Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Game #18: Super Meat Boy: 16.6 hours
I really enjoyed this, great level design, great controls, great music! And then... then the rocket launchers started showing up, and after that the non-mindless enemies, and everything started going to hell. One of my main frustrations with this game is its tendency for slight changes in timing, or the length a button was held down a few jumps ago killing you when you just miss a ledge.
This effect is massively exasperated when you take homing rockets and homing enemies into account, as a jump that was clear for the last 10 attempts could suddenly result in a rocket to the face because you were 3 pixels to the right of were you usually are when it was fired. A good example of this is a level where jumping over a rocket will result in it curving into the ceiling and detonating harmlessly, however if you just tap the button to do your minimum possible jump, the rocket does a 180 a split second before hitting the ceiling and kills you as you land. It's not really something that can be easily fixed (though the aforementioned ability of projectiles to turn on a dime is unnecessary), but considering that you rarely have time to react to changes like that it's a giant pain in the arse.
I completed every light world level and every dark world level up to and including 4-1. I also got A+ ratings on every level in the first 6 worlds bar 6-5. Didn't play many of the warp zones, or any of the glitch zones. I almost gave up on 4 Letter Word but got through it in the end.
Game #19: David: 1.2 hours
David is an abstract 2D platformer (technically, you have infinite jumps and it plays more like a shooter most of the time) where you play as a cube that needs to shoot animalistic blobs made of rhombuses. Your means of attack involves clicking David which activates slow-motion and begins charging your weapon which is a scatter of coloured dots, and dragging the mouse cursor to where you want to shoot. The game consists of a series of boss rooms with bosses to kill. There's some neat and interesting boss designs, including a final boss that must be unlocked by finishing each level on both difficulties, the harder difficulty increasing the enemies speed and reducing you from 8 to 1 hit-points.
One level is different from the others in that you are being chased by a cloud of spheres through a maze where the obstacles hurt you without your weapon. At the end of the maze you retrieve your weapon and make short work of the cloud. This level was a pain in hard mode, and took me much longer than all of the other levels as the cloud is directly behind you the whole time and the controls and physics aren't really suited to that short of level.
Overall, interesting game with a neat aesthetic but nothing to really write home about. Super-short if you don't get into the arena mode (which you shouldn't), not really worth the $5 price. I picked it up for $1 so I can't complain.
Game #20: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Trials & Tribulations: 20.2 hours (Added 13/03/2015)
Oh boy what a ride this has been. I'm going to borrow Apollo Justice from my girlfriend later in the year but for now I need to step back before I burn out from the 50+ hours of Phoenix Wright I just played.
Godot is an awesome antagonist, and the amount of backstory, intertwining cases and the fact that the flashbacks aren't even in the right order work together to form a really good build up. My main criticism on the story front would have to be how little pomp and circumstance there is about Godot's true identity, I would've liked more his former life to be talked about in the first case before the guy who obviously turns into him randomly shows up in a flashback.
I'm going to miss having to leave this universe for a bit, even if their legal system makes absolutely no sense at times.
Game #21: The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition: 6.3 hours (Added 17/03/2013)
I
think this was good. I dunno I guess I'm not in the mood for so much adventure game logic at the moment. Story was pretty good, though there was a lot of slowly walking back and forth between places. The inclusion of the version switch was nice, but I played it mostly in the modern mode. The hint system was a little busted too, sometimes it would trigger an event far in the future and start trying to teach you how to solve it.
Game #22: Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number: 8.5 hours (Added 22/03/2013)
I heard that some people didn't like this one because it was too much like the first one. Looking back I can sort of see it, but I don't really agree that it makes it a bad game. Hotline Miami 2 manages to up the ante on story, level design, soundtrack and variety of character powers. Mechanically little has changed, but it was so good to begin with that's okay. I guess it's from the Galaxy 2 school of sequels in that way.
Game #23: Indigo Prophecy: 8.7 hours (Added 30/03/2013)
Well that was a game of ups and downs. It was so boring at times I had to push through in small pieces, and then occasionally something interesting would happen or there would a neat set piece and my interest picked up again. It would've started strong if it wasn't for the god-awful PC controls that took the first few scenes to get used to. I liked the characters alright, especially Carla, which means it sucked extra hard when she got completely derailed at the end and falls in love for no other reason than the main character needs a love interest and she's the only person around who isn't a male vagrant. I'm so mad about this that I can't even get worked up about the plot going especially crazy. At least that was interesting, at least the DBZ fight scenes and mystical Mayan bullshit were interesting.
