More digital games I've owned forever! Pictobits is a game that I ported over from my DSi that I actually got for free. It was one of a few games my DSi's previous own had bought, but I guess the people at Gamestop didn't wipe the DSi correctly, so I could just redownload what they'd bought off of the eShop. Score! It's the only one of Nintendo's old Art Style series of puzzle games that I own, and I thought it was about time that I see it through to the end. Many years ago I finished 11 of the 30 stages, and this time I finished the rest (as well as replayed all the old ones). All in all, it took me about 2 or 3 hours to play through the whole game.
The concept of Pictobits is that you're matching colored sets of descending blocks on the bottom screen that then form 8-bit pictures that appear in the upper screen. Block are picked up and put down again by tapping them with the stylus, and oddly enough you put them down in the order you picked them up, like you're stacking them in a tower (e.g. pick up red, blue, then white, the first one you'll be putting down is white). You can match blocks in horizontal and vertical lines of four or longer, or of rectangles of 2x2 or higher. The thing is, that you can only match blocks with the ones descending from the top of the screen, and those sets of blocks will freeze in place (turning into normal blocks you can pick up) once they come in contact with anything. This means that you can get filled up with clutter REALLY quick if you aren't fast on your feet, especially in the last 20 or so levels. You have some emergency buttons though. You can tap the POW feature to wipe away the bottom two rows of blocks as well as send all floating blocks rocketing to their lowest possible position (at the cost of one unit of your maximum amount of held bits), but you can also get those carry positions back by spending 5 coins (which are earned when a match is made). It's a really addicting little game, if a tad frustrating in the hardest levels. The levels themselves are based off of old NES games. The big recognizable ones are Marios 1 and 3 as well as Zelda 1, but there are also some less common ones like Wrecking Crew, Excitebike, and Ice Climbers. There's even a pair of levels dedicated to Nintendo's own NES "Baseball". The bits create the picture on the top image in tune to the music, which is composed of slight remixes of classic themes from the game whose picture you're building. The music ranges from good to pretty damn good, and the credits music especially is fantastic. The game isn't entirely perfect though. I say the last 20 levels are hard, because there are 15 normal stages, and then each has a "dark world" version, which is really just a whole new level based on that game as well. To unlock them, you need to spend your saved up coins on the menu screen (you also unlock tracks in the jukebox this way on the title screen). The coins feel really unnecessary in this regard. Unlocking these stages requires a not super painful but still present amount of grinding stages over and over for coins because of how expensive the later ones are, and it feels really unnecessary. There's already a feature on every level where if you complete it fast enough with a high enough score you get a star-rank near your high score. Why not have those unlock the dark world stages? Very puzzling bit of design there that, while certainly not deal breaking, brings a tinge of annoyance to an otherwise really fluid, fun experience. The other complaints I have are mechanical. If you have any difficulty differentiating colors quickly, this game will likely irritate you immensely. There are some levels where the colors you're dealing with are VERY similar in color (like a dull white and a light grey), and I cannot tell you the amount of times I had to restart a harder stage because I'd mixed up two very close colors. The other annoying thing is that you pick up and place blocks on a grid, but that grid is invisible, so if you're trying to set up a big chain for the incoming blocks, you may well mis-tap the screen and end up putting down something in the wrong place or nothing at all because of a slight miscalculation. This irritation goes the same with picking up blocks. There was many a time where I put down a block only to realize it was the wrong color because I'd mistakenly picked up two before when I meant to pick up one. The controls are generally fine, and they certainly don't make the game unenjoyable, but they will very likely irritate you a handful of times if you wanna see the end of the dark world levels. I don't think they could really be any better with the control mechanism being the way it is. It's more of a necessary evil of how this game's concept demands its execution to be done, and it's about as good as it could possibly be outside of providing an in-game grid for reference (which would've been really nice, if I'm honest). Verdict: Highly Recommended. You're probably going to have to pirate this if you wanna play it these days, unless you wanna track down a DSi with the game on it, as the Art Style DSi games died with the passing of the DSi eShop. That said, it's an excellent puzzle game and a real shame that it's been "lost" in that way. Hopefully Nintendo does a big collection of all the Art Style games on Switch or something. Pictobits is a game that isn't exactly as ingeniously addictive as Tetris, but it manages to make something interesting and engaging out of that tried and true "dropping blocks" puzzle formula with a fantastic presentation layered on top to boot.
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Playing so much PS3 recently, I started to think of other games I've had on my PS3 for AGES that I never finished, and Tokyo Jungle was one of the first that came to mind. I've owned this game for over 8 years, and got a bit bored with it last time and never ended up finishing it. Granted, I would argue that "finishing" Tokyo Jungle in just seeing the credits really isn't the overall goal of the game, I finally saw the credits. I beat the story mode and got every trophy, and it took me about 15+ hours over the course of a weekend.
