Developed/Published by: Blinkbat Games Released: 7th August, 2014 Completed: 2nd September, 2014 Completion: Conceivably, you could class reaching 1000 holes as completing it, so I officially gave up on this one. I got to hole 69 (hurr hurr) and quit. 197 strokes, a 2.9 par. Trophies / Achievements: n/a
“To play golf is to spoil an otherwise enjoyable walk.”—attributed to “the Allens” by H. S. Scrivener in 1903.
Will I ever play it again? No.
Final Thought: Here was me, worrying my time spent playing New Star Soccer, a game where you mostly aim an arrow to make a ball go a direction, would make me look a total fanny. Why did I worry?
(Desert Golfing is the purest representation of the idea that if you stick some surprises in your game, game designers are going to lose their shit over it. Why create an ecosystem like Spelunky’s when you can just, you know, stick a bitmap rock at hole 300 and slightly and slowly modify the colour palette? Video games truly are art, in that Desert Golfing allows those “in the know” to jerk themselves silly while the average punter thinks “a kid could do that.” It is our shark in formaldehyde, although one I’d believe made without guile, now we just need some dickhead to spend £8 million on it.)
I’ve been watching Game Centre CX again! I’d fallen out of the habit, but recently I got off my arse and organised my collection of Iron Chef episodes and started watching them in order (can you believe they made fifty-six episodes of Iron Chef in 1994? That’s more than one a week!) and it put me in mood for some Game Centre CX too. And after watching the Kacho valiantly battle his way through Ghouls ’n Ghosts on Megadrive, I thought I might as well give this a shot, because it’s been in my collection for donkeys.
You probably know the drill with the Ghosts ’n Goblins series: it’s absurdly difficult, and it changes from “Ghosts ’n Goblins” to “Ghouls ’n Ghosts” and back again confusingly. Most of the games are incredibly similar, differing only vaguely in terms of hero Arthur’s abilities and enemies. But then, plenty of series are even more restricted than that (you know, look at any side-scrolling shooter series) and it’s not like we complain about them (unless we do? We might!)
Probably the most interesting thing about the series is that the very first hit right around the time of Super Mario Bros., so you have to remember that this didn’t come from a context where that was what platformers were. In fact, it kind of feels like a series from an alternate dimension where Super Mario never really happened.
It’s a dimension where a locked-in jump is the done thing. It’s also one where randomly spawning and aggressively player-seeking enemies are the done thing. So while your jump is completely predictable, the enemies aren’t.
Can you tell where this is going?
I mean, you obviously can if you’ve ever played the series. The games just aren’t fair. You can do your best to deal with these enemies—and I’ve seen players far above my abilities perform absurd feats—but you’re going to commit to a jump, or throw a weapon at the wrong time, and you’ll die (usually by being knocked off a platform.)
It’s not good! Or fun! In fact in level 3-2 of this—a level where you have to survive on a small moving platform for quite some time, while attacked from all sides—I was pretty close to breaking my Vita in half. I had to beat it twice, too (and in fact, to “fully” complete the game I’d have to beat it at least once more). The game doesn’t even really offer much in the way of the kind of streamlining we’ve come to expect from our masocore; no quick restarts, limited lives meaning you have to continue from the start of the level at some point and often struggle on with a lost cause number of lives, etc.
The worst thing that Ultimate Ghosts ’n Goblins does however is that rather than previous games, where you just have to survive the levels, in this one you’re supposed to find all the hidden nooks and crannies (and I do mean hidden: a large amount of the game is about triggering chests by jumping in certain, totally unmarked, parts of the levels) in order to gain enough gold rings, or witch ingredients, or magic spells, to complete the game fully.
The game chooses just about the most uncomfortable twist on the unlock abilities design possible, by making sure you can’t collect plenty of stuff until you have magic spells that do things you don’t expect (the turn-things-to-stone spell that causes gravestones to explode is… alternate dimension logical I guess?) or very specifically have this one shield that allows you to fly.
