Welcome to Bandy’s Blogs.
Once a month, I’ll be making blog posts on games that I’ve been playing recently. The games will range from stuff I’m playing for a video, or just things I’ve popped in with my spare time!
October 2024
Tetris Effect Connected
I do not tend to replay games very often, not unless it’s very special. Tetris Effect on the other hand, is such an incredible masterpiece that I’ve replayed it at least a dozen times if not more. It’s Tetris as you’d expect, but it goes so much farther than that. The music is paired with the sound effects of your pieces rotating and dropping, and the background pieces all flow together while you’re clearing lines. There’s a beautiful sense of calmness and awe when playing Tetris Effect. There’s not really a good way to describe how playing this game feels, it literally feels like you “Connect” with it in the way the music matches so impeccably with the audio. There are tons of different pieces of music and backgrounds, all of them are absolutely breathtaking. The music is so good that I’ve actually spent a lot of time listening to it on it’s own; it takes an incredible game soundtrack to reach that level of quality. The updated version adds multiplayer, which is a really nice touch. It’s cross platform, so I’ve played on PC while playing with friends on the Switch or PS5 and it runs flawlessly. And that really is the main gist of Tetris Effect. There is a new mechanic called “The Zone” where you can basically stop time and make more than 4 matches at once. It’s a cool mechanic, but frankly I don’t even use it. The magic of Tetris Effect comes down to just turning your brain off, and letting your mind escape with the music. There’s not many games out there that I’d say have “vibes” but this one does. It’s probably the most “Vibes” game ever created, and is absolutely worth playing by everyone; even if you aren’t great at Tetris.
September 2024
Super Monkey Ball 2
Super Monkey Ball 2 is one of the most underappreciated games on the Nintendo Gamecube. While it’s a game I grew up with and carry nostalgia over, it’s aged much better then most games in the 2000’s. The goal is to roll a funny monkey to the end, it’s as simple as that. The controls and physics are so well-tuned, that I struggle to understand why they haven’t been replicated in it’s future sequels. This game expands on the 1st Monkey Ball in a few different ways; most notably through the Story Mode. The evil monkey, Dr. Bad-Boon takes away all the bananas, so it’s up to our 4 furry friends to get them back. The cutscenes are incredibly cheesy, and are so bad that it’s just awesome to go back to. The story mode itself is all about clearing levels like in the normal Challenge mode, but you can pick and choose levels to your liking. The difficulty progression for the most part is good, although there’s a few really tough ones somewhat early on. That’s something I can really appreciate about Monkey Ball 2, it’s not afraid to be difficult. These levels, especially in Expert and Master mode will absolutely destroy you without practice. This is one of those games where practicing is actually fun to do, because you can retry a stage almost instantly. I wish more games took a players time into consideration like Monkey Ball 2 does.
That’s not all that’s included in Monkey Ball, another huge aspect is the party games. These were in the first Monkey Ball as well, but they’ve been expanded on. There’s more then double to play, and the customization has been upped as well. And Monkey Billiards is something else, not only is it a really solid way to play billiards, but the music is perfect. It sounds like exactly as you’d expect if you were really playing billiards at a bar; outside of Aiai drinking a glass of milk watching the game. Not all the party games are winners though, Monkey Boat and Monkey Dogfight are just okay. And some of the other new ones like Monkey Soccer and Monkey Tennis are pretty average, yet functional minigames. The real meat comes to things like Monkey Fight/Race/Target; those minigames are easy to play with games for hours at a time. It’s a bit of a shame that there wasn’t a proper Super Monkey Ball 3; which was apparently rumored to be in development but was later cancelled. This will always be a special game to me, I’ve cherished it for as long as I can remember. And if you haven’t played it yet, you’ve got to give it a chance!
