I work 2-3 nights in a row with 2-3 off in between, so I’ve been limiting myself to only jumping into Pokopia once between each batch of shifts so that I won’t overdo it. Once I start though, that’s it for the day - it’s bedtime the next time I’m aware of my surroundings.

I mainly just chill out in Palette Town (or Paulette Town because my Ditto is named Paul), building habitats and trying to make it into a nice little village. Despite spending at least a good 20 hours there I’ve barely made it 30 seconds’ jog away from the entry road. I’m basically only doing the story so that I’ll have more options for building and more friends to bring in, like I think I’ll need to get into the next (4th) main map to find cable cars to unlock the item for one of Eevee’s mates. I just like making my own little slice of paradise in post-apocalyptia.

Since I’m working this weekend and only have my Switch, I’m bouncing between Pokémon Violet, Scarlet (for exclusives), Arceus and Sword just doing a few little tasks each day in my endless quest for a shiny living dex.

I’ve also been playing a bit of Gale of Darkness now that it’s been rereleased. I played a lot of Colosseum as a kid, but never managed to get a copy of this one. It’s pretty rough, but about what you’d expect. Some of these models and animations are insane.

Looking forward to getting back to Monster Hunter Stories 3 and Resident Evil Requiem next week.

I’m stuck at work, but I brought my deck for a little Monster Hunter Stories 3. I opted to start over rather than import the save from the demo, so I’m not very far in yet. It’s such a satisfying game to play and it looks so good!

I also smashed out a little Pokopia (brought the Switch too… Security can get a little slow some nights) and did something I’ve been ignoring for a few days but was told today is a limited time event. I hate timed shit in games :/ It took like 20 minutes to get more than enough trade-in items to buy everything, but I still don’t like being told when to play games. Oh well.

Yeah if you’re into Pokémon and want a simple little game (or big game because apparently it’s huge) I’d rec this. It’s worth it, the others are having fun too and you can’t put a price on your loved ones’ enjoyment. This is the first I’ve heard of that tradition and I’m not entirely convinced it’s a real one, but check your DMs.

I’m an outlier there. I like slow, atmospheric survival horror punctuated with small segments of high pressure action. 4 is a full game of all of the worst parts of the series, I hate it.

I loved 7, 2 Remake and 3 Remake, then pretty much find most of the rest of them dull & tedious to an unplayable level. I wasn’t paying much attention to Requiem, but I’ve been watching a mate play it and it looks really good. I think if you liked 7 it’ll be right up your alley. As for Village, it wasn’t for me (there’s one section I thought was great, the rest was eh) but most people I’ve spoken to who are into the newer ones rate it highly, so I hope you like it.

Since you asked for a follow-up, I’ve played a bit of Pokopia.

It’s cute, and it’s a lot more Minecrafty than I expected. You build little habitats for Pokemon like a few bunches of tall grass or tall grass under a tree or whatever, and things will move in to live there. Everyone has a basic personality, and it’s all super friendly. There’s no pressure, you can half-ass everything without consequence, but you advance by making your community happy by providing them with what they ask for. I’ve done the first 2 maps so far (they’re all based on towns from the Kanto region). The last thing I did was get to a map that basically has no real story and lets you build however you want, and the game said I can move my Pokemon from other maps there so I’m going to build a little community for my favourites.

As for negatives, building is quite tedious, you can place blocks in 3D space around you based on where the camera is looking so you kind of have to swing it around madly to get things where you want them, and building in a cramped area is rough. Destroying blocks takes a few punches but you punch in a little AoE attack, so you have to line things up very precisely with the same annoying system when you only want to hit a specific block. You can make pre-made building kits that require the help of a bunch of mons with different skills. This is great, but anything past the most basic couple of huts takes ages and it’s in real time (as in “Come back tomorrow and we should have this done”). Thankfully you can just change the console settings to time travel without consequence, because fuck that.

Anyway, it’s a nice cosy, low-pressure game with a surprisingly grim story. You wake up in the post-apocalypse and everyone’s gone, so you have to try to make the areas nicer to attract more Pokemon back, while rebuilding towns in the hope that humans will come back too. As you explore you find pre-whatever logs, & some post-whatever journal entries that seem to be suggesting the world became uninhabitable due to climate change so everyone “went away.” A lot of the friends you make are so sad that their trainer is gone and can’t wait to find them again, and I don’t know how this is going to end but well… I think you should get comfortable without them, guys.