The shield’s a weird one, to be honest, considering the Ghosts ’n Goblins franchise has basically never involved this level of control in-air. It changes the game almost entirely from the minute you get it into one that’s not about the inflexible jumping but the much more flexible (if temporary) flying. It doesn’t make you die any less (well, maybe a bit less) but you’re much more in control. It’s an odd twist that the level design works around, and that doesn’t make you feel better about the levels you’ve struggled through to that point (and it doesn’t come until very late in the game…) In a game that’s otherwise A to B linear being asked to jump back and forth in insanely difficult levels that you feel, by rights, that you’ve completed, just to collect some things because you can now fly… it just doesn’t work.
It explains why they re-released this in Japan with all of that stuff removed, though!
Will I ever play it again? Uhh… I really did sort of want to collect all the rings and “fully” finish it. But the hidden bits are so annoying that life is just too short. If you could download the Japanese version to Vita, I would maybe consider it. But… no.
Final Thought: I’m not really sure what excuse I have for, ultimately, not having a bad time playing this, though. Not that I liked it, but that I didn’t feel that it was a total waste of time. The nice PSP-era graphics, which are maybe in that sweet spot of dated for me right now? That as stiff as the game is and unfair the enemies are, there’s this responsiveness that means that it feels good, and you want to succeed even in the face of frustration?
Developed/Published by: Dimps, Capcom / Capcom Released: 19 October, 2012 Completed: 3rd August, 2014 Completion: Beat the arcade mode a bunch of times (twice on the hardest setting, actually) and played a bunch of the other modes. It’ll do. Trophies / Achievements: 40%
Well, if a wee guy from France can win Evo by playing Rose with a PS1 controller, I’m sure I can stand to play Street Fighter x Tekken with a Vita, even though it’s only got four face buttons and they’re tiny.
No, I can’t.
Will I ever play it again? Nope.
Final Thought: Well, obviously I played it for ages, but it’s horrible. What’s with this gem thing? Gives you bonuses or something for playing in particular ways, or being weak in others? But you’ve got all these menus to navigate to select them, and they’re totally incomprehensible in the moment, like, you have no idea what you’re opponent’s packing and how to deal with it?
Just a total abomination.
However! I will give them a lot of points for making people who suffer through this game some utterly absurd cut-scenes. Abel, obsessed with petting the bear from Tekken, or Zangief and Rufus’ amazing transformation.
Developed/Published by: New Star Games Released: 11th June, 2012 Completed: 3rd August, 2014 Completion: Won the Scottish cup and Scottish Premier League titles (twice) and won young player of the year, club player of the year and division player of the year at 21. Trophies / Achievements: n/a
How about that Kim Kardashian game, huh? Something something free to play, something something did she even look at the game lol, blah blah stupid people zzz zzz whales? yawn yawn “video games” fart.
Everyone’s an idiot, and I’m here to tell you why.
Now, I haven’t played that Kim Kardashian game. In fact, like most people, I don’t ever think about Kim Kardashian, other than possibly a brief period when it turned out Kanye West married her which isn’t so much thought as much as it is “information going into my brain, pointlessly.” To be honest, I’m astounded that I know how to spell her name off the bat. Haven’t had to rely on the spell checker at all, not that it would help (it’s got a red line under it even now, and I stuck it into Google to make sure after the second time I wrote it.)
The point is this: even in all the defensive articles I’ve read about her game—made in Toronto, fact fans, and I genuinely think it’s got great art in the context—people mostly blether about how it’s a time-waster, but in a different context.
Here’s why people play these games and why they’re successful—and why it surprises me there aren’t more of them. They’re story generators. Stories in which you (or the character you’ve chosen to make) get to be the star. Now sure, these stories aren’t massive, or deep. In fact, they’re mundane. You aren’t saving the planet. But they’re your choices, and you invest, and you remember them.
Take New Star Soccer, right? Here’s me, chucking it on the phone while in the depths of World Cup football madness (as it’s been officially designated by the World Health Organisation). I make me, well, me who is sixteen and has enough of a talent for football that I get hired by Dumbarton.
