Splatoon story mode screenshot log

Got up to stages 19 on Squid Jump before getting a game over.

Continuing sets you back a few stages and resets your score to 0... may as well restart from the beginning in that case.
It gets really hard when there are a lot of those powerups that make you jump really fast, and almost all the platforms are tiny ice or conveyor belts or tiny moving platforms.

Here's my screenshots checking out all the small details in the hub area.

I'm just gonna play the single player in this. The multiplayer is pointless now that we have Splatoon 2. The Joycons are infinitely more comfy than the bulky gamepad.

Started the campaign mode, Octo Valley.

The first world is very easy and boring. There's no challenge at all, and it's all very linear. Then I got to the first boss... That was actually kinda fun... and then the 2nd world is where the game started getting way more creative and fun with its enemies and obstacles.

Metroid Prime comprehensive playthrough part 4

Tallon Overworld South

Now heading into the crashed Frigate... immediately you can tell what this place is because it looks similar to the ventilation shaft on the other Frigate that you escaped from at the beginning.

Reactor Core... a huge room with platforms that looks like it'd be a huge pain to get back out of if you came here before getting the gravity suit. And the Aqua Pirates here will pretty much guarantee you fall to the bottom while fighting them.

There's a bunch of machinery down here that looks scannable, but of course being underwater it's all unusable. Although the power conduits to open the door are still usable. This door is on a ledge that I think is unreachable without the gravity suit.

In the next room, which has a door to a save room and another power conduit door, you can see glowy radioactive stuff underneath the crumbled floor. I dunno what the pirates would be doing in this crashed frigate... maybe trying to salvage materials or something?

Got my 9th energy tank for free, just basically lying in plain sight on the linear path through the Frigate.

Another conduit door, just up out of the water... damn should have saw that coming.

Ori and the Blind Forest hard mode playthrough log part 7 - Final

Mount Horu, the last area of the game, has an incredible difficulty spike...

There's fire and lava everywhere, and even most of the floors that you can stand on, will hurt you if you stand on them for more than like half a second. There's a bunch of really fast shooting enemies that can only be defeated by their own projectiles, and often you NEED their projectiles to get up through the paths, so you have to kinda avoid killing them.

At the top of this area, there's two doors that lead to some linear action/puzzle sections where you push a rock down to block the lava flows, and this opens up a couple more doors below... each door leads to more difficult action/puzzle sections that open up more of the Mount Horu area, until eventually you get to the bottom where you find the final element.

Kirby Super Star Ultra - high playthrough part 2

World 6: Revenge of the King

King Dedede demands revenge! Will he finally reign victorious over his age-old nemesis?!

"I'ma get revenge on dat der kirbeh"

This first level is like a purple jelly colored version of Green Greens... There's some really cool/whimsical looking stuff in the background... I could stare at and admire the graphics of the kirby games for a while they're just so good.

omg what... this purple forest area is too good, and before I even get the time to fully admire it, there's this insanely cute elephant miniboss.

wtf how can a game be this cute and good.

One thing I didn't realize up until now, but the cpu partner thing makes it REALLY easy to juggle between wanting to always keep your mainstay fav ability while still being able to try out other abilities once in a while... The elephant gives me suplex kirby, and now I can try that ability out while still keeping the sword in reserve as a cpu partner until I want to go back to it.

omg, the suplex movelist in this game is... surprisingly complex... as much as some of the Return to Dreamland moves. but they're mostly all just for style and don't affect your actual offensive ability at all.

That level ends with Purple Jelly Wispy.

Illusion Islands... it's a purple Ice Cream Island.

Kirby jumps in the boiling purple drink and swims around like it's nothing.

I think there's split paths here that may or may not be one-way only... took that path that requires a stone or hammer... kept the sword cuz I was enjoying how sword kirby looks in this game so much...

I don't care if I miss stuff at this point, like I'll take any excuse I can to replay this game through again because it's that fun.

This fire lion miniboss... it looks so cool in this game. I think this mode has been nearly all about new/returning minibosses that weren't in the original KSS.

I hit a warpstar before I was able to take fireball power...

Lolo and Lala... These single-room, mario bros arcade style minibosses are always great to see return in some form... it's such a well designed boss fight, that again I'll take any reason to replay that exact same boss fight again once in a while.

Third stage, Crash Clouds... the rainbow jellybean versions Grape Gardens?

Ori and the Blind Forest hard mode playthrough log part 6

There's a few things that I'm able to get now with the Light Burst ability, but it seems there's still some breakable looking walls and stuff that I can't get through yet... Only one ability left so whatever that is has to be the thing to break walls.

Next area is Sorrow Pass, up above Valley of the Wind. Interestingly, this area has a lot more wind/gliding sections than Valley of the Wind had... It's supposed to be the fire area, isn't it?

The enemies in Sorrow Pass are even tougher than in Misty Woods and Forlorn Ruins. It's a very linear path of almost entirely wind gliding obstacles... There's a big central vertical structure that you keep coming back to and opening up more shortcuts as you go further along... Eventually I made it to the last ability and warp point... This last ability is the charge jump, which lets you break through breakable ceilings, and you can also use it while clinging to the wall to charge jump horizontally and break through walls. It starts getting confusing with all the buttons you have to press to do an aimed charge jump off a wall...

Also I'm realizing this climb ability is actually more useful than I thought. Not only is it needed to do a horizontal charge jump, but it's also very useful for dodging enemy attacks in certain situations where you don't have any ground to stand on.

