I continue to be impressed by Nintendo’s dominance of the digital presentation game. From the very first Nintendo Direct, the company has always handled the model better than every other brand that has even tried to do them in the gaming space. As the title suggests, Nintendo continues to be direct with their Directs. This latest partner showcase, though a little misleading with the core messaging presented at the beginning of the presentation, was still a master class in how to do it well.
The very first thing said in this Showcase was that you are about to see a presentation of games from publishing and development partners that will be released on the Nintendo Switch in the first half of 2024. This was slightly misleading in the fact that some of the announcements shown were for games that will be releasing after June of this year, but all the announcements are releasing in 2024, and the bulk of them will be releasing within the first half of the year. The more important point is that Nintendo opened with a promise that was clear, concise, and immediately relevant to the viewer.
The second thing I really liked about this presentation was how it was organized. This Direct was broken up into sections by not necessarily genre, but something close to that. It was really nice knowing beforehand if the next series of announcements would be interesting to you. While I always watch the entire presentation, this transparent structure made it easy to skip over the parts of the presentation you knew you wouldn’t care about. Assuming, of course, that you weren’t watching the presentation live, which I never do.
Third, and this goes back to the timing of releases structure I already mentioned, Nintendo Directs are awesome because when they make announcements, they often follow them up with information that will potentially affect you the day of the Direct. There’s nothing I love more than a presentation announcing a game, a release date, and then dropping a demo during/soon after the announcement. In this Direct, Nintendo announced three demo drops and just straight up launched nine games during/within 24 hours of the presentation. And I downloaded all of those demos.
Finally, and this is always the most important thing about Nintendo’s presentations compared to those of Sony and Microsoft, the Direct uses it’s time efficiently and effectively. This presentation was just under 24 minutes. In that time, they showed 31 games. 32 if you count Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection as two games. And every game, even the small indies that were shown for less than a minute, got enough footage to make me understand the project and potentially grab my interest enough to look further into it, if I was interested in the genre.
Honestly speaking, most of the announcements shown in this Direct weren’t that impressive. But the way they made those announcements was top tier. Even XBOX had multiple showings in this presentation. Because Nintendo is so confident in their business that they have no problem spotlighting the competition on their own platform.
As far as the actual announcements are concerned, I won’t take the time to go through them all, as again there were several. But I will note that there were several ports, remakes, and remasters, which I’ve already stated my concern about in past blog posts. The industry is clearly stagnating towards IP and easy nostalgia sales. What I’m more interested in is some of the smaller titles I’ve not seen before like Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure and Penny’s Big Breakaway. I’m also impressed with what they showed of South Park: Snow Day. Though I will probably regret the purchase later, I’m definitely going to end up buying Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble. I like those games, but I’m sure to get bored before clearing 200+ stages.
I have to admit that I was underwhelmed by the closing announcement being Endless Ocean Luminous, but I respect Nintendo having the gumption to do games of all sizes and expectations a solid. It’s easy to close a presentation with something like Zelda, God of War, or HALO. It’s risky to close with something most casual players will simply overlook or not care about.
All-in-all, I consider this a very successful Direct, and I’m sure that I’ll end up buying more than one game that was shown in it. And this was released on the same day that Bandai Namco published the trailer and release date for the Elden Ring DLC. Only Nintendo has the balls to do that; and for good reason.
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I’m keeping it very light this week and giving a personal gaming update rather than my normal serious posts. As the title says, I finally built my new PC. I built my previous gaming rig nearly eight years ago. At the time, my specs were top of the line. I had a GTX 1080 GPU, an i7-6700K CPU, and an X-99 motherboard with all the fixings. That PC was good to me over the years. There were the occasional problems, like when the AIO cooler finally gave out towards the end of last year, but all in all I got nearly a decade of solid gaming out of it. That said, it was clearly time to build a new one. Technology has changed so much since I built that system that upgrading wasn’t even practical.
Building this new system was difficult for so many reasons. For starters, getting the parts I wanted was quite a challenge. You may have seen my blog post from November about how impossibly difficult it was to get an RTX 4090 GPU. I was finally able to get one, but I had to do so through a distributor via my work connections, which absolutely should not have had to happen. And I still had to pay full price for that card, even while calling in a work-related favor. But there were also just a lot of issues I encountered during the building process that just weren’t concerns when I built my previous system.