Tokyo Jungle's premise is that all humans have vanished. Ten years have passed, and escaped pets and zoo animals have reclaimed the streets of Tokyo as have the local flora. You play as all sorts of animals, from a pomeranian to an ostritch to a raptor to a mammoth, surviving as long as you can and racking up a high score. This game is ultimately a score attack survival game. I would describe it as kind of a micro-Dead Rising with a bit of a rogue-lite twist in how things change from run to run. One in-game year is about a minute, and the game effectively ends after 100 years (a new apex predator is introduced that can't be eaten and is EVERYWHERE, so a meat eater will definitely starve, and a plant eater (aka grazer) has a very hard time finding opportunities to eat and mate). Your animal needs to eat to keep living, and after about 10 years your max hunger starts ticking down until you effectively cannot eat. The remedy to this is to mark territory to "take over" an area and make potential mates appear. The more you eat, you'll level up from rookie to veteran to boss, and the higher your rank, the higher ranked female (you have to play male animals) you can attract and mate with. The better your mate, the more siblings (and therefore effectively attacking partners/decoys and extra lives) your next generation will start with as well as likely better stat boosts. Then the next generation continues the whole thing and the map status gets a little bit of a refresh. Progressing through generations is also what gives the game it's rogue-lite-y elements, as the tiny stat boosts you get continue though not just to your next character, but to your next playthrough as well, so play an animal enough times, and it'll slowly get more and more beefy and strong. There are two types of animals to play as: predators (carnivores) and grazers (herbivores), and the game does a good job at making them feel different and one not distinctly worse than the other. Predators tend to have runs focused more around combat and trying to take out enemies as they go (at least ones they can take out). You have a normal attack, a command to sorta make your litter mates attack with you (although I'm still not sure how exactly that works), and can use the right stick to directionally dodge. You also have a super attack button bound to R1 that you can use to do a stealth attack or a counter once an enemy super attack is dodged. My most successful run was with a jackal, and the key to surviving against the lions and larger predators that come to eventually populate the map is to not only know when to pick your battles, but also that you can sometimes take down a larger predator instantly with a stealth kill while your normal attacks might barely damage it. Grazers, on the other hand, are more about being agile and avoiding combat whenever possible. They generally have very low attack, but they also have a double jump that predators lack, so a quick way to escape is often to double-jump onto an above awning, should you be lucky enough to be near one. Grazers are hunting down plants to eat, rather than animals to kill and eat, so while big predators are still a danger, you're a little more at the mercy of how the map spawns. Eating animals, eating plants, and exploring the map can also net you little present boxes that have consumable items in them. You can hold up to ten at a time, and they range from flea-removal shampoo that gets rid of fleas, to a water bottle to remove toxicity and fill your belly, to a magazine, which, for whatever reason, is a full heal to all your stats when used XD The great equalizer between grazers and predators is the factor of map pollution. Over time, especially as the years go on, pollution will strike and leave different areas of the map, and different areas will also suffer droughts of food of all kinds as well. Predators have small stomachs and are generally slower, so although you need to worry about attackers less, the silent killers of disease and starvation are far more present for predators than they are for grazers, and a big part of playing the game is learning how best to not only deal with the other animals, but pollution as well. The map is always the same, and you also have semi-randomized time limited challenges to complete each run for more bonus points, stat boosts for your current generation, and even extra clothes. Clothes are equippable items you can find from defeated foes or for completing challenges. You can hold as many as you want, and once one is found one time, unless it's a special super rare one, you can buy it on the main menu's shop with the points you earn each run acting as currency. You also unlock new animals to play as by completing certain challenges, and they are also unlocked with these points. The different kinds of animals are pretty well balanced too. Sure, bigger predators are tougher and can win fights easier, but their stomachs are suuuuper tiny, so you need to CONSTANTLY be eating or you're gonna starve really quick. This is where I'd say Tokyo Jungle has its biggest flaw. Other than the game getting a little samey after a while (it is a score attack game after all, so that's a given), you only start with two animals, a Shika Deer and a Pomeranian. There are like 30+ animals in the game (with a few being $1 DLC each, one of which is a salaryman in a suit X3), but you unlock them one at a time through challenges which are sometimes super easy and other times brutally hard. You'll hit a few that are no problem at all, and then you'll die loads of times just trying to do the next one. And retrying those challenges isn't fast, because the requirements to start them become being more about time passed in your current run, like needing to be in your 3rd generation and having completed 4 other challenges before the map event to unlock that animal will start. Top that off with some animals playing very similar or literally identical to each other (the Jackal and Lyceon literally have the same stats and move animations, and one unlocks the other), and it makes the whole unlocking process really grueling, albeit super satisfying when you finally pull it off. I unlocked about a third of them by the end of my time with the game, mostly predators (that cheetah challenge was just too hard XP). The other big issue I wish the game had fixed is the map, particularly around pollution. Though areas will get polluted, the only way to tell that is to catch the little bullitains that come up about it in the upper right of the screen while you play (while your attention is quite logically probably focused on other things). While you can check how much food is currently in a map area, you can't look at any other aspects of the map's current conditions, and that can be really irritating when you suddenly wander into a super polluted area you were hoping was full of food, only to find it's full of super toxic food from all the pollution (which give calories if eaten, but also TONS of pollution). The game's story mode is a series of structured missions taking place in the game map. You unlock them by collecting data files as you play the survival mode, and once you collect all present on the map, you'll unlock a new mission (for a total of 15, including the tutorial). They're sorta serious, but they acknowledge how silly the premise is fairly often. They're often about taking down a series of enemies around the map, or sometimes are HORRID stealth stages that the game's stealth mechanics just are not good enough to make fun (and whose checkpoints are not nearly generous enough). It's a neat little diversion that explains why the world is the way it is, but it's certainly not what I'd call the main draw of the game by any respect. There are a couple animals locked behind completing story mode though, so it's worth going through if you really really wanna unlock everything (although no trophies are tied to animal unlocks). Verdict: Highly Recommended. Tokyo Jungle, by its sheer premise, won't be for everyone. That said, it's really good at what it does, and if this sounds like something you'd enjoy, I'd say it's definitely worth checking out. The only hesitation I'd have at recommending it is that the nature of its gameplay does make its appeal a bit niche. It does have local co-op play, which can be very fun, although the game is also pretty hard, so that can be an obstacle to enjoying it with someone unless you're just going out for silly fun. Especially if you can find this on that PSN physical bundle along with Journey and that other game, this is definitely a game worth picking up and trying out for the sheer silliness and the good challenge of being a Pomeranian forced to take on a raptor XD The last game I'll be doing for the 2010 Retro theme, it's yet another game I owned at one point, didn't really gel with, and then put down. Unlike the previous couple games I've done that with, however, I ended up really being thankful I went back to this one. I finished the Japanese version of the game after doing like 80% of the stuff (I'd guess) after like 20+ hours (I couldn't find an in-game clock to tell me how long I'd played it XP).