Christ David Cage get your shit together.
Game #24: Bioshock 2: 16.7 hours (Added 4/04/2015)
This is easily the Bioshock game with the best combat overall, but as everyone says the story is a bit naff. It's also very hard to not see a lot of the game through a very cynical lens, as it shows its roots as a sequel the creator never wanted at times. I also don't remember the Little Sisters referring to the Big Daddys as "daddy" as incessantly as they do in Bioshock, preferring "Mr Bubbles" which hardly ever turns up here. Lamb starts out interesting but she seems to be on autopilot by the end of the game (which is way better than Bioshock's end sequence). Minerva's Den stays quality the whole way through though, and manage to throw in twists I either didn't see coming or only saw coming at the last second, which was good.
Game #25: The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D: 37 hours (Added 06/04/2015)
I'm actually kind of glad that I never finished this on Virtual Console. It suits a portable pretty well, though it does require some changes that some people aren't happy with. It also makes me wonder what a Zelda game with no full-scale dungeons would be like. The dungeons in this game are top-notch, and the bosses feel very different from usual Zelda fare which I really liked. But the real joy of this game is exploring, doing side-quests and tackling the many smaller areas that are around the place.
My one major criticism is that the circle pad isn't really suit to the high speed manuevering of the Goron and Zora transformations. I never quite felt in control during those segments.
Game #26: Cloudbuilt: 6 hours (Added 07/04/2015)
Okay let me get this out of the way first, this game's soundtrack is great and I hope more indie developers hire Jacob Lincke in the future. Secondly, this game is really pretty. It uses a fairly simplistic cel-shaded artstyle with a cross-hatching filter that does an excellent job of making it look like a moving sketch, though when it's flying by at 300 miles an hour you don't always notice it.
Then we come to the all-important gameplay. Each of the levels takes place on a sea of rubble in the clouds, the main components being various blocks and panels you need to traverse to get to the goal. The character is equipped with a gun that enables you to dispatch enemies and a jetpack and rocket boots that enable you to run along and up walls and double, triple and quadruple jump. This is balanced out by a limited fuel supply that recharges when you are not performing these actions. However the addition of fuel replenishment pickups leads to a lot of parts where you will be wallrunning for extended periods, and these are easily the hardest parts of the game. The levels are mostly open-ended, with at least two to four routes from any given Point A to Point B (save for one or two chokepoints a level) so there's a lot of on-the-fly decision making about which route you seem the most likely to be able to handle. It gets really hard really fast, but when you pull off some of the harder sections it feels amazing and even traversing simple sections is really satisfying.
Something else that's really interesting about Cloudbuilt is the progression structure. There's a lives system, which are generally looked down upon these days, but it seems to exist for a completely different reason to the classic versions that have their roots in arcades. There are checkpoints scattered throughout each level as well as pickups that let you place one of your own, and each checkpoint restores you to 6 lives. After you beat the prologue and the first level you unlock 2 more levels (+1 free DLC branch), and each of those levels unlocks another 2 that form 4 main branches that continue for another 4 levels or so. The difficulty curve down each branch is roughly equivalent, and each rank you achieve on a level above the lowest increases the number of lives you enter a level with by 1. The net result of all this is that the lives system serves as a warning telling you that you're stuck, and that you should go try another level you've unlocked. By the time you come back to that level you will probably have more retries available to you. Your mileage may vary on how useful this is in practice, but I thought it was a neat idea.
Thematically these escapades in the clouds are a manifestation of the brain of the main character, a soldier, reorganising and integrating with cybernetics following a traumatic accident in an unseen war. She monologues about the implications of the incident and the floating dream-scape she's now inhabiting, and admittedly the story itself is forgettable. What's memorable about this though is that each branch of the map represents a different path that the character can go down as she slowly recovers from her surgery and this is represented by subtle changes in level design (such as the path of returning to the army being stormy, relatively linear and littered with enemies). At the end of each path is an ending, though the accompanying cutscene essentially only differs in lighting and voice-over, I thought that thematically the names of the four levels at the end of each path (Regret, Inspiration, Acceptance & Redeployment) did a much better job of conveying what the endings, and the story as a whole, were trying to do with significantly fewer words.