I have spent the last eight years using a full-tower case. This was an intentional choice, because of the large number HDDs I had in my previous system. With the power of M.2 SSDs, and a motherboard capable of housing a whopping six of them, I was able to increase my total amount of storage space while reducing the amount of real estate needed within the case to achieve it. This made me make the grave mistake of choosing to go for a mid-tower case instead of sticking with full-tower. I wanted to reduce the total amount of space my system was using. My full-tower build sat on the floor under my desk, but my mid-tower case can sit on my desk. It seemed like a great idea, but I regret it immensely.
Building in a mid-tower case with high spec components sucks. Even more so when you have large hands/fingers. For example, my 4090 GPU is much fatter than I expected it to be. The length is fine, but the height is so big that it covers the use of my second PCIe slot on the motherboard. The simple solution for this would of course be to do a vertical installation, but I don’t have the space to do that with the other components I have installed, such as an Elgato internal capture card, in such a small case. The case I chose allows for eight fans. This was crucial considering my 360mm AIO liquid cooler. However, fitting the power and RGB cables (still not sure why those can’t be managed through the same pins at this point) for that many fans + the cooler itself is a nightmare in such a compact chassis. On paper, all my specs are compatible in the case I chose. In practice, this is a bit of an exaggeration.
While it was a struggle, and I’m still setting things up software wise, I am happy to report that my PC is up and running. I went with a 49” ultra-wide monitor, which I hesitated about for a while. While clearly a natural progression from a dual 27” setup, it is very different in many respects. For instance, you have an unlimited amount of monitor real estate for multiple applications at once, which my system can definitely handle with the GPU, CPU, and 64 GB of DDR5 DRAM I have installed, however, many individual applications look terrible in full screen on such a wide monitor. Internet browsing in full screen looks horrendous on sites like YouTube, that fill all the extra horizontal room with white space. I was never a dark mode type of user, but I can see myself using it now.
It’s always annoying having to redownload all your games on Steam and other launchers. The fact that you can’t just manually copy them to your new drives is honestly just stupid. There are some work arounds for this, but, with the exception of GOG, due to their lack of DRM, it’s really just easier to redownload games manually on most launchers. Especially since I’m transitioning all my storage from HDD to SSD in this new build. Thankfully, my internet and read/write speeds are good, so the process has gone pretty smoothly so far.
I fought the transition to Windows 11 for as long as I could. My old system was still running an inactivated version of Windows 10. But I decided to take the plunge with this build and bought a key, on sale of course. So far, the transition hasn’t been too bad. There are settings issues that I find inferior/worse in W11, but nothing that had made me unable to accomplish the things I want. The only thing I was not able to do is install the Zune music launcher software. Microsoft has gone out of their way to kill it off, but I was still actively using it in W10. Sadly, the amount of extra effort it would take to install Zune in W11 just isn’t worth it. The truth is that Windows Media Player, which was obviously developed by Microsoft alongside the Zune software, now has most of the features that I loved about Zune. I was even able to maintain my playlists without having to recreate them. I just had to store all my music files in the same drive letter as in my previous build. If I was still actively using the device itself, which I still have in working order, I’d go the extra mile to install the software in this build. But since I use the software and not actually the player these days, it just wasn’t worth the effort.
As I write this, I have yet to actually try out any games on this new system. I want to finish all the setup and installation first. But hopefully I’ll be ready to actually play something soon. I’m planning on doing Starfield first, since that’s the game that actually motivated me to finally commit to building a new system.
For those interested, here are my specs:
Operating System: Windows 11 Pro
Motherboard: ASRock Phantom Gaming Z790 Nova WiFi
CPU: Intel 14th Gen i7-14700K
CPU Cooler: MSI MAG Coreliquid E360
DRAM: 64GB (16GB x 4) XPG Lancer RGB DDR5
Storage: XPG Gammix S70 Blade 4TB X 4
GPU: GIGABTYE AERO NVIDIA RTX 4090 OC
PSU: XPG Cybercore II 1000W Platinum
Case: XPG Invader X
As always, thanks for reading. Please take the time to follow my blog, leave a comment, and check out some of my other channels if you enjoyed what you read.
