“Whatcha Playin’, Pixels?” – #009

A weekly roundup of games enjoyed by the writers of The Pixels

It’s finally Friday! Between adorable fox warriors, over-the-top bosses in fantasy lands, and ultra-machismo guys trying to kill CHAOS, here’s what the writers of The Pixels were up to this week:

My adventures in Elden Ring have stalled somewhat over the past couple of days as I’ve found myself at a bit of an impasse: there are two places I really really want to go to, but both are guarded by ridiculously difficult bosses. Despite the fact that I should probably be leveled enough to beat them, I’m just not having a good time being pummelled repeatedly by the same two toughies. So.. I’ve been doing a bit of level-grinding to pass the time whilst idly listening to some music. This week the soundtrack to my level grinding has been provided by Elvis Costello, and I have found that landing a perfect jump-attack on an Armour-Clad Stabby Man just as the chorus to Pump It Up hits is quite a cathartic experience.

I’ve also played through the free prelude chapter to the upcoming Ghostwire Tokyo which has actually told me very little about what to expect from the main game. There may or may not be a man known as KK whose tie appears to be flapping in the wind more often than it is sat in place. There may or may not be bits where you draw magical symbols in the air with your glowing fingers. There may or may not be evil kids in yellow raincoats. At this stage, it’s too early to say, although I can point out that this Prelude is in the form of a visual-novel that lasts roughly twenty minutes and has one single bizarre turn-based encounter in it that made me think back to Radical Dreamers, of all things! If you’ve got any interest in Ghostwire then it could be worth a look, but I honestly don’t feel any more enlightened now, plot or gameplay-wise, than I did beforehand.

~TeeBee

This week I have been playing Wreckfest, the first racing game I’ve paid any real attention to since Forza 3 back on the Xbox 360. It’s great fun, taking part in banger races and demolition derbies! We’re playing it with my dad and it’s a delight to see him learning the ins and outs of video game racing!

I also continue my campaign on Mass Effect 2, which continues to be just as cool as I remembered it, and have picked up Guardians of the Galaxy, which is great fun and has a really good feel to it.

~Bizarro

Sunday night, I played a bit of Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master. I loved this game as a kid and I was excited to play this one again on stream. I didn’t beat it, but I had a lovely time playing it.

I finished Majora’s Mask on Tuesday and it felt immensely satisfying pasting the final boss to the ground using the Fierce Deity’s Mask. My best bud, who was watching that morning, felt it was greatly anti-climatic though.

Apart from those two, the rest of my week was spent playing Tunic! We received an early release copy of the game for review and I was happy to take this on. My goodness, this is a great game! The little fox warrior is so adorable and there’s a lot of depth within it. It reminds me greatly of a cross between Hyper Light Drifter and Redwall. I even got to stream it on Thursday morning and it was a nice break from the Zelda games I’ve been playing. You can find my full review of the game on the front page. Spoilers though: I LOVE IT and you will too!

~Ryan C

While Elden Ring is still taking up most of my playtime, I also started playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD on the trusty Wii U. Like Wind Waker (which I finished a few weeks ago), it was a game I tried renting as a kid, but my underdeveloped monkey brain was not ready for a Zelda game’s complex puzzles and controls. No, all it was capable of doing was mashing A in Pokémon until the game told me I did a good job.

Twilight Princess bears the immediately recognizable mark of Zelda’s romantic adventurousness and quirky charm, but I sense shared flavours with games like Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and even horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. I have a feeling TP‘s developers were inspired by these games’ aesthetic and artfulness. It’s interesting to note that it was made to appeal particularly to a Western audience and that it was inspired heavily by the Lord of the Rings films, which were at the peak of their popularity at the time.

I love how the game continues to open up and grow vaster in how we’re able to traverse it while deepening its mysteries and connections to the Hyrule we might be familiar with. I love the dungeons, the puzzles, and the bosses. Particularly, allowing the player to save a town from the grips of twilight before we’re introduced to it with its bustling population makes it very satisfying to eventually explore it. I have a soft spot for a good town in games, and Zelda always delivers. I’m glad I came back to Twilight Princess because so far, it’s a really special game.

~shhwonk

Last few days I’ve started getting seriously sucked into Terraria. In fact, as of this week, it is my most played game on Steam! I love it when I get into a game that is difficult to put down, which doesn’t happen too often, especially if they’re not story-based games. 

