This is kind of a replay, as I've beaten this on Steam plenty of times and played it a ton, but I've never done it on PS4 before. I was over at a friends' place for the coldpocalypse the past day and a bit, and I'd brought my PS4 and some controllers so we played through OctoDad, once with just the 3 of us and then with their third housemate for a 4-player run!
The premise of OctoDad is that you're a dad who is secretly an octopus. You need to keep secret from your wife and children as well as from the world at large your true nature while still going about your daily business. It's a very silly game where the entire mechanical premise is that it's REALLY hard to be an octopus pretending to be a human, so you control each leg and arm individually. It's something you can learn to do well eventually, but it purposefully controls so awkwardly that it's great fun to bumble through with friends (particularly on the mode that has you all shuffle limbs you're controlling every time you complete an objective XD). Verdict: Highly recommended. This game is just an absolute joy to play with local co-op. The writing is as silly as the premise, and it's a great thing to spend an afternoon or evening going through with a couch-full of friends ^w^
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Though I have beaten this game before, I've never done a 101% run like this. HbomberGuy's marathon charity stream of a 101% run last week inspired me to pick the game back up (once again) and try (once again) to do a full completion after giving up on it a couple years ago. I ended up clocking in a 16 hours and 37 minutes (which would actually put me at #62 out of 65 speedruns of 101% if I were to submit it to Speedrun.com somehow XD). For some reason the resale shop in my hometown had a CIB copy of the Japanese version for just two bucks more than a loose American copy, so I picked that one up, but it's functionally identical save for some bug fixes (making it technically the best version to play on a mechanical level, though only slightly). This was really one of the last unfinished projects of a game from my youth, so I'm really happy that I was finally able to plow through those last few horrible golden bananas and do this XD
Granted, I did get 201 golden bananas, but you only actually need 100 to beat the game. The game is well known to be a collectathon to end all collectathons, and it succeeds (for better or worse). DK64 usually has its Tag Barrels and the constant swapping between kongs to backtrack through areas for more collectables cited as one of its greatest issues with pacing and design, but I would say another big part of that is how inconsistent the difficulty is. The beetle races are some of the hardest bananas in the game to get, and there's one in world 2 (out of 8 ), and mini-games like Beaver Bother are almost comically broken and difficult compared to others like Teetering Turtle Trouble which you'd have to nearly try to lose at. That said, you only actually need every other golden banana in the game, which is a far lower ratio than in Mario 64 or in Banjo (though not by that much, admittedly), so you can really pick and choose which ones you wanna go for and which ones you can't be bothered with. A bit like Xenoblade Chronicles, trying to complete the entire game is something that doesn't really offer much reward compared to just completing it normally, and will disrupt the pacing to the point where you're really going to hamper your enjoyment of the game compared to just going for a normal playthrough to see the credits roll. That said, I do still really like this game. It has a lot of nostalgia for me, from the characters' designs and their characters displayed through tiny, silent interactions with the environment (like how Chunky will turn around in the minecart stages to wave hello at you) to how fucking EXCELLENT the music is. I was surprised at the time at just how long it took to hit me that this game has some really damn good music in. Verdict: Recommended. If you like N64 platformers, this is definitely one to give a go if you're hungering for more after the Banjo games and Mario 64. It has far too many problems with its pacing, difficulty curve, and framerate (and good god does this game have some framerate difficulties) for me to ever say that it's better than either Banjo game or Mario 64, but it's still a good enough game to stand far above the worst members of its genre whom it also shares a console with. I had a friend over to hang out over the weekend, and she quite likes horror stuff, so I thought why not give this game a go (she prefers co-piloting to actually playing games herself). I don't really recall where I heard about this one, but I do vaguely recall picking it up on sale over Halloween on PSN after reading good things about it. At any rate, I was certainly glad I had a friend to cower behind going through it, as this game gets proper unnerving pretty damn quick XD . It took us about four hours to complete it with only marginal amounts of getting lost, although we did get the good ending.