3D Dot Game Heroes, awkward title aside, is a really loving homage to the original Dragon Quest and Zelda games made by Silicon Software, FROM Software, and IREM. The conceit of the story is that long ago, an evil demon king tried to take over the world, but he was foiled and sealed away by a legendary hero. But that was when things were 2D. Here in Dotonia, the king gets bored of living in 2D, and he brings the world into 3D for the heck of it. This has the unintended side effect of allowing an evil wizard to get the evil dark orb the demon king was sealed in and try to resurrect him, and the king calls upon you to collect the six colored orbs throughout the land to try and stop the darkness from returning. Aesthetically, it's a really pretty mix of 8-bit Dragon Quest and 8-bit Zelda 1 from the visual to the music (which is good, but some of which is like, there is no way this isn't breaking copyright infringement it sounds SO much like what it's paying homage to XD). Mechanically, however, it's much more Link to the Past or Link's Awakening than Zelda 1. You collect magic meter upgrades, pieces of "life" (not pieces of heart, oh no, these are apples, not hearts UwU), you go into dungeons where you get a new tool that helps immensely with traveling the world, your main weapon is a sword. Heck it even has bottles you can fill with health potions just like LTTP. The dungeon layouts are conceptually and aesthetically, but the way they're designed with multiple floors makes them feel more like the Gameboy Zelda games than anything. There are also a lot of NPCs to talk to (often with their own irreverent, at least somewhat game-referencing sidequests to do), and a lot of sidequests to do for them (some of which give you items that do literally nothing, but you need all of to get the hidden final sword). The things the game does most uniquely to anything else are how it handles the swords. You start with a cruddy wooden sword, but quickly move up to more powerful swords. The thing is, you can upgrade them with money, and at full health it gets screen-fillingly MASSIVE and actually has the upgrades you pay for money for (which is a neat incentive to not get hit). Your sword also doesn't slash like Zelda. Hero just sticks it out directly in front of them. Many swords can up given a turning upgrade, but that means you need to manually turn when you slash if you want to slash in another direction. The manual turning takes a bit to get used to, but it really comes into its own after a while and makes the overall experience feel more than just a good Zelda clone. The other great thing I loved about the mechanics was the monster encyclopedia. Like many RPGs out of Japan, this game has a bestiary. The thing about this one is that it's an item. Not just an item, a WEAPON. You need to physically hit every monster you want to register in this thing, and that goes the same for bosses up to and including the final boss himself! Finding ways to register the bosses in the monster book was one of my favorite parts of the game, and it makes for a neat sort of self-imposed hard mode that you can do to unlock the ability view their 3D models in the book and also silly blurbs about the enemy/boss in question. Finally, the game also has a character creator where you can make your own hero. The game comes with 6 presets, but you can use colored blocks to make your own character however you want. You can make a Ryu from Street Fighter or you can make just a solid cube of blocks. Whatever fancies you~. Interestingly, male characters have a +1 to power, while female characters use 1 less magic (not below a minimum of 1 though) to cast spells. It's a neat addition made extra neat (if likely unintentionally progressive) that gender is just a label put on your character. It's just a setting you pick when you make your character, and how they look is entirely down to how you design them. I don't really have much in the way of complaints other than things it perhaps does a little too much in favor of being a retro-style game rather than a 2010 (technically 2009 in Japan, but who's counting) game. The minor complaint I have is that the world map is a lot like Link to the Past's, where it's a giant view of the overworld. The only issue is that, because it's 3D, it's like looking down at a diorama and not a 2D projection, and this makes actually seeing detail on the map very difficult (and often totally pointless). The game also has a bit of a performance issue in areas with lots of NPCs and/or water effects, and has a bit of a problem with soft-crashes. Especially in the throne room in the main castle, like 50% of the times I went in there, it locked on a loading screen and I had to reset the console to start playing again. It's basically only a problem in that one room of the game, but it's still really annoying. More importantly, for the TONS of side quests in the game, there are no quest markers of any kind. Your key item list also only gains items. It doesn't lose them when you give something to someone to complete a quest. This means quite often if you come back after, say, a day of not playing, you can have totally forgotten if you even did a certain quest (or what the details were, who the people involved in it were). It's sweet that they were really going for quirks that made old games what they were, but especially in this game that has some fun, interesting side content (that locks some neat weapons and upgrades behind them), it is far more frustrating than fun to need to either rely totally on my memory or a guide to have a chance of seeing that stuff. Verdict: