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Post by Xeogred on Jun 6, 2021 12:13:58 GMT -5
Yeah, if Twilight Princess HD and the Metroid Prime trilogy come to Switch, I can probably box up my WiiU forever. lol
I pretty much love all the 3D Zelda's, except for Wind Waker, even though I'd say it's still a good game compared to other series, but a weak Zelda in my book. OoT is the only one I've beaten several times and own several versions of. Come to think of it, Twilight Princess is the only other 3D one I've beaten twice now. But yeah I'll get through Majora's Mask 3D sometime, I'm excited for Skyward Sword on Switch. As for BOTW, I'm saving that open world energy for BOTW2, lol.
I like how OoT is more dungeon focused and plays like LTTP or LA, just in 3D. After that the games got more fetch/side quest heavy and such. I still love most of them but yeah, OoT kept things simple... in a good way to me.
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Post by Moulinoski on Jun 8, 2021 9:40:30 GMT -5
Yeah, if Twilight Princess HD and the Metroid Prime trilogy come to Switch, I can probably box up my WiiU forever. lol I pretty much love all the 3D Zelda's, except for Wind Waker, even though I'd say it's still a good game compared to other series, but a weak Zelda in my book. OoT is the only one I've beaten several times and own several versions of. Come to think of it, Twilight Princess is the only other 3D one I've beaten twice now. But yeah I'll get through Majora's Mask 3D sometime, I'm excited for Skyward Sword on Switch. As for BOTW, I'm saving that open world energy for BOTW2, lol. I like how OoT is more dungeon focused and plays like LTTP or LA, just in 3D. After that the games got more fetch/side quest heavy and such. I still love most of them but yeah, OoT kept things simple... in a good way to me. I feel like Twilight Princess wasn't any more or less side quest heavy than Ocarina of Time. Skyward Sword is also a bit more focused than the usual (but then again, it's unusual in that it's not really that open to begin with). A Link Between Worlds has the MaiMai but for the most part, it's like "go to these places, now go". Windwaker definitely expects you to travel the whole open sea and back (which is cool) and Majora's Mask has a ton of side stuff as well. The Oracle games and the Minish Cap have little collectable stuff that I guess I can see as side quests. Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks also have little collectible things but imo are still focused enough. BotW is the king of sidequest Zelda, though. Practically the whole game is a side quest with the only main objective being "defeat Ganon". Fortunately, the game is kind enough to give you markers for where you should actually go. They're all so very good, though! There really isn't a bad Zelda unless if we add in the CDi ones (in which case, Zelda's Adventure seems to be the one to take the cake). By the way, Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventure is very fun with a friend or family member (probably more fun with more). You know, in case you want to share the Zelda love. |
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Post by Sarge on Jun 10, 2021 12:23:49 GMT -5
Yeah, I'm not sure Twilight is any more side-quest heavy, outside of the fact that it's a good bit longer than Ocarina. It does rate as my favorite 3D Zelda, but almost all of them are great. Majora's Mask will always be my blind spot - that one does go heavy on side quests, although I recently discovered that the remake monkeyed around with the length afforded by the time-slowing song, making things feel much more rushed. I bet I'd enjoy it a lot more freed from the time constraints. I will probably try to give the N64 game some run again one of these days, probably emulated so maybe I can bump up that frame rate.
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Post by anayo on Jun 11, 2021 17:14:37 GMT -5
2c) Warcraft II: Beyond The Dark Portal (human campaign) 26) The Operative: No One Lives Forever 27) Star Wars Rogue Squadron 3D 28a) Warcraft III (Human Campaign)Detailed thoughts and impressions coming soon. I loved Warcraft II when I played it for the first time in 2020. It’s my #1 favorite RTS game. So, I had high expectations for Warcraft III. Overall WC3 is good, but I prefer WC2.  Likes:Like #1: The graphics are pleasant, which came as a surprise since I usually prefer sprite based graphics over 3D accelerated ones from those days. I feel like the technology and craftsmanship that went into pixel art was really mature back then, whereas 3D accelerated polygons were more like a crappy version of what we have today. However WC3’s art direction is charming, with bouncy animation and a diminutive quality lending everything the sense of itty bitty figurines on a table. I sense that the art team must have had great command of color theory, too.  Like #2: Optional quests on each map inspired me to find and try to complete them all, although this aspect didn’t seem as developed as I would have liked. I was hoping that going above and beyond might unlock some ultra rare god-weapon, maybe like how talking to the right people in Shining Force III (Sega Saturn, 1998) will let you unlock incredible items and characters. But this never seemed to happen in WC3. It’s also possible secrets like this are actually buried in the game and I just never met all the criteria to reach them.  Like #3: Some missions had objectives that differed dramatically from the ones in WC2. One comes to mind where I had to kill 100 zombies before the enemy forces could accomplish that. There was never any mission like this in WC2. So, it cannot be said that WC3 doesn’t iterate on WC2. Dislikes:
Dislike #1: I found WC3’s human campaign to be too easy. This is probably since my sense of normalcy has been warped by WC2: Tides of Darkness’s human campaign, which I would not characterize as being suitable for beginner or casual players. To WC3’s credit, there were difficulty options, and I chose “normal”. So maybe I only have myself to blame. Or maybe if I wanted something harder I should have turned to the Frozen Throne Expansion.  Dislike #2: WC3 lays it on thick with the exposition. The characters are verbose and take themselves way too seriously. This game came out in 2003, so I can’t shake the suspicion that Blizzard wanted to set their sights for the grandeur of Lord of the Rings. That’s fine, but they tried to do it without the scholarly background of J.R.R. Tolkien. It made me miss how WC2 confined its storytelling to a text crawl at the beginning of each mission. It also made me miss WC2’s boisterous spirit akin to the zany energy of the performers at a renaissance fair. I’m way more tolerant of amateur storytelling when it doesn’t take itself so seriously. WC3 loses this quality and my endearment along with it.  |
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Post by EasyHard on Jun 11, 2021 19:40:33 GMT -5
RE: WC3 lackluster sidequests. Yeah. I would go further and say often the RPG systems in Warcraft 3 feel very muted during the single player campaign. Hero abilities are great of course, but the rest like your basic level ups, new pieces of gear, and consumable charms and potions often feel just a little bit superfluous. Items can completely change the tide of battle in multiplayer, and minor stat bonuses (especially speed) feel magnified when you are always up against evenly matched opposition. I still like the sidequests and killing stuff for experience in the single player, but it matters less than the game thinks it should.