I can easily see why this game got a somewhat mixed reception from GAF when it released but I absolutely loved it. My main gripes are with one of the enemy types that is a shielded drone that tries to ram you and can only be defeated by avoiding it's sight for about 20 seconds so it drops its shield. It's a bit flow-breaking in the instances that you can't just run past it and it can and will follow you for a long time if you do.
My other main gripe is with the controls, your action keys (jump/wall-cling/wall-jump and boost/ascend wall) work perfectly well for the most part but having boost and ascend while wall running on the same key can get really frustrating. If you want to be the most efficient you have to activate your jets to maintain height on a wall just before the wall running animation becomes really obvious. The problem with that is if you hit the button too early you air dash into the wall instead which looks
really cool but uses up a lot of fuel that in some levels is necessary to make it to the next pickup. I'm not sure how you'd fix it but it is a problem.
Game #27: Valiant Hearts: The Great War: 4.9 hours (Added 10/4/2015)
This is an amazing, touching story about a family torn about by a war they had no stake in. Many moments, especially the ending are very powerful and I think the art-style was used pretty effectively to show a lot of the horrors of war without making it too explicit.
And then occasionally and evil cackling German man shows up and you have a boss battle. BECAUSE VIDEOGAMES.
Overall though, I think the fact that the game seems to stop every few scenes and try to be a videogame (even though it doesn't seem to know why) doesn't drag down the overall experience too much. The good most certainly outweighs the bad, I just wish it was a little more consistent in its use of tone.
Game #28: BOXBOY!: 9.8 hours (Added 12/4/2015)
General consensus is about right on this one. Amazingly charming game with a good amount of content, it just doesn't get that complicated or consistently difficult until over 100 levels in. The 5 post-game worlds where it's actually throwing everything it has at you are pretty great though. The unlockable costumes are even more adorable than the vanilla game and the score attack and time trial levels are really good. I managed to finish all the score attack levels but could only figure out how to beat par on half of the time trials.
Game #29: The Starship Damrey: 1.9 hours (Added 15/4/2015)
I feel like there's a lot of wasted potential here. They really nail the feeling of seeing the world through a camera attached to a robot. That's in part due to the constant HUD and scan-line on the screen but also having a point of view that's lower than you're used to. The atmosphere is good, exploring a lifeless ship with only the whir of the robot's servos and the glow of its torch for company.
The problem is with everything else. At it's heart this is a pretty mediocre adventure game kept alive by the mystery of what happened to the ship, and the resolution to that, while shocking in the moment just kind of falls flat once its over.
I also hate,
hate that this game has cutscenes. Going into a lift? Third-person cutscene of the robot entering the lift. Doing an action more complicated than moving or picking up objects? Third-person cutscene of the robot doing the thing. It just took me right out of the feeling of controlling the robot, which is all the game really has going for it and I can't figure out why they did it. There's no reason that the cutscenes that are in the game couldn't have been in first-person.
Game #30: HanaFuckyouNoESakura Samurai: Art of the Sword: 5.7 hours (Added 22/4/2015)
AKA Iaijutsu Simulator 2011. As stated on this forum before, it's basically Punch-Out in feudal Japan with 3D movement and less complexity. I found the 3D movement doesn't add anything though as the lock-on is automatic and disengaging it is an easy way to get yourself killed.
If this game was a little shorter I would've hated it. The end-game enemies have a nasty habit of starting attack chains that are only differentiable after they've initiated the first attack and you're busy dodging it. It was only near the end I came to realise that for all the game's encouragement to do perfect dodges performing a good-enough dodge or dodging for the worst case scenario and missing an opening are acceptable courses of action. After that some enemies became a lot easier to deal with, especially the enemies that also use iajutsu because by the time you realise they're going to do two attacks it's too late. But if you dodge twice assuming they will the worst then you'll be okay, even if you miss the opportunity to kill them if they only attack once.
Putting really long levels infront of the bosses also soured the boss fights a bit, and there was only about 4 backgrounds/levels to fight in. But in the end I did get the hang of it and thought it was pretty enjoyable.