Highly Recommended. I haven't played a ton of Zelda clones, but this is far and away the best I've played. It succeeds in standing tall among Nintendo's own greats, and feels like a lost Legend of Zelda games from the SNES days in many ways. If you have any kind of nostalgia or appreciation for this style of game, this game is very well put together and whimsically references that nostalgia itself a lot over the course of your 3D Dot adventure. An absolute must-play for any fan of 2D Zelda games. Another game for the 2010 Retro theme, and although it's a repeat, it's been over 8 years since I played it last. It's a game i remembered fondly and had been meaning to play for a few months now, and a friend of mine in America was nice enough to track down a copy to give me when I came to visit (the game never came out in Japan ^^;). I thought I'd remembered a decent bit, but I had forgotten a TON about this game. I went in expecting something just okay, and a decent portion of that my nostalgia, but I left with something better in many regards than I had originally given it credit for. I beat it on normal mode and it took me about 8 or 9 hours.
Splatterhouse (2010) is a reboot of the series that brings it into the 21st century. It's a reimagining of the original Splatterhouse story, as Rick and Jennifer go to visit the creepy Dr. West. Dr. West kidnaps Jennifer, Rick is left for dead, and Rick has to use the Terror Mask to get hella jacked and go beat up a bunch of monsters to get her back. Those are still the broad strokes of the story, but Splatterhouse actually surprised me a decent amount with the level of substance it has to its narrative. A lot of the dialogue in the game is Rick and the Terror Mask (delightfully voiced by Jim Cummings) chatting as they go through their quest to rescue Jen and save the world. A lot of their conversations at least begin with the Mask taunting Rick for being unused to horrific violence and generally not being super manly. The Mask has a lot of one-liners or snide comments that are occasionally 4th wall-breaking, but I was either neutral or positive towards most of the humor in the game ("Let's show him why we call it 'SPLATTERHOUSE'", was one of my personal favorites X3). One line of taunting in particular is how Rick secretly loves all this and how he isn't grossed out at all, although it eventually escalates beyond simple taunting. The Mask saying how Rick is really a killer and always has been, "in another game, in another life." "You've been secretly wearing a mask your whole life." Rick even begins to start getting wrapped up in just how visceral everything is and how good all this revenge feels. The game has a lot of broader strokes around analyzing the macho, aggressive aspects of toxic masculinity, but the most focused aspects of it revolve around that line of thinking. Is Rick really a violent person, or is he just doing what needs to be done as a victim of circumstance? As Rick insists to the Mask that he's actually a good, peaceful person despite all the horrible violence he's clearly enjoying partaking in, the game poses the question to Rick, and by extension the player: are who are actions portray us to be, or who we internally insist we truly are? That said, the game doesn't really go quite far enough in a lot of its other comparisons to really mean much. It tries to compare Dr. West and Rick's goals in a way that could make Dr. West sympathetic, but it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny despite working in the moment. Particularly, the way it sexualizes Jennifer seems to be at least partially in an attempt to dissect Rick's macho, protective attitude towards her, but especially with the collectibles being her nude photos, it's really hard to argue that a lot of her presence isn't just T&A XP. Regardless, while it isn't exactly Spec Ops: The Line, it's a fine commentary on violence in games, and it's something I have to give credit to the game for doing (even if it kinda fumbles the landing). Aesthetically, it leans pretty hard into being a schlocky, B-movie sorta horror. There's tons of blood (like, a LOT of blood effects), some pretty grotesque glory kills, and the collectibles in each stage are pictures (often topless) of Rick's girlfriend Jen. If you are at all squeamish about blood, gore, dismemberment, then I would say this game is probably going to be a very hard sell for you. The main saving grace for me is that everything you're fighting (in true Splatterhouse fashion) are monsters and not humans, but they are often still humanoid, so it's not exactly like it doesn't look like tearing off a head or an arm XP. I'm not really a metal fan, so I didn't really care for the vocal tracks, but the instrumental and retro-inspired themes are pretty good. Nothing mp3 player-worthy, for the most part, but something I noticed beyond the gameplay and thought was nice (which is a heck of a lot more than I can say for how I feel when I play most other games where the music just blends into the background for the most part). The game looks pretty good for a 2010 game, and BOY does it suffer for it. The game has some ever-present framerate issues, at least on the PS3 port. Perhaps they're a little better on the 360 version, but I wouldn't count on it being a huge difference. It doesn't usually hinder gameplay to any significant degree, but there are some fights where the game does chug to a near unacceptable level for brief periods. Definitely far from a deal-breaker on a mechanical level, but it really makes it suffer in the visuals department. SPEAKING of the gameplay, it's Splatterhouse, so