Wonder Weekend

I was home alone a good amount this weekend with a cold, but it afforded me some pretty good game time.


I had a pretty good time playing more Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap, defeating a boss and gaining access to another transformation type: Fish Man. This in turn opened up a couple of new areas I could get to and another couple of abilities to go to even more places by breaking blocks in the environment, and in some cases, creating new ones. Again, this is a pretty cool game for something originally released on the Sega Master System.


After Wonder Boy, I loaded up Breath of the Wild again for the first time in a week or so, and had a great time making my way to Hateno village and unlocking the Sheikah slate's final functionality, a camera and compendium. Next it'll be back to Kakariko again to speak to Impa again. I'm not sure how I'll travel it this time, though. I might go overland a different way, or maybe just fast travel it. Adventure awaits, either way.


Dawn of War III has finally come out, and I've played through the campaign tutorials and the first couple of campaign missions, one as Space Marines and one as Orks. It seems like fun, so far. I have a couple of gripes, though. First, the performance in the menus is pretty bad, which is odd. It seems fine in game. Second, panning around the battlefield by mousing to the screen edges is S-L-O-W, and for seemingly no good reason. You can hold down the mouse wheel (middle mouse button), and do a kind of grab and pan thing, and that moves at the speed you would expect. I'm not sure why this extremely sluggish movement is there, and there doesn't seem to be any option to change it, either.


Finally, I got a chance to check out the beta version of the Necromancer class in Diablo III. It didn't take long for me to determine that, yes, I am very interested in playing this once it's released. Hopefully that's not too far out at this point.

Wonder Boy Pathfinder

I made some progress in Mass Effect Andromeda over the last week, actually getting out into the open world on one of the planets for only about the second time in probably 35 hours of play. I'm at a point in the game where I can go to one of two potentially habitable planets, or go hunt down the Kett leader's flagship for a confrontation. Instead, I've opted to dig into some side quests that, in a roleplaying sense, sounded urgent.


I've also dabbled in Super Mario World and Heroes of the Storm. The latter now has a fresh 2.0 update that I'm interested in exploring a bit. I still think I am fundamentally not that into multi-player games, though. I've been playing beginner level bot matches just on a lark here and there. Playing a game to relax, imagine that.


I picked up another retro-style 2D action game on the Switch, the beautiful remake of Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap. It's a cool game from the Sega Master System, a platform I have very little familiarity with, though I can credit my interest in video games to it. Wonder Boy lets you flash back and forth from the modern, very lavish 2D art to the super old school 8-bit reality of the original. I find the new art really nice and have been almost entirely playing that way.


The underlying game is very well done, and while it definitely feels simplistic, it's an interesting design considering when the game first came out. It's an open-world action platformer more or less contemporaneous with Metroid, but not done in quite the same way. Here, doors open into the background, where in Metroid they always open on one of the four sides of the screen, which means the way the world fits together is pretty different. It's also clear some or all of the doors are magical, so it may not be possible for all of the levels to exist in one contiguous chunk.


You begin as a boy with a sword, but begin to gain the ability to transform into other types of animals and fight and explore in different ways. So far I have been a lizard boy and mouse boy. I'll continue to explore what this nifty game has to offer.