hylian_elf wrote:

@Cocha stop making me want to play it!

But Isaac…you can make us whole again…

I'm surprised you've never really played it - definitely up your alley.

2. The Last of Us 2 (PS4) - 22hrs

An absolutely gorgeous game with a genuinely engrossing plot.

As good as the story telling is in these games, I already prefer the TV series for that. No matter how good a games plot, they will never be a match for movies/TV imo.

As far as the gameplay goes, its fine. Nothing special, it's fun enough but probably a bit to simple for it's own good.

So overall, a bit disappointing compared to the first for me, but if they release a Part III I'll bite. Until then I'll be happy watching the TV show.

7/10

My list

21. Olli Olli World - Finding the Flowzone (2hrs)

A quick smashthrough of the second round of dlc. The addition of gusts of wind just act like half pipes or speed boosts really, so it's not doing anything markedly different from what came before (and lacks some of the quirkier moments of the Void Riders dlc), but credit where credit's due the courses/routes are absolutely wonderful in this. It's Olli Olli perfected. Obviously I don't know at which point these were designed on the developmental roadmap, but they certainly feel like the work of team that absolutely nailed the course blueprints and built this round of dlc at the peak of their powers. Basically, 'Welcome to the Flowzone' couldn't be more apt. It's pretty much the best Olli Olli's ever been, and it's been at least good since 2014. [8] for the dlc (it's smol but perfectly formed). [9] for the delicious main course. The best console game of 2022.

The main game slow drips information to the player. You can perform all moves from the start but the characters won't tell you about a lot of them for ages. Linking tricks with the manual is key to the thrill, so it might be worth checking the manual moves list and rolling alightly ahead of the ongoing tutorial. It's a cracking game, even if you ignore score chasing and play it as a checkpoint autorunner.

Always wanted to play Alien Storm. I think I played the arcade one once or twice.

6. Gunstar Future Heroes (GBA)
I was enjoying this on normal until about halfway through when one level was hammering my health bar so hard I could never get to the 7-phase boss in any condition to put up a fight. Started again on easy which was way too easy. Finished it almost without dying. Pretty good though. Some crazy sequences and a million different ideas packed into 6 short levels. A casino level with dice rolls on a board determining how it plays out. Rotating around the screen on top of a space ship. Finding stuff in a rotating maze. There's a lot of rotating actually. I don't feel I've gotten the most out of it. Given the difficulty settings, you either need to be much better than me or much worse. 
[7]

7. Cuphead (Switch)
I've played it. I didn't enjoy a lot of it. The animation is beyond any other computer game (except maybe Dragon's Lair). It's almost unbelievable that there's a videogame that plays this well and looks like this. I like how responsive it is, it controls really well, and all the surrounding sound effects, voice work and character design is perfect for what they're going for.
But it's got some problems. I didn't realise quite how hard they were going on the boss fights. I thought it was a run 'n' gun, but there's not much running at all. It's one tough as nails, multi-phase, pattern-learning boss fight, then another, then another. It's a bad structure. They break it up a bit, but not enough. And the bosses are quite variable. Too many of them are filed under annoying. At a rough guess, I'd say 60-70% of them are fine. Go there, get hammered a few times, start learning the patterns, persist, you get there, it's done. B rank achieved. Thank you and goodnight. 

But then the remaining 30% have some fucking annoying thing going on. A ridiculously long first phase is a common fault. With typically a lot of different attacks that are going to fuck you up at least once. That then prevents you learning the other phases properly, you die too quick, so you're just doing that first phase over and over again. It's not even that hard, there's just so many attacks, so many things going on for so long that you're bound to fuck up once or twice. Especially, in my case, if you're forced to do it over and over and get bored. 

Then there's ones with quite a lot of random elements thrown in eg platform placement on a scrolling screen, which contrive to fuck you up once or twice. There's often very little you can do about having to eg jump out of the way of one thing straight into another. It's just that the game has spawned the things that way and that's that. Take your lumps. 

