this was a while ago but i found where those pesky fightfrogs were hiding and boy that was a secret secret. weird considering how chunky a part of the game it turned out to be. maybe there was a hint towards it, choosing to believe there wasn't since that would mean i missed it five times. i've never played Battletoads. gamestop always hung up on me when i called to ask if they had it in stock. but i'll assume this counts as having "beaten battletoads". it was cool

anyway back to challenge mode. i very slowly and occasionally dropped in to chip away at them, and completed almost all the actual unique stuff. i realized there's really only ten new challenges for each campaign and the rest are just the boss fights with time and health limits, except for King Knight where half of those ten are Joustus challenges which i also don't want to do. i've seen Joustus, those bosses, and myself on low health more than enough

showdown knight time! this one has its own title screen and menus so surely it must feel like a separate fully-fledged thing, even moreso than the other campaigns, and not just a kickstarter obligation that amounted to an afterthought of a gamemode

ok look. it's a free update so whatever. the game is not a very fun game to play. i played through the story with three separate characters which are basically small classic Smash campaigns, complete with a "break the targets" level. there isn't actually a "story" with ""dialogue"" except for when say Shovel Knight goes up against Shieldwife and there's an extremely brief exchange of "buhh we have to fight!!?"

name something that happens in this video

i found more often than not that the way to win was to not play. for sure the least enjoyable stages are the "get the most gems" ones. so it's a shame that those amount to about 80% of all stages for some reason. it wouldn't be so bad if i wasn't constantly in some manner of I-Frame Hell, or the CPUs weren't always reading my inputs on medium difficulty. the final boss was especially a nightmare, i only managed to beat it with Spectre on medium before finding out there was no reason to play any difficulty higher than easy

turns out medium is too difficult and easy is far too easy. at least playing through it with every character seemed attainable now, but i was still thinking ughh do i really have to do this to feel content with it. then i unlocked another character oh no. looked up the roster. oh no!! there are many unlockable characters!! whatever they take like 10-15 minutes each i'll do it. at least it'll be interesting to play as ones who haven't been playable up till now, and then i can mess around with them

never mind i ain't doin all that. went through with 10 out of 20 characters and it's mostly the same thing everytime just with some different dialogue, so i'm considering Showdown's story mode Seen. maybe would've kept my attention if the difficulty was more balanced and i didn't have to resort to seeing how pathetically i can win like in the video above to keep things interesting. favorite character of the ones i played was Shield Knight, she has this shieldthrowpunchpunch combo that's mostly useless because of how long enemies' invincibility lasts after the first hit

Showdown would be a perfectly serviceable diversion from the main game if it weren't for all the unlock conditions. it is also possible to unlock everything by just hanging out in multiplayer matches for hours... but there's also no online play man!! i mean not that i'd play it anyway. but Shovel of Hope DX is getting online multiplayer, is my argument. basically Yacht Club should have considered that i do not have friends who aren't on my computer

so after almost a year and a half for whatever reason, That's Shovel Knight: The Whole Trove. gotta be one of the best troves you can buy. it's a good meal of a game. that's why i kept putting it down for so long between campaigns because i was so full with my big belly of good games. now if you'll excuse me i have 349 other shovel knighted games to play to fully catch up on my shovel lore before that 3D one comes out

badge looks terrible i don't remember when or why i spent money on it