If you read this blog regularly, then you know that I’m both a fan of Ubisoft games and specifically the Assassin’s Creed franchise. I have mentioned the company and the franchise countless times over in the decade that I’ve been writing this blog. I have played every console release Assassin’s Creed game, in order, going all the way back to the original game, with the exception of Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which I already have and just haven’t had time to start yet. A large part of that is because of how long it took me to finish Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. I originally started Valhalla in September of 2022. I finally achieved 100% completion of the base game in February of 2024.
Now let me clarify a few things to start off. First, I played a lot of other games between the day I first started Valhalla and the day I finally finished it. I did not spend the entire last year playing only this one game. Second, while this game did take me a long time, in terms of dates, I only played it for 140 hours total. I played Assassin’s Creed Odyssey for 195 hours before I finally finished that one. However, it only took me five months to do that. Interestingly enough, I completed 100% of Odyssey, including all the DLC. In fact, I consider ‘The Fate of Atlantis’ to be some of the best DLC I’ve played in the last decade of gaming. Not just great for Assassin’s Creed DLC, but in general. While Odyssey is not my favorite game in the franchise, that DLC is absolutely masterful work. All that said, while I did play most of the DLC packs in Valhalla, I have opted not to play the ‘Dawn of Ragnarök’ expansion. That’s really what this post is about.
I’m pretty big on story DLC in games. I hate that it exists. I wish all games launched with the story fully finished and included at the base price, but because I play games for the story, and care deeply about staying up to date on canon, I will usually play story DLC for any game I really enjoyed. Non-story DLC, I can take it or leave it. If I really like the gameplay, I’ll often do it. But if I’m not in love with the game, I’ll usually pass on it. For instance, I really like soulslikes. I have a love-hate relationship with them, but I play a lot of them. With the exception of Elden Ring, I’ve played every FromSoftware soulslike to date, and I’ve written a lot about them on this blog. Yes, I will eventually play Elden Ring. Ironically, I’m waiting for the DLC to launch, so I can get the deluxe edition at a discount. That said, I’ve never played through the DLC for a single FromSoftware soulslike. Since the story is ALWAYS mediocre in those games (yeah, I said it), I never feel compelled to play the DLC. By the end of them, I’m just happy to have reached the credits. Whereas I always play the DLC in Team Ninja soulslikes. I’ve played all the DLC for Nioh and Nioh 2; and I’m very confident that I’ll play through all the DLC for Wo Long Fallen Dynasty, which I plan on finally starting this year. Because those games actually take narrative storytelling seriously. The point is that I usually take the time to play story relevant DLC. Yet I still will not be playing the final DLC pack in Valhalla.
Obviously, the problem with Valhalla is not that it’s too long. In fact, if I went on to complete the Ragnarök expansion, my total play time would probably come in almost exactly the same as that of Odyssey. That said, by the time I finished Valhalla I was really ready for the game to be over. I don’t consider the issue to be the gameplay though. In fact, I didn’t like the gameplay in Odyssey. I feel that Valhalla definitely has superior combat to Odyssey. And I also feel that way about Origins in comparison to Odyssey. So I wouldn’t say that the problem is that I burned out on the gameplay. In my opinion, the real reason that I don’t want to play the DLC is that it’s story DLC that doesn’t actually matter, even a little bit.
Story DLC is funny because if it matters too much, it’s insulting to the player base. If you have to play it to understand the plot of the series, then it shouldn’t have been DLC. On the flip side, if it’s posing as story DLC, but accomplishes nothing, then it feels like a waste of time, assuming you’re playing it because it’s being sold as story DLC. And that’s really how I feel about the Ragnarök expansion. DLC is nothing new to the Assassin’s Creed franchise. It goes all the way back to Assassin’s Creed II. I haven’t played all the DLC in the franchise, but before the Ragnarok expansion, I had played everything going back to at least Syndicate.