For the first world and most of the second, it was fine. But then one particular prick by the name of Grim Matchstick (a one-headed dragon that becomes a three-headed dragon) took forever to beat. It was the random fucking clouds you've got to leap between. Sometimes you have to jump and there's a projectile in your way. What can you do? You're trapped. The first two phases weren't even that hard but what was hard was getting the right random configuration of clouds and attack patterns that you had enough life left on the third phase to work out what the fuck was going on before you croaked. 

Absolute ballache. Once I did it, like with most of the bosses, I had plenty of health to spare, and the third phase was a doddle once I'd figured it out. But doing that triggered my RSI and my arm and wrist were on fire the next day. I'm not doing this anymore. No more banging my head against a brick wall with a game. 

So yeah I didn't enjoy that part very much. But the rest of the game after that was ok really. World 3 is pretty good. There's a giant robot fight in the bi-plane that is probably one of the hardest but I loved it. Looked amazing, fun to do. Probably my favourite bit. World 3 redeemed a lot of the game for me. Some of the others were easy. The Devil was another pain in the arse but I'm giving them some leeway for that since it's the last boss in a hard game, and he is literally Satan. 

A lot of the animation gets lost though, in a buzz of frenetic activity. There's no point pain-stakingly drawing multiple frames for some subsidiary character marching around the screen if you're forcing the player to relegate them to their peripheral vision because you're also hurling projectiles at them, while getting them to dodge a boss attack and asking them to shoot a particular part of a boss. Seems like a waste of effort to me. Animation like this should be stuck into a disappointingly easy platformer where it can be properly appreciated. 

So not for me really. Going to give the reputedly harder DLC a miss and watch a playthrough of it on Youtube. It's still objectively very well made and I loved some parts of it. [8]

8. Dead Cells (Switch)
I saw the credits after probably 35 hours of play, in three big chunks, spread across two years but I don't consider it completed yet. A lot of legwork for getting to the credits was done under strict, original rogue-like conditions. But I kept bouncing off. Caught between its top-tier hack and slash action and disliking the rogueyness. It doesn't matter how good a game is, there's going to be issues if it's going to punish me so brutally for a lapse in concentration. Or for the crime of reaching further in the game and encountering a new monster with a surprise devastating attack. It's intentionally incomprehensible, and too slow to dole out improvements. And that goes on for a long, long time. 

But that was the old Dead Cells. The smorgasbord of options and tweaks they've brought in changed the situation. After mucking around with different settings through different runs, I eventually settled on default settings but with three continues which is ample to stop me getting frustrated with it. 
Even the continue system, dumping you right back to the start of some giant level, would be too brutal in another game. But for that rare blueprint that you've lost (or might not get back without another 10 hours of play or whatever), there's enough forgiveness built into that system now for me. The final boss is so brutal that the idea I'd need about 45 minutes just to get back and have another ten seconds of getting pummeled - I'd never have done it. A lot of the success of a run is down to the RNG weapon pick-ups and sometimes the dice just don't land how you need them to. 

Anyway, it's 'complete' in as much as I cheesed my way to the credits once. I think I'll return to it later in the year when I've cleared some other backlog games. Then chuck in all the DLC, probably the upcoming Castlevania stuff as well, use the single boss cell I've acquired and try and get to a stage where I've rinsed it for all I can.
Gameplay, graphics, soundtrack, level 'design', baddies and humour all top-tier. 
A post-patch score of [9] which I can see getting upgraded to a [10] in the future. It's very moreish even when it's kicking you in the balls and dumping you back at the beginning. 

9. Super Mario Maker 2 (Switch)
Fine. The story mode was alright. Some good ideas, some ok, some not great. Too much Mario 1 in there for my liking, not nearly enough World. And when it was World, it was usually the ghost castles. The user-created levels I tried were all shite. I didn't give it much of a chance admittedly but finding the gold in amongst the mountain of poo seemed difficult. Couldn't be remotely arsed with creating my own. 
[7] 

