#486 Pikmin

Posted: 11th June 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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3

700th played so far

Genre: Strategy
Platform: Gamecube
Year of Release: 2001
Developer: Nintendo EAD
Publisher: Nintendo

Another landmark! 700 already. I mean, this is 7 years in the making, but we’re getting closer all the time.

At this point, there are some game series I really need to start – multiple entries where I haven’t played any. This is not on purpose – just how it goes sometimes – but we wanted to make sure we actually covered them on time. Pikmin is a Gamecube addition to the Nintendo line up, one where you guide these cute Pikmin creatures to repair your spaceship and get out. So far, I’ve mostly seen this through Nintendoland, which had a minigame based on it, but I want to see how it plays out.

Our Thoughts

Consoles have always struggled with setting up strategy games the way the PC does, one where you can play with a large number of units and have the large scale battles from Command & Conquer or even Warcraft – one where a double digit number of units or ore work out the fight and building up an army matters. Without mouse select, how do you split and order units. This is, to be fair, a problem that seems to be solved by now, but I’ve yet to experience it in all its solutions.

Pikmin, to its credit, has created a good solution. You play professor Olimar, a space traveller who has landed on an unknown planet and found these plant creatures called Pikmin. They grow like seeds, with the help of a hive, and when you pick them they will follow you. You can give them limited orders, mostly by throwing them at things to pick up, fight or otherwise manipulate. Some coloured ones have extra abilities (like exploding, which does sound horrible) and so you get the three basic ‘units’.

You lead them around the level. They will follow you unless you store them in their hive, or leave them waiting while it’s convenient to have less around. That last bit also happens when they get stuck behind something, which means you need to be careful with the swarms that follow you. This is even more important because, as night falls, you go to bed and any Pikmin that aren’t safe with you will disappear and die. It’s an interesting mechanic that forces you to pay a lot of attention… and do a sweep of the area just before you go to bed.

What makes it difficult, though, is that the controls to control Pikmin aren’t always great. Most important, while the colour Pikmin you use for different tasks matters, you cannot select which one you throw. You just use whichever one is the nearest, which isn’t great if you slightly move and get a bomb in rather than your tenth standard one. It really stands in the way and nearly lost me just about everything and creates a giant management chore instead to get it right. With the time limit present – yeah, that is thing here too – the time pressure makes the time you need to sort this even more frustrating. A single button hookup could have sorted this and it baffles me this wasn’t done before.

Final Thoughts

These control niggles undermine what’s a fun strategy game. When you get the chance to explore, there are a lot of things to discover and track down and a number of nice, simple puzzles that stand in your way – the big step is to get enough Pikmin there. I wish I could play it slightly more sandboxxy, slightly more focused on strategy and exploring, but here it has a solid enough game.

#634 Chibi-Robo

Posted: 7th June 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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0

699th played so far

Genre: Adventure/Platform
Platform: Gamecube
Year of Release: 2005
Developer: Skip Ltd.
Publisher: Nintendo

So there are a few action/adventure-like games left that feature you playing as a robot – aside from this, we’ve yet to play Rocket: Robot on Wheels, and I believe Space Station Silicon Valley is another. It means that I’m ill prepared – in my prep I realised this isn’t set on a space station or alien planet, it’s actually set at home. In other words, today I’m going in completely blind.

Our Thoughts

I’m not quite sure what I expected, but this wasn’t quite it. You’re left in a household as a helper robot to fix a family, in a world that actually reminded me of the early stages of Katamari Damacy – lots of messy items thrown around while you are a tiny character in your own home. It’s a perspective that always turns the mundane in something challenging and scarier and even though this is a friendlier world, here it adds some more exploration.

Here, however, you don’t grow – nor do you need to. Instead, you help out in small and big ways. Early on, cleaning the living room is a nice way to get some brownie points that allow you to gain some upgrades and grow to get your first extra abilities. Later, you start to focus on bigger stories, reuniting husband and wife and fixing a lot of people and creatures’ lives around the house. As you unlock abilities, you also get the chance to engage in some combat, get to different areas and otherwise proceed further.

Through all of this, an energy limit stops you from going too far. There are plenty of plugs where you can recharge, and running out isn’t a game ender, but it prevents you from pushing yourself too far when exploring. It doesn’t take too long for it to become less of a hindrance, as your battery size increases, but it is enough to feel like a hindrance from time to time.