What all the previous DLC had in common was that you always played as a major character in the plot, usually the main protagonist of the specific game the DLC was featured in. In Valhalla, this is not really the case. While it does try to justify it within the plot, there are several sequences in the base game where you play as Odin, the Norse god. But if you know Assassin’s Creed then you know it’s not a god. It’s actually an Isu who was named Odin; and Norse mythology is really just humans misinterpreting the past, believing that a past civilization was divine rather than just highly advanced. In my opinion, all the Odin sequences in Valhalla are boring. They’re not super relevant, other than the fact that you sort of get a glimpse into Isu culture. And you have limited use of your skills and gear, making the gameplay feel like a step backwards from where the actual protagonist, Eivor, is at any given moment in the game. The Odin stuff just isn’t that interesting, and it has no bearing on the plot of the game. Not even at the macro assassin’s history level. It’s just filler to pad the run time. As such, I don’t care about it.
The ‘Dawn of Ragnarok’ expansion drops you into an entirely new map where you have to play as Odin for an extended period of time. While all the previous Odin sequences, and DLC in general, also do this, the map for this final expansion is much larger than previous DLC packs in Valhalla. It’s very much an actual expansion as opposed to just some DLC, which is why they titled it appropriately. All the previous Odin sequences would have you play as him for at most four hours; and that’s if you’re doing every little thing. When I completed the introduction to the expansion, it was clear that we were probably looking at anywhere from 10 – 20 hours of straight Odin gameplay. Even then, I still considered playing it, thinking it would affect the plot in some way meaningful, but Reddit was in agreement that it was just filler that wasn’t going to change your perception of the plot in any way. I just couldn’t be asked to waste my time on that sort of content.
I think it’s pretty sad that the Odyssey DLC was so good only to be followed by a game with a lot of extra content done in such a disappointing and mediocre way. There is an incredible amount of extra stuff to do in Valhalla. They literally added an additional roguelike gameplay mode as part of the DLC. But it’s not worth doing story wise. It’s all just content with no real substance. When you play the DLC in Odyssey, it matters. The story changes because of it. Knowing what I know about the canon because of that game makes me sad at the thought of all the people who care about the story of Assassin’s Creed but didn’t play it. I can’t say anything like that about the Odin sequences, DLC or otherwise, in Valhalla. What’s even worse is that not all the DLC in Valhalla features Odin. There are DLC expansions where you still play as Eivor, and those are really good. It was really fun to travel to Ireland and France as part of Eivor’s journey in Europe. I appreciated this content a lot. So it’s not that the team wasn’t capable of making good content. It’s just that they wanted to do more Norse mythology stuff but couldn’t make it meaningful the way they did with Greek mythology in Odyssey. Hopefully, they don’t screw up the inevitable DLC in the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Red, because Japan has a lot of cool stuff they can use for DLC based on local mythology.
As always, thanks for reading. Please take the time to follow my blog, leave a comment, and check out some of my other channels if you enjoyed what you read.
In many ways, this game feels like the perfect follow-up to Inkulinati, which I’m still playing, even after having published the review back in December. Pyrene is a tactical card battle game that combines deck building, roguelike elements, and a dash of RPG mechanics, which, surprisingly, actually make the game more accessible. While I went into the game expecting to like it, based on the press kit I was given, I did not expect to enjoy this demo as much as I ultimately did. Please note that I reviewed the currently available beta demo of this game, so aspects of it are subject to change.
At first, Pyrene looks a little cheap, for lack of a better word. The opening cutscene is not very compatible with the more cartoony art style. However, the game itself works very well in the style the developer, Two Tiny Dice, ultimately went with. It’s simple, but not lazy. The cards look like they could be real cards that you’d use in a tabletop gameplay scenario. The landscapes are similarly drawn. Even though it’s a fantasy game about fighting monsters, some of which are meant to be horrific, it’s a very pleasant game to look at. I also want to take the time to mention just how readable the text in this game is. The font chosen is extremely easy to read and equally pleasant in the feelings it evokes when seen. They used the same font for the text on the cards and in the menus.
