#511 Disaster Report

Posted: 2nd May 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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690th played so far

Genre: Action
Platform:Playstation 2
Year of Release: 2002
Developer: Irem
Publisher: Irem/Agetec

As I’m writing this, it’s actually the first weekend of the new year and we watched the Disaster Artist yesterday – making for two names I keep mixing up – and put the Christmas decorations away. This may seem irrelevant, but because of the layout of our place, the PS2 is not very accessible when the Christmas tree is out – especially when I had to redo some cables so our PS2 can show its images in slightly higher def (and require less awkward cable swapping).

This meant that while I selected Disaster Report (or SOS: The Final Escape as it’s called here) as our next game a few weeks ago, I’ve been skipping it until I could reasonably play it again. We’re there now and it’s finally time to dive into this world.

Our Thoughts

One of the things I’ve never experienced where I live are earthquakes. I’m glad I’ve been able to avoid it as it feels horrendous. In Japan, however, they are more common, and although I don’t think it’s explicitly spelled out, a game about an artificial island wrecked by earthquake feels incredibly Japanese. There are even, from early on, tips on what to do and how to move to survive an earthquake.

The first semi tutorial area sets it up well. You’re on a bridge to the island. You have to make your way across, which involves climbing over barriers, jumping across places and carefully walking. This is set up to create some cinematic moments – the bridge drops away behind you, you have to run to make sure you escape without falling and at least once need to rescue someone from a falling subway car.

The world opens up after this first section, although it isn’t as open as it seems. There are sidepaths, but they’re not that long, and you need to trigger plot events to shift things in the world and open paths. Nicely, it feels like backtracking is usually possible (but that isn’t something I checked much), but there’s always a limited number of ways to go forward. It’s really where it takes on basic adventure roots – how do I get passed, where do I go, and what item do I use where to proceed. It’s combined with action segments (though no quicktime events – you have to think here) that mix up the speed quite nicely.

One of the things I obviously didn’t check is the new game plus mode. Apparently you can find a bunch more goodies and such. Maybe I’ll get to that one day.

Final Thoughts

Disaster Report presents an interesting setting to explore, sometimes frustrating to find your way around, but a different enough setup that it was more enjoyable than I first anticipated from the title. There isn’t as much rescuing as I thought there would be based on the title, instead there’s some bits of survival as you need to keep up your water levels and such. It’s probably a far more interesting path and tell its story better this way.

#1012 Far Cry 3

Posted: 28th April 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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689th played so far

Genre: First-Person Shooter
Platform: Playstation 3/Xbox 360/PC
Year of Release: 2012
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Publisher: Ubisoft

It’s been a few years since we played Far Cry 2, the Ubisoft open world game set in the jungle (as opposed to historical cities or Watch Dogs‘ futuristic city). This third game in the series was actually released after we played the second, being added in the list’s update, and with a lot of attention at the time.

Peter wanted to play it for his list and I joined in, going back to rule the jungle, but without malaria.

Our Thoughts

Far Cry seems to have a standard set up where you get captured in the jungle, escape and then try to defeat your captor – who is of course part of the bad guys in the game. They capture you and your friends – including your brother – and a lot of the game is you trying to reunite with them while taking out that gang.

You do this in a large open world, where survival is a bit of a thing. Not to the extent that you have to keep track of hunger levels or anything like that, but it feels like you’re constantly scrounging. What helps that is that you don’t just get normal upgrades – although they are in there – but that your inventory is mostly upgraded by you taking animal skins and turning them into different pouches. It’s a slightly different idea, nice, with the best upgrades locked behind special quest adventures. It makes it feel like there’s a bit more survival going on, even though it’s obviously not that realistic.

While exploring the world is great, if overwhelming, it falls down a bit at the plot missions. The main one that got to us is one where your weapons are taken away and you have to steal some as you stealth through a base. Stealth, because otherwise everyone will attack you at once and it gets overwhelming. Fine if you’ve been focusing on it, but the game is happy to let you rely on sniper rifles and the like before that, and Peter hit a real brick wall on this one. Part of the open world is that the game doesn’t telegraph you the preferred route – you have so many options – but that falls down when you can’t take another path and they don’t try to help you get along on the current one.

