Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Game #37: Kirby and the Rainbow PaintbrushCurse. (Fuck you NoE): 20.2 hours
100% completion baby! At the beginning I thought I wouldn't bother unlocking and completing the challenges that required beating each boss with no damage. But challenge rooms and redoing those bosses proved a nice distraction from the main levels on the occasion that they were becoming a pain, or if I missed a collectible in a long one. A handful of the challenge rooms were straight up copy pasted between sets though which was a little weird.
It's really unfortunate that such a pretty game can't be played on a TV. But at the same time I doubt you'd be able to get the same amount of accuracy even with a cursor. What this game is really crying out for is a better Gamepad screen.
Oh and one more thing. The worlds are Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo... and Purple. PURPLE?!?! I hope one day someone asks the localisation team what happened there.
Game #38: Snapshot: 14.5 hours (Added 29/05/2015)
Neat puzzle platformer. The gimmick is being able to take photos of boxes/creatures/fireballs etc to remove them from the level and then deposit them somewhere else. Since you can rotate the photos and they conserve momentum it's a mechanic that lends itself to a lot of variety. The capturable elements mostly stay contained within their own world, or set of levels (the game is structured so that there are 9 courses of 3 levels in each of the 4 worlds) but they're used pretty well. The soundtrack's nice too. I wouldn't say it would be amazing enough to pull anyone out of a puzzle platformer funk but it's a good time.
Game #39: Wolfenstein 3D: 12.4 hours (Added 06/06/2015)
At first I didn't like this at all. But eventually I got used to the controls and the wild damage variation and I ended up really enjoying it. It holds up pretty well, but Doom still holds up better.
Game #40: Code Name S.T.E.A.M.: 30.9 hours (Added 07/06/2015)
I'm left wondering how history will remember this game. It's really good, but two design decisions have turned a lot of people off (and the one that's a fair criticism has already been fixed). That and the graphics, but I think that was overblown too because they fit the setting and hardware really well.
Lots of options going into a level, which is great. Some enemies are a giant pain in the arse but there's usually strategies that can kill them easily. Also I restarted missions a lot once I'd seen the layout of the level and I could pick a better set of units. Unit balance is pretty good, a few people are pretty situational but they're all interesting except for one that's just awful.
Game #41: Splatoon: 14.9 hours (Added 08/06/2015)
I'm going to get this out of the way first. In the end what made me decide to put down the game for now was me getting fucking sick of the online ecosystem. Today was a public holiday in Australia so I got experience the laggy arse global matchmaking system in all its glory. I also had a string of Splat Zone team problems where I would be stuck with the one useless player and the other team would get the guy capable of winning a match by himself 9/10 times and the lag didn't help. I'm sick of it, I'll come back to it later. Nintendo you disabled voice-chat to improve the online experience but the online experience is still shit. I also wish you'd add signal strength indicators to your online games so I can tell if it's my connection or not. Ugh.
Now that the rant's out of the way, what did I think of Splatoon? It's great. Music's great, sound effects are great, the weapons all feel satisfying to use. Single-player is pretty unique, the final boss is amazing. The game has charm out the wazoo, making you want to spend time in the hub even though you don't need to. It definitely has it's problems though. My biggest gripe would be that changing your loadout or accessing the options menu can only be done from the main hub for no reason, meaning you have to leave your lobby or the single-player to change anything. Another problem I have (that's partially on me) is the controls. The sensitivities are different for each axis with no way to change it which should be fixed, but I also can't quite get to grips with the motion controls, which are really necessary to compete. I'm often finding myself trying to use the sticks to aim when motion would suffice but I have to stand still to focus on aiming to be able to get my hands to use them. That one's on me though.
Looking forward to jumping back in in a few weeks or something. Hopefully the online is still healthy enough that my gripes haven't gotten even worse in my absence.
15/06/2015 UPDATE: Turns out that a new map came out right after I gave up and drew me right back in. I'm still playing Splatoon daily and actually getting okay at it now.
Game #42: D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die: 4.4 hours (Added 15/06/2015)
Swery's style is really interesting to me. D4 is in many regards a better game than Deadly Premonition, however I think that's to its detriment. It's still a very quirky, surreal and enjoyable experience. But I feel like Deadly Premonition's odd jankiness contributed a lot to that atmosphere, so having a more mechanically basic game that actually functions correctly means that D4 loses that. Swery incorporates another element of Twin Peaks (the giant) into this game in an amazingly creepy way, and sprinkles in a bit of Wild Card virus for good measure. Keep up the good work you crazy bastard, David Cage should really be taking notes.
