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Category: Every Game I’ve Finished

  • Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. (Intelligent Systems, 2015)

    Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. (Intelligent Systems, 2015)

    Developed/Published by: Intelligent Systems / Nintendo
    Released: March 13th, 2015
    Completed: 25th April, 2017
    Completion: Finished all the levels, collecting all but eight of the gears.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    Here’s another Nintendo failure, then! You know, I do like to complain that Nintendo only seem to pump out games in just a few franchises (Mario, Zelda, recently Fire Emblem) but here’s what happens whenever they put anything else out: it tanks. So no wonder they’re getting the idea that people just want the same thing over and over until they run it into the ground. And honestly, sometimes it’s fair that the things they release fail, because they’re insanely misguided (Metroid: Federation Force) but then it’s also sad because Nintendo then learns the wrong lesson from them (“people hate Metroid”).

    I mean, the lesson they might have learned here—Intelligent System’s attempt at a Valkyria Chronicles-esque third-person strategy title—is probably “don’t let Intelligent Systems do anything except Fire Emblem” because bloody hell I can’t keep up with the number of Fire Emblems that have come out. (Remember Advance Wars? It’s been almost ten years, guys.)

    And, frankly: it’s a shame. Because I liked Code Name: STEAM. I know, that’s insane. I hate everything. And let me state as caveat that I immediately installed the patch that allows you to speed up the enemy turns. But Code Name: STEAM is a completely serviceable strategy title that—outside of a few frustrations—I found completely pleasant.

    Now, I can agree: it’s a bit weird looking. It doesn’t manage to nail the comic book look it wants, and the enemies are somewhat… dull. However, it’s got a weirdly interesting and diverse cast drawn from literature. It gets some points, for example, for gender-swapping Zorro (was this secretly why it failed? Neckbeard boycott?) but loses some for having Dorothy bare her midriff (why?) but maybe it gains those back by including Queen Califa. I’m not a perfect arbiter of points, ok?

    It does have some other flaws. Many (most?) people complain about the lack of a true tactical view, but that didn’t bother me because it’s obviously not what they’re trying to do. With free movement before you commit (hindered by enemy overwatch attacks), it’s a game about careful scouting and much more about the feel of being in a small attack squad. I do think the game is much too stingy with its steam-based action points, meaning you travel through levels very slowly, and the game doesn’t have any good sense of a progression of power—all of the unlocks are similar in power levels, just different, when it could have done with more steam being offered as you unlock new boilers (for some reason, most boilers don’t refill fully each turn, and the ones that refill slowly that you unlock I found unusable. Rather a big misstep, I feel.)

    I’d say the main mistakes they’ve made are in working against the slow, methodical play style that the limited action points engender. To mix things up they add a lot of “pressure”—first with baddies that spawn in (behind you, usually) which is a mild irritant, and then just the worst: “spotter” baddies in levels featuring mortar attacks.  They spawn and you have to get out of their line of sight or take a severe hit. Of course, so you can’t stall, you can’t kill them (just move them, hopefully out of sight, but it’s generally awkward to do) and this is insanely frustrating with the limited amount of action points on offer. There are certain levels where you will be harried to the point scouting is impossible, and you get situations where you stumble forward, get shot by a baddie with knock-back, and then land directly in the path of the spotter you thought you were escaping, and die by mortar. Oh, and there’s a couple of difficulty-spike levels outside of that: one with mounted guns that don’t have a clear range (frustrating) and another with a bunch of exploding enemies dropping in that I found… ragey.

    Honestly, at least one of these levels had me considering stopping playing, and that’s really awful, because the game is so close to being an all-round nice time like Valkyria Chronicles. The final boss is a pain in the arse too, admittedly—but at least it’s nothing like the final boss of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, my last dalliance with an Intelligent Systems game.

    However, the levels in which it works—it really works. In general the map design is clever, with a good mix of complex indoor and outdoor spaces, and while generally it’s a bad idea to split up your team of four, the level where you’re forced to do was a particularly fun one, I thought. There are far more fun levels than frustrating ones, it’s just the annoying ones are going to stick in your craw (I mean, they’re ultimately why I didn’t collect all the gears you can find in levels, and I wanted to.)

