Last Game You Finished And Your Four-ghts

gjones wrote:

I blasted through Metal Slug 3, one of my favourite games. Although, I enjoy playing it on the easiest setting with 99 lives because I am both a) not particularly great at it and b) it's a dirty DIRTY game full of cheap insta-kills.

For some reason this game is considered the best one of the series and I need to play through the others to really put that statement to the test. Yet, the shooting, animation and "feel" of the game is nice and satisfying. Real chunky sprites that fire chunky bullets - while a random bloke announces "MACHINE GUN" when you pick up a new weapon. The word I'm looking for is "character" - which is why I've always preferred King of Fighters over Street Fighter. The animation and detail is phenomenal for the time, being part of the Neo Geo line of arcade games priced the same as most consoles. Metal Slug is just pure fun.

Metal Slug 3 isn't my favourite, but the way you describe it still applies to the lot of them. They're all pure fun, and I've always thought that they piss all over any of the Contra games.

I finished the main story mode in Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time as well as a good handful of the alternate timeline stages and secret bonus levels. I think I've played enough to tell you that Crash 4 is quality, a proper sequel, and pretty much everything I'd hoped for. Behind Animal Crossing New Horizons, it's probably my second favourite game of 2020.

There's tons to compliment, like the superlative animation, character design and visuals, the five different characters and their varied and interesting gameplay, and the sheer amount of content. What I love most is the addition of the Modern difficulty mode. That's where players can just focus on completing the levels and seeing the whole game through. I'm a Crash Bandicoot veteran by now, and I know too well that nothing's more annoying than being stuck on a section, losing all your lives after many attempts, getting a game over and having to do the whole level again (only to reach that same section and get another game over). It's harsh and needlessly aggravating. The Modern difficulty doesn't fundamentally make any difference to Crash 4's gameplay, as every jump, enemy and obstacle is exactly the same as it is in the standard Retro difficulty. All Modern mode does is remove the lives mechanic entirely - therefore allowing you limitless attempts to finish a hard bit - and adjust the position of the checkpoints when it knows you're struggling with a certain section on any given level. It's a total gamechanger, and a really positive one at that. 

If there's anything to nitpick, it's that I felt some of the later levels weren't very enjoyable because of how tough they were, and that some of the new Quantam Mask powers weren't very original or well implemented. In particular, Crash 4 got quite fond of it's anti-gravity sections - yet anytime I played those, I just thought about how Super Mario Galaxy did them much better thirteen years ago. Slow-motion is another one, a mechanic that was already knackered before that shitey Matrix game came out. One other point is that it lacks a killer soundtrack, which I think matters in a platformer. 

Despite it's familiarity, not only does Crash 4 do an excellent job of recapturing the magic of the original PSone trilogy, but it even arguably surpasses them. It's that good. 8/10.

I don't agree with Andy, you know (big surprise there!).  I don't think this would be a great film, and I certainly don't think you should watch a playthrough over playing the game.

Okay, so he's not wrong that the gameplay recipe isn't the greatest on paper: a litany of fetch quests, broken up by dungeons that are slogs to get through.  And okay, you're mostly here for the aesthetics: the beautiful Stuido Ghibli visuals and cut-scenes, the charming (limited in places) score by Joe Hisashi, and Drippy's voice acting.  And okay, you could remove the main gameplay loop of the familiar battle entirely and lose nothing.  That's really odd, to be honest - the familiars are complete ignored by the story.  It's bizarre.

But.

First off, the story isn't the greatest.  It's alright for a game, because we're used to cackling world-ending villains with maybe a vague bit of sympathetic backstory in this young medium, but as a film it would be one of Ghibli's weakest.  What's more, if you're listening to Drippy's great voice acting you expose yourself to the hero's voice, which is the sound of a voice actress giving up on life before your ears.  The rest of the cast is variable-leaning-positive, I'd say.

And also... I kinda liked the gameplay.  There's something compelling about training up and metamorphosing well-designed monsters, and the dungeons slowly going from slog to slaughter as you level up has a charm all of its own.  I also liked the combat!  Being in real-time, it's already ahead of many entries in the genre, and it's layered without being overly complex (looking at you Xenoblade games).  Heck, I even liked the fetch quests.  There was something oddly compulsive, and occasionally relaxing, about them, benefiting no doubt from the lovely design.  Certainly I found the game as a whole hard to put down after I got into it again.