The game is pretty cute, not exaggeratedly cartoonish to look at, but the perspective enhances some of the more cartoony points. The characters are exaggerations – especially when they aren’t human – and it creates a fun tone to what is partially a fairly dramatic storyline. It’s quite well executed in a world I want to see more of.

#570 Manhunt

Posted: 3rd June 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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0

698th played so far

Genre: Action
Platform: Playstation 2/Xbox/PC
Year of Release: 2003
Developer: Rockstar North
Publisher: Rockstar Games

With Manhunt, we play one of the more controversial games out there – at least at its time of release. It’s a protagonist playing in a big game of murder and death, something you do in most games, but that celebrates it here in its fully violent ‘glory’.ย  Undoubtably, it will look boring and primitve now (Carmageddon, the controversial game I remember from my childhood, certainly suffered that fate).

There is a larger conversation about violence in games (with at least some credible research showing no link between video games and violence, or even situations where we see a correlation between higher video game consumption and lower violence rates), but I don’t feel too qualified to talk about that now. Instead, let’s talk about the quality of the game instead, as much as we can.

Our Thoughts

The easiest way to ruin a game are its controls and Manhunt has an issue there. The camera doesn’t have a fully free control, instead following the character – it’s as if you’re doing first person while in a third person game, and it doesn’t quite work – it’s quite confusing and, for example, really turns you around (yeah…) when you leave the wall after sticking with it in stealth. It’s something you sort of getting used too, though not fully, and it never quite gets out of your way.

It sort of carries over to combat – it all feels quite clumsy and can be quite bad. Really, the game is all about stealth takedowns – sneak up and kill them before they notice you, often in violent, gross ways. In fact, you can decide how bad it is by how long you hold the button – creating the infamous scenes.

The game revels in its gratuitous violence, encouraging you to amp up the violence and killing you gruesomely if you don’t get there. The background seems to be that you’re a condemned murderer, now the protagonist in a violent murder TV show – one that revels in seeing you kill everyone. So you get encouraged to, although of course the game doesn’t allow for a different approach. It feels there’s no point to it, no reason, and it just doesn’t compel me to keep playing I’ve seen plenty of violent games, but this is just so pointless that I don’t see why I would participate in this one.

Final Thoughts

As the boundary of what’s acceptable keeps shifting, this game’s supposed upsides – a big violent game – doesn’t look as compelling as both the violence isn’t interesting, and how it portrays that doesn’t appeal because it’s dated, and would have looked dated within a few years anyway. Something beyond “Raargh violence” might have made this work, but this is so underdeveloped it’s not worth it for me.

#83 Spy vs. Spy

Posted: 30th May 2018 by Jeroen in Uncategorized
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0

697th played so far

Genre: Action/Strategy
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 1984
Developer: First Star Software
Publisher: Beyond Software/Tynesoft/Wicked Software/Kemco

I remember playing Spy vs Spy with friends about… 20 years ago maybe? Probably a few more than that, but probably about a decade after its first release. I only remember bits of it, but it stands out to me that a game that was that old even then still remained fun for us. Now I have to play it again, and it’s an experience I’ve sort of been looking forward to reliving for the past seven years of doing this blog.

Our Thoughts

The premise of this game is simple: Find a few different items (passport, ticket and such) that let you leave the country, while you set traps for the other spy so they are slowed down and can’t find them before you. The traps have an interesting system of checks and balances – most have an item to save you from them as well, creating a bit of a challenge where you have to be lucky and fast enough to find them. You need to know what you’re doing. You can tell game complexity is going up and it really works here by building on some simple concepts.

The stakes are raised with each level, featuring larger areas with more places to travel through. This is nice against the AI, but in multiplayer really would challenge you further and I think it’s those interactions, from so long ago, that I really remember well.

The game’s fairly stylized visuals – dictated by the era it was made in – work well. They feel like good copies from the comics series this is based on and create a good setting for the slapstick. It’s like they knew their limitations, and knew this could apply here well.

Final Thoughts

Spy vs Spy may see simple to us now – when we’re used to adventure mechanic, this feels fairly straightforward. At the same time, I feel it’s an advance for the time and it plays well, having just enough going on, int he game and with its graphics.