Detention is a Taiwan-developed game in the style of Lone Survivor, that is, it's a Silent Hill-like game that takes place in a side-scrolling 2D-environment. However, unlike Lone Survivor, this game has no combat and far fewer enemies in general, instead opting for a heavier emphasis on the story and atmosphere aspects, with enemy encounters being restricted to sneaking past them. Granted, the game takes place in 1960's Taiwan, a restrictive place under martial law, and tells the story of a girl named Ray who wakes up to suddenly find herself trapped at her high school during a hurricane after falling asleep in class. The ghosts you're avoiding are all actually from Chinese folklore, and the notes you find scattered around tell you how to deal with them in ways that align with actual superstition. This largely revolves around holding R2 to hold your breath as you quietly walk past them, but without much UI for enemy line of sight or how long exactly you can hold your breath, sneaking past enemies is always tense without ever being too difficult. The friend I played with grew up in China, so it was cool to have her confirming so much of what the game was talking about and giving in sight into what was happening or things to try (down to the achievement we accidentally got for jokingly trying to dial the Chinese emergency services number on an in-game phone XD). Things slowly but surely go more Silent Hill-y fairly quickly. The game is, for the most part, more focused on having you slowly discover the story and solve puzzles than go past monsters, so there aren't really that many monster types or encounters. That said, because the monsters are so few and get fewer as you progress through the game, when they DO appear, it can be a proper tense experience as you need to get back into old habits of how to sneak past them. The story is a story of national anxieties intersecting with personal traumas, and gets more into the narrative behind why all this is happening more-so than the monsters surrounding it as you go through the game more. Despite wearing its Silent Hill inspirations so unabashedly on its sleeve, I thought this was one of the better games I've played as far as handling the actual Silent Hill storytelling style is concerned. Information is revealed piecemeal to you but not in an aimless fashion. It allows you to slowly form conclusions that seem right at first but soon get challenged with new information as the broader narrative slowly opens up. Even then, the story is effectively told entirely through flashback scenes and notes you find, so there's a lot of onus on the player to put together the whole story, as the game never spells it out explicitly. It was ultimately something I really enjoyed, even as someone who isn't the biggest horror game fan. Verdict: Highly Recommended. It's a bit short for the MSRP of $15, but if you want a horror game with a very different setting that handles its genre very well, Detention is a game well worth picking up, especially on a sale. It does more than just copy-cat, and uses its unique setting and kinda paper-drawn art style to create a play experience that feels familiar but with its own distinct atmosphere and narrative. If you are into Silent Hill, this is likely something you'll enjoy going through on your own on a dark night. Even if you aren't a big fan of actually playing Silent Hill games, like me, but like horror stuff, this is a very approachable game for more casual fans of the genre with how simple and forgiving the overall mechanics are. I'm a big Katamari Damacy fan, and replaying/playing through all of them in one big marathon a couple years back, I stopped after my 4th game and left Katamari Forever on the shelf. I finally took to trying to finish it these past few days, and while I'm glad I waited, this was still a fantastic experience. It took me about 12 hours to do the whole game, and that was mostly just playing each stage once (although failing some quite a few times XP).
The main reason I'm glad I waited is because this is more of a greatest hits collection than a brand new game. This is a collection of 32 stages, almost all of which are comprised of a selection of the best levels from the previous 4 Katamari games. However, as a result of how previous entries reused actual stages for many levels, you don't often actually repeat the stages, meaning this has the best stage variety out of any previous Katamari game. On top of that, there are tons of remixes of songs from previous games as well as a "Katamari Drive" mode that you unlock upon completion of the main game where your Katamari is SUPER fast (making some stages very easy and some SUPER hard). Other than that, it's the same old Katamari you know and love. You use the joysticks to roll the Katamari around the stage, rolling into smaller things to clump up your main Katamari into a bigger and bigger destructive force as you try and meet the goal of the level before time runs out. The physics engine is great, so it plays as well as you could hope for. The load times are also SUPER fast, and there's FINALLY an instant retry button on the pause menu, and those two quality of life features alone make this a very easily recommendable game. The only slight negative is that when you start getting REALLY big or in really item-packed levels, the framerate tanks pretty hard. This doesn't really affect play though, as the whole game slows down too, so you aren't losing time or anything. The story is as light as ever and the writing is as silly as ever. The King of the Cosmos has knocked himself unconscious by hitting his head on a star, so The Prince and the Cousins build a giant Robo King to replace him until he wakes up. Going back and forth between the