Final Thoughts

It’s a good game – overwhelming, sure, but a place you can get lost in. Just a shame it didn’t do that elsewhere, which was enough to stop us completely.

#639 Yoshi: Touch & Go

Posted: 24th April 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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688th played so far

Genre: Platform/Puzzle
Platform: DS
Year of Release: 2005
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo

From the different Mario spin offs, the Yoshi series feels like the most enduring, but also the one drawing most on Mario’s past, using enemies and really just being story prequels with a different protagonist. At the same time, it experiments more than Mario platformers have done for a while and they have felt different. The childish, thick lined graphics alone give it their identity.

Yoshi Touch & Go is the sub franchise’s new contribution to the DS, the other being the DS port of Yoshi’s Island. Its control scheme, its unique point, is different…

Our Thoughts

In this game, you guide Yoshi by drawing clouds on the touch screen. He’ll keep walking or falling and you need to draw clouds on the bottom screen to guide him. When falling, that means anticipating what is coming, while when walking you’re staying ahead of that. You get the option to tap for a jump and to trap enemies in bubbles as well as creating cloud paths, but it’s still all indirect.

I’ll be honest, it’s fiddly and I don’t love it. At the same time, the game seems to be set up for that, with the challenge often being how long or how far you can hold on. Without save games or many real checkpoints, you’re really doing a score attack on an infinite runner, but in a game that presents itself as a platformer instead.

What adds to that is that the game can be incredibly dense with enemies and the hitboxes are fiddly and difficult to predict – you have less room than you think and can quickly lose out. You can capture enemies in bubbles to get rid of them, but you don’t always have time.

The game’s art is still gorgeous, with a hand drawn style that sets it apart from the rest of the Mario series. It’s a fun world and everything in the game seems to reflect that, even if it belies the actual difficulty.

Final Thoughts

Yoshi Touch & Go feels like a bit of a misleading game, the focus of the game seems a bit different from the platformers we normally see from the series. There’s some platforming, but the classic controls are missing and the challenges feel quite different to me. It’s fun once I got into that side of the game, even if I guess I didn’t get as far as I could.

#905 Colin McRae: Dirt 2

Posted: 20th April 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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687th played so far

Genre: Racing
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: Codemasters
Publisher: Codemasters

I’ve been enjoying racing games in the past – while loads get frustrating and I always feel unlikely to pick them up myself, I enjoy playing them as long as they go okay. Colin McRae: Dirt was an example of what I enjoyed – tough, with plenty of challenges, but also letting you progress without perfect results. It compromised and delivered a lot of fun.

For today, I pulled out the sequel to that game, and I’m optimistic that I’ll enjoy this one as well.

Our Thoughts

It didn’t quite work out as easy this time, and the first race almost feels to blame. Tutorials in racing games, I’ve come to realise, are crap because they don’t seem to match quite how the game plays normally. I always struggle more with them than the races that follow, which feels wrong. I mean, I’m still not great, but I never feel the tutorial helps me that much. Not having any customization in the first race doesn’t help either – the vehicle didn’t really suit me.

And it’s such a shame considering how the game is set up afterwards. Regardless of your result, you always get some cash and get closer to the end result, so it’s actually incredibly friendly to keeping you going once you get past this hurdle. Sure, it’s not easy, and especially not to get high in the rankings, but the game realises that you can play just to have fun, without having to be the best all the game. Sure, it helps and gives you a goal, but I don’t always feel the need to.

The other advantage, again, is that the game has many game modes. You’re not just racing around a circuit trying to beat a time (although there’s some of that as well) but end up doing rally stints, parts of laps and all sorts of different modes. It really adds to the variety of the game.

Final Thoughts

The variety and contents of the levels in the game make the whole thing enjoyable and I feel the game cares more about having fun than pushing you to always be the best. It’s quite refreshing and why it still feels like one of my favourite racing series.

#515 Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell

Posted: 16th April 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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686th played so far

Genre: Action
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 2002
Developer: Ubi Soft
Publisher: Ubi Soft

Tom Clancy games have, in the past, left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter showed earlier that its politics feel quite objectionable. That’s probably because the past few years have left me more open to seeing it, but it still feels a bit gross.