Game #43: Age of Empires III: Complete Collection: 39.9 hours
I initially had to try hard to not keep comparing it to AoE II, it's a very different game and that's okay. But boy did not having resource drop-offs throw me for quite a while. It's definitely it's own thing (and closer to Age of Mythology if comparisons have to be drawn) but it has a lot of interesting mechanics going for it.
So what's new? Well instead of the history spanning empires of the previous 3 games AoE III is more focused, with you taking control of a colony in the new world. To this end you gain experience and each level you can chose a bonus to be sent to you from your home empire, from resources, to extra troops or permanent bonuses. This means that if you get into a big enough fight you can play all of your trump cards and spawn a new army very quickly. The binary choice system when aging up from Age of Mythology reappears in a reduced form, with each age change giving you a choice between two one-time bonuses (usually resources or units) that are granted to you when the research completes.
In addition to this the game features native incampments, where you can build a trading post to gain access to new units, and trade routes where a trading post will bring you periodic resource or experience bonuses. The trade routes are especially interesting because if you invest in upgrading them the enemy can benefit if they have a trading post elsewhere on the trade route.
One thing that didn't really work for me is the story. The campaign spans 3 generations of the fictional Black family as they try to defend the fountain of youth from an ancient cult. It touches on some American history but it's mostly a fictional story instead of the fictionalised versions of real events found in the previous games. Luckily this is corrected in the expansions, with the campaign from The War Chiefs focusing on the character in Act III of the base campaign's father and son as they get involved in the Revolutionary and Sioux Wars respectively. Then Asian Dynasties has three short campaigns with two focusing on the rise of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the Indian Revolution, the Chinese campaign is weaker as it's a fictional story about a Chinese treasure ship sailing to the New World.
Civilisations are much more diverse than AoE II (though that's not hard), the Asian civilisations from the second expansion in particular have a lot of quirks. The Japanese can't hunt, the Chinese can only build preset groups of units and the Indian villagers are made of wood. They also build special buildings that grant them permanent buffs in order to age up.
So yeah overall I had a lot of fun exploring this unfairly maligned entry in the franchise, even if it has its downsides and there are better RTS from its era.
Game #44: Yoshi's Woolly World: 27.4 hours
I haven't played Yoshi's Island or Yoshi's Story in a long, long time. I never played any of the handheld Yoshi sequels, but I read a little bit about why people don't like them. That said, this feels like the Yoshi's Island sequel everyone's been waiting for. It doesn't do a whole lot new, but it does old very well.
As is standard for modern Nintendo platformers this is easy to get through and the challenge is in finding the trinkets. There are four side objectives to complete per level and three of them are meaningful with wool getting you new skins, flowers unlocking the special stages and stamp coins unlocking new stamps for Miiverse. The special stages are like Tropical Freeze's in that there's a noticeable jump in difficulty and a focus on moving forward at all times, which is a welcome change of pace from the rest of the game.
Really (assuming you enjoy Yoshi's Island style gameplay) you get out of Woolly World what you put into it. There's Mellow Mode which gives you the ability to fly, and badges you can pay for that do everything from making you immune to bottomless pits to revealing where all the secrets are. But if you want to play this game old-school there's a lot to do and it's very enjoyable. I almost cracked 30 hours and I didn't even get to 100% completion, I didn't bother with finishing every level with full health, nor did I manage to defeat the last fight in the boss tent. I also went through the pick up the one or two things I'd missed with the secret revealing power up on my second/third runs through levels.
Game #45: BRAINPIPE: A Plunge to Unhumanity: 0.5 hours
Threw this on to kill time before bed because I saw that it was super short. Probably a bad idea. Concept is pretty simple, fly through a twisting psychedelic tube dodging obstacles while weird music and sound effects play. Repeat for 10 levels. Worthwhile audio-visual experience if you see it on sale for 99 cents.
Game #46: Alien Spidy: 3.6 hours (~30% completion)
*sigh* What a shit show. It's taken this long but a game I've played for the challenge has finally beaten me.
So I've been scrolling past this game in my Steam library for years and it's always caught my eye. The main character seemed cute, I liked the name, so I figured lets finally give it a go. The gameplay turned out to be failure on almost every level, but there's still a glimmer of potential here, so where do I even begin.