Now I've opened up the path to where the objective marker is telling me to go... and something tells me that might be the final level of the game, because I don't see any other big sections opening up after this... unless maybe you go inside the Spirit Tree for the finale. I guess now is the time to re-explore the entire world one last time and collect everything...

I stopped leveling the blue ability branch after I got the Triple Jump. The last ability on that branch is just extra defense, but I wanna try and beat hard mode without that. Instead I started grinding the purple path so I can get all of the things that'll let me see where all the items are in order to 100% the game. I'm only half-way through the red path, and haven't unlocked the Cinder Flame ability yet... If it turns out I don't have enough ability points to unlock that before getting to the final boss, then I'm just gonna try and beat the game without it. No deliberate grinding allowed.

There, that was easy... I now have all of the items on the map. I didn't even need to unlock the "see fake walls" ability. Although I'm still missing one energy cell... I'm guessing it must be in this last area coming up, because it doesn't show up anywhere on the map.

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Kirby Super Star Ultra - high playthrough part 1

I've never played the DS version of this before, and it's been like over 10 years since I played the original Kirby's Super Star, so this is like, practically a blind playthrough. I only remember the basics.

What I do remember is that this game is not really "6 games in one". In fact, it's pretty much the size of a normal Kirby game, with each "game" in the menu screen being about the size of a single world. Like in most Kirby games, the first world is always the shortest and pathetically easy, and then the worlds get progressively longer.

Spring Breeze is the first world, it's only 4 stages long. These stages are extremely simple, much like Dream Land 1. There weren't even any secrets to find, except for the one time I went into the moon and got to a bonus room where you collect a bunch of food and 1ups while falling, then land in an optional miniboss. Also there might've been some extra stuff beyond the door that lead to the Dedede fight, I dunno, that last stage was weird how it basically let you start the final boss right away.

This is the first game where every Kirby power has a Smash Bros like moveset. This is expanded further in the newer Kirby games.

Beating Spring Breeze unlocks the next 3 worlds; Dyna Blade, Gourmet Race, and The Great Cave Offensive.

Dyna Blade is basically like world 2. Gourmet Race should really be counted as another bonus minigame (there's 3 others unlocked from the start, labeled as "Sub games". So the Great Cave Offensive would be world 3, Revenge of Meta Knight is world 4, and then finally Milky Way Wishes is I think might be long enough to be considered both worlds 5 and 6. And then there's some other modes added in the DS version that I've never played before.

I guess I'll do the first of the 3 Sub Games next.

This card minigame is quite hard... You play against 3 cpus, and it shows a bunch of face up cards on the touch screen, then when a card shows up on the top screen, the first one to touch the matching card on the touch screen wins... but it gets easier as you go into more rounds, as the number of cards to choose from goes down... er, actually maybe it's just random. The 3rd level is insanely hard, the only way to win is by just keeping the bottom screen in focus, and hope that the one that comes up in the top screen is instantly recognizable and your stylus is already near it.

I won all 3 levels after about like 15 minutes... damn that apparently doesn't count towards completion. The file is currently 9% completed.

Next I'll do world 2: Dyna Blade. Looks like this is 5 stages long.

I like these CG cutscenes that were added in.. kinda showing the transition period between the 2D Kirby art style and Return to Dreamland.

This is where a lot more stage elements are introduced that weren't in Spring Breeze... like ladders, bomb blocks, puzzles with missable rewards... all things that are useful to learn about before starting Great Cave. And also the stages have become a lot longer and more complex. Like already in the first stage it's not always clear which way is progress and which way is optional rewards... sometimes I think both ways lead to progress.

Ori and the Blind Forest hard mode playthrough log part 5

I can't think of much new stuff that the glide ability gives me access to... all I know is that the next destination, for the Veil of Warmth, is further northwest of the Valley of the Wind.

I found out that the Black Root Burrows is actually an extra optional area that was added in to the Definitive Edition of this game, and I actually have everything I need to go through this area now... It turns out this area isn't as hard as I initially thought. Of course, now that I have a ton more life capacity and save capacity, this helps a lot.

There's another glowing orb thing that you gotta carry around, just like in Forlorn Ruins, except instead of allowing you to walk up certain walls/ceilings, this glowing orb lights up the area around you and also makes certain invisible platforms visible, and makes those blue light doors invisible so you can pass through them. You don't have access to any of your acrobatic abilities while carrying the orb, so it's a bit tougher of a platforming challenge... fortunately you can still drop the orb whenever you are safely on the ground, in order to more easily kill the enemies around you to make carrying the orb around easier. I just realized how useful the bash ability is in combat. Using it to deflect the enemy projectiles back at them as a means of getting rid of them, is much safer than rying to engage in close combat and platforming while at the same time dancing around their projectiles.

After getting through the darkness area and putting the orb back in its place, the entire area becomes bright again... and I already managed to get all the ability cell pickups here while it was dark lol... but the path in Black Root Burrows actually continues... I get the dash ability, which apparently is completely optional outside of this extra area... and since I already unlocked air dash in the ability tree I have that move now as well... This makes navigating through the world even faster and less tedious than before (and it already wasn't very tedious at all).

Next is a few platforming sections making use of the dash, and then you get to ANOTHER new ability, the Light Burst, which is basically a Yoshi's Island egg throw. This place uses this ability a lot to activate switches that only the Light Burst can reach... and you can also through the Light Burst straight up and then do a bash off of it in midair to get extra height without the use of an enemy... this opens up so much... I think pretty much nothing is out of reach anymore...

I'm not sure what's up with this little story sequence at the end of this area... it shows ghost images of a bunch more of those fat characters like the one who adopted Ori in the beginning... one of them died and then the other left home and went somewhere else.

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