Robo King's more general "build it really big" missions (as he contemplates the terror of his existence as an explicitly temporary sentient being) and the sleeping King's dreams (which are more specialized levels, like the first game's "get one cow or bear" level) while he spouts nonsense about how he's supposedly lost his memory are both very entertaining. The graphics have a kind of style that makes them look less matte and flat as previous entries and now have more of a sketchbook look, like there are pencil hashes on textures instead of them just generally being flat, bright colors. It looks nice, but has some occasional very annoying problems. The King's levels have a monochromatic tint to every type of item you haven't collected yet, and this can make already hard levels (like where you need to collect/avoid very certain kinds of items that were made more obvious in their original games by their coloring) far harder than necessary. That poor decision on how to color the King's levels is really the only serious complaint I have with this game. Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you're only gonna get one Katamari game, make it this one. It has a crazy amount of levels and stages, online play, local co-op, smaller mini-games, and tons of high-scores to aim for as well as presents & cousins to collect. This game's mission statement was to be a Greatest Hits collection for everything Katamari, and it has succeeded in flying colors. Considering how well Katamari ReRoll sold on Switch, I really hope we can get this game a Switch port because it absolutely deserves it~ I picked up this game on the recommendation of several friends that it was the best part of GTA4. The copy I got was the standalone pack of the two DLC's, so I checked out the first DLC, The Lost & The Damned, first and HATED it for the whole couple hours I spent with it. The Ballad of Gay Tony immediately hit me with a much better style and color palette and a more engaging story, but that wasn't exactly a high bar to clear. It took me a little under 10 hours to do just all the story stuff.
The Ballad of Gay Tony follows the escapades of the titular character "Gay" Tony as you play as his business partner/body guard Luis Lopez. Tony is an aging gay man who is going through a bit of a midlife crisis and has borrowed a ton of money from some really bad dudes to keep his clubs open and to fuel his drug habit, and the game consists of Luis going around and fulfilling obligations to these mafia-types to pay back Tony's debts as well as clean up his other related messes. The story is by far the best part of the game, as Luis and Tony not only have good chemistry, but they're also just fairly well written characters. Tony is a bit of a stereotype, but not in a grating or obnoxious way as GTA so often loves to do. The rest of the main cast are certainly more on the line of obnoxious/offensive in how they're portrayed, but the game makes up for this in how well acted Luis is, as his straight-man (no pun intended) way of dealing with things is a consistently entertaining foil to the madcap cast of characters he has to deal with. The pacing of the story is all over the place, as characters are picked up for certain missions and then never spoken of or referenced again. Sure, you can hang out with your childhood friends and go to clubs or play air hockey together, but once you finish the couple missions with them and unlock the totally optional (thank god) "drug war" combat sections, you never engage with them again in the story, and the same goes for a decent number of the guys Tony owes money to. The overall narrative is carried heavily by the likability of its characters, and if you hate the characters (which I honestly wouldn't blame anyone for in a GTA game), this game is likely gonna be a really miserable slog. The world of GTA 4, with all of its "satire" of American pop-culture is honestly as grating and not funny as ever. The radio stations in the cars have good music, but are so often interrupted by such miserably annoying fake advertisements I often found myself listening to songs I didn't even like just so I could get off of stations that were playing ads. This is an element that also really adds to that aforementioned "miserable slog". Anything that isn't the story is a flat-out negative in this game. GTA 4 may've been popular at the time, but MY GOODNESS has it aged poorly. Even without the beige filter that The Lost & The Damned put over everything, this is still a really ugly game. The cutscenes look pretty good still, but that doesn't make up for all the texture pop-in and ugly textures the actual game is FILLED with. It also runs pretty badly on a 360, with the framerate pretty consistently diving into areas where it begins to affect gameplay as well as the lack of RAM on the console consistently leading to super annoying crap like cops spawning literally just out of your line of sight so outrunning them takes FOREVER. The other side of this also means that some NPC's who I'd need to start a side-quest or even just buy a hotdog to heal myself occasionally just wouldn't spawn, so I'd need to just look around or leave and come back so they'd finally spawn in. The driving isn't great, but it isn't bad. It was certainly annoying enough that I hated doing any races in the game because if you hit a bump on the curb (or a piece of scenery trash) you FLY into the air like you're made of cardboard. However, the REAL sticking point for why this game is so consistently not fun to play is it's main meat of most missions: the combat. This game has an insane amount of shooting in it for a game where the shooting is so god damn bad. First of all, you don't have a weapon wheel. You just tab between