The human campaign is definitely the dumbest and easiest, but the story remains serious throughout. Arthas can be such an emotional brat. I like the Night Elf campaign the most, it reminds me of when you would glimpse fantasy races and their societies in Lord of the Rings. (And it's quite a different feel from the "High Elves" you meet in the Undead campaign.) Speaking of Warcraft 2, a few missions in the Orc campaign feel like subtle callbacks.
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Post by Sarge on Jun 11, 2021 20:52:21 GMT -5
Those shots do look pretty cool. Indeed, I think a lot of it comes down to color choices and smart graphic design within the constraints at the time.
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Post by anayo on Jun 12, 2021 7:26:30 GMT -5
RE: WC3 lackluster sidequests. Yeah. I would go further and say often the RPG systems in Warcraft 3 feel very muted during the single player campaign. Hero abilities are great of course, but the rest like your basic level ups, new pieces of gear, and consumable charms and potions often feel just a little bit superfluous. Items can completely change the tide of battle in multiplayer, and minor stat bonuses (especially speed) feel magnified when you are always up against evenly matched opposition. I still like the sidequests and killing stuff for experience in the single player, but it matters less than the game thinks it should. Yeah there seemed to be a lot of things in WC3 that felt as though they ought to have been more significant but they just weren't. Not unlike some of the gadgets in No One Lives Forever. Overall I'm glad they added that stuff in WC3 since the game certainly isn't worse off for it and it does make it stand out from WC2. But it does feel a little anticlimactic. It's like Blizzard had all these cool ideas and only got as far as introducing them but not developing them to their full potential. Wait, this whole time I was assuming WC3 had only a human and orc campaign, like WC2. Are there actually more campaigns for more races? Yes! WC3 is a pretty game. But it didn't look that way until I upgraded to a 16 MB ATI Rage Pro card. The game would run on the 8 MB ATI Rage, but even at the lowest settings it chugged at seemingly sub 20-fps. Also, the textures looked really bad. I feel as though Blizzard's artists targeted the "medium" preset and added "low" as an afterthought for people with old computers who were just desperate to play it. Also: this is the first game I insisted on playing at 800 x 600. Up until now I had been playing everything on this PC at 640 x 480. But WC3's written fonts are hard to read in that resolution. Also some of the loading screen artwork looked weird. Again, it's as though they went over everything with a fine tooth comb at 800 x 600 to make sure everything looked good then tossed in 640 x 480 as an afterthought. |
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Post by EasyHard on Jun 12, 2021 7:49:21 GMT -5
anayo Heh, both the base game and expansion have 4 campaigns. Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos goes Human -> Undead -> Orc -> Night Elf. The Frozen Throne goes Night Elf -> Human -> Undead. They also added the 4th TFT campaign in a patch for the Orcs, although it is in a vastly different style. In that campaign, you control a small group of heroes (no units or base building) in a story largely unconnected from the main plot. What makes it different is that it is very quest driven, where you venture out into huge maps from a central town to kill something or investigate some objective. The RPG and item systems were customized for this campaign to make them matter more. So there are more than 10 levels per hero, there are more than 3 levels per ability, there are new items and gear (I want to say you can upgrade your gear in stores too, like +1 to +2 to +3 to..., etc.) I think the normal campaigns are much more compelling, but they put a lot of effort into trying a new idea.
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Post by anayo on Jun 12, 2021 8:40:26 GMT -5
anayo Heh, both the base game and expansion have 4 campaigns. Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos goes Human -> Undead -> Orc -> Night Elf. The Frozen Throne goes Night Elf -> Human -> Undead. That makes sense. I was thinking WC3 was scant on content if I had just completed 50% of it. Yes it isn't lost on me that WC3 is the evolutionary link between the 90's RTS and modern MOBA. That might also account for some of my ambivalence toward it, since my tastes are more aligned with the former. |
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Post by Sarge on Jun 20, 2021 22:27:10 GMT -5
Beat Fester's Quest. While I've beaten the US release before, this was done with the PAL version, which makes a few changes. First, most enemies don't take quite as many hits, but even more importantly, your shots are no longer blocked by the environment (think Mega Man), so much of the positioning difficulty in tight quarters is gone. It's still not a perfect game, but I think the base-level action is better than Blaster Master's overhead sections. I'd give this version a 7/10.
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