10. The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds (3DS)
Nice balance between old and new. Good new mechanics, excellent dungeoning but very easy. I died a few times. Mostly through carelessness because I wasn't worried about dying. Not the most sophisticated combat system though so probably would have got frustrated with too much of a challenge there. Got so into it I almost wanted to collect all 100 baby space octopuses but thought better of it. Really good. Some of the old niggles of LttP of quite obtuse solutions. It doesn't lean too heavily on the wall mechanic and mixes it all up. Good use of the various powers. It's a better game to play today than LttP. [9]

11. Blanc (Switch)
A terrible experience. 2 player co-op, gameplay-light, Journey-style, walk 'em up with mild puzzle elements thrown in. Played with the kid, with one player being a wolf cub and the other being a fawn. Sometimes only the wolf can reach somewhere and has to press A by a thing to let the fawn through. Sometimes only the fawn can get to a place and then has to press A by something. The puzzles involve finding the bit of scenery you need to press a button against. Those are the gameplay highlights.

Although there's a trail to follow, it disappears through the busier areas and you've got to feel your way through an invisible path of where the devs have allowed you to go and where they haven't. Maybe you can't jump down to a ledge that is down and right and you're pressing down and right. But then adjust the analog ten degrees and now you can. Or maybe you just can't get to that bit. Wonderful stuff. 

It would be harmless enough if it was just that but there were a number of technical problems and it's only two hours long and isn't doing anything at all ambitious. The movement when you're picking your way over platforms is unforgiveably clunky for something so limited. There's a part where you have to escort some ducklings through the wind by sheltering them. The fourth time in a row that this happens is completely fucked. No matter what angle you take to protect the duck from the wind, it ended up getting blown back to the start. There were three ducks and we did the first one straight off. Then the next two took about thirty tries. I would have packed it in if it wasn't for the kid. There was no rhyme or reason why it was happening. The times it worked I was doing the same thing as the times it didn't. It was just fucked. 

You can slide down hills like you can in Journey but mostly the hills are about a metre long so as soon as you get going you've stopped. There's one sequence where the whole level is sliding and that really is the highlight of the game. Unfortunately, that level came right after The Duckling Saga where I was absolutely fuming. So can't say I enjoyed it. My daughter liked it but she'd packed in the ducks and I was trying to do it with both controllers which probably didn't help my mood either. As soon as the slidey level was done, there's a bit where you have to lead some sheep to a place. One of the sheep kept getting stuck on a bit of scenery. So went back, led the sheep well away from the scenery, led it back round, watched in horror as it veered towards the same bit of scenery and got stuck again. That happened about four times in a row.  

Then the final sequence of the game had to be redone because the wolf cub had pressed A on a thing before we'd done some other thing (more leading an animal through the wind) and the game didn't let us go back. A simple bit of playtesting could have sorted that out. But nope, fuck you. So that was a restart to the last checkpoint.

The graphics are 3D but they've tried to render them to look hand-drawn. So they've got that jagged black outline effect. It's rare that I like that and I don't here. Very occasionally it looks quite beautiful. The two main characters look ok. Most of the scenery looks like one of those pictures where a photo has been turned into a pencil sketch by some button in photoshop. A lot of artificial-looking cross-hatch shaders. Significant frame rate drops on the Switch when the camera is panning around as well. 

It feels like it's aiming to be the next indie darling but it's nowhere near the quality of the sorts of games that usually break out in that space. It's probably possible to play this, escape the glitches and bugs and be quite charmed by it. But it completely rubbed me up the wrong way. I hated it. When the credits rolled, I was amazed it took so many people to make it. And by how bad a job some of those people did. It was also £13 for 1-2 hours of 'fun'. [4]
[/rant]

24. Sophstar - Switch (3-4hrs)

Well received indie vertical shmup from small Brazilian developer Banana Bytes (of.. Sophstar fame, as far as I can tell).  The buzz was generated solely on the quality of the product, which is always nice to see, and word of mouth has spread to the extent where even I managed to hear about it (I play more shmups than I used to, but I'm hardly a genre aficionado with an ear to the ground).  