it's a brawler. It's certainly not Bayonetta, but it's certainly better than Darksiders despite still feeling a little repetitive at times. The game does a good job of varying up the conditions of when you'll fight enemies so it doesn't feel like exactly the same fight yet again despite the overall enemy variety being decent but not exactly huge. The game is fairly difficult, so you're often on your toes as Rick can't take THAT much punishment despite a generous ability to heal. You have light attacks, heavy attacks, grabs, and a super meter. The super meter allows you to do your health siphoning move, do special super attacks, as well as activate your invincible super form. As you kill enemies, the Mask absorbs blood points which can then be spent on new abilities in the pause menu. Combat flows well and feels nice and meaty despite not being super deep, which is exactly how I like my brawler combat. People who like something a bit more technical will likely feel bored by it by the end, but this was exactly my speed when it comes to this kind of thing. The game also has a fair bit of platforming, but it often is either pointlessly easy or frustratingly difficult. In addition to 3D platforming sections where your exact position can be difficult to judge, the game also has 2D sidescrolling segments in an homage to the old Splatterhouse games. The 3D platforming sections are definitely the most frustrating, as Rick's jumping doesn't really feel super great, your windows on when you can jump are often not that huge, and the loading times are not exactly short when you die (like 10-15 seconds) (and on that note the loading screen is also this really obnoxious loop of a monster freaking out at the camera and I have no idea who thought that was a good idea but they were VERY wrong). I don't remember being nearly this frustrated with the platforming in my last playthrough, so maybe I was just more unlucky than usual this time through the game, but that was my experience through the game this time nonetheless. Verdict: Recommended. I wasn't sure how well this game would hold up upon replaying it, but it was actually very pleasantly worth my time. I still hold this up among Enslaved: Odyssey to the West and Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom as Namco's 3 forgotten gems of last gen. It's certainly not perfect and its certainly not going to abide by everyone's sensibilities for gore, but it's a well-realized product and also a great home-collection of the other three retro Splatterhouse games to boot! (no Wanpaku Graffiti, unfortunately). It's getting harder to find (and a bit more expensive as well) these days, but if you can find it for cheap it's definitely worth picking up. Back from vacation, so it's time to finally do my write up for my games beaten in 2019! It was a bit of a huge year outside of games for me, with getting a teaching job in Japan and moving out here in March, but even with that I manged to beat more games than I have in any year since I've been tallying them up annually (the previous high was 70). I guess I have a lot more free time as a teacher who barely leaves the house than I did as a full time student who would go and hang out with friends from time to time
I played a lot more retro games this year than I have the past couple years (certainly compared to last year). Also a lot more repeats than previous years, that's for sure. I guess that's likely a combo of getting addicted to playing through games I know well in English but now in Japanese, and those games being easy/cheap to find between the resale stores in my city and my access to the Wii U Virtual Console. Then all the repeats are also due in at least part to just wanting some comfort food gaming because moving was a bit stressful ^^;. Regardless, the comparisons of Japanese and English versions (at least in regards to my memory) was something I really enjoyed and I hope I can do at least a few more in this new year ^w^ Anyway, now down onto my highlights. I didn't really play many games that actually came out in 2019, so these are just gonna be my favorite/least favorite games I played this year, regardless of their release date. ~Favorite Games (in no particular order)~ Shin Gundam Musou: Flake talks about this game a lot (the English version anyhow) in the Slack chat, and I really enjoyed the first Dynasty Warriors Gundam so I've been meaning to try this out for ages, and what a great use of 800 yen it was. One of the very few PS3 games I've ever put the time into to earn the platinum trophy on, this one absolutely devoured my attention with a combination of how mindless and fun the giant robot bashing is. I didn't really pay attention to much of the "What If" stories, as this was definitely a comfort food kind of game that I got pretty close to when I moved out here and I wasn't really in the mood to look up tons of words to understand a story I couldn't really appreciate, but I still really enjoyed my time with this game. Not quite Hyrule Warriors, but easily one of the best Musou games ever made (and it even got me to watch Turn-A Gundam, which I also really enjoyed ^w^). Final Fantasy VI: It'd been a while since I played this game, and playing it in Japanese was really neat at first, but then I realized just how long it's been since I played this and just how much better than I remembered it actually was to play. Getting a deeper than ever understanding and respect for the story and characters, particularly the villain (although I think that's down to being an adult who's better at analyzing the media they consume, more than it has