Each time I fire up my PlayStation 4, nearly all of my logged on friends are playing Fallout 4. One is playing Tales of Xilia 2, because she has other issues, but most are lost in the Wasteland. I have different issues; I’m playing the hell out of Assassins’ Creed Syndicate.

Some of it is for strategy guide review purposes, and some of it is just for me. I really wanted to clear out all of the regions with my gang, and I was going to take the time to do that regardless. I still plan to do that with Mad Max eventually. I also wanted to get all of the collectibles, scratch that, most of the collectibles, and the strategy guide is helping me do just that. While you can buy treasure maps to highlight most of the collectibles, such as the pressed flowers, locked chests, and beer bottles, you have to use real money (or earn a crap ton of Helix points) to buy the maps marking the Secrets of London and Queen Victoria’s letters. Why use real money when I have a strategy guide? This is exactly how I looked into the reliability and usefulness of all of the book’s maps.

I have one more area I need to fully explore, and then I’m ready to review this one and move on to Halo 5: Guardians and Rise of the Tomb Raider.

I’ve been playing a lot of TriForce Heroes as well. When I say “a lot of,” I mean that pick it up a few times during the day to see if maybe this time is the one time I’ll get the Serpent Fangs to craft the Cozy Parka. I kept a tally of how many times I played level 2 of the Ice Caverns–Snowfall Ravine–and it was the 10th time that finally yielded the coveted Serpent Fangs. Now I’m ready to continue, and Garitt Rocha better be damn right about this Cozy Parka. I could probably play the Snowfall Ravine in my sleep at this point. The eldest watched me during one of my sessions and he commented how I was really good at the game (he happened to watch the one time I never once got injured). I replied that it’s amazing how good you are at something when you practice so much. Perhaps he will take that to heart for his own endeavors.

*Cue “the more you know” jingle*

I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving (if you live in the US) this week. If you don’t, I hope you have a fantastic week! No vidcast this week, but I think Chris will be posting some of his videos from his Extra Life streams and I will be hard at work reviewing guides. Chris has said he doesn’t want to carry over any guides into 2016, and I’d love to do the same!

So what the hell happened to Monday? Good God everything went by so fast yesterday that I realized when I was picking up the kids from school that I hadn’t made my Monday Gaming Diary post! And I actually have real things to say for once and not blah blah I’ve been reviewing a crap ton blah blah.

I’m back in the strategy guide reviewing game, and even though I’ve already played Assassin’s Creed Syndicate and I know what I want from the guide, I’m still working through it to make sure it does what I need. As a result, I’m “forcing” myself to run through all of the areas and try to clear them out as best as I can with the guide’s help, and this means collectibles first and foremost. I better get every single damn Trophy for the collectibles.

And guess what? Stabbing people on a whim is still a lot of fun!

At night, I’ve found that playing handheld games is easiest while I’m still single parenting, so it’s been a lot of The Legend of Zelda: TriForce Heroes. While this game is definitely meant for co-op, you can play it alone, although it makes it so much harder. I’ve almost rage quit it a couple of times because I ran into a situation that was obviously meant for multiple people, particularly a few boss fights. The strategy guide has been my saving grace on so many counts because of this.

TriForce Heroes is a lot of fun after you get past the weirdness of it. It’s weird in that it’s not your typical Legend of Zelda game, and I don’t mean that in a Majora’s Mask way or even a Hyrule Warriors way. I imagine that this game came about from a fateful developer’s meeting when someone said, “I want to make a Legend of Zelda game that’s like Portal, but without Zelda or a Portal Gun. And we need to throw in some dress-up Barbie mechanics like Final Fantasy X-2.” And the executive presiding over the meeting said, “I like it!”

At least so far, there is no Zelda or even Hyrule. The fashionable kingdom of Hytopia had a very stylish princess, and the Witch of the Drablands was so jealous of her eye for fashion, she stole her clothes and cursed her to dress badly. Now everyone in Hytopia is afraid to be chic, which is killing the fashion industry and making everyone rather sad. Whenever times are bad, the kingdom looks for the legendary TriForce Heroes to come and save them, which is the player and two of the player’s friends.

Also, instead of exploring an open world and going dungeon crawling, Link can only travel to one dungeon at a time, he’s given a set number of heart containers and specific weapons. It’s the player’s job to figure out how to get through the rooms and defeat enemies with the weapons given. At the end of the dungeon, Link is rewarded with a material, which he must take to the Hytopia seamstress and have her make an outfit for him that grants him certain abilities. For instance, the Kokiri Outfit allows him to shoot three arrows at once. The Big Bomb Outfit turns all bombs into, well, large bombs. Solving the puzzles relies upon as much as which outfits you pick as how to use the weapons efficiently.

As a result, I stay up rather late swearing I can find a way to beat this puzzle before turning to the guide. It’s silly. It makes fun of itself. And despite how frustrating it is at times, it’s a lot of fun.