What are you playing on your Switch 2: Play Harder

I really hate turning to a guide, and though ocassionally I'll look soemthing up and it'll be such bullshit I'm like "that's on the game, not me" I usually feel better if I figure something out myself.

Treesmurf wrote:

I've gone back to this little known game called Tears of the Kingdom thanks to the influence of Hyrule Field Report, I want to get all the shrines done at the very least but reckon I'll end up trying to finish all the side quests and Treasure maps in the process.

Yassss! Did we already spoil the shrine reward for you?

Oh I'm a big guide hog. It takes very little for me to lose patience and start looking for walkthroughs. Games are for fun, not for banging my head against a wall until I figure something out.

I'm an impatient old man who feels like his gaming time is limited - in my youth I would've avoided a guide unless stuck for hours, but now, fuck it, I ain't gots to prove stuff you vidjagame

Thatis a rare case where I did regret it a few times - I looked stuff up for Tunic, towards the end when trying to get all the stuff. I worked out a lot of it though, and did feel dumb for the stuff I had to look up, as opposed to a clunky bit of game design.

Oddly talking guides on SS3 as CW and me got different endings in Dragon's Dogma 2. As I looked up what a certain item was for that spent a while getting, that then explained where to use it.

Buskalilly wrote:

Treesmurf wrote:

I've gone back to this little known game called Tears of the Kingdom thanks to the influence of Hyrule Field Report, I want to get all the shrines done at the very least but reckon I'll end up trying to finish all the side quests and Treasure maps in the process.

Yassss! Did we already spoil the shrine reward for you?

Yes but by choice to keep listening/not skipping forward, as ever with TotK it's more about the journey than the destination.

Balladeer wrote:

Games are for fun, not for banging my head against a wall until I figure something out.

That's fair - for me, though, it's more fun overall to struggle for a little bit but then solve something and have that satisfaction.

I decided to put Metroid Prime Remastered on the back-burner for the time being. Truth is, there was a stretch before, during and after the point where you get the Gravity Suit and Thermal Visor that just bored me to tears. Nothing happened for hours. I think I’ve got a long way to go but I’m not massively interested in where it’s all going. I expect I’ll have a chance to return to it later in the year, when the Switch’s release schedule quietens down over the summer.

~

I've moved onto Endless Ocean Luminous. I'd bought and paid for this weeks before the reviews came out, and I was unpleasantly surprised to read into those reviews how simplistic it was, how unvaried it was, and how it had removed features from it's Wii prequels while turning it's story mode into an unworthwhile grind. It honestly didn't cross my mind that they'd regress from what they'd put out fifteen years ago and release a game that's worse. But they have. 

It's still a relaxing and (no pun intended) fluid game that I've sometimes enjoyed. Yet it's randomly-generated oceans lack the defining characteristics of quality game world building, the lack of interactivity with the oceans' creatures drains the game of any realism it might have had, and you can't help but feel that the use of an AI navigator to tell the game's story and voice the game's trivia is a worrying sign of the future for this sort of thing. I predict that the much-maligned story mode will be patched in an update though - it's utterly senseless how even incremental progression is locked behind scanning thousands of individual fish, that's clearly a nonsense design choice. 

It's certainly not the worse game I've ever played but I'm umm'ing and ahh'ing about trading it in to get as much of my money back as I can.

From what I've read, abandoning MPR because it's boring for Endless Ocean Luminous sounds like abandoning Britain because it's wet for Atlantis. Still, if you'd already paid for the ticket to Atlantis before the whole sinking thing, I can see why you'd try to get your money's worth.

Since my last update here I've smashed through Botany Manor and Paranormasight, and ended up flailing around for a next game while I make gradual progress through Pepper Grinder. Of all the 2D platformers I've played on Switch, Pepper Grinder is definitely one of those.

Did you ever look at Promenade? After I saw reviews and thought of you.

I did not, I could swear this is the first I've heard of it.  Nintendo Life reviewed it in February (7/10 but reads like an 8) but I don't remember seeing that review until now.  That said I'm not exactly short on platformers to play: after Pepper Grinder there's the patched-up Penny and Smurf-recommended Splasher for me to try, as well as Planet of Lana if I fancy something a bit different.  So I don't think I'll get onto it any time soon.

Have put on my PSN wishlist but believe it has a physical, so one like Tchia and Pacific Drive if I see the physical somewhere I very well may pick it up.