Across my first season, I play… not particularly well, but I’m alright. But I notice we always get beat by East Stirlingshire. Every game we play, they pump us. I start to pay attention. I try harder in those matches. It comes down to the last match of the season… they beat us.
I’m traded up, joining Stenhousemuir in the second division. I play poorly. I’m subbed off several times. In disgrace I’m traded off to Raith Rovers; I start playing incredibly well. I feel bad beating Stenhousemuir, but I do it anyway.
My character—me—gets a girlfriend. But I’m always training, or trying to improve my standing with my teammates. She badmouths my manager in the press. I immediately break-up with her. The next time I date, I’m in a better financial position, I’m in a better place with my manager and team. I make sure to spend time with her.
New Star Soccer is simplistic and—certainly in comparison to that Kardashian game—ugly. Based almost entirely around short football matches that occasionally ask you to aim the ball in a quick football scene (you’re looking at a 90’s Football Manager-like text stream otherwise) it sounds like there’s really nothing to it. And when the game is tied to an awkward energy system requiring you regularly quaff energy drinks to keep playing (once every three matches or so. I originally thought you’d get energy back over real-world time, but you don’t) the “actual” story you’re telling is one of an insane addict, forced to pay more and more for their next fix to avoid crashing as they become a bigger and bigger star (it’s not long before your next energy drink costs more than your designer suit did.)
But it’s all sort of easily overlooked because you’re in the cup final, and you’ve just—gulp—been given a free kick that can win the game. You haven’t been training in free kicks. Should you pass to the player to your left, or try and chip it over the wall?
The game-literate will forever wax lyrical about the story telling possibilities of something like Dwarf Fortress or rogue-likes, or even rogue-like-likes. That sensation that you’re not just playing someone else’s story, but creating your own.
You might sneer at Kim Kardashian’s game, or New Star Soccer as a time-waster, or a way to suck money out of the gullibles’ pockets. But they’re offering players something other games aren’t. Sneering isn’t going to change that.
Will I ever play it again? I really wanted to win the World Cup as Scotland, but it’s two years of in-game time away. I’m stopping playing this, but god knows I might go back to it in a weak moment.
Final Thought: I spent two dollars on this—one to turn off ads, which weren’t actually annoying enough to force it, which was good honestly—and another dollar to get some weather effects (which was super not really worth it.) You never actually have to spend real money otherwise, though; getting stuck as a substitute isn’t the worst thing in the entire world and if you’re sensible you’ll save up enough money to buy a stable as soon as possible, then race horses for a steady income. Sounds mental but it works.
This has been lying in a pile of Nintendo DS games forever. Probably don’t ask me why I decided to play it now, I’m not sure I actually have a reason. Maybe that I’d went to see Patlabor: The Movie and its sequel in the cinema and felt like something anime-ey? I have no idea.
Anyway, Time Hollow is… is this what a visual novel is? I mean, I honestly don’t know. Is the Phoenix Wright series a visual novel? If it is, this is one too, because they’re… similar. Ish. In that you wander about, collect clues (sort of) and watch talking heads talk to each other for a pretty lengthy period of time. If they have another name, it’s probably something like “visiting locations over and over and clicking the screen everywhere until you hit the right trigger for the story to continue novels”.
Remarkably, however, I quite liked Time Hollow. It’s short (taking about as long as an average young adult novel to read, probably) and there isn’t really very much game to it, but it’s charming. This is the kind of thing where the story has to keep you interested enough to put up with all the “is it this? Is this what you want?” clicking, and for me, it did!
You control Ethan Kairos, who ends up in a timeline where his parents disappeared some years ago. Given a magic pen that allows him to open portals to the past (quite honestly the weakest excuse to use the DS’s touch screen ever, and you only do it about eleven times) he sets out to solve the mystery.