    I’m gonna say that it’s weird to me that Code Name: STEAM didn’t get a fairer shake when it was released. It was slated by almost all reviewers with them almost all concentrating on the (pre-patch) lengthy wait between turns, and I guess that one mistake wrecked any chance of it managing critical acclaim at least.

    Well: It’s got the only critical acclaim it truly needs: that I liked it. I mean, I didn’t love it or anything but I had a nice time. That should be more than enough!

    Will I ever play it again? I won’t, but the sequel they tease at the end I would have played, except it shall never exist.

    Final Thought: I recommend this, actually. I’m gonna… recommend it. Really! Because when I picked it up it was $5, and pretty much any store is gonna have it for pennies. You can do so much worse.

    This essay is featured in Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24.

  • Passing Time (Honeyslug, 2013)

    Passing Time (Honeyslug, 2013)

    Developed/Published by: Honeyslug
    Released: May 22nd, 2013
    Completed: February 29th, 2016
    Completion: Finished all the challenges with a bronze cup or higher.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    “Ball, ball, ball,
    Footie, footie, footie,
    Ball, ball, ball,
    Football!”
    —“The Footie Song” by Adam & Joe

    Will I ever play it again? Probably not, to be honest.

    Final Thought: Passing Time is a tremendously charming little PlayStation Mobile title that you can’t get any more because, you know, PlayStation Mobile got shut down and that. I got insanely raging on one of the challenges (actually complaining about it on Twitter to the developers, I think?) and put it down for about a year, but when I was just making sure my PlayStation Mobile purchases worked (that they had the runtime thing that would make sure that they worked forever, or something—the whole PlayStation Mobile shutdown was kind of a bugger) I started it up and beat the challenge after a couple of attempts, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

  • Mass Effect 3 (BioWare, 2012)

    Mass Effect 3 (BioWare, 2012)

    Developed/Published by: BioWare / Electronic Arts
    Released:     March 6th, 2012
    Completed: 7th May, 2015
    Completion: Completed it with one of the good (but not best?) endings. Or something.
    Trophies / Achievements: 640/1550

    So there’s me, right at the end of Mass Effect 3, and I’m like “hmm.”

    I’m like “hmm” because I realise that even though I thought I had installed the special BioWare-makes-the-fans-happy-really-sorry-how-abrupt-the-ending-was-please-stop patch, I, uh, hadn’t. And I really, really couldn’t be arsed waiting for it to install and then playing through what might turn out to be a significant chunk of the game again to see the “proper” ending.

    So I didn’t and watched my ending “again” on YouTube with all the stuff they added.

    Now. I’m not really a fan of… uh, fans. In general, I’m one of those sorts that thinks that authors should put out their work exactly as they want it to be, and be done with it. The author dies to the audience, the audience, to the author, never existed.

    However, if the ending of Mass Effect 3 was as BioWare intended, they’re fucking idiots. No, lazy idiots. The extended cut is a botch job—stitches things together just enough that you’re like “yeah, fine, whatever” but it’s actually quite embarrassing to think they thought the original pass.

    (Whether that’s more embarrassing than fans peeing their pants in such an astonishing baby-tantrum that they went to the Federal Trade Commission in the US, I’m not sure.)

    Speaking of authors—BioWare is interesting, isn’t it? If you were to ask me who the main creative force of a lot of games were, I could name a person quite easily. Fable III—another example of a game with a garbagey ending and promises it couldn’t keep—you can place your anger at Peter Molyneux’ door. But with Mass Effect 3, or any BioWare game, I’d struggle to name any person who worked on it. Wikipedia says this bloke Casey Hudson was the director, so I’d assume the buck stopped with him. Never heard of him.

    (To move on from authors to auteurs, if you’re wondering, I don’t feel the auteur theory fits for every work. But even in a huge video game, I think it’s important that one person or a small group of people shepherd the work into a consistent whole. Otherwise you end up with drivel. And we often end up with drivel.)

    In this case, I wonder if the buck stops with Electronic Arts. EA are generally parodied as evil (I think they’re still topping the worst companies list, aren’t they?) despite the fact that everything has consolidated so much when you get down to things they’re just another massive corporation (so, evil, but no more or less evil than any of the rest of that shower.)

    Here, however, the corporate bells and whistles on Mass Effect 3 are egregious. Mass Effect 2 might have had some DLC characters and that kind of shite—pay another $20 or miss out on three chapters from the latest Game of Thrones book, imagine it—but Mass Effect 3 makes the decision that, you know, if you really want to get the best endings by raising your “galactic readiness” you should spend a lot of time playing multiplayer. And you should play the tie-in iOS game. Oh, and the tie-in app!