I really appreciate how distinct each of the many monsters are from each other. Each species of monster, and really all the cards in the game, have their own identity. There are no reused monsters rendered in different colors. No lazy iterative evolutions of the same monster with horns added. Each creature is its own monstrous thing. Note that this does not mean that you encounter each monster only once in a given run. You will refight the same monsters several times in a given biome. However, the same monster will not appear in multiple biomes. The demo had four different biomes, named “Grasslands,” “Dark Forest,” “Mountain,” and “Snowy Plain” respectively. Like the creatures, each biome is distinct in its setting; and each one has its own specific gameplay characteristics to go with it.
Pyrene runs very smoothly. Not just for a card battler, but in general. There is quite a bit of movement in this game. From cards to attacks to constantly changing stats on the cards, the gameplay is pretty dynamic. At least for this genre anyway. That said, this is not a very graphic intensive game. It ran perfectly on my old GTX 1080 GPU, bless its heart. I really can’t say that I have any notes for the graphics outside of the opening cutscene. I really like looking at this game.
From the time the menu screen loads up, this game delivers a solid audio experience. The first thing you hear is a perfectly appropriate song that has a distinctly fantasy vibe to it. The opening cutscene, though visually underwhelming, is fully narrated with solid voice acting from multiple actors. As it’s a card game, you get the typical card swishing sounds as you move them. However, the sound effects also lean heavily into the battle aspects of the gameplay. Attacks have distinct sound effects, as do the follow-up effects caused by them. While I can’t say that every monster has its own distinct sounds, there is enough variety to be more than satisfied with. You can alter the sound mixing directly with volume options for music, ambience, and sounds as three separate sound types. While I would not say that the sound is what makes this game worth playing, it absolutely measures up to the rest of the game in quality.
This is a narrative driven game complete with various quests. The opening cutscene sets up the plot quickly and effectively. A small village is attacked by monsters during a not so natural disaster, causing most of the buildings to be destroyed and nearly all the villagers to flee for their lives. You start off the game as one of these villagers with your first quest being to make your way back to the village. From there, you meet another villager and continue to fulfill quests as you discover what caused the natural disaster, rebuild the town, and rescue other villagers from surrounding areas, all of which have been overrun with monsters. It’s a simple plot, but it works effectively for the gameplay without bogging the player down with dialog like a traditional text-based narrative system might.
As you progress through the game, you will meet and talk to multiple characters, including some monsters. Other than the tutorials, all the text in the game is dialog based. You learn the story through the conversations the characters have with each other, rather than having to read/watch random info dumps to get the story moving forward. Once you learn the gameplay, you technically can play the game without caring about the story at all, but as the story is far from burdensome, there’s no real reason to ignore it. As with the sound, you might not be playing the game for the writing, but the writing is not bad, all things considered.
This is one of those games where the mechanics seem simple, but the underlying strategy required to excel will push you to think in new ways and adapt constantly; and that is absolutely a compliment. The basic idea is that your character is a card with an hp stat that doubles as your attack stat. Meaning that if you have 10 hp, your next attack will deal 10 damage. However, the same is true for the enemies as well. If an enemy has 3 hp, it will deal 3 damage, whether you kill it that turn or not. Every time you attack, you also take damage, unless you have armor, which you can gain during play but never start with. The map is broken into zones. Each zone is a random grid of card shaped spaces. You can only move to spaces occupied by other cards. Spaces can contain enemy cards or object cards. When you attack a card, and it dies, it will always be replaced with an object card, though the object is semi-random. It can be coins, wood, or, less often, a few other things. Your goal, technically speaking, is to clear all the cards off the board so that the grid is all empty spaces, but it’s actually a bit more complicated than that.