#856 Resistance 2

Posted: 26th May 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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0

696th played so far

Genre: First-Person Shooter
Platform: Playstation 3
Year of Release: 2008
Developer: Insomniac Games
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

Some of the games I’ve picked randomly on this list were very much “Yeah, that’s a game I should just check off”. Reistance 2 feels like an FPS, hailed for its large number of weapons in the book, as well as other places where it goes big (in numbers). Is it worth it? I’ll see if I can be convinced. So far, these modern shooters tend to feel boring and samey to me, and really need something special to stand out.

Our Thoughts

I can’t say that Resistance 2 wowed me at any point, or gave me a feeling that I wanted to keep playing. I suppose there were some vaguely memorable moments, but I doubt that’ll last for a year. Let’s split this critique in two parts, as I feel both have their flaws and good sides.

Starting with the tutorial, it felt bad to play through. I didn’t get many choices – fair enough for a tutorial, and indicating how the rest of the game is mostly a single path – but I felt I had several unfair deaths along the way. There were some unexpected instakills that required me to replay sections – sometimes several times – because I didn’t see why it was. Add to that several surprise monster appearances that made it all feel unnatural. I felt like I wasn’t in control, which felt jarring, I just had to hope I hit the right points even when the game wasn’t great at telling me what I needed to do.

That disappears a bit when the tutorial is over. Sure, you still don’t get a lot of choice on where to go, but you get some side areas to explore, some more options on how to approach things and generally more ways to prepare for what’s to come. This leads to a bunch of set pieces, stealth sections and big FPS areas which feel a lot more fun to play through. There are still downsides – first person platforming isn’t great, especially when hitting the water can be instant death even early on or in dark environments. A bunch of monster fights feel like they’re just infinite battles, where you wait for the timer to run it without it actually being fun to do.

The game stands out in the weapons it provides. There’s a lot of variety and it makes good use of secondary fire. One that stood out was the magnum, which fired detonatable gel when you use seocndary fire. This is used for both progression and mayhem and it’s one of those things that feels fun to pull out from time to time.

Final Thoughts

The things this game wants to do, it does well: Big action pieces, lots of weapons and lots of enemies. The bits in between can get frustrating though, and even the fighting got to me. When I first saw daylight again after the first level, I felt exhausting reaching it, and that feeling never quite went away. I can see how you can really get into this if it’s your thing, but here it just did not connect.

#131 Blasteroids

Posted: 22nd May 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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695th played so far

Genre: Shoot ‘Em Up
Platform: Arcade
Year of Release: 1987
Developer: Atari Games
Publisher: Atari Games

Asteroids is a classic, defining the 2D shooter genre in a major way. Its sequels don’t come up much on the list – although derivatives might have – and Blasteroids is the one official one that made it on – nearly a decade later.

The game looks different – gone are the vector graphics – and seems to have a proper level structure in it. We should see some progress here.

Our Thoughts

Blasteroids offers basic Asteroids gameplay as the game starts, shooting rocks one screen at a time. The graphics are different from the start – moving away from vector graphics gives it a more conventional look, losing some of what the original game feel unique.

The game itself becomes the better for it. After the first screen, we go into a mission map, which you can tune for your own difficulty (although you have to beat all of them eventually). It introduces more aliens that fly around, more challenges to deal with, and at the end of the map a decent boss fight – challenging but not difficult enough to put me off.

It makes for a more epic twist and really builds up the game – something you really need by this point in time, where the old gameplay wouldn’t do if you wanted to call it a modern game (for 1987). It’s just enough and tweaked enough that it is a lot of fun. This is genuinely a good game.

#541 Wario World

Posted: 18th May 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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694th played so far

Genre: Action/Platform
Platform: Gamecube
Year of Release: 2003
Developer: Treasure
Publisher: Nintendo

Wario is a bit of an odd one, isn’t he? Starting off as a villain, he took over platforming duties on the handhelds in his Wario Land series (until that went back to Mario again) when he moved to minigame collections as well as Mario sports series. In all of it, he’s defined by his greed and desire for wealth, in various guises.

In Wario World, Wario jumps into 3D, sort of – a 3D platformer of sorts that still seems to have you going after treasure. I guess they found the best developer for this!