August 2024
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
Phantom Hourglass is one of those Zelda games that you don’t really see people talk about nowadays. It’s only on the DS, and it really can’t be played properly on anything else. The entire game uses a touch screen, and you’ll do all your moving and combat with the screen. While of course this makes sense in that era to make a Zelda game in this fashion, it has aged pretty poorly. There are some clever uses of the touch screen, like writing down notes on your map as an example. But after several hours, I was really missing the D-Pad and buttons that were literally right next to me on the same device. The dungeons and difficulty have been toned down a bit because the touch screen is harder to use quickly, so at least it’s been accounted for. This is such a weird game, because I would like it so much more if the controls were just normal. The utilization of the items in the dungeons are fantastic, writing notes on your map makes for great puzzles, and the story is quite unique. And not even just that, but there’s lots of new races of characters that you don’t see in every other Zelda game; it really stands out on it’s own.
The game’s biggest issue however comes down to one dungeon; The Temple of the Ocean King. I cannot believe how obnoxious this is to play. First off, you re-visit this place 6 different times, and you’re forced to re-tread ground on each visit. Then on top of that, there’s a time limit which adds so much un-needed stress. If you get hit by a phantom, it chews up more of your time, and if you go down to zero then you replay the entire dungeon over. It’s just miserable, until the very last visit. You basically become invincible, and can finally take out the phantoms. If there was no time limit and we didn’t have to re-tread floors, this would’ve been an okay concept. But it really hurts the game a lot since you spend so much time here. And the sailing is also just fine, it’s a little boring but at least the ocean is smaller than in The Wind Waker. So all in all, I really wanted to like Phantom Hourglass more. It’s really just held back by a few shortcomings that could’ve easily been resolved. But who knows, maybe it’ll get some sort of remake someday, I’d be curious to see how Nintendo would clean a game like this up.
July 2024
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD
I recently played through the entirety of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD. This is a game I’ve been wanting to play for a super long time, but I never got around to actually finishing it until this month. And boy, was this such a treat to finally tackle. I’ve been playing through a lot of Zelda titles to eventually rank all the games, and I was really looking forward to this one. For starters, the art style is just incredible. It has aged so remarkably well, and I really like that Nintendo went with this style and went against the grain of what people wanted. It’s one of Nintendo’s prettiest looking games, and it moves so well too. Some criticize the amount of bloom, but I think that’s really over exaggerated. The bloom is not as bad as people say it is. The animations are very expressive, even with the faces simply changing as still images; it still looks really great. The game runs at a mostly smooth 60FPS, but I did notice more frame drops then I expected. Especially out in sea, the game would dip to 10-15FPS when there was a lot of happening at once. The frame dips weren’t that big of a deal though, it wasn’t often enough that hurt the overall experience.
The Wii U’s gamepad is one of the main reasons that there’s not much reason to play this original version from the Gamecube. The touch screen has a map being shown at all times, which is obviously super handy if you’re lost. You can flip through the charts and pull them up on the fly, as well as swap items without having to pause And there’s a lot of quality of life improvements too, the main being the Swift Sail. It not only coasts through the water faster than the normal sail, but it doesn’t need to rely on the wind’s direction. This makes the sailing REALLY fun to do, especially because The Great Sea’s music is just perfect. You really feel like you’re on a grand adventure, it’s magical. The other big improvement is motion control aiming. Trying to nail a shot with your boomerang or Bow 'n Arrow has never been easier, you can make subtle adjustments by just tilting the Gamepad. Although the Miiverse functionality doesn’t work. It is kind of goofy that there’s Tingle Bottles that use Miiverse that are just completely worthless now.
My favorite part of this game by far is the dungeons. While there’s technically only 3 main ones, there’s a lot of miniaturized dungeons as well. These are some of the best paced dungeons in the entire series. The puzzles take a bit of brain power, but also aren’t obnoxious to figure out. The versatility of the items is what makes the dungeons work so well in this game, they’re nothing short of a blast to tackle. And I really like the sailing too, it’s really not as big and empty as people say it is. Although I think our minds have been warped on what “Big” is after playing Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. This is TINY compared to those games, but I digress. I’ll have a lot more to say about this HD remake and the original version when the Ranked video for all the Zelda games comes later in 2024.