    If you don’t do this—or, if like me, you don’t actually realise you’re supposed to do this and can’t really do this, because it’s several years later—you’re fucked (I think you can get the best ending if you 100% the game with the extend cut patch, but I’m not totally sure. I certainly wasn’t sure what I had left over to do to get it.)

    So what you have here is a story, a narrative, a creative work, whatever you call it, absolutely and totally at the whim of a corporate treatment that says something as vapid as “we need people engaging with the brand in a holistic manner across multimedia.” Or something. Mass Effect 3 becomes “content” to be exploited.

    It’s a disaster, and to be honest, the majority of Mass Effect feels like a franchise spinning it’s wheels. No matter how you get there, you get to an ending that I characterise as “the Deus Ex.” If you’ve ever played a Deus Ex game you probably know what I mean (they all do this): you’ve just made a million decisions through the game, and right at the end they give you two or three options, usually represented with big buttons or something, none of which are exactly “good” or “bad” and none of which have anything to do your choices previous. In fact, the ending of Mass Effect 3 is almost exactly the same as the original Deus Ex if you think about it.

    Even more so than Deus Ex where it’s a let-down, here you’re like “what? This has nothing to do with the rest of the game at all???” It’s baws.

    (If you want to complain that actually, the endings you can get do relate to your decisions because of the way you collect “war assets,” there are still basically up to three endings. Everything else is so mild as to be meaningless.)

    Anyway, my point isn’t that the ending is bad and therefore I’m annoyed. My point is that I don’t think Mass Effect 3 could have been good in the culture it was developed in. Who cares about quality when you’ve got content to exploit?

    Will I ever play it again? Ha ha no. And it has made me doubt I’d play Mass Effect 4 when it inevitably comes along.

    Final Thought: You might have noticed that despite being frustrated by its problematic aspects I didn’t dislike Mass Effect 2, while I consider this one a disaster. Well, Mass Effect 3 has improvements—it looks better, combat is evolved—but it’s just not compelling. It gets off on the wrong foot immediately, I think. The stakes are so comically high—the game begins with Earth being invaded—that flying back and forth and doing missions and stuff just doesn’t seem to make any sense. I was constantly like “wouldn’t everyone on Earth be dead already?”

    Yes. I didn’t find a space opera “believable.” But the whole things ultimately makes about as much sense as Fable III and if that isn’t a sick-ass burn I don’t know what is.

  • Groove Coaster (Matrix Software, 2011)

    Groove Coaster (Matrix Software, 2011)

    Developed/Published by: Matrix Software / Taito
    Released:     July 28th, 2011
    Completed: 2nd May, 2015
    Completion: Finished all the tracks in normal, gave up partway through hard. I’d seen all the content though.
    Trophies / Achievements: 34/62

    Since early man carved the first iPhone out of limestone on the African savannah, tapping his finger on the screen in time to music has been something he has wanted to do. He started with things like Tap Tap Revenge, but by the time he’d evolved into hipsterlopithecus, he demanded that the things he tapped on have some kind of relation to things from culture he could at least pretend to vaguely remember, and so the Space Invaders-themed Groove Coaster was born!

    That sounds like I’m being hard on Groove Coaster, but it’s a rhythm action game which starts with a very simple concept—your avatar (probably Space Invadersy) follows a track, points on the track appear, tap the screen when your avatar passes them. It slowly evolves so that sometimes you have to hold, some times you have to swipe, etc., but the main thing is you tap the screen in time when prompted. It’s about as simple—as digital—as rhythm action gets, which in itself is kind of interesting.

    You see, I don’t think Groove Coaster is any good at all when it tries to be challenging, and it made me realise something about a lot of rhythm action games, certainly the most well remembered ones like the Guitar Hero franchise—that they’re not really about the skill of performance in the way video games generally are. They’re more like playing music than is obvious I suppose: as a musician it’s a rare talent indeed to be able to just pick up some sheet music you’ve never seen before and play it with a band that already knows the music. In a video game, generally you want to be able to react and recover; you want to be able to perform, or believe you can succeed, from the moment you know the rules. Music is—usually—about repetition more than innate skill, and so are rhythm games; you might fail that track several times because of a noodly bit in the middle, but once you get it, get that muscle memory down, you’re golden.