weapons by hitting right and left on the D-pad. You can also only hold one type of each weapons (how many types there are is unclear, as you only cycle through them and gun stats aren't a thing visible to the player in any way), they aren't upgrade-able, and a lot of the better guns you get through missions aren't actually sold in stores and therefore buying ammo for them is impossible (yet they DO sell RPG launchers in stores, so whatever). The basic task of gun maintenance and even knowing which guns are better than others is needlessly obscured and cluttered. Secondly, combat in missions is made even more frustrating by the fact that your enemy radar is terrible. Very very frequently, if your current mission objective doesn't involve killing enemies, you won't even be shown enemies on your radar, just the interaction points you're trying to tick off to get through the mission. So some missions you have an ability to plan around more than what you can see, and others you can't. It's entirely arbitrary, and makes the awkward system that is actual gunplay even more of a pain to deal with. Lastly, and most importantly, is the aiming and shooting. Aiming is done in a very confusing system that the game takes far to long to try to adequately explain to you in any detail (there is a controls menu you can look at at the pause menu, but there are three different control sets, and the labels for what each button does blink between different types of situational actions ever couple seconds, making it an absurdly difficult menu to read. I literally never figured out how to aim and fire weapons while driving, let alone change weapons while driving). You hold LT to lock onto an enemy within your line of sight with the gun you currently have out. If you wanna free aim, you gotta half-hold LT, or take out the guy you're currently looking at. If you're in cover (which is different from just crouching), sometimes you can fire multiple times at what you're aiming at with the auto-aim, and sometimes you can't. It's very circumstantial and I never figured out the nuances behind it. I have to stress that the most horrible part is really the aiming itself, especially in cover. I turned the aiming sensitivity all the way up, and the speed at which the character aims the guns was just never consistent and always jittering all over the place (especially when in cover), making hitting anything not auto-aimed THAT much more of a pain in the ass. Add this all to how you can die really quickly, and really the only thing I can say that's any good about the combat-packed mission design is that at least the load times are mercifully quick. Verdict: Not Recommended. GTA 4 is a game whose systems have aged very badly. Saints Row 1, for all it copies from GTA's style, improves on its mechanics to such a high degree that I find it retroactively staggering that a game I thought was so mechanically flawed was so superior to this game. Don't even get me started about Saints Row 2, which just blows absolutely everything about this game out of the water. If you really want a "drive around and cause mayhem" game on your 360, Saints Row 2 is just about as cheap as any GTA 4 stuff, and is a far superior (and enjoyable) play experience than GTA 4, Gay Tony-version or otherwise. Unless you just HAVE to see the story, I would stay far, far away from this historical building block for the open world-city genre. It was on sale for the new year, so I finally picked up the final part of the BOXBOY trilogy. I loved the last two, so I thought I'd enjoy this one. I was right! This is an excellent close to the series, although I'd be lying if I said I didn't hope it continued in some form (perhaps a spiritual sequel).
I found the 2nd game BOXBOXBOY! a bit underwhelming in retrospect, as the just two boxes thing didn't really spice up the main game (granted the bonus levels were hard as usual). Bye-Bye BOXBOY! has levels with special powers for your blocks (rockets, bombs, warps, and snake), which really spice things up, in addition to little escort missions as well for some worlds. The puzzles are also well designed with a good difficulty curve as normal for the series. The bonus stages are once again properly tough as well, with some really creative uses of the new powers it introduced earlier (each new power and escort level is only in that particular world. They don't carry from world to world). Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you're just gonna play one BOXBOY! game, let it be this one. It's by far the best paced, designed, and polished of the three, and it's a steal at the current price of 3.50. You'd be hard pressed to find a better deal for a better puzzle game on 3DS ^w^ I had some down time at a friend's place while we waited for their boyfriend to do some errands (we were effectively in between games of Super Mario Party), so I just decided to kill some time and show them some Night Slashers because it's silly campy fun.
It's a pretty shameless Final Fight clone from Data East in '93, but it's a fun clone. It's got a graphic horror movie theme, and the VA is SO bad it's hilarious. It's also a great port to the Switch and you can play it with 3 players with only Joycons, so that's another plus. It's easy to play with only 3 buttons (attack, jump, and special), so anyone can play and at least muck about for fun as you also have infinite continues/credits. Verdict: Highly Recommended. It's a great little game I love having as something I can just play on the Switch whenever, a lot like how I feel about something like Snipper-Clips. $8 well spent, and if you can find it on sale, even better! |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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