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Tag: video games

  • Far Cry 2 (Ubisoft, 2008)

    Far Cry 2 (Ubisoft, 2008)

    Developed/Published by: Ubisoft Montreal / Ubisoft
    Released: October 21st, 2008
    Completed: 15th December, 2014
    Completion: Finished the main story missions, saw the ending. I did some of the other missions, but not to any particular end.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    So! I’ve already written an entire article about Far Cry 2 in this space here, just before Christmas, actually, but I’ve deleted it now because I didn’t like it. The article that is. Far Cry 2?

    I also did not like it.

    As you can probably tell, what with this being the second article I’ve tried to write about Far Cry 2, it’s a difficult game to write about. There’s several angles, you know? And when I try and tie them all up together, well, they end up a half-formed mess. Like Far Cry 2!

    Let’s look at it this way. You know when you watch a movie, right, and then some character does something obviously, stupidly illogical, or there’s some gigantic idiotic plot hole? You know, when you’re watching, like, Prometheus (for some god forsaken reason) and you’re like “how is the guy with mapping robots lost” or “why is that guy touching and annoying a creature that’s so obviously dangerous?” You know, those things?

    Whenever I think of these things, I always sort of imagine my dream job, which is to be the person who, once everyone has decided to make a film, reads the script and says things like “how is she running around after just having abdominal surgery?” or stands on set and stops things to ask “why don’t they just run in a different direction from the giant spinning wheel of death?”

    If they doesn’t get a satisfactory answer, well, they stop production until they get one/changes are made.

    I was sort of thinking about this job while playing Far Cry 2, to be honest. Now, I’m well aware that game development is different from movie development. In game development, I feel like it’s harder to spot errors that are going to come up at the earliest stages, and frankly, when you have big ideas (and it’s clear Far Cry 2 is a big idea) you’re obviously going to fall short in some ways and have to patch things over as best you can and hope it doesn’t fall apart. (This obviously happens with big studio pictures too, but I’m already way off topic here.)

    Far Cry 2 is a game where you are driven into town by a civilian, past checkpoints, and then afterwards, you never see another civilian and every checkpoint is psychotic. Why?

    In Far Cry 2 you have malaria, but you can’t buy malaria pills or get them off the factions you have to help the underground resistance. Why?

    Your target, the Jackal, doesn’t only spare your life but save it repeatedly. Why?

    You never actually do anything that leads you to the Jackal, and no one ever promises you information on him outside of a loading screen tool-tip, despite that supposedly being your aim. Why?

    Both sides try to kill you at all times, even when you’re doing missions for them. Why?

    And so on (and I could go on.) Look, I can hear the arguments people would make against what I’m saying—in fact, I’ve heard them before, because people have long had arguments about this game over things like the checkpoints respawning, going on about how the game is systemically interesting anyway, etc.—but my point is here that these kind of things are never explained in a way that makes them make sense to the audience, and that kind of thing is important to me as a player, ok?

    Playing it, I got the sense—or maybe I wanted to believe—that Far Cry 2 started as a game with a dynamic war happening across the game’s map, where when you sided with one faction they’d treat you as an ally (i.e. you can pass through their checkpoints, etc.) and conquer map zones back and forth (likely pointlessly, as is in line with the game’s ‘point’ as far as I saw it.) A game where every battle was chaos, with crowds of civilians trying to avoid getting shot. A game where malaria was something more than an annoying timer until you had to do another short, pointless mission. Something a lot more open ended, actually. But they had to cut it all down because that’s hard to actually do. I want to believe—I genuinely want to believe—that the answer to every “why?” is just “because it’s what we ended up with, ok?”

    Or, maybe, as is often the case, it’s the fact that game development, like movie development, doesn’t have “why-men” but producers and CEOs and the like who say things like “no, we can’t have civilians being shot” or really any number of things that make this game less than what it feels like it could be.

    Far Cry 2 is one of those games where you feel like “the only way to win is to not play” but not in a clever way where you’re like “ahhh” but in the actual way where you’re better if you don’t bother.

    Will I ever play it again? No.

