2 - The Gardens Between

Fun little puzzle game, I had to look up two puzzles as I just wasn't seeing it, but apart from those the rest felt solid. Looks good, and some fun island design. It's short, but it shouldn't have been longer, this was a nice experience.

23. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening - Switch

First timer here.  It's easy to see why this is so revered as a 1993 Gameboy title, but played first as a reboot it's a touch trickier to asses.  Getting the old stuff out the way first - it's close to mind boggling to me that this is based on an OG Gameboy game.  As mentioned elsewhere I had no idea that machine hosted games this complex.  I've watched a few videos and I'm very impressed by it.  So, big shout to the original, but from here on in we'll be focusing on the reboot.

Don't panic!  It's still, mostly, an excellent Zelda entry.  It lacks the intricacies of ALttP but the combat is fun and the dungeons are mostly high quality.  The last 2D Zelda I played was Minish Cap (in 2017 iirc), and I'd put the majority of these dungeons above what was on offer there.  The update is chunky and lush - non game-breaking framerate stutters aside - but it's a shame more wasn't added to alleviate the feeling of being totally stumped.  The phone shacks help, but they're not a complete cure.  Which clearly makes this a game best enjoyed by those who have sampled its delights before.  With Google as my new Navi I successfully muddled through, but I'd probably still be stuck if I hadn't reached for pointers here and there. 

I was reasonably confident I knew the ending going in, and yup.  Again, that was probably quite something in a 30yr old game but I doubt it would be put on such a pedestal in 2020.  Good though (and probably the best thing I can remember from a Zelda game in terms of storytelling), just not amazing!!!1

Toyed with a [7] but with its roots taken into account it scrapes an [8].

Not updated this thread for a while. Apologies for the content dump.

10. The Floor is Jelly (PC)
One-man-dev minimalist platformer effort. Drop through a door, bounce around the environment and puzzle your way through to the exit. There’s some good ideas -nice, precision, meat-boy-esque stuff and a fair chunk of it is enjoyable. The levels mix stuff around and add crazy buoyancy effects from water, tinker with the gravity, brain-frying platform activation sequences and mini maze things. 

The jelly physics have their limits though. You can warp and distort the stuff in all sorts of ways and you can end up clipping through a wall or a floor fairly easily. One level I was one side of a wall and the exit just the other side. But to get over the wall I had to go up this huge tower with all sorts of tricky stuff lurking. But I thought the wall looked thin enough to glitch through so I just bounced against it and stretched it a bit and slipped through. Some times I got to an exit with no idea how because I just slipped through something I wasn’t supposed to. It's not a persistent problem because usually you're just jumping on fairly thick surfaces that don’t bend around too much but it's there quite a bit. 

The final levels starts playing with the parameters of the jelly. It starts ok with the floors becoming like a melting marshmallow, but then it decsends into shitvillle. Having it glitch and vibrate madly, just like he’s playing with attributes and messing around with the sliders in Unity or wherever. During one part you have to know when this mad glitchy jelly is at the right height to jump from but it’s on on some random fluctuation algorithm and it’s essentially just a lottery. Some of it starts expanding out in random directions and then you get jammed between two bits of the scenery and thrown off screen and you die. None of this final section works at all well. But a lot of the game is (ahem) solid. [7]

11. What the Golf (iOS)
I enjoyed the abundance of video game references. The content is just kitchen-sinking it,  everything thrown in there and it’s more hits than misses. The rough rule is anything that doesn’t really roll properly, like a house, gets a bit tedious. Round things are pretty good fun. And the vehicles are great stages but the single swipe control becomes a bit sketchy. First person holes are poor due to gyroscope merchanics. No one idea sticks around too long though and it’s not too tricky to keep cranking through the levels.  It’s really brimming with ideas and fun rip offs. And the progression system doesn’t ever really force you to churn through the content. You can dodge anything you’re not enjoying but fill your boots with the better stuff. Decent effort, enjoyed it. [8]

12. Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow (Snes)
Cold Shadow is a blindfolded, ninja alter ego of a Hawaiian-shirted private dick by the name of Maui Mallard who is an alter ego of well-known Disney mascot Donald Duck. You transform between either of the first two twerps as they solve some missing magic statue thing or have to find something or stop someone. I didn’t follow the details. Neither MM or DS were ever seen before or after in any other media. 