Alien Spidy is a platformer in the vein of Super Meat Boy, it has decent music and cute graphics so that's a plus I guess. You control an alien called Spidy and try to move from one end of the level to the other while collecting point orbs. Your abilities consist of moving, jumping and a web swing, and that's where a long chain of "this would be okay, but..." problems begin.
The game controls badly. You lack air control in a game that sorely needs it, walking over the slightest bump in the ground is enough to make you count as being in the air and not be able to jump and it's all around floaty and unresponsive. This would be okay, but the game is set up as a precision platformer. With the controls as they stand it just isn't that satisfying to play, which brings me to the web swinging. The game doesn't give you any tools to help you plan your swings, you have to be able to judge when and where to shoot a web to get the exact arc you want. This would be okay, but the game is structured around collecting series of score orbs.
This would be okay, but the scoring system makes collecting individual orbs next to worthless. Orbs combo with scores of 5, 11, 19, 29, 42 (+ bonus 5000), 59 etc, and the combo resets after less than a second, making anything other than sets of 5 completely worthless. This would be okay, but the game forces you to care about your score. Each world starts with every level but a handful unlocked. Secret levels require a 4-star rating on a certain level to unlock and the last level, completion of which unlocks the next world, requires an average of about 2.5 stars across the rest of the levels.
This might be okay, but the game actively tries to prevent you from being able to achieve a good score. Even though gaining points is really, really hard. When you die or otherwise return to a checkpoint you lose 1500 points. On top of this you lose points at a constant rate of 100/second no matter what you do, and then the game tells you the exact breakdown at the end leaving you to cry over a base score that would've unlocked new levels bled away by delays.
On top of this, when you die or otherwise return to a checkpoint the level many obstacles do not reset. Enemies or obstacles that move back and forth stay moving during the respawn animation, meaning that the timing in each life is often inconsistent.
The game has native 360 controller support, as it debuted on the XBLA, but since there's no reticule and you need to be able to make precise web shots it's almost impossible to play with a controller. Even with the mouse it can be a crap-shoot as the cursor is very thin and a light blue colour that blends into the sky on all of the daytime levels (about half) when the background is scrolling.
The game is also very buggy. I had to limit it to 60fps because it would glitch out and get stuck in a repeating twitch animation preventing me from shooting my web otherwise. Occasionally the game would lag, not run at a low frame-rate, actually lag. I would shoot a web, nothing would happen and I would fall to my death, then halfway through the death animation the web would appear and I would snap up to it.
So despite all this. I spent a good 3 hours with the game (the first .5 was tinkering with the framerate to get it working). I made it through the first world and a good 10% of the way into the second. Through the game forcing me to repeat the levels over and over and over I saw glimpses of potential. When you pull off a web swing properly through memorisation and fly through a line of orbs it does feel good. I figured I could see this through to the glitchy, uneven end. The second world had introduced a number of interesting new mechanics and I was keen to see what the third and final world had in store.
And then tonight I loaded the game up and it had deleted my save.
Upon checking the forums I discovered that this is a widely reported issue that the developers have never commented on. Then I immediately came here to type up this report. The reviewers were right on this one, it's not worth the glimpses of something good through all the shit, stay away.
Game #47: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl: 29.2 hours
Whoever told me this game was open world was sort of lying. Whoever told me this game was awesome was not. The first few areas feel like an open world but as the game goes on it starts to feel more like early Crysis wide corridors.The atmosphere is amazing, the entire way through the game you know that death is just around the corner and it gives the whole thing this wonderful sense of foreboding. But you still feel like you're a lot stronger by the end, at the beginning you have a double-barrelled shotgun and a pistol that can't hit anything for shit so a lone military soldier or a pack of wild dogs might be your downfall. By the end you've gone powered armour, regenerating health and rifles that can hit someone in the head from twenty paces but a few powerful soldiers will still tear you to shreds if you're not careful.
Buggy though. The alerted state of the AI can also carry over when you load a previous save SOMEHOW which screws with a few missions. Also you can tell that this game had a long and difficult development cycle, the subtitles often don't match the dialogue and the quest descriptions are very off sometimes. There's a lot of talk of sneaking into bases in the objectives but enemies are too perceptive for true stealth to be viable in any of those instances. You're better off making some noise and then sneaking to a different spot and killing the enemies while they're trying to flush you out of where they think you are.