Game #31: Valkyria Chronicles: 52.6 hours (Added 03/05/2015)
This game is amazing. Looks great, sounds great and tells an engaging story. Though the story gripped me the most at the incident on the Malberry Shore I've been waiting to get home and play more every day for three weeks straight. All the little gameplay tweaks they've made from standard TBSes are great, especially the removal of a 1 move/turn limit for the units. The amount of personality crammed into each of the optional characters is also really nice considering that it's all told through incidental dialogue, special abilities (another really cool mechanic) and personnel files.
It wasn't without it's flaws sure. But apart from the unit balance drifting all over the place in the early and mid-game there's nothing major and
eventually all of the classes come into their own but it does take a while. I also ran into a few 120fps related bugs, but for an old PS3 game the port options are pretty great.
Game #32: Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box: 12.7 hours (Added 07/05/2015)
I approve of the addition of the memo and the fact that digits are now entered in individual boxes instead of sequentially. Taking a train journey is a nice change from wandering the village of the first game, even if this game does eventually settle down into one city.
I'm getting sick of the constant "The Professor and Luke decide to do the thing they just said they decided to do" cutaways too considering they take 3-5 seconds and serve no purpose. Oh and that ending, at first when the twist was revealed my first reaction was "Oh fuck off", but it's so audacious I can't help but be amused by it.
Game #33: Broken Age: Act 2: 6.0 hours (Added 09/05/2015)
Not really sure what to say about Act 2. It's obvious they've taken some of the feedback from Act 1 on board. There's a few tweaks to the difficulty here and there, and some really obscure old-school puzzles. Art design and acting remains great. Not sure how the story will play out as one game but I hear it's fine which is good considering how much changes at the end of Act 1/start of Act 2. I think that ultimately Broken Age was a victim of its own hype, but it's a good game and I am satisfied as a backer.
Game #34: Unmechanical: 2.2 hours (Added 10/05/2015)
This is a really cute physics puzzler that in a lot of ways reminds me of my Game #9, Bob Came in Pieces. However instead of a customisable space-ship with thrust-physics based
movement you're a simple robot capable of simple and consistent movement and a single tractor beam underneath you. I think Unmechanical (which came out two years later) is the better (and certainly prettier, the input from the developers of The Ball really shows) game, but Bob Came in Pieces has more interesting ideas due to it's increased complexity.
The atmosphere in Unmechanical is really good, with lots of alien machinery and dark areas. It's pretty short at 2-3 hours, but I only had a problem with that because it ends
very abruptly. There's two endings dependent on a choice at the end and I didn't even realise I was making the choice, or that I was even close to the end, until the credits started scrolling across the screen.
Game #35: Jazzpunk: 1.8 hours
Well... that happened...
Not every gag hits in Jazzpunk but damn do some of them hit hard. I actually laughed out loud when I tried to interact with a turtle and ending up throughing sais and a pizza at it while a old-school spy movie sting played. It's a pretty shallow joke but the fact that it comes out nowhere makes it work in the moment. I think that sums the game up pretty well too.
Game #36: Crimson Shroud: 13.3 hours
Well it wouldn't be a Guild game if it wasn't a bit of a mess I guess. This is an RPG short-story, set entirely inside a single dungeon and framed as a tabletop campaign, with second person narration and figurines for the characters and enemies. There's also a bit of decision making but it's all completely inconsequential, fix that and you
nail the style they're gunning for. The combat system is basic but still brings some interesting things to the table, with a combo system that encourages you to use a different type of ability each turn to earn dice which you can spend on bonus power or accuracy for attacks
Now... the bad... there are only a few enemy types in the game. Skeletons, goblins and zombie goblins are the fodder and will be armed with either staves, axes, swords or bows. Then there's about 7 or 8 boss enemies some of which end up mixed into encounters when you replay them. That would be fine if they were used effectively, but one of two events or bosses require you to grind for key item or good weapon drops. To add insult to injury in the last part of the game there's three boss fights in quick succession and the middle one is by far the hardest. I spent a few hours grinding for the equipment to win the fight and by the time I did the final boss had turned into an absolute cakewalk. Don't get me wrong, it's a fun game, it was just very trying of my patience at times.
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