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Other than that last week I mentioned Digimon Story Time Stranger, I played the demo but didn’t really like it. Then there was Monster Hunter World, which I mentioned was one my favourite games but my gf isn’t really enjoying it so my dreams of playing that together with her have been crushed. On the bright side the demo of Monster Hunter Stories 3 is fantastic, I never finished the 2nd game because while I liked the game I started to really hate the teammates’ AI and couldn’t force myself through it, but the upcoming game fixes a lot of issues and it so fun to play. I just dropped $330AUD on Pokopia this week (one for me, my for my gf and one for my sister’s birthday present), so I’m not sure about dropping another $108 on this, but it’s extremely tempting.

Nope, I’m not a hype kind of guy. I want a title and release date, then nothing else until it’s out. I didn’t even want to see the starters but it’s unavoidable unfortunately.

I have no idea about Pokopia, it looks vaguely Animal Crossing-y but I’ve never really played that either. Hopefully it’s fun. I don’t buy enough full price games to really care about that, maybe 1-2 a year. If I mainly played games on console I’m sure I’d have to be a little more frugal.

My sister and I both finished our shiny living dexes in Z-A, so it’s back to Arceus and Violet for me. I’ve also been told to try out Digimon Something Stranger (🤷 can’t remember), I’ve never been into Digimon but why not.

My girlfriend has started Monster Hunter World which is one of my favourite games, and I’m looking forward to some co-op with her for the optional stuff. I’m making her do the story missions on her own so that she’ll actually learn how to play without being carried, because the endgame will be rough if she doesn’t.

Other than that, just killing time until Pokopia.

My sister and I have 9 things left to complete both of our shiny living dexes in Z-A (I’m going for all forms - regional, alternates & sexes, while she’s just going for one mon per dex #), so probably more of that. 3 of my remaining guys are Pumpkaboo/Gourgeist forms, and since only the medium size spawns in Hyperspace I have to go back to doing those the old way by running through the Wild Zone over and over. Still, beats doing them in Sword.

I guess if anyone has any spare shiny Pumpkaboo (small or 2x jumbo) hit me up, I have 8 boxes of extra shinies I don’t need.

According to the final results screen it took 22.5 hours to complete the 4 main maps 100% and then do what’s presented as the final challenge to hit the credits, but I definitely took my time. Not sure how much postgame content there is. If I end up restarting (I haven’t had a day off since then to get into anything) I should be able to do things a lot quicker. A pretty major theme of the game is the pursuit of efficiency.

A lot of my stress lately has been work-related, and let’s just say I might have a lot of free time coming up to play Pokémon, I should know next week :/

I don’t know much about it because I try to avoid seeing anything and go into games blind, but the Internet has an infuriating need to know everything about upcoming games which makes that very difficult. I am looking forward to Z-A though, it should be fun.

I’ve just been playing Pokémon and Pikmin 4 for the last month or so because I’ve been so stressed that I can’t handle anything more intellectually demanding.

I beat the main story of Pikmin 4 yesterday with no deaths, I’d reload every time anyone died. The final status screen listed 2 deaths, which I’m 100% certain didn’t happen. I guess they must have been from when I played the demo back in June. Now I need to get jnto postgame stuff, but it’s kind of ruined for me. I’ll probably start over instead :( I know it doesn’t make a difference, but still.

Pokémon is just shiny hunting in outbreaks because it’s easy and mindless. I have a good 40-50 mons trained for raids and 90+ combat-ready, but standing in the field and pressing the auto-battle button is about as much ss I’m up for these days. At last count I had around 340 or so shinies, so the living dex is coming along.

I played a few races with my sister at launch, then didn’t touch the game again until I had a couple of mates over the other week for a games night. We did all 8 cups and knockout races back to back. Because it was all one night everything blurred together, I honestly don’t remember what was a circuit race and what wasn’t, I don’t know if things were changing lap to lap like in Sonic Transformed or if it was moving us to different areas, I don’t know what the hell was going on at any point. There’s clearly so much there but it all felt so random which made it completely forgettable and so disappointing.

Then it wants me to do all this other disconnected stuff in free roam but from what I can tell it’s just 15-second challenges and there aren’t any races? And it doesn’t allow split screen either. Who plays Mario Kart alone?

I don’t need an article reporting on something that might happen, I’ll just wait for the one reporting on the thing once it’s happened. That’s where the juicy info will be.