It’s an animation-heavy platformer. And like Earthworm Jim, Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure and (to a lesser extent) Aladdin, that animation comes at a huge cost of the platforming being all over the place. Aladdin did an excellent job at designing around it’s own limitations. This doesn’t. You’ll pick up hits without doing anything wrong, collision detection is the fuck etc etc

The level design is ok, you have to pick up a certain amount of jewels and stuff per level. The barrier for getting through is pretty low but it encourages you to hunt around a bit. The camera is a mess. It shifts and jolts around with your movements like they’ve coded it to be operated by a drunk. So it’s a 16-bit licensed platformer measuring somewhere in the poor to mediocre range, a [6] at best. But wait! It has an eye-poppingly vivid colour palette, some great little ear-wormers on the track list and some big dog, hand-drawn, 1990s Disney Renaissance era, cartoon animation. The amount of hand-drawn frames in this game is obscene. Huge levels of squashing and stretching, smearing all over the place. There's something like three separate idle animations for each of the two characters. That's probably more frames than eg Sonic has in his entire game. It's an absolute joy to look at. It's really worth checking out a youtube playthrough to get a look at some of it if you're at all interested. There's a well-designed, incredibly well-animated and enjoyable platforming adventure game inside this but it's completely buried beneath an avalanche of piss poor programming.   

13. Counterspy (Vita)
Solid but unremarkable 2.5D stealth bobbins. Enjoyable enough for the short time it takes to complete. The Defcon counter that runs between levels, that can potentially end the game if you fuck up or you’re careless, is a good touch as it keeps the tension ratcheted up nicely. [7]

14. Avenging Spirit (Gameboy)
Excellent old platformer. You are a ghost. You have a ghost energy life bar. Possess an enemy. Take on their skills and their life bar. When they die, get to another one quick before your ghost life bar runs out. Very stiff and slow controls by today standards but it's otherwise good, and would have gone down a treat in my old pile of gameboy games. Plenty of replay and variety in trying to complete it as you can experiment with different characters and seemingly infinite continues. There’s a couple of power house enemies - a laser rifle guy and missile firing robot - these are the big guns that you really need to find and keep possession of if you’re going to get through some of the later bosses. I took a standard gangster into one battle and it was fruitless so I took a missile firing robot and whupped him. This is a solid [9] by 1991 Gameboy standards and I liked playing it but it's too slow now to recommend it.  [7]

Hall of Permanent Abandonment
2. Velocity 2x (Vita)
Very enjoyable top-down shooter and platformer switch-betweener with teleportation stuff. Great soundtrack, nice little minimal story. Both shooting and platforming elements are solid but the platforming wouldn't survive as an enjoyable game on its own. You're switching between each quite fast though so it prevents tedium. 
At probably about the half way mark, I thought this might be a [8], scraping a [9] in terms of how much I liked it. There were a couple of issues with it at this stage but I was happy to overlook them. 50 levels seemed a bit much but I was cranking through them with average performances. 
 
But then I hit an XP wall at about level 43 right when things were gearing up for the end game. Each level is a collect em up and time trial. By just worrying about collecting, you can get three or four fifths of the available XP. And that's what I was doing. 

So now the game is an OCD, second-shaving grind-a-thon through earlier levels, getting the gold time which might take a few goes, levels can be 4-6 minutes long on average. And you're getting maybe 20 extra XP at the end of it. And you might need 100 to unlock the next level. Then another hundred after that. And so on for the next seven levels until the end. 

And it's at this point that the games issues, which I was overlooking, become much less ignore-able. You have equivalent moves in both the ship and on foot but the button layouts are a bit different so you’ve got to keep switching between these two layouts while getting blisteringly fast times in maze-like levels that can often be pretty long and complex. And a lot of the problems in getting fast times is that I could never settle into an intuitive rhythm with the controls. And some of the mechanics are just fiddly and take a bit of time that the game doesn’t give you (the platforming teleportation throwing ball thing is a fiddly nightmare).

It also doesn’t help that after about level 10 the game has introduced all it’s new mechanics and everything is just variations on a theme, more teleports, more gates to unlock in a certain order, oh you spent 20 seconds on this one fiddly teleportation bit? Fuck you start again. 

The clues in the name I suppose. It would be more forgivable if I was locked out because of a skill ceiling but the golds are perfectly achievable. If you want to spend 15 minutes, nailing down a speed run through a level that is very similar to the other 49 levels, for a pitiful reward, to then eventually unlock another similar level.
As a game to whizz through, this is top. But it seems to think a bit more of itself than that, and it's wrong.

Also precisely why I gave up on the otherwise excellent Velocity 2X.

I'm literally at that point on V2X too.  The first game did similar too.