    Final Thought: The fire looks amazing, though. Is there another game/series where fire looks this good? I should have played the entire thing as a pyromaniac instead of my usual decision to roll stealth. It’s so good!

  • Rygar: The Battle Of Argus (Tecmo, 2008)

    Rygar: The Battle Of Argus (Tecmo, 2008)

    Developed/Published by: Tecmo, Team Tachyon / Tecmo
    Released: 11th December, 2008
    Completed: 4th December, 2014
    Completion: Finished the story mode.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    I played this for an hour, right? I played this for an hour and I was like “this is absolute garbage. Real ‘kusoge’ and not even in a particularly funny way. I should stop playing this.”

    And yet I went back and I finished it. While I was finishing it, I was like… will god forgive me? When  my life is over, and he (or she) looks at how I spent my precious time on earth, they’re going to be like “you spent five hours of your life, precious time you could have spent with loved ones, playing Rygar: The Battle of Argus?”

    What am I going to say to them? That I multitasked, watching some episodes of Scot Squad on the iPlayer, and that I listened to the very first radio play featuring Adrian Mole (then called Nigel Mole) but I didn’t like it very much (I loved those books back in the day, but listening to someone read their diary isn’t very fun.)

    I guess I could say some stuff like that? I could mention that occasionally, very occasionally the voice acting is funny? (Surprisingly, it’s not on Audio Atrocities, not even for the peach of a line “I pledge my victory to this feather!”)

    I could bring up that the game is sort of really funny because it’s exactly, as in 100% exactly, the same as the PS2 game it’s a “remake” of (Rygar: The Legendary Adventure) with the only change being that the hero looks utterly ridiculous? That Tecmo had the audacity to announce this for Wii as “Tecmo New Style Action Game” according to Wikipedia and then title it, amazingly, Warrior of Argus: Muscle Impact in Japan?

    I could say some stuff like that I guess… but would god forgive me?

    Will I ever play it again? Maybe my punishment in hell will be to play this again.

    Final Thought: Once you’ve beaten the game apparently you can play it again, but your hero’s weapon is a pizza instead of a ‘diskarmour.’ Fair enough.

  • Crossy Road (Hipster Whale, 2014)

    Crossy Road (Hipster Whale, 2014)

    Developed/Published by: Hipster Whale
    Released: November 20th, 2014
    Completed: 23rd November, 2014
    Completion: I got a score of 248 and was like “yeah, good enough.”
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    Crossy Road is really good! I completely, totally recommend that you download it, if you’ve got an iOS or android device or whatever, and play it. It’s completely worth it, what with it being free and that.

    Now, that said, down to the business of pulling the game apart, such is the way of this blog.

    Shall I start with something basic, like the controls? Yeah, let’s do that. If you’re not au fait with Crossy Road (because you didn’t, just that second when I recommended it, download and play it) it’s an endless Frogger. It’s complete ingenious, in that way that when you see it you’re surprised no one ever thought of it before. In fact, I’m suspicious that someone must have. Seems like the kind of thing there are loads of on the app store, only they’re all ugly and crap, looking like Unity test projects. Maybe not loads. At least a couple (only now I’m sure they’d be impossible to find, as every shitehawk clone merchant starts to pump out Roadie Cross, Angry Bird Cross, Ridiculous 2048 Cross Wings, etc.) 

    Anyway, Crossy Road is isometric and lets you tap to move forward, and swipe to move left and right. Can you guess? Yeah, it’s super easy to throw yourself into traffic as you try and adjust your position by a swipe being read as a tap. Super easy, and every time it happens it sucks. A lot.

    That’s annoying, but it’s not what made me stop, actually. What made me stop was… well, I’ve been playing TxK, right? (Which is also great, and you should totally get it even though it’s not free at all.) Anyway, some years ago Jeff Minter had the amazing idea (at least, I think it was his idea and I’d rather type this caveat rather than google it) that his games could “save” your highest score as you progressed and let you start again from it when you died. Not in an infinite continues way, but in a “this was your highest score, and this was how many lives you had at the time.” The idea being that rather than having to go through all the boring easy levels again—that you’d probably perfected—you can just start at a point where you know you’ve mastered it and continue from there.

