2.5 KiB
2.5 KiB
| title | excerpt | tags | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stray Thoughts 3 | Sweater weather is here! |
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I've been fortunate to have vacation time for a few days. It was much needed R&R after a long haul of a project. I got to spend time with my partner — we had a special day where we did everything she wanted! There was plenty of tea shopping.
I picked up Metroid Dread on Friday. I'm a few hours in now. Here are my thoughts where I am:
- The game is hard! I didn't expect this but I'm happy to see a new Metroid game with a challenge.
- I wish the music was memorable. I refer to Super Metroid's music that maintained the atmosphere but managed to create choice tunes.
- I'm not feeling the dread. My feeling is that the developers wanted to recreate the feeling of being pursued by the SA-X, but instead landed on this frenetic and chaotic encounter with the EMMIs (that name is dumb and will forever be). It's clear when entering an "EMMI zone" which defeats the feelings of dread and anxiety.
- Speaking of the EMMI encounters, getting a game over when colliding with one feels like bad game design to me. I understand they are supposed to feel threatening and impossible. The game over feels clunky and awkward — it serves no purpose other than to slow gameplay down. I would prefer it fade to black and spawn Samus at the previous checkpoint.
- The load times are substantial. The Switch hardware is showing its limits lately with games trying to hit a visual fidelity it cannot maintain. Dread suffers from long load times (but are thankfully not bad if you use the sleep function) and choppy framerates here and there.
- Why is Adam here? He has zero personality. He is not interesting at all. His notable attribute is that he says "Any objections, Lady?" to Samus. If his dialog boxes changed to "Ship's Computer", there would be no difference.
- Why are the aim and missile buttons on the bumpers and not the triggers? Why is there no method to remap the controls? I'm hoping they will add an option to remap controls in a patch, but that will likely be when I've finished with the game.
Despite my negative thoughts (I'm a passionate Metroid player), I am enjoying the game. I'm glad they're making a brand new Metroid game. I hope that Metroid Prime 4 is happening and hasn't been quietly cancelled!
My friend shared Green Lung with me. I was hooked instantly. It was when I discovered the "doom" genre and all of its sub-genres. I've been listening to it non-stop since.