I don't remember too much of it in the first one but the sequel is one of the worst games I've seen for it. Hate that sort of arbitrary lengthening, it's a great game otherwise.

24. Way of the Passive Fist - Switch

Attention naysayers, the under-the-radar indie scene is teeming with originality if you look hard enough.  At a glance this is a tough sell - single player scrolling beat 'em up with 1990s arcade rubber stamp visuals based on a parry/counter-attack rhythm/pattern system.  Firstly the graphics; they're fantastic.  Honestly, it looks exactly the right kind of bold & chunky for an imitation Final Fight clone circa 1993.  Sound design is just as faithful too, the tunes are quite toe-tappy.  Plenty of games aim for a snapshot in time feeling and miss the mark considerably, but this absolutely nails it.  Even the enemy design strikes me as accurate - you wouldn't need to squint to believe this was from the era when scrolling beat 'em ups were ten a penny.

Anyway, the game.  You defeat enemies by parrying their attacks (set patterns depending on enemy types) until they're knackered, and then press the poke button, which sort of Jujitsu pressure point prods them to death.  Some attacks must be dodged, and you also have a dash move to get you out of trouble.  Successful parries and dodges build up your super gauge.  Some enemies can only be dispatched by a super.  Bad guys do the one-at-a-time attack thing the genre loves, but it's more pronounced here as deviation from that system would be game breaking.  It also has an XP system with a few unlocks as you progress.  It's hard to explain really, but you'll pick it all up fairly quickly in practice, partly because it's tough as nails.  Levels award medals for scores, and it's entirely possible to keep combos going for the duration of the stage.  I'm shocked how well executed the core idea is.  Coupled with fun bosses, replete with sampled speech snippets before they get their arses kicked, and this is a genuinely good game.  The customisable aspect to the difficulty settings are quite well done too - you can tailor it to suit your skills, and I ended up playing somewhere close to easy.  It does its job well though, I played level one on max difficulty after the credits rolled and nailed it.  

It's not quite great, some of the levels are overlong and can become monotonous (especially those without bosses), but it's eyebrow raisingly competent at the admittedly slightly weird thing it does.  [7], but that feels harsh at its current price (£2ish iirc).  I'd actually recommend it at a tenner if you like the genre and fancy something that freshens it up.    

You have a real solid start this year! I saw Persona 3 earlier, now Nier! That's a good list

7. Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (Switch) - 8hrs 

After playing the Toad stages in SM3DW I really hoped for a spin-off and I'm glad the say it lived up to my expectations.

It was one of my favourite Wii U games and it's an even better fit on the Switch, as it has nice short and digestible stages ideal for short bursts. Like most games like that though I ended up playing for a lot longer, with a 'just one more level' mentality.

8/10 

My list

8. Wonder Boy Returns Remix (Switch) - 3hrs 

Perfect visual and audio update of the arcade classic.

Simple perfection through repetition auto-scrolling platformer, but ironically it's biggest issue is just how repetitive it can get.

7/10 

My list

Nearly hit double figures, so I'm kinda in the hunt still given it's March... Couple of mobile games in progress too, might hit up Norwood which seems short, but unclear what next on console (and maybe something chunkier, which would allow me down ofc...)

12.Doom Eternal - 10 Hours - 9/10 - Xbox One X

What an awesome ride. Not gonna lie, it took a little getting into, I was worried that maybe I remembered Doom 2016 far too positively and it wasn’t the game I remembered, but after a couple of hours it all sinks in and just gets better and better. Sound is incredible, visuals outstanding, levels are just one room of non-stop action after another aside from the one thing that brings the score down. The swimming and climbing/jumping sections are just awful, really irritating. It says a lot that the rest of the game is that good that you can simply look past them. Seriously, buy this game and Rip and Tear.

9. Sparkster (SNES) - 3hrs
10. Sparkster (MD) - 2hrs

Before I get into these two games, for a bit of context, Rocket Knight Adventures is a stone cold 10/10 for me. It’s easily a top 10 for the Mega Drive and arguably Konami’s best game for the console. These games are sequels to that, and like many 16-Bit games, we were treated to two different games ala Aladdin and not just a carbon copy like The Lion King.

The graphics are great on both, but like most games for both systems the amount of colours on screen is quite apparent, and for a game as colourful as this it just gives the SNES an advantage. There’s a few more effects going on to, you know from the reflections in the water and enemies morphing from rocks in the opening level that it’s quite a looker. The MD game looks great but the SNES just edges it.

Sound is even tougher to judge, I really like both but I think for the style of the game the MD wins. That unique industrial metallic sound of the MD just sounds more appropriate to the action on screen. The SNES game sounds good but the MD music gets the adrenaline pumping more.