    (TxK does over-egg it a bit by giving you a save after every level. I’d prefer a single save at the first level you died, so you could always start from a “perfect” run, but that’s another article entirely.)

    Anyway, I was thinking about this because Crossy Road is about, well, getting as far as possible, but that means once you’ve got a sufficiently high score—over about 100, I found—it’s super super annoying to have to do that first 100 moves. Now, Crossy Road doesn’t seem to have a particularly intense difficulty curve (it definitely gets harder, but it’s subtle) so I’d imagine that giving you checkpoints would allow players to easily climb into the thousands, at which point what would be the point? After all, Minter’s save system removes something that can easily be argued as important to old arcade games—the endurance test. You’re not at 100% the whole time, you’re going to lose concentration, or slip due to tiredness. I know, having played in enough 6+ hour Netrunner tournaments (not the same thing, but, you know, educational on endurance, anyway.)

    Thing is, that doesn’t remove the fact that once you’ve got a decent score in Crossy Road climbing back up there is just boring. I don’t want to do it. So I don’t.

    Will I ever play it again? Nah.

    Final Thought: If you want an interesting comparison, however, there’s Canabalt, which I’m happy to play every once in a while because it’s so rhythmic and fast, or perhaps even more comparable there’s Jetpack Joyride, which I played, as the kids say, the shit out of. Crossy Road made some waves for being “indie” but including loads of free-to-play business, and yet it didn’t include any of the stuff from Jetpack Joyride which makes it so compelling (to the point where I rarely cared about my high score) in terms of unlockables that significantly (well, sort of) change the game, and everyone’s favourite, the coin doubler (which I never paid for, but I’m surprised that Crossy Road didn’t ship with it.) 

    Anyway, wasn’t the original Frogger endless Frogger? It was just cut up into levels rather than one long experience. Really makes you think, huh.

  • Kirby’s Epic Yarn (Good-Feel, 2010)

    Kirby’s Epic Yarn (Good-Feel, 2010)

    Developed/Published by: Good-Feel / Nintendo
    Released: October 17th, 2010
    Completed: 28th November, 2014
    Completion: Finished all the levels. Didn’t 100% collect everything or anything, but close (cannae be arsed to boot it up to find out exactly how close.)
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    Do you like Starbucks? I really don’t. In fact, I go absolutely out of my way to not use Starbucks. I hate it when I’m at, say, an airport, and the only way I can get a hot tea is from a Starbucks. I mean, look at that, I’ve written “hot tea” there because I’ve gotten so used to being beaten down by Americanisations from places like Starbucks that I don’t just say tea. Thing is, it’s not like Starbucks is that bad. It’s bland, and competent. It’s really, when you get down to it, not offensive.

    You might want to guess here where I’m going with this, but Kirby’s Epic Yarn isn’t Starbucks. No. What Kirby’s Epic Yarn is like is… well, imagine a person who loves Starbucks, right? They love it. And so they decides to start their own coffee place, very much based on Starbucks. Their coffee shop attempts to have Starbucks-style coffee, Starbucks-style music, Starbucks-style decor. But, by virtue of being made from the sweat of an individual, it doesn’t come out quite that way. The coffee is a little more interesting. The music is some interesting jazz. And the decor has a really cute, handmade feel. This person hasn’t got anything wrong, they’ve just made something much more personal, more “real” despite basing their design on something bland, corporate and forgettable.

    It’s the kind of place that you’d go—hell, I’d go—and I wouldn’t hate it, you know? I’d appreciate the cute touches that they put in. The cushions, or the art. I’d find myself having a perfectly pleasant time there. None of that edge of irritation that Starbucks engenders—where it’s so bland, you feel annoyed that it’s been calculated to not annoy you.

    But I’d, without really thinking about it, not bother to go back.

    That’s Kirby’s Epic Yarn. It’s cute, full of lovely touches. Genuinely sweet, really. But the core… well it’s just another forgettable 2D platformer, isn’t it? If you’re going to put all this effort into making something lovely, please don’t base it on a Starbucks.

    Will I ever play it again? Nope. And this goes on the sad pile of “Nintendo games I won’t keep” which is rare indeed.