It sounds pretty… anime, and the start—where you’re introduced to his school chums and the specky lassie that fancies him—sets alarm bells ringing, but written by Junko Kawano of Shadow of Memories non-fame it’s far more interesting than that. Rather than being one of those time travel things where the hero does a bunch of stuff, time changes for better or worse and he goes about fixing it if it went wrong, here it’s delightfully mixed up by giving other characters the ability to change timelines, meaning that as soon as you “fix” something, someone else might pop in, break that and leave you in a new reality that you have to get your bearings in before you can even work out what to fix.
It’s all scripted, of course, which does mean you’re not really doing any actual work to make any of this stuff happen, but it’s all pretty logically consistent for a time travel plot, even if it doesn’t wrap up quite as neatly as I’d hope (as usual, the characters are never as smart as the players.) It’s frankly far more entertaining than it has any right to be.
Will I ever play it again? Nah. Although I’m adding it to my collection of DS games, not just getting rid of it, so there’s that.
Final Thought: Entirely possible that I liked this just because a pet cat is a fairly important character in the whole thing. Well drawn, cute meows, A++ cat would cat again.
Developed/Published by: Firaxis Games / 2K Games Released: 13th June, 2008 Completed: 16th July, 2014 Completion: Beat it with every possible victory; once on Chieftain, twice on King and twice on Deity. Done with it. Trophies / Achievements: 595/1000
I’ve written before about how important Civilization is to me, and—suddenly in the mood for the series—I decided to give Civilization Revolution another shot after hating the iOS version (mostly because it was so ugly I couldn’t get past the initial learning stage.)
I’m a huge fan of the original Civilization; it’s got what you could charitably describe as workmanlike pixel art, but within that it’s got bags and bags of charm. From the city view (nothing more thrilling than seeing a wonder appear) to touches such as the evolving styles of your advisors (modern despotism!) it’s wonderful. Just looking at some screenshots now make me casually debate stopping writing this and playing it for a while (I won’t.)
Of course, it isn’t perfect (I remember Gary Penn complaining in Amiga Power about how prescriptive it was about the path of a civilisation; your story might include Greece conquering the English, but you can’t decide you’re not going to invent the wheel, something the series has never really felt comfortable messing with) and I’ve probably played Civilization II more (which more or less jettisons all the charm for just generally being a bit more polished.)
Anyway, I then didn’t like III, or IV; didn’t play the Call to Power side-stories, and while people do like Alpha Centauri, my ability to care if my space peoples have built a “hab complex” or not is zero.
Civilization V is great, though. Still lacking that original charm (though I do like the deco stylings) but actually fixing a ton of the problems that Civilization has had since the first one—stacking units tiresomely to make armies that bash against each other tediously, most importantly—the only issue being that dipping back into it now with all the expansions felt like a bit much for me. And so, as described above, I decided to go with Civilization Revolution.
So here’s the thing. When you get down to it, Civilization Revolution is a very slightly streamlined Civilization with modern-for-2008 graphics. That you don’t have to use settlers to upgrade the areas around your cities is about the biggest thing I can really note, to be honest. It adds some stuff from the later games—culture wars and great people—and adds some stuff that doesn’t seem to make a great deal of sense (like the ability to make armies of three units, which you can stack anyway.)
So why don’t I like it? When I think about playing the original, doing my own version of the “one city challenge” without really knowing I was doing it—in fact, using it as a way to tutorialise the game—I wonder, would a new player be doing the same thing? Would they fondly remember the (in my mind) irritating Sim-like advisors after they’ve graduated to Civilization V? Would they thrill as they see their cities evolve directly in the game world rather than a few menu levels down?
Is it actually fairly successful at what it does, it’s just that I’ve been there, done that, and I like pixel art more?
Probably.
Will I ever play it again? I could hoover up the rest of the achievements easily but no.
Final Thought: Here’s something quite important, though. You don’t have access to any of the levers that allow you to endlessly generate new scenarios. While in big boy Civilization you can generate a small world made up of islands with seven opponents, or a massive world with just one, here you’re stuck with pre-made scenarios. And the AI, as far as I can tell, is terrible (it doesn’t actually seem to exist until you discover it, which makes winning even on Deity rather simplistic.) So you’re probably not going to want to return to this 23 years later just by seeing some screenshots.
