Oracle of Seasons - Thank Goodness for Restore Points

Oracle of Seasons has many great attributes common to Zelda games, including being fantastically odd at times.  For a hand-held game that is nearly 20 years old, the gameplay holds up quite well.  I never owned a Game Boy Color so with my recent 3DS purchase this is the first time I've had access to the game and as a long time fan of Zelda games I was excited about the opportunity to play the game. 

I no longer review games on the site and so I'll stop discussing the game at this point.  It was well received by critics and fans and I'm sure at this point those who are interested have already played.  I wanted to take a brief moment to discuss Nintendo's Virtual Console and how fantastic it is.  Specifically, I wanted to discuss restore points.  Oracle of Seasons has many great attributes, but two negative attributes are that the game can be tedious at times and they are stingy with hearts, making dying easy.  I blame Capcom.  The restore points allow you to save the game at any point, so that if you mess up or die, you are able to start the game from the previous restore point.  This save feature is awesome and I think all games should have this feature.  In fact, this game is so tedious at times I probably wouldn't have finished the game without restore points.

With that being said, I technically haven't finished the game yet.  I'm on part 2 of the final boss and I keep dying.  After dying I am able to restart the game where  I started, as if going back into time before dying.  It takes the sting out of the tedious nature of the game. 

I've died several times so I decided to place finishing this boss off on the back burner and start Super Mario World.  I've been wanting to play through this game again for quite some time but didn't have a convenient way to do so - another example of the fabulousness of the virtual console.  It's loaded with both games I want to play again and games I've never played before.  I'll get around to finishing Oracle at some point.  For now, I'm off to Yoshi land!

Nintendo Direct

It wasn't too long ago when I was complaining that I didn't have any good games to play.  That changed quickly.  Last week Nintendo Direct announced several games for the Switch that are being released in the near future that I'm interested in.  I've commented on the Switch in the past, and to summarize, I like the system a lot.  My biggest complaint with the system is that the game choices are quite odd, and while critics seem to like the games, I'm not overly interested in most of them.  That's about to change.

There's a couple of new Mario games about to be released. The one I'm most interested in is the New Super Mario U, a 2-D platforming game.  Obviously most Mario games are quite good and I'm sure this one will be no exception.

I'm also interested in Animal Crossing.  Obviously this is a hugely popular gaming series and the Nintendo community seems quite excited that the game is coming to the Switch.  I've never played any Animal Crossing games but now that I have access to the series via the 3DS and Switch I'm interested in seeing what the fuss is about.

The game I was most surprised to see and maybe the most interested in is Cities Skylines.  I've always been a fan of the city building sims and have been playing 2004's Sim City 4 for over a decade.  However, as previously discussed Aspyr doesn't seem to support the game anymore on the Mac and OS updates have made the app unplayable.  This is quite disappointing.  I've played Skylines once on Steam but unfortunately my computer doesn't have the horse power to run the game well.  I've always been skeptical of playing these types of games on a console but the PS4 version of the game got good ratings for controls and from what little I've seen on the Switch the controls look smooth.  Ideally I'd play the game on the computer but I honestly don't know when I'm going to upgrade my computer - it could be years.  So I'm likely to take the plunge on this one.  Some people said the game lags when your cities get large but I've also heard people say this happens on PC as well so I'm just going to find out for myself.

And by the way, while this has nothing to do with Nintendo, there's also this little game coming out soon called Red Dead Redemption 2.  What a time!

Smart Commute

Earlier this year my office moved 60 blocks south.  This is problematic for my commute.  Previously, I was able to avoid the highway and take side streets to my office.  This is no longer a practical option.  My office is now far enough away that there is really no way to avoid the highway.

There's a stretch of road on my way to work that due to the nature of how it is designed gets backed up daily.  This is usually a minor inconvenience as the delay is small and expected.  However, if there is even a minor fender-bender or if a cop has someone pulled over or if it is raining/snowing, etc., my commute time can double.  This obviously isn't acceptable.  The trouble is, I already give myself about 40 minutes to get to work.  If the commute goes smoothly it typically takes 30-35 minutes.  Since the major slowdowns are infrequent (a few times per month) I don't think it is worth the effort to give myself more time on a daily basis.  This is where the "smart" part of the smart commute comes into play.

When I can remember, I've started using Alexa/Google Maps/Waze. If any of those services show significant delays, I could bypass the common area where delays occur and get on the highway at a more distant point.  The problem is you need to know of the delay ahead of time in order to take a different route.  I've only done this a few times but thus far I haven't found it to be overly accurate. At least once both Google Maps and Waze said traffic was light on my commute and I got stuck in a jam.  I'm not going to give up on the idea yet because I am hoping they can save me significant time and frustration on my commute.

Why Do We Need Yearly Updates On Games In 2018?

I'm finishing up my 3rd season in F1 2016's career mode and I'm contemplating if I want to upgrade to the 2018 version of the game.  I skipped the 2017 version because of minimal differences between the 17 version and 16 version.  However, now its been two years since I've upgraded and am feeling like it is time.  There's been enough changes in the sport (new rules, new cars, new tracks, the halo, etc.) that it probably makes sense to upgrade now.

The point of this post is that I really don't understand why sports games continue to have yearly updates in 2018.  We've long passed the point where consoles can download patches and updates to the games, and computer games have obviously been able to do this for years.  For most sports games, there is minimal difference in the games from year to year.  While I'm sure there is some argument that they can sell more games this way, it seems like the gaming companies are also taking on huge production overhead to update on a yearly basis.  Plus, once a new version comes out usually the 1 year-old version immediately drops in price.  It seems to make more sense to release versions of games instead of yearly games.  This would allow companies to continue to charge full price for a game for a few years and they could push updates and patches to the game as they come along.  This would get rid of the huge production cost of new games and allow companies to support the games they spend a lot of resources developing longer.  This is how most other game genres operate.  The yearly production schedule is also likely to blame for things like Madden glitches. 

I'm hoping that as time progresses game companies adopt this model.  I think it benefits all involved and will allow companies to dedicate more energy on less games, making a better product.