    Final Thought: I honestly thought Jeff and Casey Time had taken music from this game. I was pretty sure they’d lifted one of the tracks… maybe Lava Landing? (which is amazing, give it a listen!) but it turns out that it’s an original piece of music, The Infinite Tea Time. Also amazing but really nothing like Lava Landing. This is therefore proof I, and you, should watch Jeff and Casey Time again because it was really good and it’s clearly been too long.

  • Pocket League Story (Kairosoft, 2012)

    Pocket League Story (Kairosoft, 2012)

    Developed/Published by: Kairosoft
    Released: Jan 5th, 2012
    Completed: 17th November, 2014
    Completion: One full career with a high score of 101,601. Beat every league and every cup except the Prin team match. They’ve got max stats! It’s nigh impossible!
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    We’ve talked about football several times here, but here’s a thing! I have no idea what a football manager does. I’ve never managed to get into any of those Football Manager-type games (nae luck, Kevin Toms!) because I just don’t care about club football, but I got back into Pocket League Story recently after—more or less—realising it had been sitting on my phone for the past year (or two?) when I stopped midway through a career in it. I’d just watched Scotland beat Ireland so it seemed like a good idea.

    Anyway, then I watched Scotland get pumped 3-1 by England, seeing Gordon Strachan just sort of occasionally get up during the match, yell and point, getting increasingly grumpy looking in the stupid chairs that the sponsors make them sit in (they’re a car manufacturer, so they make them sit in race car seats… I assume. If that’s what they usually sit in, that’s absurd.) I thought… how does he affect the game while he’s there? When he puts a new guy on, does he whisper in his ear “do this, tell the guys to start doing this tactic”? Something like that?

    I mean, when you’re running a national team… does he get up every day and go into the office? After the match, does he sit down with tapes of it, pinpoint the mistakes, make edited highlights, talk to the team individually or as a group, talk them through what went wrong, find out why from their viewpoint, and work on what they do next?

    I really have absolutely no idea. I mean, I assume something like that happens, there’s four months till the next match, and even though all the players have their club teams to go to, I’d like to believe they do post-mortem matches with the players and plan extensively for the next one. But who knows? They might just all go home after, meet for a few days training directly before the next match, and be done with it.

    Anyway. playing Pocket League Story is a bit like watching Gordon Strachan, you can’t really do anything while the matches are happening, other than possibly tap a player to make them go on fire (uh, not that Strachan has that ability… I think???) which makes them more likely to avoid being tackled/score. You don’t have much of a say in anything, you just sort of watch money flow in, build wee cute buildings, try and get sponsors, and buy new players when you have cash (which has a really weird mechanic in that you give them the money, then try and convince them to join. If they don’t, you lose the money. I pumped millions of dollars into trying to hire a monkey. A monkey.)

    It’s hypnotic anyway, because watching numbers go up is brilliant, as we all know. Having an unstoppable team of powered-up football men doing footballing seems brilliant, even if you didn’t do really do anything. Which made me realise something: a watched game is a played game. After that England match I played the match over and over again in my head, thinking what should have happened at certain points. If only he’d done this, or if they’d made a change in tactics there. I played the game over and over in my head. Made me think that in some respects people who watch sports are—really—playing the game, more or less as much as I played this. In conclusion: sports are cool, don’t cuss people for enjoying watching sports. Unless it’s cricket, cricket is fucking crap.

    Will I ever play it again? No way! I really really shouldn’t play any more Kairosoft games, they’re all pretty timewastey. However, I’m sure at some point in my life I will, regretfully, install Grand Prix Story. Maybe that counts as “playing it again?” I mean it’s basically the same thing.

    Final Thought: My favourite thing about Pocket League Story is that I had David Beckam(’s facsimile) play for my team for ages, and I replaced him with the monkey. The monkey was better.

  • Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (Konami, 2003)

    Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (Konami, 2003)

    Developed/Published by: Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo / Konami
    Released: May 6th, 2003
    Completed: 15th November, 2014
    Completion: 99.8% map completion. I have no idea which tiny secret area I missed. Gah. However, I saw all three endings anyway.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    Look, if you tied me to a chair and demanded I tell you which Metroidvania is the best Metroidvania, well, first I’d say “Jesus, you didn’t have to tie me to a chair. I’ll just tell you, ok?” and then I’d say it’s…

    It’s Metroid: Zero Mission. There’s no debate here. If you’re planning on tying me to that chair again to attempt to change my opinion to something stupid, like Super Metroid, well, you’re going to have to… actually to be honest I’d probably just agree with you long enough to get out of the room/basement/storage locker/wherever it is you tend to do your tying of people to chairs to find out and then change their opinions.

    Anyway. Metroid: Zero Mission is great, and it’s on the GBA, which had a lot of good Metroidvanias (remember when there was a turf war where some people wanted to call them Castleroids? Ah, simpler days.) Case point: Aria of Sorrow! It’s a good one! I probably liked Harmony of Dissonance more, even if the music in that sounds like a piano being dropped down a fight of stairs onto a mariachi band. Oh, and the the graphics are kind of bonkers; meanwhile Aria of Sorrow looks amazing—very consistent in a way that Castlevania games sometimes struggle with.

    I dunno, though. Look, it’s your basic IGA-led Castlevania, you know? Really big, sprawling castle that makes no spacial sense. There’s a setting-related excuse thought—the castle is some sort of dimension of its own, as a result it’s just mad—but in this one I was really struck by how, I dunno, randomly designed Castlevanias can be. There’s definitely a thread to the design—players are going to go here first, before they can go there, because they need that—but you often get a sense that the rooms are just “well, this one is a corridor, and this one is a 4×4 cube” and the challenge is designed this way “put respawning skeletons in that one, and a bunch of axe armours in that one.”

    I mean, there’s a good reason people wax lyrical about Dracula X (or the other, more linear Castlevanias) they’re very carefully designed into a moment-to-moment experience. Here, there might not be a clear “encounter” or design to a room; it’s just a space with some stuff in it. In retrospect it’s that which makes the castle design feels weird in Castlevanias; the rooms don’t have to make sense (a kitchen doesn’t have to be a working kitchen) but they have to make sense as a designed play-space. Mario levels make no sense at all, but they’re so carefully designed as experiences that we accept that Bowser’s castle is constructed of wobbly blocks that dip themselves in lava, cannons that constantly fire, etc. in a way we don’t with a Castlevania. Or at least, I don’t.

    I mean, really, the one section that stands out in every Castlevania is probably the Clock Tower, simply because they’re always so clearly modelled on the Clock Towers from Dracula X—entirely about the experience of dodging harpies and Medusa heads while climbing cogs. Sure, it’s frustrating, but it’s designed.

    To be honest, Aria of Sorrow is a really strong example of something that’s become endemic in games right now—weak or non-existent level design being utterly papered over with collectibles and RPG systems. I mean, Aria of Sorrow feels good to play (I will never get sick of the ol’ “dodge back out of enemy attack, move forward and attack” dance) and everything you do gets you more exploration percentage, more levels and new weapons and things. There’s always something new to kill or new to kill something with, and it works; the game might be sloppy and empty as a designed experience, but the “feel” is superb. And, you know? Here that’s enough. I ain’t gonna complain.

    Will I ever play it again? Yeah. I can see myself playing this again, it’s nice and short. I’ll have to finish all the DS Castlevanias first though… no, really!

    Final Thought: I know you’ve probably spent the majority of this article preparing the ropes and your special torture chair simply because I don’t like Super Metroid very much, but please don’t let this distract you from Aria of Sorrow’s perfectly pleasant time. Maybe let it distract you from the game’s story though, which is total bobbins and the one thing I found annoying.

