What are you all playing?

@fsfxii Some good Metal Gear Solid V thoughts there. You may want to consider cross-posting them into the old Phantom Pain thread for archival purposes

classicgameroom.freeforums.net/thread/95/metal-gear-solid-phantom-thoughts

Yikes. Sorry about that fsfsxii. Promise that was not the intent. -_-

Fire Emblem for Android

Finally got Yars Revenge and Dungeon Hutner today. Time to see if this game was worth the wait, and not jsut Nostalgia goggles. Also, if I can find some english instructions for Dungeon Hunter...despite the English words, it's in friggin' Japanese!

Finally playing the Vita version of Sly Cooper Thieves in Time, the only Vita game I own, and so far I haven't noticed any real differences from the PS3 version, be it for better or worse..

Also playing around a little with EyeCreate on PS3, it's no game though, just a camera program for recording video, sound and taking photos using a USB camera like the PS Eye, but it works well enough, has some filter effects and additional settings for brightness and such, is easy enough to use and export to the PS3 storage and I've heard it's also available as a free download for those who have a PSN account, but I don't have that so it's nice they released a physical retail version.

So, I'm still playing Red Dead Redemption. The game is awesome, but it also confirms that western open-world games aren't my jam: I have a good time when playing it, but I'm not crazy to go back to it when I'm doing something else. It will take a long time until I finish it.

On the other hand, I started Zelda: A link between worlds this week. Holy cow, this is really something else! I can definitely tell Nintendo was already trying to go back to a more free, exploration based open world with this one before they went all out with Breath of the Wild. See, in general, ALBW looks and feel a lot like A link to the past, to the point that it's obvious it started as a remake. But there's a single feature that makes it stand out among the past Zelda games: there's a shop right at the start of the game that lets you "rent" various items, all of them at the same time if you want and have the money - and this Zelda is very generous with rupees. Essentially, you keep the items until you die; when that happens, you have to spend money again, but you'll have a lot of money remaining. So, what's the big change? Basically, this means most the items needed for exploration are completely available right at the start of the game: after the very first dungeon, I can already use bombs, a hammer, the hookshot, wind/fire/ice rods and, after some light exploration, I also got the glove to pull rocks, flippers to swim, the net and a bottle, all of this before the second dungeon. I spent hours just exploring the map before going into the second dungeon, while in past Zelda games, I would not have enough items to go exploring.

Also, here you can see the advantage of japanese open-world games over western ones: the overworld is open, but designed as a level. There are specific obstacles and you have to creatively use your items to keep exploring; there are no empty spaces, every square in the map looks handcrafted (instead of being this giant place that you walk/drive/ride through with no dificulty, with either empty spaces or repeated content). So, ALBW is a more open version of ALTTP, a middle ground between it and Zelda 1. I can definitely see how they were trying to open up the series, make it more like the 2d games instead of keeping the played out Ocarina of Time model.

In conclusion, I'm loving it, something I can't say about Zelda since... The Oracle games, I guess.