As of tonight, in our three-man Master Mode vanilla playthrough, we just beat Plantera. The worst boss fight so far (especially in master mode) due to how many minions branch off in its second phase. Keep in mind that of the three of us, two of us actually had no idea what Plantera looked like prior to the boss. This playthrough has been wild especially since two of us are noobies and the third is the Terraria Wiki himself. Plantera was probably a crazier experience for us since we all found the first phase too simple, so that was a fun laugh. We also wouldn’t have won against Plantera if all of us were dead at the same time before respawn. There have been at least thirty seconds where both of my party members were dead and I was left dodging and shooting at the boss, which really made the experience all the more memorable because my surviving was vital to our chances of success at that point. 

I’ve also finally decided that I’m going to be sticking to mostly ranged weapon classes. I’ve been switching back and forth for a while and it’s been difficult as roles and materials are limited so I’ve decided to stick to bows and guns.

~Zernius

I’ve been dabbling in a lot of short stuff this last week with the goal of getting my backlog to under 300 games, and, well, mission accomplished! It’s still a long way to go, but every game ticked off the to-do list feels great. 

Since I was so close to my goal, I ended up pushing through three small games this week: Kero Blaster, a small platformer by the dev of Cave Story; Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna), a beautiful puzzle-platformer based on native Alaskan folklore with documentary videos telling stories and history with elders from the tribe; and The Darkside Detective, a silly point-and-click adventure in the style and humor of classic Monkey Islands with a Twin Peaks style story. All very different games, about 4 hours each, give or take. I really ought to do some of the longer games on my backlog, though. Otherwise, I’m going to tear through all my sub-10h games and have nothing but chonkers left staring down at me.

~Maggie M

I’ve had it up to here with Spider-Man! Seriously, I’ve been checking out a ton of Spidey retro games this week in preparation for our Spider-Man episode of MAGE CAST podcast, and lemme tell yeah… a lot of them are a real menace. The Spidey retro game scene was rotten to the core with controls that had no idea how to handle the web-head’s unique navigational skills. Trying to cram jumping, punching, flying kicking, web-shooting, web-slinging, and wall-crawling on controllers that had a d-pad and two action buttons was a recipe for disaster.

That said, after 1 bad NES game, 1 gross Atari 2600 game, several awful versions of Arcade’s Revenge, 4 terrible Game Boy games, a mediocre GBA game, and a handful of others, I did find a few high points! Web of Fire for 32X, Spider-Man: The Videogame for arcades, Spider-Man vs the Kingpin for Sega CD, Separation Anxiety (sequel to Maximum Carnage, played on SNES, of course), and Spider-Man for PS1 and N64 are far from shabby, whether due to greater visuals, better music, or controls that actually made sense. Either way, the journey was an adventure worth chronicling in photographs.

Outside of the comic book world, I beat my first story boss in Elden Ring on my first try! I just had so much built-up enmity by the time I reached Morgott the Omen King. It was inevitable. The game is great but it’s so huge I’m beginning to lose some steam on it. The godawful co-op mechanisms in place also kind of put a wet blanket on my excitement for the game as well. Fan response has made it clear it’s always been this bad in the multiplayer department. That’s a bit disappointing, so it seems like playing it as a single-player game is the way to go. Curse you, brand new PS Plus subscription!

Still gotta be better than the angry caveman simulator Cory is going to talk about next.

~Red

I love Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin. It’s about an angry man named Jack Garland who’d like to kill Chaos. He yells at bad guys, then gruesomely smashes them into kibble. Most of his dialogue is irritated grunting. He tells party members who are trying to open up to him about their concerns to shut up about their stupid feelings because he doesn’t care. At one point an NPC tries to inform him at length about some bit of lore or another, and he gets bored, puts some mall rock on his phone – he has a phone for some reason – and walks away mid-monologue. Oh, from a gameplay perspective it’s a rock-solid clone of Team Ninja’s Nioh games, but that’s not why you came. You came for Jack. One day, when I grow up, I want to be Jack Garland.

~Cory G

Don’t forget to let us know what you’ve been playing this week!

Ryan Cheddi – our friendly, neighbourhood caffeine addict – is a man of many talents: an engineer, a gaming historian, a fiction writer and a streamer. He is also a self-avowed Sonic the Hedgehog fan. You can check out his cool beans at his site – Games with Coffee – or find him on Twitter as @GameswCoffee, and Instagram as @games_with_coffee. He streams on Twitch, also as GamesWithCoffee.