  • Steel Diver (Nintendo, 2011)

    Steel Diver (Nintendo, 2011)

    Developed/Published by: Nintendo EAD Group No. 5, Vitei / Nintendo
    Released: March 27th, 2011
    Completed: 2nd November, 2014
    Completion: I finished all the missions. Didn’t bother my arse with the time trials or anything like that.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    I’ve taken a while to write this one because I felt that if I sat down and wrote my little… well, whatever it is these are, reviews, or journal entries or summat, right away, I’d just be going fucking mental here. Because this is one of those stupid games where it’s a total breeze right until the end, where the final boss is just totally stupidly hard for no particularly good reason, and you just end up wanting to snap your god damn 3DS in half, hold it tightly in one hand, fly to Japan and then shove it right up the arse of the director of the game (in this case, Takaya Imamura.) Now, I don’t know where Takaya Imamura lives exactly and he apparently produced F-Zero GX, so that would, probably, be a bit of an overreaction. However, I’ve noticed that Nintendo really, really love stupid difficulty spikes in their second/third tier releases (Super Princess Peach, for some reason, really sticks out in my mind… it was years ago I played it and I still want to fly to Japan and shove a broken DS up at least one arse) so I suppose I should be used to this by now.

    Anyway. Steel Diver was a weird launch game for the 3DS that no one liked, in fact, no one liked it so much that I bought it for three dollars. Three dollars sealed. Seemed like a bargain, I thought. After all, on the back of the box it looks like a cute little sub sim thing! I think I bought Pilotwings Resort for about a fiver at the same time and that was delightful, just delightful, so how bad could Steel Diver be? (Let’s forget about the boss, for a minute.)

    It’s bad. It’s bad because it, in classic “we have this input form, we have to use it” style that you’d have thought Nintendo would have been over by the time of the 3DS, you control it totally through the touch screen. Which turns a submarine sim into a game that’s entirely about choosing to either move the slider that’s “depth” or the one that’s “speed.”

    Sometimes you have to fire torpedoes! But mostly you’re trying to make sure you don’t bump into things by going “erk, going to fast, have to slow down” or “crap, the sea floor is going up, have to raise depth.”

    It’s stupefying. Brilliantly, the game is designed so you never actually have to fight enemy subs (just go past them, there’s no reason to fight them, no score or points or anything) which I guess is “realistic” but sure does make them seem pointless. And when you do have to get into a fight, using the stylus to push some sliders slowly and fire torpedoes… it’s like using the 3DS stylus to get good bits of jam out of a mouldy jam jar. A tedious and lamentable thing to find yourself doing.

    Honestly. Steel Diver isn’t a game super worthy of rage. Because you shouldn’t be getting to the point where you’re fighting the last boss. Just about as far as you should go is opening it to get the Club Nintendo code and then closing the box again forever.

    Will I ever play it again? ha ha ha ha [begins to choke on own mirth]

    Final Thought: Y’all ever play that Radar Mission? Steel Diver is someone at Nintendo going “hey remember we released a sub game for the Game Boy when it came out? That was a good idea, lets do it again.” Steel Diver even comes with a weird, off-brand Battleships-a-like that you can play with another 3DS owner, but you don’t want to do that because it’s the equivalent of asking a friend if they want to sit in a ditch and eat bogies with you.

  • Bugs vs. Tanks (Comcept, 2013)

    Bugs vs. Tanks (Comcept, 2013)

    Developed/Published by: Comcept / Level-5 
    Released: June 20th, 2013
    Completed: 28th October, 2014
    Completion: I finished all the missions, including the extra ones, unlocking all the tanks that you can unlock from said missions!
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    Bugs vs. Tanks is not very good. At absolute best you can sort of think of it like an Earth Defense Force game, except there’s no buildings being destroyed, or really that many bugs on screen at one time, or, uh, any particularly interesting weapons.

    But it does have all of the slightly wonky graphics and rough controls you expect from Earth Defense Force? And giant bugs, obviously the main comparison point?

    Basically, you play short levels where you shoot at bugs with your tank (though weirdly, firing is automatic at default.) occasionally finding new tanks. It’s very, very… blah. If not an Earth Defense Force game, it’s definitely in the ilk of the Simple Series that spawned it, feeling like a phoned-in cheapy title, but sadly not one with any interesting ideas to back it up as such. Keiji Inafune worked on it, apparently, in (probably) yet another case of a named Japanese developer saying “it would be cool if…” and then never checking in on the team again.