Our Thoughts

This game was quite fun to play through, once I got used to some of the oddities – things like how to unlock some of the treasures and how to handle some of the controls. It’s 3D, but starts off as a 2D platformer with some depth, and always have that static camera that gives you that perspective. Not having a camera struggle, and being able to rely on platforming instincts, is really quite useful. The small bonus underground puzzle levels enforce that, creating some action, platforming and puzzle sequences that keep it all fun.

The fights themselves, meanwhile, feel more like larger brawls, with their inspiration clearly taken from beat ’em ups of the past – not too different from my past Double Dragon experience. Perhaps with less enemies, more colourful and cartoony, and with more different behaviours, but it does feel like a group surrounds you and you get to punch your way out of them.

It’s a shame that the game fell down at the final boss of the first world for me. I’ll freely admit it’s likely my fault, but I couldn’t get to grips with how to beat it and when trying to follow the rules I learnt from earlier levels, it went wrong and I got nowhere. I feel I could have done more, but I struggled to see where to go and got frustrated enough that I resorted to videos to see what to do. It’s a shame – it feels like some more explicit hinting would have done it for me.

Final Thoughts

As a platformer, this game is a lot of fun and feels like it foreshadows later developments in the Mario games – going down the earth for different challenges didn’t seem that far off some of the challenges in Super Mario Odyssey. The fighting is decent in groups, but don’t necessarily work as well for big boss battles. I may have been unlucky and gotten the wrong idea, but the levels felt so much more inventive that I wish I had more of that.

#857 Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4

Posted: 14th May 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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0

693rd played so far

Genre: Role-Playing/Life Simulation
Platform: Playstation 2
Year of Release: 2008
Developer: Atlus
Publisher: Atlus/Square Enix

I really enjoyed Persona 3 when I played it some time ago, more than I thought I would, with the life simulation aspects really appealing to me. I’d been holding off for a bit, but the random choice threw up Persona 4 and I had to go for it.

Notable here is that I’m actually playing Persona 4 Golden, the Vita port (which this series seems quite suitable for) that was realised more recently. It is, in fact, the only Vita game that’s been in our box to play, and I’m now happy I’ve got access to it – even if it means having to find the Vita first.

Our Thoughts

Persona 4 did not disappoint. There is a lot of life sim, requiring some optimization to make sure you build up your relationship with all your contacts as well as possible, both directly meeting them and building stats that change the subsequent conversations and increase the relationship gains. The writing might not be amazing, but the characters build quite nicely and the world you see is interesting and alive enough. There’s not loads of game, although it encourages frequent restarts with some random events, but it works well as a storytelling set up to take you through the year this game covers.

The other part of the game, the dungeon crawl, was weaker in the previous game. Here, I still struggle to really know what the relationship between the two halves of the game is – I know your powers depend on your link with the different major arcana in the tarot, but I never felt that I could actually feel the difference here. I know I’m building links for a reason, but I’m not sure what that reason actually is.

The dungeon crawl itself is good – it’s still exploring randomly generated dungeon floors (though more pre designed on certain floors than before) with the standard attack and magic items. However, first go now depends on you hitting your enemy earlier, rather than the initiative I noted before, and you restart your assault on the tower each time instead of going up in levels.

It’s a shame that you have to make a choice between the two modes: You can go into the dungeon most days, but it means skipping out on the life simulation. The latter is timetabled rather tightly, so you don’t end up going in other than when the plot demands, and that means I just don’t get enough exposure to the dungeon early on. I would have preferred a system that would have let you do both more frequently, with time limits and a plot that allowed for it. It’s close, but really not quite there yet.

Final Thoughts

I think I felt the same mismatch here as I did in Persona 3, a game of two halves that don’t quite meet up and feels less balanced than it should given the importance put on the dungeon crawl and setting up its statistics. It can feel oddly tacked on, and probably isn’t the best game that’s out there. It’s still a great game to play, though, and I’m looking forward to continuing it.

#1018 The Walking Dead

Posted: 10th May 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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1

692nd played so far

Genre: Adventure
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 2012
Developer: Telltale Games
Publisher: Telltale Games

On other blog, I have written about reading the Walking Dead comic and watching the same TV series. The game is the third medium the series has done well in.