Developed/Published by: PES Productions / Konami Released: 20th September, 2013 Completed: 9th July, 2014 Completion: Won the World Cup as Scotland (on penalties versus Uruguay in a 0-0 nailbiter.) That’s all that matters, really (though I did also play Be A Legend as Messi, lazily, for a while.) Trophies / Achievements: 38%
Football! Yes, we’ve gone football mad here at exp. Towers, what with the World Cup and everything (though that’s finished by the time you’re reading this, which means that we’re no longer football mad and are instead football sane.)
Whenever there’s a big international tournament (because the Old Firm has led met to basically distrust and fear club football) I tend to like to play a footy game, and it’s almost always Sensible Soccer (I usually go to the bother of finding the most recent update files and everything.) However I decided to actually try a “modern” football game for the first time in years and years, and it was this one!
Note I put “modern” in quotes there, because the weird thing about PES 2014: Pro Evolution Soccer is that—and this is probably not news to people who buy football games every year, or whatever—it feels like a game that could have come out on PS2. I mean… it looks like one too, sorta. shonky animations, character faces that—unless they’re a star—are generic, crap crowds, awful, repetitive commentary…
It’s sorta weird! And retro! But not in a good way, like Sensible Soccer. In a way that makes me think all the way back to this series when it was International Superstar Soccer on Nintendo 64, except faster?
In fact, after playing a few quick exhibitions I decided to scale back my ambitions from “I’m gonna download all the fan-made real team information and play this seriously!” to “let’s win the World Cup with Scotland and call it a day.”
It’s important to note, however, that if you look past all the surface stuff, PES 2014 still plays a decent game of footy. Don’t play it on Beginner (at all) otherwise you’ll spank every team like they’re Brazil (a sentence that now makes sense after this World Cup) but on Regular, it’s fun! You know, football. Passes, through balls, that sort of thing. It’s not very exciting, you’d probably call it workmanlike, but scoring a goal still feels amazingly rewarding, so there’s that.
Will I ever play it again? No. Next time (Euro 2016, probably) maybe I’ll pick up a FIFA. Those feel “new” right?
Final Thought: I didn’t really discuss why I put PES 2014 down so fast, did I? Indeed, I’m sure there are many, many people out there who want to moan about my surface take on this, after all the website crows about the game’s “trueball tech” and the “M.A.S.S. (Motion Animated Stability System.)“ Even if that was all incredibly apparent, there’d still be the UI.
This is a game where, in the flagship modes are “Be a Legend” and “Master League”, you spend a lot of time in menus. It’s also a game where literally every screen has a loading screen after it. Where information that could all be on one screen is spread across two or three. Where getting from one football match to the next—even if you don’t touch or change anything—can take two or three minutes.
It’s gash; it takes all the imagined fun of “being a footballer” or “managing a football team” and replaces it with all the fun of “watching loading screens” and “turning off the music because there are only six songs” and “stopping playing this forever.”
Developed/Published by: San Diego Studio / Sony Computer Entertainment Released: 25th May, 2010 Completed: 7th July, 2014 Completion: Finished the campaign. Trophies / Achievements: n/a
If you have a question, it’s probably “Don’t you mean ModNation Racers: Road Trip?” and it would be a fair (if surprisingly specific!) question; I’d expect nothing less. However, I’m actually talking about the PSP version, which I chose to play for two reasons: one, I was able to download it on my Vita thanks to apocalicense 2014 (where Sony accidentally let you download all PSP games on Vita, even the ones you aren’t supposed to be able to) and two, because this one has cut-scenes and I guess I was interested in the “world-building” of a game largely sold on its level creation/sharing?
Anyway. I remember this being announced at E3 in 2009, and the general feeling being that, yeah, vinyl toys are a pretty cool thing to crib for when it comes to character creation, but that in comparison to “Play, Create, Share” stablemate LittleBigPlanet… well, no matter what you tried to make in ModNation Racers, you’d end up with a racetrack.