Overall, great experience, looking forward to playing the others at some point.
Game #48: The Cave: 8 hours
I quite enjoyed a lot of my time with this game, but having to play it three times to see every section of the game was a giant pain in the arse. Luckily once you know what to do you can breeze through all of the repeated content but there's so much of it. I really liked the art-style and sound design though too.
Game #49: Boot Hill Heroes: 16.1 hours
Great game, got good review from RPG sites, has an 89% positive on Steam. Nobody fucking bought it (it's at about 4000 on SteamSpy). Hell the only reason I have it is because I Kickstarted it after seeing Youtubers I like plug it.
Boot Hill Heroes was basically pitched at Earthbound in the Wild West, and it more or less succeeds at that. The art-style and sensibility is very Earthbound, the graphics are basic but serviceable. The soundtrack balances the Earthbound, Wild West and SNES styles required of it very well, but it's Jake Kaufman so I'd expect no less.
I think its humour lacks a little something that Earthbound had. But the battle intro and outro text was always a joy to read for the first time (like a group of 6 geckos that think they can overpower you but start squabbling and pointing fingers at each other when they lose). That's easily compensated for by how much thought has gone into both the combat system and quality-of-life though.
Combat is a fast and engaging ATB system where you can always see when your opponent's next action is about to occur and cancel your attacks at any time. By judging the strength/nature of attacks based on how many action points your opponent is trying to spend you can time actions to sit back and save action points to take advantage of gaps in your opponent's defenses or to shore up your own when a big attack is coming. In addition when all 4 party members have selected an action the battle speed increases by 2-3x until the next action occurs. On the other end you can pause the action if you're feeling overwhelmed trying to control 4 people at once. Also worth mentioning is that one of your equipment slots is hats, which do not affect your stats but slowly teach you new abilities (of which 4 can be equipped for battle at a time) ala the Final Fantasy job system.
The game includes up to 4-player co-op as well and a lot of polish has gone into it despite the developer's insistence that it's tacked on. I played the whole thing with my girlfriend and despite some trouble in the first 6-10 hours with party members leaving and returning all the time preventing us from easily delegating roles it all functions really well. From the pause menu you can assign each party member to different controllers/the keyboard at any time, and while the lead character (which you can cycle through with Select) is walking the party around other players are free to mess around in their equipment and ability menus.
Also worth mentioning is that the game was split into three parts during development and the second part (since rechristened Boot Hill Heroes 2 is not out yet), so the story is very introductory at this point and ends without much closure.
This game was never going to light the world on fire, but it's a solid effort that has a lot of little touches I don't see very often. It's definitely worth giving a go if you like old-school JRPGs.
Game #50: Rocket League: 13.2 hours
I probably don't need to describe Rocket League, everyone already knows what it is. Features are barebones except for the wealth of customisation options but that really just makes the game clean, pure fun. I'm not great at it, and I got burnt out trying to unlock everything but once my funk wears off I can see myself dipping into it often for a few rounds.
Game #51: Chantelise: A Tale of Two Sisters: 12.1 hours
I wanted to drop this at first. It felt clunky and weird, it was a little confusing and the difficulty spike at the first boss felt insane.
It turns out I was approaching the game all wrong, it is a very clunky hack and slash but it's not as unfair as it first felt. It's a little grindy, and expects you to play each of the 5 levels multiple times before you beat it. This is counteracted by the exit to each part of the level unlocking when you kill everything in the room and then staying unlocked for subsequent attempts letting you just run straight to the boss.
The dodge move has horrendous start and end lag and a bad button combination (jump + attack) but in the end I learnt to live without it. The lack of attack options kind of sucks (3 hit combo + magic) but the magic system makes up for it. When you hit enemies they have a chance to drop elemental gems, you can hold six and they are consumed in reverse pick up order (starting at one and upgradable to a maximum of 4) to change the resulting spell or add modifiers to it.
Not a great game, not even really a good game, but strangely enjoyable and compelling.
Game #52: Picross e6: 25.2 hours
More Picross! If you didn't like the other Picross e games you won't like this because little has changed. The most notable change is that all of the 5x5, 10x10 and 15x15 puzzles are duplicated between the Picross and Mega Picross modes. It's nice to have both variations available but at the same time having to go through each puzzle twice kind of sucks.