    Having said all this though I still played it all the way through and went back to unlock tanks. Why, you might ask? Well, because tanks are quite interesting and when you unlock them you can look at them in a gallery, and read a tiny bit of text about them. It the ideal game for someone who’s slightly interested in WWII tanks, but not so interested that they’ve read up about them already? Specific!

    Will I ever play it again? I have no excuse but if someone is ever like “want to play the co-op missions” I’d totally do it.

    Final Thought: Bug vs. Tanks isn’t very good and yet I’ve just admitted I’d play it more. It simply passed some time in an agreeable fashion. I have no excuse… well, maybe co-op’s really good, you know? Like Earth Defense Force, the game that this game really isn’t very like at all (apart from the giant bug thing.)

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

  • Dragon’s Crown (Vanillaware, 2013)

    Dragon’s Crown (Vanillaware, 2013)

    Developed/Published by: Vanillaware / Atlus
    Released: July 25th, 2013
    Completed: 25th October, 2014
    Completion: Defeated the final boss.
    Trophies / Achievements: 21%

    I really, really, really did not enjoy Dragon’s Crown. I think it’s crap. Really, stunningly, confusingly-because-people-seemed-to-like-it-and-as-a-result-I-was-looking-forward-to-it crap. Boring, repetitive crap. Have I said it’s crap enough yet.

    So… what’s the deal, anyway? I’ll show my hand here and admit I’ve never played another Vanillaware game, despite also owning Odin Sphere (picked up for a fiver many moons ago) and Muramasa for Vita (I thought I’d play this first though?). However, I really do like side-scrolling punch-me-dos. I mean, I genuinely like the Dungeons and Dragons games that obviously inspired this. And obviously, it’s nice looking, even if the art isn’t to my taste really in any way at all.

    I mean, it’s probably that art, which looks nice in stills, but makes the game seem really… I don’t know, static when you’re playing it. It’s totally one of those side-scrollers where you feel like you’re fighting cardboard cutouts, you know? Where if you’re slightly to the side you miss them completely. Which isn’t amazing when you’re playing the Elf, and every arrow you fire just seems to whizz past your enemies harmlessly because you’re a pixel off (I might be exaggerating here, but it’s how it felt.)

    It just doesn’t feel rewarding to hit things, or move about, or really do anything moment-to-moment. It all feels clunky, and restrictive, and then you get your 3 AI companions (because, of course, you don’t get to unlock online play until you’re over half-way through the game) and if the game felt like cardboard cutouts before, now it feels like cardboard cutouts you’ve scribbled all over, thrown glitter at and then blown up with a small explosive. The screen just becomes a mass off, well, fuck knows to be honest, spells and attacks and bodies any time there’s a skirmish, and you pretty much dodge and then start to spam your most powerful attacks in the hope you’re really hitting anything.

    (If you don’t, it’s fine because you’ll definitely survive to the end of the level anyway, it’s really not that hard. At least until the bastarding final boss, where you’ve got to do it in two lives and have to grind/hope you’ve unlocked powerful enough AI to survive it. Hurrah.)

    Anyway. Yeah, I know you’re probably thinking like “how different is this from the Dungeons and Dragons games, really?” so… ok! I’ll have to go back and play those new ports then, eh? Rather than just base this on my memories of playing it years ago. Maybe I’ll be eating some humble pie!

    Of course, that really won’t change that Dragon’s Crown is definitely crap.

    Will I ever play it again? Never ever ever ever. Not even multiplayer. I played it a bit but zzz.

    Final Thought: I really struggled to find something interesting to say about this, to be honest. I totally get that you’re supposed to really get into pushing your way through the levels as a group, playing the (cute but easily missed) cooking game and then, when spent, sort through your loot, but… man, if it just doesn’t feel good, why bother? I mean I’m talking about a game here that feels less good to me than repeatedly clicking the mouse in Torchlight or something. I mean really.