Ni No Kuni is a very flawed game (apart from the above it suffers from slow pacing, frustrating AI, and three or four game-ending crashes in my case.  That's ridiculous, especially from Level-5 and Namdai), but it's got a lot to love as well.  I found it enjoyable as well as beautiful.  The best monster-catching game on Switch would work perfectly well without the monster-catching, which is faintly silly.

Two in a row!



This first came out in 2009, you know.  Oh, you already did?  Well, er, did you know it came out on the Switch in 2018?  That's nine years, eleven up to now, and somewhere in those timey-wimey mists I started the Machinarium demo. on my Mac.  I liked it.  I then didn't act on it until now, when the developer's newest game, Creaks, has come to eShop.  Thought I'd better start here.

I still like it.  It's a point-and-click adventure, and with that come the standard set of issues with the genre: obtuse logic, lots of back-and-forth, occasional burning to desire to refer to a walkthrough.  Its world is a lot smaller than other games in the genre I've played though (Grim Fandango and Thimbleweed Park), and that mostly works in its favour - less time spent trying to figure out the logic, which does seem less obtuse than in TWP say.  The mouse controls also translate to the Switch's touchscreen decently well, although touching another part of the screen and snapping away from what I was looking at was a frequent and annoying occurrence.  The story is told entirely without words, which is a nice touch, leaving the hand-drawn animation to carry the plot and characters.  It's very good.  (I did find the art style a bit grim and dirty, intentionally so but it was a bit of whiplash coming off Ghibli's material.)

There's also a fair bit of variety.  There are some standard Tangle Tower-style puzzles, only more of them and they're hard - mostly but not entirely the good kind of hard, where you think 'YASS I'M A GENIUS' rather than 'thank God that's over'.  However, there's also a few shmups in there, oddly enough.  You even have to play a shmup to look at the in-game walkthrough, which is a nice touch.

I said that the smaller world mostly works in its favour, the 'mostly' being that the game is therefore quite short.  I breezed through it in maybe five hours?  Plus a bit for being stuck on puzzles.  That's fine, given that I've just finished Ni No Kuni and its 55h playtime.  Machinarium was a nice palate cleanser, and one I'd recommend to fans of the genre, especially if it's ever on sale.

Super Mario 64

Got 70 stars and took down Bowser in SM64 last night (as part of SM3DAS). Wondered about putting it in the Retro thread but saw that Cappa had put his Sunshine review in here, and it is a rerelease, so I'll plop mine here too.

Not that I have much to say. I whinged about the camera a bit in the game thread in the Switch forum and I stand by that, but I do know that it was a landmark 3D platformer and camera controls in a game like that hadn't really been done before. While playing through it I did constantly think this must have been an amazing leap from the 2D SNES Mario games, and while it obviously isn't perfect by gaming standards 23 years later, it does still hold up pretty well.

I didn't really love the fact that the only direction you'd get was the name of the mission, but I did like the freedom of being able to get any of the stars in pretty much any order. And I guess this also came out at a time where you'd try and get hints and walkthroughs from magazines and Nintendo themselves, so maybe that's how they expected you to find out you can break a specific corner of the scenery by firing yourself out of a cannon to reveal a star?

I am not going to try and get 120 stars, but I'm glad I played through it, because it is - and still feels like - a landmark game. It would have been nice to have a proper remaster, sure, but seeing as my only experience of SM64 was the DS remake, it feels like I've finally experienced a seminal game that changed the landscape of the gaming world, warts and all.

SM64 was a classic game and remains my favourite game in my heart of hearts, and while I'm glad you and others are getting to enjoy it, I can't help thinking it deserves better - that camera especially. It's the kind of 'landmark/seminal game' that deserves to be fully cleaned up for the era it's now in, so that people can love it without the sort of conditions that come with its age.

My gripes come from a place of love, they really do - and regardless of all that, I'm glad you enjoyed it. (I think you did? Re-reading that, is it 'enjoyed' or 'respected'?)

I did enjoy it! I just don't have a sense of nostalgia for it, which I think leads to fewer 'wow' or 'oh yeah!' moments. I'm actually enjoying Sunshine more because I have memories of playing it at release (it came out the day after my 11th birthday), although I know it's generally accepted to be weaker than 64. I played every level in Noki Bay today and had constant waves of nostalgia for that stage especially, for some reason.

