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E3 2019 Rundown!

GRcadeTwitchcast – E3 Discussion Videos!

The Electronic Entertainment Expo which most just call E3 is the time of year us game lovers call our Christmas. It’s a little daft, but the sentiment is pretty simple, we watch people sell us stuff… Wait, that’s not what Christmas is about?

I’m not writing a massive article about E3 here, but instead a few of the people from GRcade took to Twitch and decided to talk about E3, some of the conferences were at convenient enough times for people to have live reactions to them, while others weren’t and will be discussed in a general E3 round up in the end.

First video up is Microsoft. Doom and Pedz were available for this, ad7 did try and join, but, was unable to do having Mic troubles. The Watching Artist (Matt) joined approximately half way through as Doom had to leave, but he did return to talk a tiny bit about the conference overall.

Audio only.

Ubisoft. Ah, good old Ubi, you can’t help but admire their crazy silliness. Do they stay as silly? Let’s have a look.

Audio only

Inside Xbox. Another Xbox Conference, it’s not a ’60 games announcement’ conference, but it does show a few new games and talks a little about the future of the Xbox One. I think Doom put’s it well at the end of the live viewing.

Audio only

Lastly, we have the Nintendo E3 Direct. We have Jenuall, The Watching Artist (Matt) and Pedz taking part in this one. They didn’t watch the direct during its live broadcast but they did watch it for the first time, together.

Audio only

We haven’t been able to get together since this, so a round-up isn’t likely going to happen, but we all had fun doing this and we hope we can get more done for future events. Thank you all for watching and listening to us all prattle on!

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Retro Monday #91 – The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: Randomizer

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was made by Nintendo and released for the Super Famicom in 1991 in Japan and the Super Nintendo in the US and EU in 1992. It is the third Legend of Zelda game and did a lot to set the template for the Zelda series up until Breath of the Wild.

This week the game choices were all randomisers and over on GRcade Cheeky Devlin picked them for me to try. A Link to the Past was chosen by the members via a poll.

Well, while this is Link to the Past, one of my all-time favourite game; it’s ALttP with a major twist. It’s a randomiser. I know it’s a little different to the traditional way the games have been played normally, but, I thought having a randomiser would be a really interesting way to play an old game and breathe new life into it. I’m hoping those that read this and watch back the stream will agree that it’s a great way to see things old in a new way.

For those who don’t know, a randomiser is a mod for a game that takes a game ROM and then randomises the items. Simple really. An example: in this you could open the first chest in Link’s uncle’s house and normally you’d get the lamp. But instead you could get a shield, or hammer or rupees. It’s really interesting. There are also ways to set the randomiser so you can’t actually play for hours and hit a point when you can’t progress, and you can also pick how difficult it all is. It’s definitely worth trying it out and seeing for yourself.

The game itself is The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and I love everything about it. The music is terrific, the visuals are lovely, the gameplay is great. There’s so much to love. I normally try to stick to around an hour and then move over to multiplayer games, but this I got really engrossed in and lost track of time and was playing for around four hours until after 1am.

Seriously give it a go – you’ll be surprised by how it may reinvigorate something you may now find you’ve overplayed.

Verdict: Highly Recommend.

If you’d like to take part in voting for the games or even  picking the games yourself, take yourself over to the GRcade forums and pop into the Retro Monday thread and just post to show your interest. Not just that, you can watch the gameplay live over on Twitch where it’s streamed at 9pm on a Monday evening.

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Retro Monday Game 90 – Tomba!/Tombi!

Tomba! was a platforming game made by Whoopee Camp and published by Sony for the PlayStation 1. Releasing in Japan in 1997, it was 1998 that we in the UK got the game but it was called Tombi! not Tomba!.

 

I looked online for a little while and I saw that Tomba is Italian for grave and that may be the reason for the title change.

The game was picked by GRcade in a poll of three games that were selected by Jeffyard.

I have little knowledge of Tombi, very little. The only time I can remember seeing it was one year at Awesome Games Done Quick, and some guy asked another guy if he would basically shut up. Well, as I found out on during this stream that was Tomba! 2, so my experience was with the wrong game anyway.

The game centres around a young boy, named Tombi. Described as a pink-haired feral boy, you started the game to try and find your grandfather’s bracelet that was stolen by the Evil Pigs. You’ll get to see a lovely animated cutscene at the start for that. Travelling around you’ll come across a variety of friends and things to collect (and this was in only around 1 hour of play time).

The gameplay is a little different to your standard platformer – you don’t just run along and jump on the enemies and then carry on running. In this there are more platforms in the background, and there are then places you can jump onto a wall in the background and climb it, and then explore the area. It seems to be like that for a fair whack of what I played –  you even climb a pretty big set of walls and platforms at one point to find an old guy. Enemies are defeated in several ways: you can either hit them with a weapon which will kill them dead when fully charged, or incapacitate them, when not charged. When incapacitated you can jump on them and grab ahold, press jump again and you jump up with them and throw them. They will die and if hitting another enemy take them out too. I must add, you don’t have to hit the enemies you came across to grab ahold of, but it can make it easier than jumping on them while they are moving. It’s the unique fun of this play style that has me itching to play more.

Musically it’s also lovely. The sound effects pack a punch and the music has a kind of whimsical, upbeat colourful feel.

I’ll say now, that I plan to play more of this. I’m eager to get back to it – there’s something about it that just calls to me. It’s colourful, fun, cheery and plays extremely well, and even as I’m writing this I just want to get back to the game.

Verdict: Highly Recommend

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfv_2NIeT8]

If you’d like to take part in voting for the games or even  picking the games yourself, take yourself over to the GRcade forums and pop into the Retro Monday thread and just post to show your interest. Not just that, you can watch the gameplay live over on Twitch where it’s streamed at 9pm on a Monday evening.