freak game if all their previous 3D games hadn't been complete technical messes that run like shit. XD

From GameFreak, looks cool. October 21st. \m/ \m/ Looks like it could be good, but I've also seen some people mention it has Callisto Protocol vibes, and that's definitively not a good thing. A North Korean soldier and a K-Pop star work together to save the world.