Splinter Cellis a bit older, but takes us to an alternative Georgia where the president was killed and a dictator took power. Because the Americans need to come about to protect against that. Here we go again.

Our Thoughts

Setting aside politics for the moment – I’ve gone through some of it before, and I’m sure far more eloquent people have written about it – I mostly tuned out on plot beats. Be stealthy, don’t get noticed and make your way into places. Why? It’s a game, I don’t really care this time. It’s not interesting and a lot of the game feels interchangable between settings anyway.

You’ve got a lengthy enough tutorial to introduce a bunch of different systems – though mostly standard for the genre at this point. Then it’s tackling the different missions. Checkpoints are frequent enough, but there were a few that I absolutely needed. The first mission has you breaking into a house, sneaking in to find some information. I was killed several times from direct fire and needed to sneak in. Whether or not I was hidden was unclear – some bushes did it, but others didn’t. In the end, there was a combination of sneaking when I had a chance, but violence when there was trouble. Not really as the game seemed to intend, but it worked for now. The frustration was there, though, and too early for me to say I just quit. I have standards here, just barely!

Final Thoughts

Splinter Cell was decent, not my favourite stealth experience, but it sufficed. The series turns me off, and I don’t get much more about of the shooting, but what’s there seems to have been competently done.

#980 Space Invaders Infinity Gene

Posted: 12th April 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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685th played so far

Genre: Shoot ‘Em Up
Platform: Iphone
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: Taito
Publisher: Taito

Finally, this is the last of the rushed iOS games – everything else has an off-iOS alternative or just works. Here, you’d imagine that a company the size and age of Taito would have the ability to port one of their games, but apparently it hasn’t happened.

We’ve already played the first two listed Space Invaders games: both the original and Space Invaders Extreme. The new game is focused more on evolving gameplay, which should make for an interesting shift in the game.

Our Thoughts

While the game starts off like Space Invaders, the game’s whole point is that it starts to play with the formula – evolving it, as the game says. It’s a good way to modernise it – you don’t get the sudden change you might have in normal sequels, it doesn’t stay too simple, but gets a chance to ramp up quickly.

A good example of this comes early. A basic component of Space Invaders is you stuck in the bottom row, aliens advancing while you can only move left and right. Free movement feels like something of a later era. Here, however, it’s one of the evolutions that is introduced and gives the game a different atmosphere. It really changes the game, but with the ‘narrative’ justifying it, it becomes more natural. Beyond that, a lot of it seems to come down to weapon powerups and changes, as well as enemy behaviour.

Final Thoughts

I am not sure I would have accepted this game as much if it hadn’t been Space Invaders – so far, it hasn’t offered anything other shooters haven’t done. As a way to evolve a franchise, however, it has its high points.

#922 geoDefense Swarm

Posted: 8th April 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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684th played so far

Genre: Strategy
Platform: Iphone
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: Critical Thought Games

Time for another iOS game, knocking out the batch of games that won’t be playable once the old phone and ipad stop working. With geoDefense Swarm, we’re covering a tower defense game, one that looks fairly straight forward.

Our Thoughts

geoDefense Swarm is a pretty standard tower defense game. It has a heavy focus on tower placement, guiding creatures around the area, rather than using a standard path like we’ve seen in the likes of Defense Grid: The Awakening. It looks fairly standard, with futuristic wireframe graphics for both the towers and enemies. It’s effective but works to make it stay simple. Tower functionality is standard, with building, upgrading and standard setup.

There are plenty of enemies in each level, in groups that overwhelm you quickly. I struggled quite a bit at some of the levels. Although I didn’t lose yet in the levels I could play, it got closer than I was comfortable with.

Final Thoughts

I’ve played a bunch of tower defense games now and, to be honest, this one is quite standard. It works well for a mobile tower defense game, and will probably offer that if you can still get it. It doesn’t feel like quite as big of a loss, though, considering how the genre has grown.