The way you complete each zone, during normal play, is to find the altar. Zones never start with the altar showing. You have to “spend the night” multiple times until the altar finally appears. Then you have to reach the altar. If you can do this without dying, you will have cleared the zone. If you clear the exit zone in a given biome, you can move on to the next biome. Spending the night requires supplies. Supplies are a resource that you collect from item cards. The amount of supplies it takes to spend the night increases each time you spend the night in a given zone, but the cost resets when you start a new zone. In fact, your hp, status, and starting supplies resets with the successful completion of each zone. The catch is that you have a maximum amount of supplies you can hold at a given time; and spending the night without enough supplies will cost you hp in place of the missing supplies. When you spend the night, every empty space will refill with new cards. Every remaining enemy card will gain additional hp when you spend the night. So your ultimate goal is to kill as many enemies as possible before you spend the night. Another important part of the gameplay is enemy behavior. Most enemies are stationary, but some behave in particular ways. Some chase you. Some attack when you enter their specified line of sight. And there are other behaviors you can encounter as well. You also have to consider status effects. Things like poison, burn, freeze, and bleed can drastically affect the outcome of enemy encounters. That’s the gist of the gameplay, but there are a lot of other factors you also have to consider.
Deck building is a key factor in the gameplay. Your deck informs the order that non-enemy cards will appear on the board in a given zone. The amount of cards you can have in your deck is unlimited, but the amount of cards that will be dealt in a given zone scenario is based on your endurance. Your endurance can increase as you progress through a run, allowing you to select more cards for the deal. Your cards can include a huge number of different item cards. Healing items, weapons, supplies, special technique energy (called spirit), and magic object cards can all be part of your deck. A really cool part of the deck building is that cards can be evolved as you progress in a given run. The numbers, such as the amount of healing a given card will deal to your character, can be increased. You can also add features to a card. For instance, I once got an upgrade to a healing card that also added supplies to my inventory. Meaning that every time I moved over that card, both my health and amount of supplies increased, up to my current maximum. Upgrades to the numbers have to be purchased from special vendors with gold, while additional card features are available at random by unlocking them with spirt at shrines.
Another major part of the game’s strategy is relics. Relics are semi-permanent buffs that stick with you for an entire run. Relics can change so many things about the gameplay and how you approach enemy encounters. For example, there’s a relic that turns excess supplies into armor. Armor absorbs damage in place of losing hp. A relic like that coupled with upgraded supply cards makes it considerably easier to weather large amounts of damage. While the number of relics you can start with is limited, based on your talent points, you can carry an unlimited number of relics in a given run. It’s just a matter of finding them.
While the game has you start with only one playable character, the demo shows that the full game will have more than a dozen playable characters. The demo only had two. Different characters are more than cosmetic. The second character you unlock in the demo has less hp but fights alongside a companion, allowing you to move in multiple directions separately and cover more ground before spending the night.
What I really like about Pyrene is how the game is structured. While this is a roguelite of sorts, it is not built around the traditional concept of starting the game and trying to make your way to the end of it in a single run. Instead, the game is broken up into quests. Each quest has its own completion goal and set of biomes you have to clear. Each quest appears after you complete the previous one. You can only pursue one quest at a time.
The best way to think about this game is that it’s not a roguelike so much as a collection of micro-roguelikes; and I really love that concept. It’s a much more accessible game than a traditional roguelite, because each task is not nearly as daunting as having to restart the entire game each time you die. You just have to restart that one mission. Missions include multiple biomes. In the demo, some missions require you to clear three biomes and others four. I could see the full game having even longer missions. Overall, I really love the gameplay. At first, I wasn’t fully grasping the tactical concepts at play, but it became addictive once I fully understood all the factors I had to consider when making moves. I played the demo for four hours before I finally stopped.
Pyrene has a decent amount of replay value, based on what I saw in the demo. Not only are there multiple playable characters, but there are also ways to change the gameplay. The only resource that carries between runs is wood. Or rather, you can keep the wood you collect after a run, win or lose, but if you don’t spend it before starting your next run, it will be lost for good. Wood can be used to unlock services. One of those services is the ability to play with special rules that can be toggled on and off. You can also unlock a mode that adds victory conditions to each zone. This gameplay is much harder, but it absolutely adds another layer to the experience, increasing the replay value by a considerable amount.
Currently, there is no listed price for Pyrene, so I can’t comment on the value proposition. But I can say that I absolutely loved this demo, which is currently available for free on Steam, and I absolutely plan on playing the full game when it finally releases later this year.
As always, thanks for reading. Please take the time to follow my blog, leave a comment, and check out some of my other channels if you enjoyed what you read.
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