Rum wrote:

I played every level in Noki Bay today and had constant waves of nostalgia...

Badum-tish. I probably would too, the amount of time I spent picking up every single bloody blue coin...

Yo Joe this isn't great, and I knew it wouldn't be from the start, but I was hoping for a sort fun mindless 6/10 game which would be the sort thing we would see Cappa reviewi in 15 years time such as his recent SpyHunter one.

Just it's not even that fun, and to make remotely enjoyable I put it down to easy, just so I could blast through it and put here I've beaten it as that is the only way to make it remotely good.

That looking at the 49 games I've finished this year this is one of the worst considering price, length etc as least Drowning was about £5 and took like 30mins to Platinum compared to this being £30.

4/10

Return of the Obra Dinn

Pulp Fiction meets a jigsaw puzzle being solved by an insurance loss adjustor with Bernard's Watch.

10/10

But seriously though, that's a pretty darn accurate description of this game. The Obra Dinn returns to dock with nary a crewmember in sight, so as an East India Trading Company insurance chappy you are tasked with finding out what happened so that you can serve financial justice. You do this equipped with a ghoulish version of Bernard's watch and a mysterious ledger which fills itself in as you solve the mystery. You must use logical reasoning, deduction and some calculated guess work to fill in that ledger.

The core gameplay loop is that essentially, the watch reacts to dead things. When you come across some bones, be it animal or human, your watch sends you back in time. You're treated to some subtitled audio, about 10 to 15 seconds worth max without any graphical accompaniment, and then a freezeframe of the exact moment the corpse met its demise aboard the Dinn. You can then walk about the area where the freezeframe occurred to get a good look at just what went on.

These scenes give you clues, some obvious like a person's name being shouted, and some less so - maybe a person's profession is hinted at in the dialogue, and you have to use that to piece together who is who in the resultant scene. This enables you to gradually complete your ledger and figure out everybody's fate. You resolve the game in a non-linear manner and there are some pretty bloody demises, which are the parts that remind me of Pulp Fiction.

You have to determine the identity of each crewmember/passenger through these scenes and update your ledger accordingly. The ledger comes with a number of clues, such as everybody's name, nationality and profession, a few artist sketches and everybody's crew number. Those moments where you piece together those disparate bits of information make you feel like Sherlock Holmes.

Every time you correctly deduce the identity and fate of 3 people, the ledger will lock in those correct answers. This is both a good and a bad thing, for it seems to encourage a bit of guess work - changing people's names around to see what fits, but also gives you a clear sense that you are or are not on the right track with certain characters. There were a few crewmen who I'd identified, but didn't quite get their fates right until the end. For the most part, the game is reasonably forgiving about the cause of death as it will sometimes allow multiple correct answers for a given person. The difference between getting spiked or speared, for example. There were only a couple of fates that I didn't resolve without ultimately looking up, and they made sense once I did that.

One thing the game gets completely spot on is its difficulty curve. You'll resolve the first few fates and identities easily enough, with the game giving you some characters that are fairly easy to resolve. The game also hints at the sorts of things you should be looking out for. But once you have those first three people locked in, things really open up and you can explore the ship pretty much everywhere. This seamlessly moves you into the more challenging parts of the game. Also, character faces in your ledger are blurred until the game thinks you have enough information to identity them - and once they are unblurred, the game tells you a difficulty rating for each person. This lets you focus your efforts on some of the easier to deduce characters as you organically build up your investigative skills by becoming better and better at reading the subtleties of the freezeframe environments and comparing them to other clues. This is one of the most impressive things about the way the game is designed, really good stuff.

Ultimately the Obra Dinn is a bit like a jigsaw. You have a set number of scenes to find. The order you find them can vary and you will start closer to the end of the story than the beginning (I did anyway), but there's nothing for you to miss. It's not one of those multiple outcome games, beyond you either solving the mystery or not. There will be times where you'll have to go back and check an old scene again, there were some scenes I investigated several times - particularly those where multiple things are happening on different floors of the ship! Unfortunately, rewatching scenes again is a bit of a faff. You can't use your ledger to jump back to a scene, you have to manually find it on the ship. That being said, the craftsmanship that's gone into each of the freezeframes is very good. Perhaps the Obra Dinn is less a jigsaw and more an art exhibition with a solvable undertone, because each jigsaw piece, or freezeframe, has clearly been painstakingly chiselled down to the last detail.

