Monday, November 8, 2021

Guardians of the Galaxy

  • I was a little worried after the not so great Avengers game, but GOTG turned out to be one of the best games of the year.
  • This is not a GaaS game, it's a single player adventure game that's a mixture of Uncharted and Mass Effect that lasts around 20 hours and has a new game plus mode.  
  • The characters' voice actors are not the ones from the movies and honestly I think I prefer the game's voices to the movie actors.  I really liked their take on Drax. In the movies he's basically used as comic relief, but in the game he comes across as very intelligent and you really get to know his personality and what motivates him.  The same is true for all the characters as you find different mementos during a mission and when you return back to your ship you can choose to have a lengthy  dialogue and learn about each member of the group. 
  • There is a lot of dialog in the game.  In the whole 20 hours it took me to finish there may have been 10 minutes where no one was talking.  I enjoyed the dialog and thought the writing was very well done. 
  • You only play as Star-Lord which may sound disappointing, but the game feels like a leader simulator where your actions and dialog choices seem to have a huge effect on how the story and gameplay turns out so only playing as one character makes sense. 
  • In combat Star-Lord has guns that do minimal damage with some modifiers that can affect the enemies in different ways, but the majority of the damage comes from your teammates and the actions you have them perform.   Since you are more of a commander than a powerful fighter it makes the fast paced combat interesting and somewhat tactical on the harder difficulties.  At certain points during combat you can assemble the whole group and can give them a pep talk. 
  • Amazing graphics. It maybe the best looking game and the soundtrack is awesome. 
  • The whole game is top notch and really shouldn't be missed. It was developed by the makers of the Deus Ex series so hopefully they will be able to continue that franchise for their next game.

Switch OLED

  • I told myself I wasn't going to buy one since there were only minimal improvements from my original Switch.  I was going on vacation ​two week​s​ which meant time on a plane, so somehow I convinced myself to get the new Switch and I'm glad I did.
  • I do like OLED screens and on the Switch it makes a huge difference as having true blacks and great contrast makes the graphics pop off the screen.  
  • The screen is only marginally larger, but it feels bigger and it seems to be the perfect size for a handheld console. 
  • They did update the battery in later Switches and the OLED uses the same one, but since I had the original Switch the extra battery life was very noticeable.  I got around 5 hours playing Metroid which was great.
  • On the original Switch I found that my hands would cramp after 15 minutes of playtime so I bought a device that made the Switch a bit bigger.   The new Switch is a tad longer so it wouldn't fit in that device, but for some reason I didn't have any issues cramping on the new one and at times I played for a couple of hours straight. 
  • The new dock has an ethernet port in it but since I don't play online it isn't that big of a deal and I didn't notice any faster downloading of games when I had it plugged in.  I bought an additional dock for my older Switch last year and luckily it works on the new one.
  • Moving my data from my old Switch to the new one was the only downside and it's still surprising how backward Nintendo is on the software side.
  • I wasn't sure that I was going to keep the new Switch so I didn't choose the option to completely move all of my data from the old to the new and moving it in pieces is a pain.
  • If you subscribe to the online service then your saves are stored in the cloud and can be moved easily, otherwise they are stored on the internal storage and since they can't be moved to the Sd​ ​card moving them manually is a huge pain.  They use near field communication to send the save files so the Switches have to be close together.  Also you can only move one game at a time.  On the old machine you select the game and then select send, then on the other Switch you have to select receive.  The transfer takes about 10 seconds then you have to go through all the menus again.  Notice I keep saying moved as you can't copy your save to the new machine, they are deleted off the other Switch after the copy is successful.  Moral of the story, sign up for a month of the online service for $5 if you have a lot of game saves to move.
  • Another backwards thing is that I had an sd card with a lot of games stored and you can't move the sd card to your new Switch without formatting it so I had to download all of the games again.  Ugh......
  • Other than that I am really enjoying my Switch and I am happy I upgraded.  



 

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