    I think that’s a fairly obvious realisation, but I think this is one of those “personal realisations” where you feel out what it is you like about, and find interesting in, the medium you’re talking about. Here, with Groove Coaster, I was finding it this lovely, pleasant, spacey game to play shortly before I went to bed—tap in time to the music, while the visuals flashed in front of my sleepy eyes—but as soon as it became about the challenge, I stopped liking it.

    And Groove Coaster has a bunch of quirks, anyway. Because the track your avatar keeps following often moves and changes direction, the amount you can see in the future is severely limited (and at times, the “beats” you’re supposed to hit dance on screen at the last minute, anyway.) The tapping you perform might at one point correspond to the melody, at another, the drums, and it switches between them with no warning or visual representation. And there are invisible “ad-libs” that I could never quite work out.

    Basically, Groove Coaster sort of makes you believe it’s a casual tapper, but it’s actually just as serious about repetition and perfection as any Rock Band title was. It doesn’t mean it’s bad—though I’d argue that its quirks are flaws—but just that it’s not something I found interesting past the point where I’d heard all the songs a few times; the challenge wasn’t rewarding. That’s in stark contrast to the fantasy of a Rock Band game, where as you play on harder and harder levels, you feel more and more like you’re “really” playing the song. Here, you’re just… tapping on the screen, so it doesn’t have the leeway to forget what you’re doing is just trying and failing at challenge that requires repetition and learning more than skill.

    Will I ever play it again? No, and I’m not particularly interested in the free-to-play version Groove Coaster Zero, but if I ever saw it’s wonderfully named arcade edition, Groove Coaster 2: Heavenly Festival I’d give it a shot in multiplayer mode which sounds like a lark.

    Final Thought: Don’t get me wrong, I’m a sucker for Space Invaders style, too. They really are perfectly designed little buggers and I use a fancy Taito Station tote with Space Invaders on it all the time. And I’d totally buy this rug in a heartbeat.

  • Forza Horizon 2 Presents Fast & Furious (Playground Games, 2015)

    Forza Horizon 2 Presents Fast & Furious (Playground Games, 2015)

    Developed/Published by: Playground Games / Microsoft Studios
    Released: March 27th, 2015
    Completed: 29th April, 2015
    Completion: Finished all the races!
    Trophies / Achievements: 1000/1000

    The Fast & The Furious franchise is a legitimate juggernaut, with the last film breaking a billion dollars worldwide quite easily and countless (countless!) articles about its unique appeal, from waffly thoughts on its diverse casts to hipster snark over how silly the films are despite that.

    I love The Fast & The Furious franchise. I love it. I love it so much that I’ve marathoned the films twice—once for six, and then again for seven—and the second time we did it we actually went to all this effort to edit the films slightly so we could fit them into a day and include things like Justin Lin’s A Better Tomorrow and straight-to-DVD short films.

    I love it so much that I paid $25 to watch Furious 7 in a juddering theme park chair (D-Box) on a Saturday night and cried buckets at the touching eulogy to Paul Walker at the end. While in a juddering theme park chair.

    The most amazing thing is that until that first marathon I wouldn’t have rated the series at all, having only seen the first one as a student one night when people wanted to go to the cinema but there was nothing on. And now I have such a deep adoration for a series that, I’ll happily admit, is wildly patchy in tone, content and quality.

    It’s one of those things that’s rather hard to sell to people, because the series has wiggled and morphed; lazy street-race parody, 80s action throwback, superhero movie, crime drama, heist flick… and yet as it has progressed, it’s,managed to cobble together an epic through-line of continuity, revealing a deep sincerity through a belief and love for its characters that shines through.

    To me, The Fast & The Furious series is what makes cinema great—no, it’s what cinema is. None of that shite about “turning your brain off.” They’re movies that say “we’re going to take you on a ride, are you coming with us?”

    I think it says a lot about the viewer how they react to that.

    Forza Horizon 2 Presents Fast & Furious is, and this surprises me, a wee game that is made by people who clearly also really love The Fast & The Furious. There’s not really that much to it—a few hours of driving around repurposed chunk of Forza Horizon 2’s open world—but anyone who would title the final achievement here “How Long Was That Runway?” gets it.

