JustinMikos

Justin Mikos

@JustinMikos

Writer, Video Game Blogger

Interned at Game Informer, graduated from UC Irvine with an English Major - Loves Video Games, Anime, and Bowling. JustinMikos.com is my personal blog.

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JustinMikos
@JustinMikos

Catching Up 11-22-22

Hello! Been a while since I last posted here. I actually wanted to post sooner, but Cohost was getting understandably slammed the last few times I hopped on so I decided to hold off. I just joined Hive Social with the same at as I have here with no caps so, justinmikos. Give me a follow if you are on there! It seems promising as a true Twitter replacement and lot of cool gaming people made the jump already.

Had a lot of fun gaming stuff to talk about in the past ten days. First, I finally downloaded all of the remaining 3DS DLC I wanted. This was a longer task than you might expect since all 3DS DLC is on a store inside the game itself and every game handles it a bit differently. Some were thankfully a main menu option while others forced you to play anywhere from 15 minutes to two to three hours to unlock the store. Some DLC was also just straight up gone at this point which was sad and heartbreaking for the longer commitments. Most of it available for purchase that I had left wasn't terribly interesting ultimately, so I mostly claimed the free stuff. There was some good stuff that was free though like more difficulty options and Monster Hunter in particular had pages upon pages of free missions and items to claim. I'm now fully ready for when the 3DS and Wii U shops close down so that's good.

While I waited for Pokemon to come out, I ran through a handful of short games I had put off this year like Elechead, Blossom Tales II, Lunistice, TMNT Shredder's Revenge, and Long Live The Queen. I liked all five and recommend all of them, though ideally you want friends to play with for TMNT. I'll give a brief one sentence review of each. Elechead is a cool puzzle 2D platformer where you play as a robot that can electrify platforms by throwing his head around that really tightly explores this mechanic. Blossom Tales II is a much more confident Zelda A Link To The Past styled game than its predecessor with more engaging puzzles and level design. Lunistice, my favorite of the five here, is an awesome $5 3D platformer with an amazing sense of flow backed by creative levels and energy. TMNT Shredder's Revenge may be more simple than Scott Pilgrim, but the graphics and music and unique boss battles for each level give it a ton of charm. Long Live The Queen is a really cool Princess Maker-like game where you manage your stats and mood in a variety of fields (court manners, economics, military, magic etc.) to overcome a variety of challenges to ascend the throne and has an interesting, complex spread of outcomes.

This post is getting long, so I'll quickly mention I started a replay of the Metroid Prime Trilogy collection in honor of Prime's 20th anniversary. I finished up Prime already, it's a timeless masterpiece, and I'll write about it in depth another time. Talk to y'all soon and hope you are all doing well :)

JustinMikos
@JustinMikos

Leaving Twitter, Bayonetta 3, and Mario and Rabbids 2.

So uh, a lot can happen in 24 hours. I went from, I'm not moving completely on from Twitter yet to essentially packing my bags to leave. So while I haven't made it official on Twitter yet (I have one last thing I'm waiting on), Cohost is going to be my primary, public social media account for the near future at least.

While the Twitter collapse has been happening, I largely stopped tweeting about the games I've been enjoying. If you don't know me and couldn't tell from my profile picture, RPGs are definitely my favorite genre and I'm a big fan of platformers, fighting games, and music games as well. After wrapping up a replay of Trails From Zero with the recent official release, I moved on to playing Bayonetta 3 and Mario and Rabbids Sparks of Hope. These were two of the biggest games I was looking forward to this year and while they were each not quite as awesome as I hoped, I had a great time playing both.

Let's start with Bayonetta which I finished first. The two big new things are the demon summoning and the new multiverse focused story. Demon summoning wasn't really doing it for me in the campaign and the biggest reason is because the game moved away from fighting smaller enemies to significantly larger enemies that obviously take longer to take down if you rely on just Bayonetta herself. Demon summoning is largely about queuing up the next attack or just pressing a button at the end of a normal Bayonetta combo. It looks spectacular obviously to summon a giant godzilla monster for example, but there's a level of disconnect in the action that feels less satisfying. Not to say it couldn't be cool. In the post game arena battles especially, I had fun successfully juggling opponents and extending my combos, but overall I think Bayonetta 2 remains the pinnacle of the series for gameplay. I sort of dug the multiverse stuff as well as an excuse to have cities explode all around you in the big setpieces which looked and felt amazing, but it was counteracted knowing that it all ultimately wouldn't matter to the ultimate conclusion. If there are spoiler tag options on Cohost, I'm not aware of them yet, so I'll just say unfortunately that ultimate conclusion was very disappointing on both the gameplay and story fronts.

Mario and Rabbids Sparks of Hope is in some ways better and some ways lacking compared to the original Kingdom Battle which I ultimately prefer. The beginning of the game is strong as you choose how to develop your characters and figure out your go to strategies and spark combos (usually a buff, spell, or summon generally). My regular plan was to have Mario use his strength buff, activate Luigi's Steely Stare and have him walk as far away as possible, and then have Mario and Rabbid Peach either dash foes or use fire to get them moving. Luigi's Steely Stare is absurd because it can shoot through walls and it becomes exponentially more powerful the farther away he is. Incidentally, Luigi is also the MVP when it comes to moving around maps with his huge movement ranges and the ability to do two partner jumps in one turn. I was worried about Sparks of Hope as the middle really starts to blur together as my normal strategy felt unstoppable, but thankfully the back third of the game starting with the Wiggler battle shown in previews picks up with stronger foes and more interesting maps.

JustinMikos
@JustinMikos

First Post, Hello!

Yay I can finally post! Well I could as of yesterday, but I was a bit busy worrying about the US midterm results. I'm sure like a lot of new people here at this moment, I just signed up since I'm not happy about Twitter's new ownership and direction. I've been on Twitter for over eight years now and made a lot of friends and connections there so I'm not abandoning it entirely just yet, but at the same time I'm still moving on in a way. I heard about Cohost since Austin Walker tweeted he joined and was enthusiastic about it for a great while now, so I knew this would be one of the new social media I'd try for sure. (I don't know Austin directly to be clear, just been a fan of his writing and work at Waypoint)

As much as I love Twitter despite its faults, I'm pretty excited about joining Cohost since when I write, I tend to write a lot. In that sense, being able to write paragraphs here is pretty awesome and freeing and I think I'll be more at home here than on Twitter.

Ok about me a bit, I mostly use social media to talk about the games, anime, and other media I'm enjoying and to talk with friends so expect a lot of my posts here to be about that. I do blog mostly about video games on my personal website, so I plan to share those here when I do. I've poked around Cohost a bit and have started following a few people already, so I'm still getting a full sense of the vibe here (I don't even know what this site looks like on mobile yet lol), but I'll probably make some decent sized miniblog like posts when I do. Anyway yeah excited to be here! Talk to y'all out there again soon :)