I don’t see a 2021 Weekend Gaming Update thread, so it’s time to bump this one with my happenings!
I haven’t been able to do any gaming out in the living room (home to my Xbox One, WiiU, Switch, and heart) because my eyes are falling apart and nobody within 200 miles knows how to fix them, and my couch has been pushed back against the wall–far from the TV–for the last few weeks because of Christmas stuff. So my console gaming has pretty much been nil, which sucks because I’ve got some awesome stuff waiting to be played, and I was on a bit of a kick back before the holidays ruined everything.
So instead of console gaming I spent most of this last weekend in the office playing the following games (mostly on PC):
Worms Rumble (Steam):
I try to play a few matches every day. Lately I’ve been having trouble finding timely matches at 3am local. Eventually I’ll connect to a game, only to find some lag at those hours, presumably because I’m playing on some long distance server where all the awake people live.
I adore the game and enjoy all the time I spend with it, but it can be time consuming to find a local game at the hours I live my life.
Hearthstone (via Activision’s Call of Duty Launcher)
My wife and I have had daily best-of-5 tournaments every day for the last couple weeks. Suffice to say that our victory hat has changed hands a couple times, but I do believe it’s been in my possession the majority of the time since Christmas. As it should be.
Metroid Samus Returns (3DS):
For years I’ve been waiting for this game to go on sale for $2. I finally got tired of seeing physical copies constantly selling for at or near full retail price (even used) and I finally broke down and bought myself a copy for my long-neglected New3DS system. I got the sudden urge to finally splurge on this game after recently sitting in my living room with not much else available play, and because I recently posted about a 2012 3DS Kid Icarus on-rails shooter game in our Box Art trivia thread and remembered how much fun my 3DS could be. I felt like dusting it off and putting it to work, and I’m still both in love with the system, and at war with my eyes.
So far the Metroid game has been great… with one very trivial exception. From the get-go, Samus is clearly female with her new move-set and the current armor she wears. This doesn’t irk or bother me so much as make me a bit nostalgic for the big reveal at the end of the original NES Metroid back in the 80s, when my brothers and I had our minds blown when she took off her helmet for the first time at the end of the game. I’m normally not one for in-game nostalgia, but I kinda wanted a similar reveal at the end of this game (well, I guess what I really wanted was to imagine there would be kids out there just as surprised as I was). This is the most trivial observation ever, but it’s just something that popped into my head as I played. And hey, it’s pretty par for the course that my opinions are typically nothing but trivial.