anything to do with playing the original text of the game) made this one of my favorite experiences of the year for sure. This is also the winner of "favorite repeat" out of the games I replayed this year, I suppose. Paper Mario: Color Splash: A game I'd had for ages and even brought to Japan with me because I meant to play it, on a streamer's recommendation I finally got to playing this game and I'm so glad I did. A welcome improvement on Sticker Star's combat and some of the funniest writing I've seen in a game, I was grinning ear to ear the whole time playing this thing (well, except for all the swearing during the rock-paper-scissors tournaments I suppose :b). I really hope this gets a Switch port someday, because this was really chained down by the stigma of its predecessor (and being released in the twilight years of an unpopular console), and I think it really deserves a second chance ^w^ The Outer Worlds: I got my Xbone at the perfect time to pick up Game Pass and play this really close to launch, and I devoured it. Bringing back tons of memories of an old favorite, Fallout: New Vegas, but with suuuuch welcome modern quality of life improvements. I know very well that some folks didn't care for it, but I adored the story, especially the character writing. To have an asexual major character in a AAA released game, especially one written so well, was just so awesome to see on top of everything else. Not my favorite game I played this year, but it came damn close. ~Honorable Mentions: Blazing Chrome, Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga & Bowser's Minions, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Recore: Definitive Edition, Steamworld Dig 2 ~Game of the Year: God of War (2018). Leave it to Sony to have made the best OoT-style game ever. Great combat, beautiful world, engaging and well-paced story. This game just has it all and it keeps coming. This lived up to and leaped clear over the hype for me. A new entry for my all-time favorites list, god damn I have no idea how they're gonna follow this up, but if it's even close to this good I'll be happy. ----- ~Least Liked Games~ Final Fantasy IV: This will take the top spot for "least liked repeat game" (edging out Mario Party 3). Several friends of mine talk up 4 as one of the better ones but I absolutely do not see it. Granted I was playing the much clumsier Super Famicom original rather than the streamlined SNES port, this game was still such a let down it's easily on this list. I'm not gonna go into it again, as I already did on the actual review, but just how shallow the story is still gets to me on top of just how much of a mechanical step down it is compared to FF3 (even just on QoI features, totally ignoring the differences between the job systems). Tiny Barbarian DX: This game is close to fun, but falls deeeeep into a "far too aggravating to be fun" trap that it never escapes from. Especially in the more recently released 3rd and 4th chapters, there are SO many pixel-perfect jumps, annoying enemy placements, and grueling combat gauntlets combined with not quite precise enough controls that this game is a miserable time. It may have some nice animation, but god damn is it not worth it once you really get into the gameplay parts. Castlevania: Circle of the Moon: Another game I know has its defenders, but I just cannot see the appeal like they can. Clunky controls, a too big and too barren castle, underwhelming or just outright cheap boss fights (that final Dracula fight is one of the worst in the series I swear). I would say that the card system is fun, but the cards are so well hidden that I barely even got to use them because I wasn't lucky enough to find them. I'm really glad that Castlevania moved away from this idea of what their Metroid-like games could be, because this is far at the bottom of the barrel of Metroidvanias in my book. ~Honorable Mentions: Snake Pass, Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story & Bowser Jr.'s Journey, Shantae: Risky's Revenge ~Least Liked Game of the Year: Corpse Party. Anyone who read the review I wrote for this very likely saw this one coming (the longest one of these reviews I've ever written, coming in at just over 3000 words). A decent horror story buried under a mountain of clunky controls, perverse serialization, and crude localization choices, I don't think Corpse Party will be a game I will ever forget for just how much I disliked playing it. I certainly realize that there are games who do the things this one does but worse, and I don't care because I see those as nothing but garbage for the same reasons. Sexualization of minors is a horrifically commonplace problem in the anime industry, and while I'm certainly not going to conquer that issue myself, I very much hope that Corpse Party is the last of that I ever have to be exposed to personally. I played through this for the 2010 Retro TR theme this month, as it's a game I tried but just never got back to a few years ago. Going back to it now, I remember all the ways I felt about it back then, and I still feel them now and can articulate them better. Let's just say it's probably something I would've put down and let stay down once more had it not been the TR encouraging me XD. It took me around 13 hours, according to my in-game clock, to beat the game on normal mode and getting very nearly all the collectibles. I also played the whole game with a Steam Controller, and it worked surprisingly well (although there was one puzzle where it seemed my lack of a right analog stick might make it impossible, but it was only quite difficult instead XD).