It’s true, and kind of an interesting framing of how we think about games. A side-scrolling platform game level? That could be any number of things! But a kart racing game racetrack is always a racetrack.
The thing about LittleBigPlanet, of course, is that a LittleBigPlanet game level… is always a LittleBigPlanet game level. If you want to start designing a platform game, you want to decide how your hero moves. In LittleBigPlanet, your hero moves like total garbage. With possibly the floatiest, worst jump in any game that’s ever been taken seriously, along with that “three Z planes” thing that literally everyone hates, there’s a good reason that every story I’ve ever heard about someone who makes LittleBigPlanet levels getting hired in the industry, it’s onto the LittleBigPlanet team.
(Absurdly, of course, for LittleBigPlanet 3 they haven’t unlocked the levers of Sackboy’s movement, instead adding more characters with their own specific quirks; The “create” part of the “Play, Create, Share” slogan is something that has been paid lip service at best, let’s all be honest.)
But my point is this: if ModNation Racers was a solid kart racer, being able to build a good race track should teach you more, much more than building a LittleBigPlanet level, in terms of pacing, challenge, excitement, all those other things you want to know when crafting an experience for a player.
Nae luck, ModNation Racers is crap as well.
Will I ever play it again? Nope.
Final Thought: “But!” you cry, “You played the PSP version, you lunatic!“ I could install the Vita version! but I’m not going to, because Mario Kart is still good on the Nintendo DS, dig? I’ll give the series this, it’s way way easier to build a racetrack than it is to build an LittleBigPlanet level.
Which probably makes it extra weird that the pre-made tracks in ModNation Racers are so boring.
Developed/Published by: Rocksteady Studios / Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment Released: October 18, 2011 Completed: 20th June, 2014 Completion: Finished Batman and Catwoman’s chapters and did all the side quests that aren’t “collect X macguffins.” More or less, anyway. Trophies / Achievements: 400/1250
Ah, Batman. Greater minds than mine have probably written about the symbolism of this beloved pervert, but for my money it’s always seemed absurd that Superman—an alien, gifted his power through no effort of his own—is the American poster boy. Bats is the American Dream; the perfect representation of that childish id: “if I can just get rich enough, I can do whatever I want.“
(in this case, “whatever I want” equalling “get super ripped and live out my sadistic fantasy of dressing in leather, pretending to be an animal, and battering fuck out of people.”)
What’s more American than the super-rich having limitless power? Of that power being used fetishistically? On the micro-scale, used for revenge on anyone who has ever slighted them, on the macro-scale, used in an endless war that doesn’t seem to feed anything but hubris?
(I’m not even going to get into Frank Miller’s deranged Tea Party take; a Batman blinded by hatred of a Superman gifted his powers, a Batman, likely, who’d lament even any innocent bystanders hurt having their bones mended on the taxpayers’ dollar.)
So yeah, Batman. He speaks to the deep, dark wishes of the hair-trigger slighted (probably why he goes down so well with the comics industrial persecution-complex): power, money, hatred. I’m not going to lie; this kind of fantasy is fun, rooted in the id as it is.
I mean, I loved Arkham Asylum. The plot was tosh, but we can forgive it being crammed with too many villains what with it being set in, uh, the prison where all the villains are held. It otherwise managed something really special: one, it was a new take on the “metroidvania” in third-person (so tightly designed around solid environments) and two, it knitted together several disparate play “scenes,” all individually excellent and carefully segmented (in turn, investigation/exploration, group hand-to-hand combat, and stealth “predator” sequences.)
It was about as close as video games get to a polished bullet aimed with a sniper’s precision. Which means it makes obvious sense that the sequel should be completely fucked up in order to fit the milieu of all other modern AAA video games.
I’m going to make an assumption from here on in; it was an external producer’s fault. Because I can’t see why the team would have made a sequence of decisions that chafe so incredibly obviously with what Arkham Asylum was. Here’s how I imagine it went.
“Great news, guys! Arkham Asylum was a huge hit, and we want a sequel! However, it needs to be an open-world game now.”