    It’s the first realistic driving sim I’ve played in an age—since digging into Gran Turismo 3 all those years ago, a slog to be honest—and I was massively impressed with just how easy you could make it to play while still making it feel “realistic.” You can more or less get it to feel like Ridge Racer if you want, but there’s a nice middle-ground there with just enough resistance that I could feel the simulation without getting annoyed at the controller interface.

    However! I was playing a The Fast & The Furious game! This is, yes, a nice racing sim, and they did do what they could to make Fast and Furious events—racing a helicopter, etc.—but with the franchise having morphed from being “mostly about cars and family” to being “mostly about everything, up to and including gun fights, kung fu, big explosions, but still cars (a bit) and definitely family” it all feels a bit pedestrian. Ludacris might be doing the voice (and his best to make it seem fast and furious) but, you know, you’re still just driving a car about town without any stakes at all.

    Isn’t that weird? The series has moved on so much that the focus on car racing just feels limited, and there’s not much the Forza chaps can do about it. It’s perfectly pleasant, and at the cost of free it was a great demo for the larger game (not so much at the $10 which it costs now, though). But it is just a demo and, honestly, The Fast and The Furious franchise deserves more. Just pick up Forza Horizon 2 now it costs money.

    Will I ever play it again? No, but if I’m ever a millionaire I’ll spend money on one of those insane driving set-ups with a wheel and clutch and proper stick-shift and everything and drive very slowly around Forza Horizon 8 or whatever.

    Final Thought: My next trip to D-Box will probably be for Mad Max: Fury Road. Cannae wait, man.

  • G.G. Series #5: Ninja Karakuri Den (SUZAK, 2009)

    G.G. Series #5: Ninja Karakuri Den (SUZAK, 2009)

    Developed/Published by: SUZAK / Genterprise
    Released: October 14th, 2009
    Completed: 23rd April, 2015
    Completion: Finished all 60 levels at the cost of many, many continues.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    I’m obsessed with weird cheapy games—well, Japanese ones, anyway. I’ve made a habit of collecting any Simple Series games I can find (like most folk in-the-know, I adore the EDF series) and I’ve always been interested in the G.G. Series, a series of really cheapy ($2) games thrown out on the DSi eShop.

    (Confusingly for collectors, there’s also the GO Series put out by Gamebridge, which includes a bunch of re-badged G.G. Series games in Europe, but in North America just seems to be a grab-bag of other weird cheap stuff.)

    Anyway, Ninja Karakuri Den is the first of the series released in North America (though the fifth in Japan) and I’m going to surprise you (possibly?) by saying I loved it. For $2, anyway. It’s a simple little game that’s anything but the Ninja JaJaMaru-kun clone you might imagine—your ninja constantly jumps, every platform he jumps from crumbles, and the idea is to modify your jump height and dash and slash to destroy all the cogs on screen while avoiding/killing enemies to progress.

    It’s great! It really is! The controls are initially a little complex until you work out you want to be dashing and slashing more or less exclusively, but most importantly they feel great. Combined with the cute graphics and just-enough-content for $2, I ain’t complaining.

    If I was to complain, I’d probably moan that there isn’t a better way to continue than just hitting retry to brute-force your way to the end, and that the bosses are a repetitive low-point of the game. And, honestly, now I’ve done all 60 levels I don’t really see a point in fighting for a high score or anything.

    Basically, Ninja Karakuri Den is one idea done well for just long enough. Could it be longer, have more enemies and maybe platform types? Sure. Did I enjoy it because it was such a pleasant surprise as I was expecting nothing good at all? Very likely!

    Will I ever play it again? No, but I’ll be happy to drop the $12 for the other six games in the series released in North America and that’s a big, big recommendation.

    Final Thought: I don’t really have any other thoughts so actually I’d like to open the floor—have you played any of the G.G. Series? Any particular stand-outs? Oh, hang on, I don’t allow comments on the site. Let me know on Bluesky?