Darksiders is a series about the four horsemen of the apocalypse doing individual quests (usually) during/leading up to the apocalypse. This first game stars War, who is confused as only he is summoned to intervene in an unexpected final war between Heaven and Hell. He is defeated by the forces of Hell and the Council (who control balance between the worlds and have the horsemen as their law enforcers, basically) task him with bringing whoever is responsible for destroying the world to justice in order to clear his name. The game itself is often described as a Zelda-clone, in style, but I would say it takes just as much, if not more, from God of War as it does from Zelda. The story is pretty pants. It's paced really terribly, with an okay setup but barely anything through most of the game until the last hour or so when you get a TON. Given the premise, it seemed like it was going to be something like "dark and light are two self-serving sides of the same corrupt coin", but it's far less interesting than that. Other than some unintentionally entertaining really badly directed cinematics every once in a while, the story takes itself too seriously to be campy fun, and it's far too shallow to get much value from on the more serious side of things. It's got some nice character designs, but everything about the game's presentation is fairly lackluster on the whole. It really could've done with being a bit more silly or a bit more daring in trying to frame its serious aspects, but it lands squarely in the middle and ends up being forgettable more than anything else. The gameplay is at times Zelda-y and at times God of War-y. For combat you have a standard weapon and two subweapons, a range of utility/ranged combat weapons (like a grappling hook), as well as consumables, passives you can equip, and money you can earn to buy more moves with. It's ultimately pretty shallow though. The moves you can buy aren't actually valuable because the enemy variety is pretty low and the strategy needed to defeat any of them never really gets beyond "mash X and dodge sometimes". Your combos also don't go together between your main weapon and your subweapons, so there's really never much reason to use anything but your main sword and sometimes your ranged stuff for far away things. Only one of the ranged weapons is actually worth using anyhow. The game has a TON of combat arenas and lots of spongey enemies, considering how bland the combat is, and it drags the whole pace of the game down that much further. The game isn't terribly hard, but enemies do hit quite hard, so you do need to keep dodging if you wanna live. Overall, the combat felt a bit half-baked, and I would've preferred if there was less of it or if it had been more engaging to actually play. On the more Zelda-y side of things, there are dungeons to explore, chests to find full of health, mana, and keys, as well as hidden collectibles to hunt down as well. Heck, the game even has heart containers and an end-game Triforce hunt (in all but name), just in case you didn't think it was Zelda-y enough. The dungeons range from mid-tier Zelda to mid-tier God of War, and are often okay but occasionally outstay their welcomes or have really arduous parts in them. There's a portal gun you get at one point and that dungeon goes on for AGES. Someone REALLY thought they had the inspiration for Portal 2 on their hands at the time, because that puzzle mechanic gets used way more than any other. The boss battles also range from "confusingly short" to "oh my god can this just be over already". Those two states of mind sum up a lot of the different aspects of the game, to be totally honest XP Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I didn't exactly love my time with Darksiders, but I didn't really hate it either. It's just so video games that the only strong feelings i really have about it are "I probably could've played something better" XP. It's not a bad game, and if you're a really big fan of Ocarina of Time-style Zelda games, you'll probably enjoy it more than I did, but the whole thing is a bit half-baked, and your time is probably better served playing the games it's doing an only okay job of copying. After playing through Risky's Revenge, I thought it only natural to move onto the other Shantae game I already owned on my 3DS. It took me a while to have the successive down times to play through it, but I eventually got it done just before I headed back to Japan. I'd heard this one was pretty good, and that's about what I found as I played it, with some not insignificant caveats along the way. It took me just under 7 hours according to the in-game clock, and I also collected all the collectibles.
At the end of Risky's Revenge, Shantae lost her genie powers, so the entirety of this game is Shantae as just a human (so no transformation powers). The Ammo Baron from the first game who bought Scuttle Town has moved in to take what's his, and on top of that, Risky has come in as well to inform Shantae that the Pirate Master is awakening from his undead slumber because of events that happened in the last game. Shantae has to team up with Risky (or really just borrow her ship and her info on where to go) to travel to five islands and defeat the "dens of evil" (dungeons) there to keep him dead for good. The humor is still very much Shantae, although it does wear a bit much at times. A lot of the humor is also tied up in references to pop culture (some hit, some miss), although I don't mind that. The music is nice, and the animation looks great as WayForward are known for. The biggest issue I had with the presentation is that you can REALLY tell the game was designed by men with how the game seems to go out of its way to constantly shove the female characters' bodies in your faces in all manners of costumes and standing positions. The degree to which the four central female characters are constantly sexualized got to somewhere between pathetic and creepy for me, and it's something that brought the whole game down a peg for me. Mechanically, Pirate's Curse is more Shantae but faaar better than Risky's Revenge. It's still the same power-ups for your base attack (a simple hair whip you can make hit harder and/or faster), but the transformations are gone now. They were a gimmick that did nothing but slow things down in Risky's Revenge, so I had no problem with that. Instead you get more moves that incorporate far more easily into how you play the game and don't break the pace. Levels also look more different on the whole, and you also finally have a Metroid-style auto-updating mini-map so you aren't wandering around lost constantly. I would've liked the ability to pin places of interest on the map, but overall the game design is head and shoulders above Risky's Revenge in a way I really liked. That's not to say that the mechanics aren't without their fumbles. The dungeons are still the best designed levels of the game, but the overworlds are still a bit too flat and bland. With the whole concept of going across tons of islands, they didn't really need to have these mostly flat areas connecting to the dungeons or gimmick stages (the running one and the stealth one both suck, especially the stealth one) instead of just having several smaller labyrinths. The signposting is nowhere near as dire as the first game, but it's still a problem (especially if you're looking to get ever single bit of dark magic hidden throughout the game, as some are very fiendishly hidden). Verdict: Recommended. This is a really solid Metroidvania on the 3DS. If you can deal with the signposting issues and the character design, you'll have a good time. It's certainly not the best Metroidvania out there in 2020, but on 3DS, particularly back in 2014, this is a really solid addition to the genre. Another game on Switch I played through with my family while on my visit to America. A game I bought nearly a year ago to play with entirely different people, this was when I was finally around people long enough to play through the whole thing XD. It took us about 8 or 10 hours to play through all the stages co-op.
