Ravenprose said:

Vintage games and their nutty near-impossible to find secret walls. Phantasy Star has a few secret passageways in caves and dungeons, but there's nothing shown in the first-person camera that there's anything there. A few hints by towns people when you talk to them and that's it. Every wall looks exactly the same, except you can walk through a rare few of them. I likely wouldn't have found any of them if it weren't for my auto map showing me a greyed out passage when I walked by.

Like I said, MK took about fifteen minutes, but originally was over an hour. I changed my wifi and that helped. Honestly, fifteen seemed like a long time compared to the S1 download times.

Microsoft announced a handheld. Meh

This weekend has been all Phantasy Star for me. I've made some significant progress. I made it third planet (out of three) after doing a quest to build a spaceship, scored much better gear for my party, especially for my magic user, bought a landrover and an ice digger, and I've lost count how many caves and dungeons and towns I've explored so far. For a 1988 game it holds up extremely welll; the more I progress, the more complelling it becomes.

This weekend it’s just been Mario Kart World for me in gaming. Watched Money in the Bank yesterday. Was pretty good.

Bought and played Monster Train (Slay the Spire-like rogue-lite) and Vampire Survivors (Bullet-Hell rogue-like).

So I managed to play some MK World.  The minute to minute gameplay is great, although very different from that of say MK8 due to how the mechanics have been tweaked.  Everything seems to be set up to ensure as much mayhem as possible.  It's like Nintendo perfected how to translate the NPC rubberbanding into actual gameplay.  The whole game is set up to get the most out of this.

I'm not a big fan of what the open world brings to the table though.  Tracks are often wide with long straight stretches that are exhilerating when you're in the middle of a pack, but not challening at all when you're ahead.  Sometimes the track will open up to accomodate different routes, which is a lot of  fun as racers fly by everywhere and you're never quite sure what place you'll be in once everything converges again.  There's too much visual clutter, debris and distractions that were added to make things more interesting while driving around the open world, but serve no purpose in a race.  More than once did I find that the visual design didn't clearly communicate what direction I needed to be heading in, which will only become more problematic when playing MKW as a party game, with people who will not be familiar with the tracks.

We're all currently enjoying it a lot in our household, but I do feel I prefer the more curated and streamlined courses of MK8.  MKWorld would have been a better game if they hadn't gone for the interlinked open world, but had just created larger tracks to accomodate the 24 player frenzy.