Category: Impressions

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Balan Wonderworld – Demo of Broken Dreams

Wow! This demo kicks off with an incredulous wonderful high-budget CG intro. Kids have discovered a magical realm where all their dreams can come true! The magician is overwhelmingly energetic in his motions to sweep you off your feet to a brand new world with infinite possibilities. His design is a bit creepy, but that just enhances the sense that he’s an otherworldly magical being. You can’t see all the possibilities in life until you cut two eyeholes in your hat. This brand new 3D platformer by Yuji Naka, creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, NiGHTS and Billy Hatcher, was shaping up to be an exciting prospect.

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Pikmin 3 Deluxe – New Technology Discovered

A mysterious object has been spotted and gathered by the Pikmin. It appears to be a flat device with removable parts. Analysis shows this technology has potential, but we are unsure how to harness it yet. It could not produce new Pikmin when thrown in the onion, but perhaps we could use it to enhance our ship.

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Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles – Online Border Patrol

Can you believe it?! Crystal Chronicles is finally being released with online and cross-play! Yay! This extremely unique GameCube game that once required 4 Game Boy Advance to play is now becoming accessible with modern technology. Well, that’s what we thought.

In a throwback to the PAL days where people in Australia and Europe gamed on 50hz TVs out of technical necessity, Square-Enix has decided to bring back that restrictive nostalgia by region locking this game online. I live in Australia and this is what happened when I tried to play with my friend in the USA.

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A Demo Harvest

Sometimes I forget that game demos are a thing. That some games offer little tasters of the full product to try before you buy. It honestly feels like a bygone era, like the demo discs you could peel off game magazines. I must’ve played tons of the Fury3 demo back in the day. You have to wonder why all games don’t offer it in today’s world of digital marketplaces. Well after a recent harvest of demos from the Switch eShop, I can see why many don’t.

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Borderlands: Nintendo Switch Edition Impressions!

After a decade of “Borderlands would be cool on Wii / Wii U / Switch” followed by thinking emojis, something finally happened. Borderlands 1, 2 and The Pre-Sequel have all come out on Switch and I’ve started playing the first game. These were released with no screenshots, footage or impressions so there’s some unknowns that I would like to quickly clear up in this impressions article. Firstly and most importantly, the game has motion controls! Rejoice!

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Trials of Trails of Cold Steel 3 – Switch Demo

After 20 minutes of this demo I was ready to delete it from my Switch forever. You start off in a busy gameplay sequence at level 35, with dozens of arts, crafts, attacks and formations that make no sense. A battle starts and there are 8 menu buttons for each character. There’s all sorts of bars, EP, CP, HP, TP, NPD, ESRB. Nobody has an actual name, they are just labelled “Pink Haired Girl” or “Blue Haired Guy” etc. for every colour you can think of, it feels like a parody. Is the game meant to be like this? Some kind of war is going on and more characters join you, then more characters appear until you have lost count of everyone and you can’t tell who is on what side. Nothing makes any sense but the music is cool.

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Rhythm Fit Adventure – Pushup Superstar

First I would like to offer my sympathies to everyone who can’t find a copy of this game. Ring Fit Adventure is sold out across the world, and it’s gonna be a while before it’s readily available again. Even when it launched it was selling well, but now with the virus situation it’s sold out everywhere as a practical way to exercise indoors. It’s being resold on places like eBay for triple the retail price, and Nintendo’s also had to slow down production a bit. Who would have thought it would be this hot an item? Well, at Pietriots we already knew Ring Fit Adventure was Better Than Real Life, and it was also my personal Game of the Year in the Pietriots end of year podcast. Okay, enough gloating.

If you are one of the lucky million people who got their hands on Ring Fit early on, good news! A free update has just launched with a brand new rhythm mode. It features 17 new songs, with two ways to play and multiple difficulties. The songs are mostly from Ring Fit itself, with a couple of guest songs from other Nintendo games like Super Mario Odyssey, Breath of the Wild, Splatoon 2 and Wii Fit.