  • Super Mario 3D Land (Nintendo, 2011)

    Super Mario 3D Land (Nintendo, 2011)

    Developed/Published by: Nintendo EAD Tokyo / Nintendo
    Released: November 13th, 2011
    Completed: 21st April, 2015
    Completion: Finished the first eight worlds, the eight special worlds, beat Bowser Twice. Three stars on my file.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    Huh! So I liked Super Mario Bros. Deluxe so much that I just wanted to keep playing it, but as that doesn’t get me through my backlog I decided to go back to Super Mario 3D Land—which I’d been playing on-and-off since I got my 3DS—and finish it off, which surprisingly I did quite quickly because I only needed a few more star coins to unlock the last two levels of the Special worlds to finish it off (along with beating Bowser again.)

    So, I’ve been effusive with praise for the original Super Mario Bros. but to be honest, since he went into the third dimension with Super Mario 64, I haven’t been the biggest booster of the Mario series. I liked Mario 64 well enough—eventually sitting down and beating it late into the N64’s life. I actually thought Super Mario Sunshine was lovely and will hold that it’s underrated for no clear reason (well, those collect blue coin missions were shite, but that kind of thing is a standard of the series now so…) But Super Mario Galaxy didn’t grab me. I finished it, but in a kind of listless fashion, and I wasn’t that interested in the sequel so I never bothered with it.

    (Though I did like Super Mario Galaxy’s story. Totally non-diegetic, but it was nice.)

    I picked up Super Mario 3D Land free with the 3DS I think—one of those Club Nintendo deals—and I’ll be honest, I worked my way through the first world with the same kind of sluggish, listless feel I had for Super Mario Galaxy. Now, I feel like I should have been finding it interesting, but… here’s the thing: difficulty is a tough thing to balance.

    3D Super Mario games have one problem they’ll never accurately fix (that of being unable to perfectly see where you’re going to land in the third dimension) and that’s always an annoying “difficulty” of them. To some extent they’ve worked to mitigate that—making Super Mario Galaxy about jumping on spheres so you’ve got more view/forgiving gravity; making 3D Land on the 3DS, where you can use actual depth (if you get on with the 3D, which I don’t.)

    However, I think the issue is more that the games are, that difficulty aside, really, really easy for ages. Super Mario 3D Land is, in some respect, a back-to-basics 3D Mario, akin to a large, prettier, collection of the secret stages of Super Mario Sunshine, which as everyone knows, were the best bits. That the levels are short is great, that they don’t get challenging until you’ve finished the entire first eight worlds, less so.

    Thing is, I’m complaining from the position of a seasoned Mario… playing guy. If you’re just a normal human, this is probably not a problem at all! And your skills grow with the game. It’s not totally without challenge, anyway.

    So I’m in the weird position where I was bored—genuinely bored—of this game for hours. But, then it got quite good, apart from the really challenging levels where suddenly you jump and fall off a platform because you couldn’t tell where Mario was going to land. But still, in the end, I liked it. I’d have played it longer, if there were more levels (of the difficult variety.)

    Basically what I’m saying is these games need a “look I’m already really good at Mario, ok” setting.

    Will I ever play it again? I doubt it, but having grown to like it, I’d happily play that Wii U sequel. I wouldn’t have said that half way through the game though.

    Final Thought: It’s annoying that you can only unlock Luigi halfway through the game, and he’s got his weird jump that means, now you’re already muscle-memoried Mario’s way of being, you don’t want to use him. That’s rubbish. Luigi is obviously better, I want to play him through the whole game next time. Maybe if you select the “I’m already really good at Mario” setting at the start you play as Luigi in all the remixed-to-be-harder levels! I’d be satisfied with that.

  • Super Mario Bros. Deluxe (Nintendo, 1999)

    Super Mario Bros. Deluxe (Nintendo, 1999)

    Developed/Published by: Nintendo R&D 2 / Nintendo
    Released: May 1st, 1999
    Completed: 21st April, 2015
    Completion: Finished Super Mario Bros. (once as Mario, using saves, once as Luigi, using no saves but one of the 1-up tricks.)
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    Super Mario Bros. is a masterpiece. That probably doesn’t sound like that crazy a revelation, but I don’t know about you but I haven’t thought about Super Mario Bros. in a long time! It’s real easy to give lip service to its place as one of the building blocks of video games as we know them without thinking of it as a work in its own right, and if you go back and play it—especially after not thinking about it for a long time—it’s… superb?