Human: Fall Flat is a physics-based kiiinda puzzle platformer. The whole game is designed to be beatable with only one person (although some puzzles I have no idea how to do alone), but you can do two players locally and up to four using online play. You are a blobby sort of human thing and you can hold right trigger to extend and grab with (you MUST do both, and can't do one or the other by itself), and can hold left trigger for the left arm. Using the right stick looks around, but it also moves which direction you're pointing your arms. Using the control stick to move and A to jump (as long as your feet are touching the ground), you navigate through a series of stages that get longer with more difficult platforming and puzzles. My favorite part about the game was all about how it handles the co-op, really. First of all there are tons of costumes you can use to dress up your blob person. I was a neon green dog fur suit, and my sister combined a Christmas pudding suit and a Santa hat + beard to make a horrific looking Santa who looked like he was melting and covered in horrible boils after she'd altered the colors on it XD. There's a lot of personalization that you can add to make things just that much more silly X3. The characters have a weird, almost uncanny aspect to how they lumber about and grab things, and it really adds a lot of character to how silly the game can already be. That factors in great with the somewhat malleable solution many of the puzzles have. The game is a physics playground designed for one person, so there is a LOT of strange nonsense and alternate solutions you can come up with if you're determined enough. One of my personal favorites was when I stood on a switch to get my sister through a door, but then the door shut behind her (you're supposed to put a box on it). Instead of doing the puzzle properly, she held the door open with her body, and then I attempted to follow after her only to get my butt stuck in the door, and it took like 8 minutes of ragdoll-ing and pulling to get me un-stuck between all the laughing we were doing XD. The puzzles are really well designed, and you always feel clever for having solved them (even if at times it feels like you DEFINITELY did not do the proper way, and just messed with the game to the point where you did it XD). The game also gets pretty darn hard with its platforming, so having another person to play through it with makes those more difficult sections much more enjoyable to go through. Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you have someone to play with, Human: Fall Flat can be an incredibly silly and fun time. If you're just by yourself, it's still a challenging but well designed physics puzzler. If I had only gone through it by myself, it certainly wouldn't be recommended so strongly, but this is an excellent game to play even with people only sorta used to video games. Not quite the level of Overcooked or Octodad in terms of how easy it is to learn and have fun with, but it follows closely behind~ Invisigun Heroes is a game my brother really wanted to play for the past couple holidays we've gotten together. I discovered it was on Switch a couple months back, or some version of it was anyhow, and he bought it for my Switch this year so we could play together. While he did some other chores, I played through some of the single player content to kill time, and I ended up just finishing it XD. It took me about 7-8 hours while collecting all but 8 of the chips.
Invisigun Reloaded is an expanded rebrand of the original PC game Invisigun Heroes. The core concept is that it's a top-down, grid-based competitive shooter, but the catch is that you're all invisible. Even YOU are invisible! Keeping track of where you are and trying to guess where everyone else may be is the main meat of the multiplayer. Additionally, there are 12 playable characters (3 unlocked by beating 3 of any of the other 9's story modes) each with their own special ability that really affects how you play the game. these can range from launching a drone that can reveal and slow players, to leaping over obstacles, to summoning a destructible block that can block shots. Shots will impact on each other, and you're revealed when you fire a shot or use your special power (usually), and if you bump into scenery, it'll wiggle and show your player color. It's a lot of mind games and we had a lot of fun playing the multiplayer with our sister across the 7 multiplayer modes (we didn't try much of it 2-player since that wasn't quite as fun). The single player mode was added for the Reloaded mega patch (and consequently, the Switch port), as were some new cosmetics and the aforementioned 3 unlockable characters. Each of the original 9 characters gets their own 9 stage series of puzzle stages to go through. Their stages are based on their own particular power, and the 9th stage is a boss fight also tailored to that character (which range from super easy, one-try-and-done to horrific ordeals that require a degree of luck for the boss' RNG to win, at least for me XP). The levels are really well done little puzzles. The difficulty curve is not always consistent and the mechanics some bosses use doesn't always gel with the game's physics (you can kinda tell that the game wasn't designed with these kinds of encounters in mind), but none of those are deal breakers. Checkpoints are generous (usually) and loading times are super short, so it's easy to hop right back in and give it another go~ The campaign has 3 difficulties: Shadow, where you have checkpoints and you aren't invisible; Invisible, where you are invisible but still get checkpoints; and Brutal, where you have no checkpoints. The difficulties don't matter for anything other than Brutal saves your completion times. I did most of the game on Invisible, and a couple of the harder levels (and harder chips) on Shadow. Each non-boss level has a little microchip you can collect, and every 8 you collect unlocks some more emotes for multiplayer (and each campaign you complete unlocks a new cosmetic shot type that any character can use). Sometimes the microchip is just hard to get, other times it might be restricted behind using below a certain number of shots to complete the level, or completing it within a certain window of time. They're a great way to make the game far harder than it already is, especially if you're playing on Brutal XD Verdict: Highly Recommended. Invisigun was already a really good concept for a multiplayer game, and the single player game does a great job of turning that into an action/puzzle game. I wouldn't say it should be your main selling point on the game, but for $20, it's a great competitive multiplayer game for Switch that now has a fairly significant single-player aspect to it. |
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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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