But that's about my only real negative for the game. The graphics do take some getting used to, but there are a number of different filters you can apply to find a mono-palette that suits. Sometimes it's difficult to see what's going on, but it's never impossible. The voice acting is good and will serve Brits well because you do need to use people's accents to deduce their identity at times. The soundtrack is also quite memorable. There aren't many songs or anything, but the tunes that are there feel appropriate for the time period, suitably ominous and quite unlike what you'll hear in almost any other game.

Overall, the Return of the Obra Dinn is an original and well executed take on investigative sleuthing with a striking audio-visual appeal and deftly delivered difficulty curve. There's nothing here that will make you want to play it again, but it is the sort of game that you could watch someone grapple with vicariously. It's drawbacks, such as having to backtrack to different parts of the ship to review scenes, are more than made up for by everything the game gets right.

If this even remotely sounds like something you're interested in then the next time it is on sale, make sure you pick it up.  

Great write up! Excited to get stuck into it... at some point.

My most recently finished game was not a 10/10...



Super Mario Sunshine

So, I basically agree with Cappa on this. When it shines (ha), it really shines, and has a fabulous sense of playfulness and identity that's different to every other 3D Mario game. When it doesn't... man, it can be another level of fuckery.

What I really love about Sunshine is the sense that you are on holiday, that you've gone to a totally new destination where everything's a bit different, and you get to visit a bunch of attractions and towns and speak to the locals. Delfino Plaza is really fun and easily my favourite hub world out of the 3D Marios. A lot of the locations are, I think, really well realised, with Noki Bay and Sirena Beach being my particular highlights. Controlling Mario was really fun - so slick compared to 64 - often with a real sense of verticality offered to you by use of FLUDD. And it looks gorgeous.

I think FLUDD and Yoshi were both underused, which is a shame. In terms of nozzles, 95% of the time you just needed the hover one; and with Yoshi, they're unlocked relatively late on and apart from a few levels where you have to use one, it feels like more of a novelty. (But the added percussion in the music when you ride one is great.)

When Sunshine stumbles is just the cheapness and frustration of some of the levels. The camera and bugginess didn't even bother me that much (the former being much better than 64's, and the latter rarely actually messing anything up for me) - not compared to, for example, The Goopy Inferno, The Secret of Casino Delfino, Secret of the Village Underside, Red Coins of the Pirate Ships, Red Coins on the Water, and The Sand Bird is Born. The number of pain-in-the-arse-levels is minimal compared to the number of good fun levels - in fact, listing them makes me realise that they were mostly the 'secret' levels (or the run up to them) or frustrating red coin levels - but you HAVE to do them if you want to get to the end because you have to do 7 episodes in every world to unlock the final level. This seemed a bit weird to me - why bother collecting Shines (or indeed blue coins) if you just need to get those specific 49 Shines?

I read a comment where someone compared Sunshine to Majora's Mask. Obviously they're vastly different games, but they feel like weird experimental games, particularly in retrospect, and that comes with more stark hits and misses. For all that some levels infuriated me, and I don't particularly feel like collecting more Shines after beating the final boss (I finished with 68), I still love it and I love that Nintendo chose to be a bit weird with it. I would absolutely love to see a Sunshine-esque game again one day - just without the cheap bits that you can't avoid playing if you want to see the credits roll.



Edit: I forgot to mention - why does Bowser's voice actor sound like Sam the Eagle from the Muppets? Bowser voice - Sam voice

I know the plot of Obra Dinn already... guess I should probably still play it though, it looks top by any metric.

Aw, poor SMS. I have fond memories, but I'm not at all surprised that dragging a barely improved version into the light of day hasn't held up overly well. Nobody else found the level with the eel annoying? That's the one that haunts my dreams, pachinko and sand birds be damned.

I didn't really mind the eel because although jetting around underwater with FLUDD made it a little tricky to aim, there were so many coins around that you could heal yourself and go back to clean its teeth a little more without any cheap shots or time pressure.

One level I loooved was the manta ray level in Sirena Beach. It was tense, but doable, and I dunno, just iconic - I have such a clear memory of it from the first time around. Love it.

I do not have such fond memories of those sodding rays.