    Ok, Super Mario Bros. Deluxe isn’t exactly the original Super Mario Bros.. It’s a Game Boy Color port. It suffers due to the interesting decision to keep it pixel-perfect: there’s less screen space on a Game Boy Color, so you only see about a third of what you’d see on the NES. If you’ve played Super Mario Bros. it feels absolutely insane to be playing with such a small field of view, and if you’re like me and you’ve played Super Mario Bros. but not for ages, this, combined with Mario’s inertia and the harsh collision detection makes the initial experience… unpleasant.

    It’s actually quite crazy to go back to the original Super Mario Bros. after years of molly-coddling—dying because you haven’t landed on a Koopa just right, being killed by being touched by a single pixel of a Hammer Bros. hammer, or just sliding into an enemy due to inertia… it’s stunningly unforgiving. Combined with the limited screen space you’d think this would make the game unplayable to a modern audience, but here’s the thing: it isn’t. You just slow down, you take your time, and you play a challenging platformer (that once you hook into, isn’t that challenging.)

    In fact, it just forces you to unlearn a lot of lazy things you’ve probably learned to do in platformers. I don’t know about you, but I play basically every platformer since Super Mario Bros. 3 by holding down “run” at all times and going for it. I basically play them all as endless runners. Run into something and die? Ah, I know where it is for next time. Here, you can’t do that, because you’ve got to inch through the levels more deliberately, and if you’re running all the time, your inertia will kill you.

    At this slower pace, I think I really started to appreciate Super Mario Bros. on a level I hadn’t before! It’s just a great game. Did you know I’d never actually finished Super Mario Bros.? I’d played it so much (especially in its Super Mario All-Stars incarnation) but always got stymied in World 8 (8-2 is a nightmare) and while here I was able to cheap out with its forgiving “save every level” I finished it without any save-states at least.

    Anyway. You might ask why not just play the NES version of Super Mario Bros.. Well, if you’re interested, Super Mario Deluxe is the template for the Mario games that followed in a slightly segmented fashion. While the original game is untouched, you unlock the ability to play every level searching for red coins, a high score and Yoshi eggs. Again, this lets you look at levels in a way you haven’t before—I haven’t been bothered to do all of them (the high scores required are harsh!) but it’s better/more interesting than finding the three big coins in New Super Mario Bros. or whatever (a series I don’t rate at all.)

    There’s also a slightly harder version of the original game (disappointingly not that different, but it’s a cool addition) and a version of The Lost Levels (modified heavily, unfortunately, due to the screen size and the like making it impossible otherwise.)

    Look, Super Mario Bros. is great. You should revisit it, in any form you can. I think Super Mario Bros. Deluxe is actually a pretty decent way to do that!

    Will I ever play it again? Immediately after beating it I started playing the star levels and then I felt just like playing through the original again so I did, beating it without saves. Yeah, I’ll play this again.

    Final Thought: Super Mario Bros. is great but placing a Hammer Bro right at the end of 8-4 (a level you can’t get a mushroom on) is cheap as hell. Come on.

    (Though if you’re interested—my second playthough I beat 8-3 as fire-flower Luigi and then walked through 8-4 easily. It’s a game of many depths and layers.)

  • Starship Defense [aka Starship Patrol](Q-Games, 2009)

    Starship Defense [aka Starship Patrol](Q-Games, 2009)

    Developed/Published by: Q-Games / Nintendo
    Released: December 18th, 2009
    Completed: 15th April, 2015
    Completion: Finished all 30 levels, 16 perfects.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    I feel like I’ve talked about tower defence here already, but apparently I haven’t. Must have been on Twitter, then.

    Here’s my thoughts on tower defence games: I have a “they’re hypnotically… ok”/hate relationship with them? They’ve got a loop that is undeniably compelling—build a thing, watch it perform, did it work? Repeat—but they also (often) have a problem that comes with that: if you don’t know what the thing you are building is supposed to do exactly, you’re going to be annoyed as you watch it fail. Also because the games tend to have multiple waves, unless you’ve been building for future waves—in a way that will feel sub-optimal for earlier waves, likely—you can get wiped out towards the end in a way that can feel somewhat annoying.

    These problems are definitely apparent in Starship Defense! I picked it up in a “god, apparently I have all these Nintendo points on my DSi” splurge right before Club Nintendo ended in the hope it would raise some more Club Nintendo points (I think it got me 10) and because I’ve generally been interested in Q-Games’ output on Nintendo systems. I had managed to forget totally that I hated Pixeljunk Monsters (their earlier tower defence) and didn’t really like Trajectile (or at least, I tired of it quickly.)