They both play very similar but they have slight nuances. In the SNES version the mechanics of the rocket, standard sword attack and even the HUD are all the same as RKA. It introduces a rolling attack with the L/R buttons which works well to. In the MD game the rocket is no longer charged by holding the button, but instead automatically charges after use, also in RKA and the SNES game a sonic boom type projectile is shot when Sparkster does his standard sword attack. They are minor quibbles, but it makes the SNES game feel more like the true sequel and the MD title the spin off.

Outside of the usual platforming action each game changes it up a bit. In the SNES game there’s a level where you ride on multiple metal ostrich birds running at a blinding speed, avoiding oncoming enemies, and a top down shoot em up level. The MD game has a giant robot level which is basically a one on one mech fight, an auto scrolling level and a maze level on an airship. They’re a bit hit and miss but serve as a nice change of pace between the main platforming.

So far so good, so now for the negatives. Slowdown, yes the famous SNES slowdown is unfortunately ever present here, and believe it or not Konami somehow pushed the MD's blast processing to far and even that version suffers, but admittedly nowhere near as frequent. This to me enforces the impression I had from the bland title screens that this feels a bit budget. This is still quality Konami stuff, but I think with a bit more polish neither of these games should have suffered as bad as they do in this department.

Then there's the Gems in the MD version. In the SNES game it’s the standard 100 equals a 1-up, similar but not identical to RKA. In the Mega Drive game, they trigger an item roulette. When you collect 10 gems a roulette in the HUD will start to spin and what it selects will drop from the sky. The items are; another gem (pointless), food for health, a flame orb (sword enhancement) or a bomb that inflicts damage. To be honest I found it added nothing to the game, as all of these items are scattered throughout the level anyway.

One thing to keep in mind for both games is having to play the game on hard to see the true ending, the SNES version takes it one step further however, on medium you only play 8 of the 9 levels. Then again the MD game has 6 hidden swords to collect from the 6 levels, basically a bit like the chaos emeralds in Sonic. So completing it without them also takes away from the accomplishment somewhat. 

This segues nicely into one of the main differences in level designs, the MD levels are more open to exploration than the SNES ones. It's a personal preference but for games like this the linear the better imo. Don't get me wrong, it's not Meroidvania and it's still a nice simple game on the MD, but to get that true ending your gonna have to work a little more for it.

So what's my favourite of the two. SNES right? Yes... on the surface, but... no. There's one huge flaw in the SNES version that unfortunately I can't ignore... The Axle Gear boss fight for level 7. It's a one on one mech fight but overhead instead of the side on view in the MD version, and it's unforgivably hard! 

I always play these retro games using save states as sparingly as possibly to get a true feel for the difficulty of the game and its use of continues etc. I spent a good half hour on this boss fight alone, found no tactic, didn't feel I was improving at all and only got past it out of sheer luck. This game has passwords and its a boss to a short and easy level, but none the less if I was playing without save states that half hour would have been 60-90mins of hell.

So yes, that's ironically the KO blow in this battle, MD Sparkster > SNES Sparkster. 

But I don't want to sound to negative at the end here. Both of these games are good, very good in fact and there's next to nothing between them. Neither of them live up to Rocket Knight Adventures, but that's nothing to be ashamed about. I highly recommend both.

SNES - 8/10
MD - 8/10

My list

28. Streets of Rage (3D Classis) - 3DS (50 mins)

It's easy to forget how good this was in 1991, especially as the sequel swaggered in shortly afterwards, flexing its megs and acting like it was running on different hardware.  As a home brawler this was immense.  Fun fact: I used to play it round my mate's house after school.  He had this, Sonic (omd) and Wrestle War iirc.  I had a Master System, so you can imagine how much my mind exploded.  The fun-ish part of the fact is that I bumped into him in the pub shortly before lockdown.  Hadn't seen him since the early 90s.

Game is great.  It had everything we wanted back then, arcade experience at home etc.  Best music in the series and lots of lol memories of all bets off situations immediately after one of you was accidentally on purpose thrown into a hole in level 4.  It's simplistic compared to the sequels - it plays closer to Golden Axe really - but there's nothing wrong with straightforward gaming.  93%

14.Resident Evil 3 Remake - 2 hours - 20/10 - Xbox One X

Yep I’m having this as its another game completion, took a lot of planning and restarts. No saves, deaths, under 2 hours, S ranking. Was a blast. Now I’ll move it on and come back and play through it again at a later date as it’s AWESOME.