I think I will be picking up the 3d all star collection today or tomorrow. I've never really played any of the bundle so it will be interesting to give them a go. My girlfriend really liked Mario 64 and wants to play it again.

I'm hoping that when I play them it'll feel good. If the first two are not my cup of tea I'm still expecting good things from Galaxy.

Speaking of Galaxy...



Super Mario Galaxy

I saw the end credits roll yesterday, but haven't collected all 120 stars. I probably won't - I already did that on the Wii - but I'll probably dip in and out every once in a while to grab a few stars. I played it almost exclusively on the TV though - tried it in handheld mode and it works, but it's not the best way to play.

It's still an excellent game and despite being 13 years old, everything was still fun, smooth, and beauts to boot with its HD facelift. Having played it after 64 and Sunshine, the amount of ideas and variety they squeeze in is crystal clear because it has far more worlds with fewer stars to get in each, meaning it's not just recycling the same objectives or the same scenery too regularly. Some stages really exemplify how they improved on the formulas from 64 and Sunshine too - the galaxies that just have one star to get, for example, are reminiscent of the FLUDD-less stages in Sunshine; and the Bowser levels are cut from the same cloth as the Bowser levels in 64, but refined to perfection.

I remember it being quite an easy game, and I was mostly right: I never had to sit and stew in frustration while trying to beat a level like I did with the other two in the package, but there were a fair few missions that offered up a satisfying challenge. Replaying levels with a different focus due to prankster comets was fun and didn't feel like a cheap way to recycle content, and I had forgotten about the green star challenges completely - also fun.

I had largely forgotten about the storybook chapters, and it was nice to rediscover them - I forgot how melancholy some of that was. Overall, still a fab game. Can't really think of anything I didn't like about it!

Agree with the thoughts on Sunshine and Galaxy. I remember spending a number of minutes just dragging Mario between the Save File options before you start the game - he was so much fun to control in Sunshine, and then in Galaxy even more so. My one negative against Galaxy is the damned Spring Mario levels - they can do one!

Replayed this on Xbox One, it's still a well written narrative game. I did only play the once this time unlike on PS4 where I replayed for the trophies.


NitW, I also replayed recently as it come to Game Pass and had Halloween theme. Last time I played it was on Switch where I did have in my Top 10 for Switch for a while but did find it slow last time, where this time found more enjoyable overall.


Another one recently on Game Pass that was ported over from the Switch and oddly will be in 6K on Series X. Think most out of all these games this be the one you'd all maybe like to give a go as it's a colourful fun puzzle platformer thing.


I wasn't expecting much from TWDFS as the series and Telltale went downhill, but I was pleasantly surprised by the Final Season that I'm glad I finally finished Clem's story.


As you might have guessed from NitW, TWD and mentioned I went back to Animal Crossing due Halloween that continued night with Little Hope the second Dark Pictures game. It was fine for what it is, just I know from playing Until Dawn can do better but for £20 for 5hr game in the mould every year or so might do them better from a business sense and I'm likely to play them.

I picked up Dark Pictures on the fantasy league purely because Until Dawn is a really good game. Open Critic is not being massively kind to it. Maybe they're a one hit wonder?

Possibly as everything after Until Dawn has been like around 70 on Meta but a 70/100 game is fine though, not everything has to be Last of  Us Part II quality.

And if the next game in the anthology is also £20, 5hrs and of similar quality as the last two that's fine.

Rum wrote:

Having played it after 64 and Sunshine, the amount of ideas and variety they squeeze in is crystal clear because it has far more worlds with fewer stars to get in each, meaning it's not just recycling the same objectives or the same scenery too regularly. Some stages really exemplify how they improved on the formulas from 64 and Sunshine too - the galaxies that just have one star to get, for example, are reminiscent of the FLUDD-less stages in Sunshine; and the Bowser levels are cut from the same cloth as the Bowser levels in 64, but refined to perfection.

I remember thinking this was a bobbins thing! Not so much from a variety perspective as from an exploration one - you're almost always railroaded towards one single star, and I disliked that after 64. I also think I like 'getting used to' level designs and exploring them fully, though, so maybe that's me.

That’s Pumpkin Jack beat, a game that seems like it was made for me. It’s an altogether satisfying, deft and well-crafted 3D platformer that harkens back to the genre’s PS2 days. It had enough variety, humour and especially atmosphere to keep me interested right the way throughout, and it’s hard for a game to do that to me these days.