    Anyway. Starship Defense looks nice—it’s almost a pencil-on-paper look, but not quite. Maybe they just thought it was too dull when they did it with black space. And I like the feel of the top screen being a Galaxian-like formation of baddies. Unfortunately, I just wasn’t crazy about the tower defence. You only get a glimpse of the route enemies will take right before they start to take it, and it makes planning for future waves difficult. Enemies are split up into two kinds, normal and stealth (stealth being the “flying” enemies you usually get in other tower defence games) and there are only three weapons that can attack stealth enemies, only one of which is cheap/immediately available, and it’s weak and unsuited for attacking other enemies, so you need to know exactly when and how to combat the stealth waves.

    (This is problematic, because there are several special, expensive weapons you will never use because it only makes sense to use the one most powerful weapon that damages both stealth and normal enemies. I beat the game, generally, using only 4 of 8 weapons.)

    I suppose tower defence games are for people who want to replay levels to get a perfect—in some respects my criticism of Starship Defense is personal. I’d much rather be playing a game where I’d be able to change tactics on the fly or have enough information, in advance, that mistakes would be my fault rather than the fault of ignorance. I don’t find it fun to replay a level where I’ve “solved” a bunch of waves to get to the wave where I should have done something different, and the game even discourages tactics changes (destroying a weapon costs energy, so you can’t switch a weapon’s position without, generally, paying double.)

    Starship Defense still offers that pride, however. Pride of having a really nice, weapon-loaded ship, and seeing it get to work. And it’s only got 30 levels, so it’s a nice “hit” of tower defence if that’s what you’re looking for?

    Will I ever play it again? Nah. And I hope this reminds me not to play a tower defence game again unless it does something really, really different.

    Final Thought: It’s slightly disappointing this didn’t take more cues from vertically scrolling shooters, with enemies flying in Galaxian formations, or the player placing fighters that can only move left/right in rows? There’s probably something there!

  • Pokémon Shuffle (Genius Sonority, 2015)

    Pokémon Shuffle (Genius Sonority, 2015)

    Developed/Published by: Genius Sonority / The Pokemon Company, Nintendo
    Released: February 18th, 2015
    Completed: 11th April, 2015
    Completion: Finished 100 levels and was like “No. No more.”
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    There are 150 levels of Pokémon Shuffle, and several more “expert levels.” I stopped at 100 because… well… I was like… “why am I playing this? This is obviously a waste of time.”

    I’m not going to faff around with this one. Pokémon Shuffle is a free-to-play game, and I’ve written about a few of those before. I think most notable would be No Heroes Allowed: No Puzzles Either! because this is the Nintendo equivalent of it—match three where you’re beating up on an enemy by making the matches; consumables help you win levels when you’re struggling.

    Looking back, I have no idea why I played No Heroes Allowed: No Puzzles Either! as long as I did, because I gave up on this fairly fast (fairly… for me.) It’s possibly that I would never have downloaded this if it hadn’t just shown up on my 3DS home menu. Incredibly sneaky of Nintendo to more or less force their free-to-play games on you (I think they did this with Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball also?) and like No Heroes Allowed, playing it a couple of times a day didn’t seem like such a terrible waste of downtime, even though it obviously was.

    I mean… I can’t really explain it. This game is stupefying. Move things, things fall, combos happen… it’s simplistic to the point where it’s deeply uninteresting, and it never gets more strategic than being able to see potential lines of four or intersecting lines of three? So it’s just move some blocks with a stylus, wait a few hours, do it again.

    Until level 90 where you literally cannot beat the level without using consumables, and I was reminded this wasn’t a way to waste time, but players’ money. I beat it using about 13000 coins worth of consumables (almost my entire savings!), finished ten more levels and was done with it.

    This is a reminder: don’t start playing these games. They do nothing for you. There’s nothing there.

    Will I ever play it again? I could go back and finish the last 50 levels but I’m sure there’s another “pay money please” roadblock at some point so no. Also, as established, this would be a stupid waste of my time on earth.

    Final Thought: I really, really want to play through and write up Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball, I must admit. But I’ve stuck fairly well to my “no spending money on new games” rules and (I think) it costs you about $16 total. Maybe I’ll run a $16 Kickstarter.