Well, COVID-19 infection rates are continuing to go down, deaths are continuing to go down, hospitalizations are. . . also continuing to go down. But the fact that the US is still averaging 79,000+ new cases every day for the last seven days is annoyingly staggering. Sure it is not the 301,138 from September (of this year), but the fact that people are still refusing to get vaccinated for any reason they can think of is again, staggering. I am sure that I am hitting some kind of pandemic fatigue talking about this every month and I am sure that some portion of you are tired of me bringing this up every month and why do I not just shut up and talk about video games like the good little sheeple that I am? Plenty of reasons but if you stay tuned, I will probably get to them.
If you read my article from near mid-month, you will know that I went out (I went on eBay) and bought a Wii U (a used Wii U Deluxe that unbeknownst to me came pre-installed with Mario Kart 8) so that I could play, amongst other games, Metroid Fusion on the Wii U's Virtual Console. There are a handful of other games that I am looking at too, but I jumped on it now because I had read articles saying that there was talk about Nintendo shutting down the purchasing side of the eShop for the Wii U and 3DS sometime after the first of the year. So the system arrived, I hooked it up to our TV downstairs, finished the set-up process, then took it upstairs and set up the base unit under our bed so that I could play the gamepad like a proto-Switch. There are some Wii games that I plan on buying that I will have to hook it back up to the TV to play (Dead Space: Extraction, Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, Metroid: Other M, Metroid Prime Trilogy, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and probably others that I am not thinking of off the top of my head). Granted I have only played one game, but I am really loving the Wii U, or at least how I have been using it.
On the Switch, now that I have just finished Metroid Fusion I will be starting Metroid Dread soon (I started Metroid Dread in the evening) and I will have an article on Fusion ready for Monday (11/8). I also finished The Blair Witch, a first-person survival horror game from Bloober Team (Layers of Fear, >observer_) which I will be writing about in a week or two (at the rate that I am writing articles these days). I also finished Saturday Morning RPG and I have an article in the works looking at the game as a whole rather than each individual episode. I did stop playing Missing Features: 2D not because I suck at platformers, but because after 11 levels, the game continues to move in a direction that has become no longer fun to play, and not what I had been enjoying about the game from the first eight or so levels. Believe it or not, I am still playing Super Mario World: Yoshi's Island, but that is usually just me playing through a single level before feeling done with the game. Occasionally I will have fun with the game and play two levels, but that is usually towards the end of each world/area and I want to see what that boss is like and those levels feel less cheap than some of the regular stages. I briefly started Flashback over last weekend, but I felt that I really was not in the mood for this type of game, although I did have a lot of fun with The Way: Remastered and I do like that style of game, but I just have to be in the right headspace to play a modernized 29-year old PC game.
On other devices, I am still playing Professor Layton and the Unwound Future and not really finding this entry as engaging as the first two. It could be the selection of puzzles feels like a barrel is being scraped, or that the mini-games seem random and out of place. I do feel compelled to finish the game though because I do enjoy solving puzzles, but also because everyone who commented about the MIDI Week Single article back in September said that Unwound Future had an amazing and heart-wrenching story, which I have an idea where that is coming from a couple of the flashback scenes with a young Hershel Layton, but if it does go that route, it may not be too much of a surprise. Also Layton and Luke need to stop being condescending assholes to Flora because in nearly every interaction with her (in this game at least) both Layton and Luke smack of patriarchal condescending assholes. On the PSP I am also playing God of War: Ghost of Sparta, which is sadly not as engaging or as epic-feeling as Chains of Olympus. I had planned on putting out a First Impressions article, but then I ended up being more than halfway through the game and I feel more compelled to finish the game than write about it, which may not be a good sign overall.
I'm sure that there is more that I could talk about but this was kind of where the flow naturally stopped when I was thinking about the games that I have recently played and started. I do wish I was playing more PC games, as I sit here on my laptop writing articles. But that is just time management and speaking of which I have some tea steeping that I should get to before in transmutes into coffee.
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