It’s not really got any major weak points. I suppose you could point to it’s lack of originality as a drawback - seriously, it does nothing that Medievil or The Nightmare Before Christmas hadn't already thought of first  - but it does everything it sets out to very, very well.

That Pumpkin Jack was mostly made by just one guy over the course of four years makes it all that more impressive. True, on the credits you can see that several others helped with the voice acting, music composition and writing, but all the games design stuff - levels, characters, animation, 3D and digital arts - was mainly the work of Nicolas Meyssonnier. I'm looking forward to seeing what he does next, and I hope it's Pumpkin Jack 2, as there's a really solid foundation for him to build on with this debut.

The points that other people made in the eShop thread about Pumpkin Jack's Game Pass eligibility, price and positioning next to Super Mario 3D All Stars are all fair points. Regardless, it's a very good game. Make sure you play it when you're ready to give it a go. An excellent 5 hour game, 8/10.

I have a bulging backlog (stop it), but as a big 3D platformer fan Pumpkin Jack might just make it onto my wishlist. Without the positive coverage from yourself and Nintendo Life, I'd probably have swept right over it.

No More Heroes (Switch)

Still a great game with a timeless art style that makes it look like it was always meant to be HD.

I think I liked it even more than I did back then, though it's been more than ten years now so can't say for sure. But I feel like the stuff in between the missions felt like much less of a grind this time. In fact a lot of the time I was even enjoying the side jobs more than fighting waves of enemies in the main levels.

Don't know if they tinkered with the game in some way to make that so - haven't heard mention of it anywhere so probably not. This seems like a very straightforward port job. But the now consistent 60fps maybe helped. The frame rate used to tank when just getting around the hub level. Not anymore. Does make it more of a shame that they scrapped the hub for NMH2 instead of improving it - something which I still don't like - but I can kind of get why they felt like it was worth scrapping at the time.

Yeah, even though I was going for all the lightsaber upgrades, training regimens, wrestling tapes and even some new clothes for Travis (which have no impact on the gameplay), it didn't really feel like a grind. Just me playing the game. I didn't feel like I had to repeat the jobs too often, with a new job unlocked after every mission, and I could break them up with combat missions which yielded a lot of money.

I liked how each of the ranked missions had their own gameplay gimmick but for me the highlight of the game was the boss fights, which I guess isn't too controversial a statement given how focal they are to the game's structure. Not only do all their characters feel well defined, but they're a lot of fun to fight. Most of the enemies in the game you honestly just mindless mow down, albeit in a stylish way, but you actually have to employ strategy in the boss fights and you even have some flexibility in how you approach them. Generally though, you want to go for wrestling moves when you can to deal a lot of damage quickly.

And those last two fights with the first rank and then the 'secret' final boss, perfect. Just perfect, with some of the best music of the game backing them.

Also I'm really glad they restored the blood to the European version of the game, making the deaths as gruesome as they were meant to be. I was taken aback at how violent one of the boss deaths was - didn't look nearly as bad in the original censored PAL version.


Now I'm just kind of worried about what I'm going to think about No More Heroes 2 now, because the more I think about it the more I can't help but agree with the more critical takes people have of it as a somewhat disappointing sequel, but at the time I did like it. Maybe even more than the first game.

It's great that it's 60fps now though. I suppose they capped it at 30fps since the first game wasn't even consistent with its frame rate target, and because of the graphical upgrade which I did like, but now in that regard it's the best of both worlds.

May not get around to it soon anyway. Buying the first game on Switch felt indulgent enough considering I already had it on Wii and it's like worth £4 these days (and I swear it went for like 50p in CEX at one point). I'm sure it's the best version of the game though, much like NMH1 Switch is.

I've seen a couple of defences of the jobs and open world this time around that I don't think I saw back in the day. I finished and enjoyed NMH1, despite it being by all accounts not the sort of thing I'd get on with (beat-em-up, bloody and crude and sexual, the jobs being arguably pretty tedious); but fell off NMH2 hard. At the time I couldn't understand it, because 1 did have all these tedious bits in and 2 just had the good stuff. Now I'm seeing more people praising these bits (including yourself), and I'm just glad there's some rationale to the decisions smaller Balla made back then.