Telltale Games first became known for their Sam & Max and Monkey Island sequels, set up as shorter adventures that tied into a larger season plot. They did so for this zombies series as well and created their most acclaimed series – one I’ve mostly been avoiding because it was coming up on the blog. It’s time to complete the trifecta now.

Our Thoughts

While the comic and TV show follow the same storyline, the Walking Dead video game takes its own route. Starting at the moment of the zombie outbreak – some time before the other two – you’re a convict who gets his freedom thanks to a surprise run-in with a zombie. Throughout the five chapters, you do your best to survive while you take care of Clementine, a young girl you find early on who joins you and trusts you to bring her to her parents.

Throughout, the zombie threat looms, larger at some times than others. However, the real conflict comes from other humans, whether it’s because they are directly opposed to you or because they travel with you while you need to see whether you can keep them happy. It suits the themes of the series (next to the violence, which feels less in this installment). Throughout, as you might do in this situation, you travel with a small group of people. They join and leave – or more often get killed – as time goes on while your choices determine parts of where the story goes. It’s an interesting system and while a lot of it loops back, the responsiveness is fairly strong – and where it isn’t it’s because you are playing as a strong predefined character.

This is a game that thrives on its writing – its graphics are fine, but not amazing, and mostly are slightly exaggerated, enough to bring across the effects. They create a slight disconnect with the violence, which is still shocking, but not as much as the show does, and it’s nice how the gore isn’t as fetishized. The writing, though, is strong, with some strong characters that are very consistent between the writers of the different installments. Seeing some familiar names as writers help, with part of the staff going on to create the brilliant Firewatch later on, but I get the feeling they got a lot of space to take it in the right direction.

Another side effect of this is that although it’s an adventure, the game has few puzzles. At the most, you may need to find the right item quickly enough to avoid being killed, but mostly you talk your way through and determine how you would respond to everything that happens. Getting a puzzle ‘wrong’ often means a different choice in the story, rather than failing to progress. It feels like interactive storytelling at its best.

Final Thoughts

So the game elements here obviously extend beyond the even more story driven games we see these days, but it’s the story and the way your choices change it that matter here. The big decisions only happen twice in each episode, but you really feel how much they matter, and the smaller decisions feel like they resonate throughout as well. It’s heavy to play – not something you just jump in to relax after a heavy day at work – but it really feels it pays off.

#148 Shinobi

Posted: 6th May 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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1

691st played so far

Genre: Action
Platform: Arcade
Year of Release: 1987
Developer: Sega
Publisher: Sega

I really should have played Shinobi earlier for the most mundane reason: There are two games on the list with the exact same name, just separated by a decade or so. This isn’t uncommon in franchises, as the recent doublings of Doom and Prey show, but it doesn’t actually happen on the list.

We start with the earlier game in the series, a brawler platformer. Dime a dozen, so I wonder where this will go.

Our Thoughts

One thing that sets a game like these apart are how good its enemies are. When there are a lot of similar enemies, maybe with some weapon changes, but following similar patterns, it can get quite boring. Shinobi, however, brings a lot more variation in its enemies, and it’s welcome as a way to keep the game interesting. Well, even if they are difficult to remember how to avoid, it helps a lot. Even more so, they really use the heights well, with characters jumping and so on, so the platforming has a point and gives you more actual choices.

It helps that the game feels good, smooth to play through without the animation timing feeling it gets in your way. When you get used to a level, you can race through, kill the enemies you know exist, and get back to where you died. You still need to survive that run, but at least you get the chance and can get used to the patterns. What also helps is that you have a special attack once a level that kills every enemy on the screen. The attack changes each level, but it always seems to have a similar effect.

The basic story is told through the level – you rescue maidens throughout the level, often guarded by a smaller stronger boss, with at the end a big, more impressive boss who escapes at the end – setting up a goal quite nicely. I didn’t really need to worry about a written story to get an idea on what’s going on.

Last, one small nice feature is the bonus game. It switches to a first person view, where you are throwing stars at ninjas approaching you. It’s different, but it works.

Final Thoughts

Shinobi works well as a scrolling brawler, introducing a bunch more concepts than most and adding a lot of variety to keep the game fun throughout.

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