  • Pix The Cat (Pastagames, 2014)

    Pix The Cat (Pastagames, 2014)

    Developed/Published by: Pastagames 
    Released: October 8th, 2014
    Completed: 24th October, 2014
    Completion: Hmm. You can’t really beat this, I just played the main arcade mode a lot and stopped.
    Trophies / Achievements: 47%

    Oh dear, oh dear. It’s been a tough few weeks here at exp. Towers, with the last batch of games we’ve been playing all being… pish, to be honest. And we quite like the plucky chaps at Pastagames, who’ve made (notably) Arkedo Series 03: Pixel and Pix n’ Love Rush, which are both pretty durn charming retro-inspired titles, so we dipped into Pix The Cat in the hope it would lift the doldrums.

    I, uh, don’t like Pix The Cat, though. I feel sorta bad about it! Best described as a rough reimagining of Pac-Man Championship Edition DX (that’s the second one with the ghost trails) you play Pix (the cat), who has to (for reasons obscure) hatch duck eggs by walking over them then drop said hatched ducklings off in particular zones. This is complicated by the fact he can’t walk into his own trail of ducks (or they all explode) or start dropping them off before he’s hatched all the eggs (because then he loses his bonus.) It’s a game about quickly working out the best route through the screen—or being able to wing it well enough—performing that and then moving to the next screen, getting faster and faster until you hit fever time and everything is worth loads of points, you’re going really, really fast, and if you hit one thing you lose it.

    It sounds pretty good! Simple, yet solid. However, this is not the case. You see, while it’s inspired by Pac-Man clearly, with strict, Pac-Man-me-do controls, it’s got very open levels. This is a subtle complaint, but you know how in Pac-Man you’re always in a tunnel? it means that when you have to make a turn, you’re always sure you’re going to turn down the route you aim, even if you’re going really, really fast—because there will be a buffer between tunnels (the, er, not-tunnel bit.) In Pix The Cat, you’re often having to make very fast turns, even in instant zig-zags, to avoid hitting stuff like drop-off zones or enemies, and it’s super frustrating to suddenly miss an egg, or screw up your entire chance of a perfect because you turned a fraction too soon or too late. In fact I’d say 100% of my mess-ups are because of that. Now, you can easily say “well, you just need better reactions.”But my thoughts are more on the line of “why is this more fun than, say, designing the levels to avoid this problem?” I don’t think it is.

    (You might say “but Snake has wide open levels, and that’s fine!” again I refer to the level design—successful versions of Snake don’t litter the level with things to avoid in difficult zig-zags as well as your own tail. So there.)

    It’s got this one “main” arcade mode, which is again, like Pac-Man, in that you basically do the same levels in the same order every time. Now, they do change slightly. Very slightly. But they’re not different in any meaningful way. And there’s still a timer. As a result, the game reveals itself to be about absolutely perfecting performance through memorisation in order to get a high score. It’s so hard, actually, to get a good score that the game is entirely about not making a single error, hitting fever time and never losing it (which you won’t manage, it’s bloody hard). This is unfortunate! Because there’s a daily challenge mode, with a… I’d imagine random, but I’m not sure, level where you first time through aren’t going to know what’s coming and have to just muddle through as best you can. It’s more… roguelike-likey and I guess therefore it’s interesting how the seeping roguelike-likeyness of games these days means that ones that don’t do it seem at a disadvantage. I don’t really see why the main mode of this is so locked to memorisation and repetition rather than being at least a bit easier and more random to reward skilful play. It’s really weird, honestly.

    Oh, it also does this thing that seems clever, that you “zoom” deeper and deeper into the screen as each level is a tiny part of a bigger level, but it looks all wrong because the tiny levels don’t… ah, god, I’m going to describe this wrong technically, but they’ve got a higher pixel density than the level you’re playing (or something) so it looks really, really bad and incongruous. Boo to that, man.

    Pix The Cat just doesn’t work! On any level! It’s like they had a lot of good ideas, but got them all very slightly wrong. Like they all sat down to program, and put their hands on the keyboard one key to the left. Ah well.

    Will I ever play it again? No. It’s too hard to unlock the “dessert” mode (hard, basically) and not rewarding enough to make me keep trying. And it’s got two other modes, “nostalgia” and “laboratory” which are full of short individual levels but I just could not bring myself to care.

    Final Thought: You can play the daily challenge mode more than once each day. I mean, if that isn’t an example of not quite getting it I don’t know what is.