I'll get the negatives out the way first - the graphics are somewhere between serviceable and 'absolutely fine', and I guess the music could be described in the same way, but this feels like more of a shame than the merely okay visuals.  The game deserves a blood pumping score to embiggen the player's chutzpah, not a cromulent set of tunes that sound like the musical equivalent of someone meekly waving a flag while reading "go team" from a cue card.  I'm also not keen on the bouncing power up that cycles through the available goodies, as it doesn't always change to an extra life before disappearing completely, which makes the risk of leaving it hanging around a bit pointless.  I suppose if you learn the patterns you'd learn which ones eventually change to the ship symbol, but if you've memorised the game to that extent you probably wouldn't be scoping for something as trivial as extra lives.  Anyway, this is a minor complaint.

Now that the grumbling's out the way, pretty much everything else is outstanding.  I really enjoyed gittin gud, and I also enjoyed the fact that it didn't demand me to GIT GUD with full capslock thanks to the array of difficulty settings.  I played on beginner (default is called intermediate - there are three higher than that, and one lower than beginner).  With regards to the genre I consider myself a beginner though, so it suited my needs perfectly.  You start with two credits, eventually unlocking more as you play, and there are eight standard stages.  I needed three continues to finish it, but I'd amassed four through repeated failure at that stage.  I'm quite pleased with myself anyway, as it's not an easy game even on beginner imho (although I'm not even sure my forced scrolling shmup skills would qualify as 'adequate', so perhaps it's a pushover). I saw plenty of Game Over screens, but none of them prompted me to drop the difficulty to baby mode, so it must be doing a few things right as I'm usually pretty quick to press the safety net button these days.

The shooting is satisfying, the playable ships are vastly different from one another and almost all worthwhile as far as I can tell, bosses are strong, the bullet patterns aren't too hellish (ergo you can play with reactions rather than full memorisation), the sub-weapons tend to work really well defensively or offensively (or both), the teleport ability isn't just a gimmick, the risk/reward score system works and it's neither too short nor too long.  I settled on the heaviest hitting craft as my 'main', as fightmans say, as it made short work of bosses and has a defensive special, but I think its lack of spread fire might be a problem on higher difficulties.  The choices are legit.

Look, I'm not a shooter guy but I'd probably have this in my top ten.  My preference is shmups where you push the screen yourself (Sub-Terrania, Bangai-O, Pixeljunk Shooter), and after that I'd probably take hori efforts ahead of verti ones (I'm down with the lingo now, obviously), but this is a genuinely excellent, appropriately priced proper indie banger.  Oh, and it has a tate mode so I got to play some of it on my special pinball monitor.  [9]



Edit: Okay so the music in the trailer isn't half bad.

It’s an odd one. I’d have been disappointed to buy it first time around because it’s not a patch on the original, all over the place, and only doable on easy. There’s not much there to sink your teeth into.

Might be worth a look, M2 ported it apparently. Just reading the Wiki page - they actually wanted to port a game called The Cliffhanger: Edward Randy, but Sega tasked them with Gunstar instead. I'm definitely going on a MAME adventure as Edward Randy ASAP, it looks great:

Urban Champion (NES) - This doesn't have an ending so I guess I'll review it in here instead of in Just Completed. I didn't actually hate this, surprisingly? In this somewhat half-baked fighting game, you engage in a street brawl in what looks to be New York. The goal is to force your opponent off the screen. You each have three lives and lose one each time you are forced off the screen. Once your opponent is downed, they are replaced by an identical one. This continues ad infinitum.

There's a tiny bit of Nintendo charm added by the people living in the apartments, who drop plant pots down into the action, and appearances from the police, who force the fighters to temporarily cease and feign innocence before continuing the brawl. There is also multiplayer. This is pretty much a complete description of the game's features.

I really don't think the gameplay is that bad. It feels like a very early proto-Yakuza. The main problem is it is incredibly light on gameplay features. There's the foundations of a decent game here, if only they'd built on them. It could have been like a side-scrolling Punch-Out!! or had more extensive levels or just any kind of fleshed out single-player mode. As it is, on no planet, at any point in human history, is this worth a full price retail release. [4]

I'd say Nidhogg pinched elements, if Urban Champion is the game I'm thinking of.