“Well, you see, Arkham Asylum had this metroidvania thing going on, you slowly unlocked the world as you unlocked your—“
“Naw, fuck that. Also we want the levelling-up thing to be really important, so have loads of upgrades.”
“That was quite finely tuned—“
“Shut up. Plus add fucking tons of collectibles. Like five hundred. And add side quests, but they’re mostly more collectibles.”
“Anything else?”
“Make sure there are a million gadgets straight away, and when you need them to traverse it’s actually a surprise, or right after you unlock them and never again. And make sure you have to unlock things that teach you systems, like timing your strikes rather than button bashing, so you never learn them. Oh! And mash up your three styles of play in an inelegant, uncomfortable way, especially in the open world.”
“Can we at least make each of the locations in the open-world like, a small, carefully designed metroidvania?”
“No, make those crap as well.”
“Uh…”
“Look, this shouldn’t be a surprise, your art direction was already over-the-top brooding dark and mad sexist. It’s not like you’ve got perfect taste or anything. In fact, make this one way more ugly and sexist. Ooh, actually, make sure the plot is total balls, starting in the middle unless people bought a tie-in comic, or something, and ending in a way that’s actually totally laughable and that the writer of this would spoil right here but, you know, people might still want to play it. “
“‘The writer of this?””
Will I ever play it again? No, but the actual tragedy you should note is that I played Asylum far past the point where I could have been done with it, collecting all the collectibles and doing all the challenge missions. As soon as I beat this I stopped.
Final Thought: Both Arkham Origins and the upcoming Arkham Knight follow the template of City, which means it worked. What I can’t understand is why when City came out people didn’t react the way I did, which is “why did you go out of your way to break something that worked so well?“
Developed/Published by: Housemarque / Sony Computer Entertainment Released: November 25th, 2008 Completed: 31st May, 2014 Completion: Beat all the planets in arcade mode. Not in one go or anything, mind. Trophies / Achievements: N/A
I must have bought this bloody forever ago and just never played it. Here’s why I didn’t, I bet: I was sick of twin stick shooters when I bought it, but it’ll have been on sale so I was banking it for a rainy day.
I can honestly remember when the only twin stick shooters for years were Robotron 2084 and Smash TV (well, and Total Carnage, but it’s pish.) Then after Geometry Wars they were bloody everywhere (though wasn’t Mutant Storm before that?) and even though I’d put Robotron 2084 on my desert island disks, I was definitely burned out on them.
The why of that, of course, is that so many of the new wave of twin stick shooters are totally flavourless. Geometry Wars isn’t, but I’d definitely say Mutant Storm is a perfect example of platonic blah. Games where none of the enemies stick in your mind, where there’s just no visual style, where there’s probably some tactics for high scores, but it’s impossible to care enough to try for them.
Can you guess where I’m going with this? Why yes! Super Stardust Portable is one of those games. The one thing that makes Super Stardust HD stand out—the actually neat playing-the-game-on-a-rotating-planet aspect—is totally missing from this because they’ve zoomed the view in (PSP couldn’t handle it, or whatever.) And without that, this game could not be more generic.
Which is a bit odd! Because if you go back and look at the original Stardust and Super Stardust on the Amiga there’s bags of weird Euro-game charm. Actually, they were much more purely Asteroids-inspired; I wonder offhand if they could have made a rotate and shoot-em-up instead of a twin stick title, or if that kind of thing is just too old hat (I’m going to say… yes. But they could maybe have gone the Time Pilot/Luftrausers direction.)
The graphics could be totally bonkers, just look at how it looked on the Amiga! Then look above, and feel yourself falling asleep. Of course, the game is a bit more intense than that, what with all the asteroid bits flying about, the three weapons (each better at different things) and multiplier shenanigans.
But it’s still boring.
Will I ever play it again? I really can’t see why I would.
Final Thought: There were some cool tunnel shooter bits in Stardust/Super Stardust, too, that are totally missing from any of these later games. I’d so rather have spent a few hours playing one of them rather than this on my Vita, honestly.
