While we here at Operation Rainfall love covering the latest in gaming news and sharing our reviews of titles new and classic, we also just enjoy playing games in our downtime. So with that, sit back, relax, and check out what the oprainfall gaming crew have been up to this week!
It’s been a pretty busy week for gaming this time around. Between trying to get my reviews done, I also finally picked up the Resident Evil 2 Remake after years of saying I’d get to it, as well as (of course) jumping back into Hyrule with Tears of the Kingdom. I also spent a bit of time playing Irritating Stick on the PlayStation 1, but as the name implies, I got irritated pretty quickly. (I’ve played it before, but it’s been years and I had the urge to try it out again.) Anyway, RE2. I played the original back on PS1 aaaaaaaaaages ago, but hadn’t gotten around to the remakes because I’m a giant coward and the updated visuals and sound design are Too Good ™. But give me unlimited ammo and I feel a lot more badass, so Leon is locked and loaded and ready to go. I haven’t gotten too far in yet – Leon just met Ada – but I’ve been having a lot of fun exploring the reimagined Police Station. The oppressive atmosphere is just right, riding that line between genuinely creepy and B-movie camp, especially when Leon spouts off some one-liners that reflect what I’m thinking. Leon is my favorite. I love him. Looking forward to the next time I get to pick it up.
I’ve only made it out of the tutorial area for Tears of the Kingdom but I’m just having so much fun right now. The new Ultrahand mechanic is a lot of fun, if very fiddly, but I really love the Ascend ability the most. Not only does it make for satisfying sound design and tactile feedback, but the sense of vertical exploration it opens is genuinely just the best. I’m a sucker for anything that lets me climb elevations quickly, and I’ve always been fascinated with games that embrace verticality in their level design. Hyrule is a gorgeous land filled with tons of nooks and crannies and Ascend is a novel, fun way to reach them, and I’m all here for it. As for the rest of the game, I adore the constructs. They are peak mascot design. Getting to harass koroks using Ultrahand is probably more fun than it should be. I spent basically the entire tutorial area “naked” because Nintendo is way too good at making their characters way too attractive and I am a simple woman. I also really like the expansion of the lore the Zonai introduce. I’m definitely curious as to where (or when?) Zelda’s got off to and how the Zonai homeland ended up floating so far above Hyrule to begin with. I was admittedly a bit bummed that the Temple of Time music didn’t play when I finally got to enter it, but otherwise the music has been really good. I expect to take my time with this game and I look forward to the long haul. – Leah
Like Leah and a lot of other people in the world, I’ve also been absorbed into The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. This game seems to be my next Xenoblade Chronicles 3, at least so far. By that I mean, it’s a game I’m completely glued to, which is rare for me lately. This past weekend I’ve found myself wanting to stay up late to play more when I’m not able to play as much as planned earlier in the day. Plus the hours seem to fly by, I’m not nearly as conscious of the time as I am playing most other games these days. Now onto my first impressions and thoughts about TOTK. So, I’ve gone through the tutorial area already and made my way back to some familiar places of Hyrule which we already saw in Breath of the Wild. Having been a few years since I was actively playing BOTW however, I’m happy to find that I don’t know exactly where everything is anymore and I’ve been exploring relatively blind, which I enjoy. Breath of the Wild started to feel a bit more meh once I knew where everything was. It was still a cool game, but it wasn’t as exciting once it didn’t feel like there was anything new to find. I’ve been quite enjoying myself, taming new horses and looking for teleports to activate and whatnot.
It’s been somewhat of a shock though going back to that beginning, weak Link portion of a new survival Zelda as I like to call it. It feels like I can’t fight anything or do absolutely everything I want to. Also, I feel like the devs tried to up the difficulty a decent amount. For example, I came across one of those big Stone Talus enemies, specifically a Battle Talus, and not only was it carrying a small bokoblin base and three bokoblins ontop of its head, but it was constantly swinging its arms, making it hard to get ontop without the Ascend ability. And then once you’re ontop, the Battle Talus shakes you off after not very many seconds. It also kinda feels like it’s harder this time to defend against attacks in general and it takes a while to do significant damage to enemies. Obviously, I don’t expect any less from a Zelda title such as this, it’s just been a bit of a shock as I said before. I mean it’s already been a long time since I played the previous game and even longer since I was at the very beginning. I look forward to slowly strengthening Link however and I know after a significant time investment, my weak early game Link days will be long behind me. If you haven’t played Breath of the Wild before, I definitely think you might want to start there before jumping into Tears of the Kingdom, simply because it truly feels like they added onto everything and tried to one up what they created before. And with all the fun new options and features added to the game, it might be hard to appreciate BOTW as much if you don’t start with it first. Those are just my early thoughts though, I can’t say for sure. – Jenae
What games have you been playing this week? Let us know in the comments!
You can read previous Week in Gaming entries here!