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Bravely Default 2 – Demo Impressions

Surprise! A meaty demo for a hotly anticipated JRPG just stealth-dropped during the mini Nintendo Direct while you were playing Animal Crossing. The Bravely Default 2 demo is free, and appears in the New Release section of the eShop as its own thing, since there’s no page for the main game yet. The demo is a 2.3GB download, and claims to have a different story to the main game with harder battles, in order to encourage everyone to experiment with the job system and get used to being Brave and Default.

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Brain Training for Nintendo Switch – Staying 20 in 2020

It’s nice to see you again, Dr Kawashima. This must be the first time I’ve ever been excited to see a doctor. Brain Training is back, the game that elevated Nintendo DS into the stratosphere outside traditional gaming. This “non-game” took off as a great way to use the touch screen and features of the DS and 3DS systems, but how does it hold up on a home console hybrid? It’s a little different. I picked up the new Switch version today and thought I’d write about the experience.

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Ring Fit Adventure – Better Than Real Life

You planned on going for a jog today, but… it’s just not a good morning, is it? You’ve just woken up and it feels like a terrible idea. It’s hot, there’s smog in the air, people outside, lots of traffic and commotion. You might bump into people on their way to work or school. You might step in something. You might have to cross several roads and jog on the spot awkwardly in front of traffic. Birds could poop on your head. Car horns are going off, lights are flashing. You’re not going anywhere this morning… but what if there was still a way? Maybe tomorrow.

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Borderlands 3 – Keeping Up With The Calypsos

After seven years of DLC and side-stories for Borderlands 2, the third game is finally here. I’ve jumped into it over the past week and have been enjoying some vault hunting on brand new planets. The story is new, environments are new, there’s a million new guns, and the vault hunters themselves have brand new skills. So, what else is new? I keep hearing people say it’s just “more Borderlands” as if to downplay this game. Of course it’s more Borderlands, the title of the game is Borderlands 3. It’s not inaccurate, just a lazy way to describe it. Borderlands 3 is purposefully designed as a sequel and does a pretty good job improving the core gameplay while offering a new scenario. I’m currently level 20 and will go a bit more in depth about what’s new.

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Luigi’s Mansion 3 – PAX Aus Demo Impressions

OooooOooOoo! Do you dare enter the house of horrors? After a 20 minute wait in line, I got to play the spookiest game at PAX Aus. The booth was very dark and had about 8 Switches, with glowing ghosts around the wall. They put a lot of effort into the presentation for this game, it was definitely the most interesting place in the Nintendo booth. The line for Pokemon Sword and Shield was longer, but they just had generic setups there. This experience had atmosphere similar to if you were playing on the couch in the dark at home.

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Fire Emblem: Three Houses – Preliminary Assessment

Fire Emblem is BACK! This game has only been out for a week but I thought it was interesting enough to write some impressions of my first 15 hours with the game. I will try to avoid story spoilers and just talk most about the gameplay, overall feeling, and what’s different. First I’ll just throw forth a quick story opinion and say that I am enjoying the story more and more as it unfolds. It starts off a bit scattered with an overwhelming amount of people to meet and kingdom lore to adjust to, but the more you play the more everything makes sense. There is a looming sense of mystery that makes every bit of dialogue worth reading and I’m getting more and more hungry for juicy info.

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God Eater 3 – Just a Bite

Too dangerous, they said. That’s why we’re locked in here. Horrific beasts have taken over Earth, beasts known as Aragami who only live to consume and destroy. Yet we’re the ones treated like evil, the only people who can fight them. The uncreative God Eaters just call us “Adaptive” God Eaters or AGE for short, simply because we can breathe the air outside. It’s a long story but Earth is screwed. The air is full of corrosive ash that humans can’t handle, except us of course. This “ability” has led us to being locked up and treated like test subjects. We only get let out to do missions for them.  Is that our fault, did we ask for this? We must be bad, just like the monsters right? Then why are we having so much fun slaying them?

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