#910 Eliss

Posted: 4th April 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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683rd played so far

Genre: Puzzle
Platform: Iphone
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: Steph Tirion

So we continue going through a bunch of iOS games and doing so involves looking at a lot of puzzle games, as that’s what the platform was about at this time – the cynic in me says that it’s the trend that led to simpler puzzle games like the match three games that dominate now.

Eliss looks very abstract, which suits with all of that, and it mostly makes me wonder whether I can work it out.

Our Thoughts

Eliss looks simple and, for the most part, it is. You combine and split spheres (they are supposed to be planets, but most planets I know aren’t that malleable) and have them in the right area to get absorbed and disappear. These ‘portals’, or squeesars, are of a certain size and colour, and so you need to combine, split and move spheres to let this happen. The phone interface makes it harder because you get given limited space, while the spheres obviously need to be usable on a touch screen. Having spheres overlap does health damage, doing it for too long ends the level, so you’re spending a lot of time on space management, trying to figure out how you can split and combine the blobs without getting in the way.

The levels build a bunch of mechanisms to make it more complicated – things like whirlpools that pull your blobs together, different sized portals (including undersized) and bright red blobs that attack everyone else.

The graphics are incredibly minimalistic, which suits the puzzles. There’s little that’s unneeded, which keeps gameplay focused well.

Final Thoughts

Eliss is focused on its puzzles, from every angle including its graphics. Its difficulty rises quite rapidly, although I’m not sure how many levels there really are – this might be completely intended anyway. Play it while you can – your new phone might not, and this will be gone.

#961 Rolando 2

Posted: 31st March 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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682nd played so far

Genre: Adventure/Puzzle
Platform: Iphone
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: HandCircus
Publisher: ngmoco

So here was a bit of a challenge – similar to our ngage worries for Reset Generation, a number of iOS games are no longer available on new devices as they do not have 64 bit builds. A few, like Pac-Man Championship Edition and Critter Crunch have made it over to other platforms, but we’ve found another few (four, in fact) that are no longer available on the app store and won’t play on modern phones or OSes.

Rolando 2 is the reason we checked in the first place, and so the first game we’ll play. It’s a puzzle game involving a lot of rolling…

Our Thoughts

… And that’s really where it starts. Rolandos are these creatures that roll around the screen as you tilt your tablet or phone. You use that to travel around different levels, making your way to the end, solving puzzles and defeating the enemies that stand in the way. You have a minimum number that needs to make it to the end and while that may sound like Lemmings, this game feels a lot more active. There is a bunch of bouncing around as you roll around the level, with a bunch of active events in certain areas and a bunch of enemies to defeat.

It gets a bit clunky in places, where the way you control the game can also feel a bit sluggish. As a concept, however, it’s really good and surprisingly flexible in the different levels the system supports.

Final Thoughts

Rolando 2 is a fun puzzle game that threads its levels together with a nice adventure story, mostly framing what’s going on on a map, but it works to build a colourful world that extends further than most mobile puzzle games do these days.

#222 Axelay

Posted: 27th March 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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681st played so far

Genre: Shoot ‘Em Up
Platform: SNES
Year of Release: 1992
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami

Here’s another random shooter drawn from the virtual bucket. I genuinely struggle to differentiate these most of the time. This one comes from the stable of Gradius and Salamander, which I struggled to introduce last time. Here we go again for what might be more of the same.

Our Thoughts

Listening to podcasts earlier this week, I heard some stories on how we don’t have the time to really learn games anymore – because there is so much more choice, a game has to have a lot of promise if you’re spending hours or days to get really good at them to progress. For me, these shooters are one of the places where this really shows. The arcade shooters tend to have the advantage that I can turn on unlimited lives and such, giving me more progress for a while, but I don’t have that advantage with a console shooter. With those, it becomes exhausting and difficult – too much for me, really, and that shows on Axelay.

The game itself is a fine shooter, helped by a decent selection of weapons. One of them in particular was helpful – changing the angle of fire based on how long you press the button, which helps with sweeps around the screen.

The graphics make good use of the SNES’s parallax options, creating a decent sense of depth – one that works well for the game, and that the game was clearly optimized for.

Final Thoughts

Axelay is a standard shooter. It’s tough, and because of the difficulty I didn’t get as much out of the game as I otherwise could have. It’s fine, really.

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