27. Ninja Commando - Neo Geo (30mins)

When you're staring at a long list of ROMs, sometimes all you can do is pick the one that sounds even more awesome than the rest. The title is actually a perfect description of the game too - it's a ninja version of Commando. Although one of the characters seems to be a commando, so if you play as him it's a commando version of The Ninja. It's short, suprisingly easy and unlikely to set tongues wagging for originality, but it's also an absolute blast to plough through. This was solo too - it's no doubt even more enjoyable with a pal in tow. There are a small handful of things that separate this from the crowd, and these variations on the well worn formula genuinely work well. Firstly, your weapon power increases the faster you hammer the fire button (standard shots always go straight up the screen). Secondly, each character has a close range defensive move for last ditch saves. Thirdly, and most interestingly, there's an evade cartwheel of sorts that can get you out of trouble, but if you fire during the spin you chuck an oversized shuriken in the opposite direction. None of it takes long to learn, and it all works well.

The plot is a bit Turtles in Time esque, which sees you hopping between time periods (such as 'Egyptian' and 'WWII') to thwart the plans of a badman called Spider, who eventually shoots himself in the foot by overplaying his maniacal timelord hand. Translation is delightfully terrible, which is far more amusing when you see it in a genuine retro game than when modern retro inspired titles try to All Your Base it. Snippets of dialogue are always a treat, and each level ends with the message YOU HAVE DEFENDED THE HISTORY FROM ENEMY.

I can't imagine the despair if I'd used used up a 'can I have this for my birthday if I also do the washing up for ages' card on the £199 cart (just looked this up because I was about to guess £120, and it's blown my mind), but as a retro runthrough it was terrific fun. 5 out of 6.

Edit: Apparently this was a Neo Geo CD game, which presumably made it far more affordable (until you factor in the price of a Neo Geo CD console itself).



28. Sonic The Hedgehog Pocket Adventure - Neo Geo Pocket (70mins)

I don't think I've ever played a Neo Geo Pocket game (2mins on this when my colleague had one at Game doesn't count), so I'm intrigued by this section of the Anbernic menus. I tend to enjoy 2D Sonic, and this was a gap in my pre shit-the-bed era Blue Blur knowledge, so I dived in. Approaching the NGP for the first time in 2023 is a little weird, especially as I wasn't sure what kind of standard of games to expect (or more specifically, which console represents the closest equivalent), but based on this I'd say...somewhere close to a [Super] GameBoy Colour, maybe? Anyway, despite the fact that the NGP is regarded as 16-bit HW, I'd say this is a halfway house between 8 & 16, albeit situated closer to 8-bitsville than 16-bitsberg. There's no way this could run on a Game Gear, but for the most part it's a fair way behind Sonic's MD run-outs too. None of this matters really, I just find it interesting. If we're isolating wow factor examples, the special zones are particularly impressive. They're based on the tunnel style from MD Sonic The Hedgehog 2, but I'd say they're a touch better here, and almost definitely more interesting in terms of design. Not to mention less unfair, because Tails isnt lagging behind you fucking things up on a one second delay. Which makes them the best Sonic tunnel stages outside of the Saturn version of 3D Blast, imo.

Standard gameplay isn't as fluid as 16-bit Sonic, but still makes a good attempt at offering a playable 8/16-bit Sonic hybrid. The main stages are all familiar, despite the inexplicable name changes, and the remixed tunes are mostly legit. It's weird to run through Aquatic Ruin Zone, known here as 'Aquatic Relix Zone' (wot), while a squashed down arrangement of the Hydrocity music plays, but I suppose it's just odd rather than something worth complaining about. If anything it was fun to try to name the origins of all the tunes (admission: I failed to place a couple that were pinched from the split screen stages of Sonic 3, and one from Sonic Jam, even though I bloodywell recognised it).

Overall it's a solid effort. I don't know how fondly this is remembered, but I don't recall too many complaints at the time. It's good rather than great - it wouldn't trouble a discerning Hedgehog top 5, imo - but good Sonic is still great fun in my book, and as a Pocket sized Adventure this doesn't go far wrong. 4 out of 6.

He’s lost it.

I have been making cocktails this evening.