After banging my head against the wall a bit with the Warrior class I was able to succeed with the Rogue. This was mostly because I got the upgrade (chose, not randomly received) were each successive attack was a bit faster and I had a weapon that did poison damage. It was a good run and I now feel like I have a better sense of the game's progression (generally go up/down and head east warily - there's a timer of sorts so you're forced to move eastwards).
The game's main gimmick is the fake windows-style OS that runs the entire game. It's fun and cute, but some aspects get a bit cumbersome/tiresome - for example managing inventory gets annoying but the biggest is the shopping. It takes too many steps...add to cart, confirm, then drag thing you bought into your inventory.
I do want to try out some of the other classes - the Rogue was more fun than I expected, and I guess the other classes probably have their own special perks/skills to use. I'm played mostly as the Warrior without success, but now that I get the game, perhaps it'll go easier?
I often mixup Rayman Legends and Rayman Origins. I know I played both on the PS3, but don't remember which one came first and so on. I fired this up the other day because I was curious - and it turns out that I had not played the PS Vita version of Origins. Such a great game...and it looks like the game levels are the same - which is nice.
The Vita adds a few things that are new - you can use the touchscreen to tap on lumis that are inside bubbles, as well as tap enemies that have inflated (popping them). There might be other stuff but I'm not sure I want to continue playing the game because, well...as great as it is, I've already played it. That being said I did play through the entirety of the first world/area. I wanted to play one of the musical platforming levels that I adore - but rather I played a flying on the mosquito 2D shooting level as the final one. I don't recall this exact level, though I did remember flying around on the mosquito, so I'll just blame my memory for this one. Though...I am curious...
I did see a note that the Vita version has the most "content" with unlockable stuff - and I think this refers to these "half ying-yangs" you need to find - you just tap on them, which is why I think they're new. I'll do a bit more digging just in case.
I don't really know much about Neopets - I mean, I know it existed and what it was about in the general sense, but I'm not familiar with the Neopets lore - names of pets and so on. So, I have no real way of knowing if this game is "true" to the source material. But, it's been fun to play what is essentially a kids game that clearly has lots of background material that I assume kids would have been all over. Sort of like playing a Pokemon game without any knowledge of the types and so on, and the characters are just like dropping these references assuming that you know what they're about.
The game itself is...not that interesting. I've been playing the story mode, eschewing the mini-games for now, and...it's pretty linear, there's a map - but you don't choose where to go really and the character you create walks from place to place automatically (sometimes this takes quite a while, when going someplace on the other end...and you can't interrupt it or do anything about it once the character is moving along). The game's core gameplay is essentially a version of reversi (or was it Othello?) - the two-player abstract boardgame where you place a piece on the board and then flip over your opponents pieces to your color if they are between two pieces of yours. You continue doing this until the board is full and then you see who has the most pieces. Confusingly, as you place pieces you can also earn XP - which doesn't matter in the context of the match, but your character levels up and, I think - gains the ability to have more neopets (neopetpets?) than give you a special move you can use in the regular match.It's not all that exciting and seems like it's under-utilizing the Neopets stuff? But then again, if I recall, the neopets webgame was mostly about raising/hatching neopets...but still, there isn't any of that here either...
That being said, the game is connected to the bigger game - you can get codes which I presume unlock stuff for you on Neopets "main". There's also a fair amount of multiplayer options that, for obvious reasons, I'm not going to try out.
I think that this game was described in its review in Edge magazine as the best Nintendo game not made by Nintendo that you'd assume was made by Nintendo. It's a really fitting description and, as I write this having unlocked all of the trophies for the game, I'm just a bit disappointed that it wasn't longer!
There's quite a bit for me to unpack and unwind from my experience so...
(a) Nostalgia
The game is littered with references, many overt others less so, to the Playstation as a brand and its history. In the game levels it is common to spot little robots recreating moments from famous Playstation games - sometimes with little costumes and all. I enjoyed seeing them, trying to identify some (when I wasn't sure what they were) and so on. The game also has a vault of artifacts you find and collect - and they're all Playstation-related (including PSP and Vita, of course). As I'm playing the game and collecting these I realized how intertwined my personal play experience is connected to the PlayStation. The PS1 was my first console (I had played on earlier ones, but never owned one or had access to in my home) and I've owned every single one since - not in all the different hardware models, but still. That's a lot of consoles (7 in total, including the handhelds) and I'm also pretty familiar with a lot of the games that came out for it. So, this really did feel like a trip down my own personal memory lane of games. I'm sure I missed lots of references, but it was fun to spot some of the more "obscure" ones? (Uncharted is easy, but Patapon less so...) It also made me realize how much I miss some of the important series that haven't seen releases recently - Wipeout being the standout example here. Each of the main areas ends with a level that plays the startup/system song/chime for each of the platforms - it's been years since I'd heard the PS2 and PS1 ones...sigh.
(b) Trophies
This is the first PS5-exclusive game I've played, so as I'm playing I'm also exploring and trying to understand the new menus/operation stuff for the console. So far the most striking novelty for me - and I'm not sure if this was just a Astro's Playroom thing or if other PS5 games will do the same - is the functionality for tracking and getting more information on game trophies! Hidden trophies remain hidden, with no way to track or anything, but for the others you can add them to a "task tracker" of sorts AND, read a short blurb with advice on how to get the trophy and, if you're interested, you can watch a short video of the trophy being obtained! I don't think this is a huge game changer, but it's definitely an interesting evolution in the meta-gaming aspects of trophies and all that stuff. Weirdly I haven't heard people talk too much about them recently - and while general chatter about "gamerscore" was a thing 5-6 years ago (perhaps more?), nowadays I haven't heard much at all. It's almost like trophies/achievements stopped being a thing? Nintendo/Switch does not have them (which I've always found curious, because clearly it's a choice they made to not have them), while the system in Steam is pretty wild west (in terms of inconsistency and so on). At this point I have a pretty respectable "score", but it's mostly from longevity - you sort of get there naturally if you play games and have been playing them consistently on PS3 (when trophies started for PS), PS Vita, PS4 and, now, PS5.
(c) Controller/Feedback
As I'd heard, this game really is a masterclass on haptic feedback - like, wow, really wow. It's not just the feedback - all the different kinds of rumble and so on (lots of really subtle options and uses, just in the game - walking on different surfaces felt brilliantly exectued - I could close my eyes and know it was wood, ice, glass, etc.) BUT, I was most surprised at how the controller can change how it feels to press the buttons - or at least the triggers - adding a little bit of resistance and the like - so the triggers feel smooth, bouncy, clicky, hard to press, etc. The gacha machine and the feeling of popping the capsule (or crushing the can, depending on what you pulled) was super... immersive? Verisimilitudinous? Not sure if that's a real world - but it felt realistic in a way I was not expecting (and I enjoyed playing around with it). I wonder if there's a PS5 devkit with demos for controller haptics? Would be SO GREAT to have in a haptics/game design class...just to show students what can be done!
