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.
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?
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. Deluxeso 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.
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.)
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!
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.
A few weeks ago I had a dream—one of those sort of generic dreams where you find yourself doing a test, but you can’t read the pages—but something about it involved me starting Mass Effect 2. I can’t remember in what context or why. So, not one to go to war with destiny, I booted it up.
Here’s an important fact: I didn’t like Mass Effect. My main memory of Mass Effect is that it was boring. Boring shooting. Boring dialogue. Boring bumping around on boring planets, before boring missions in boring, samey (sometimes exactly the same, I remember) spaces.
However, I’d made it through the whole game so I imported my hero into Mass Effect 2 (after changing his face significantly, because he was a rum looking chap and that’s no mistake) and got down to work of saving the galaxy again or whatever.
Now here’s where the article gets a bit… I don’t know. It’s the kind of thing I think can easily be discounted as sort of fannish complaints (despite the fact I wouldn’t consider myself a fan) relating to one of the biggest factors of the Mass Effect series and (in general) Bioware’s output—the romance system.
You see, something I definitely respect about the Mass Effect games is that adherence to the idea that your choices stick and have consequence. In terms of game franchises that go to some effort to tailor the experience via the player’s actions from one game to the next I can more or less name this and… The Walking Dead? I’m not even sure if that’s true for The Walking Dead offhand.
So here’s me, playing the game. I’ve shot up to my cabin on the Normandy, I’m wandering about… and I’m like… “that’s weird. Why is there a picture of Liara on my desk?”
Liara is one of the cast in the first game; I didn’t romance her. Actually, I had sort of unintentionally conspired with the game with a really retrograde past for my hero—I’d romanced Ashley Williams (the one other possible romance target) only to, at one critical point of the game, let her die because—I can’t remember actually, but it was critical to the galaxy or whatever.
So there’s my hero with his sad and clichépast—the woman he loved, dead because he chose the galaxy over her… except the game has decided that actually I’ve kept a torch for Liara instead.
And it didn’t make me particularly happy that on meeting Liara during the game, she made out with me. I didn’t consent to this. I feel… genuinely uncomfortable.
You might consider that a massive overreaction. After all, I actually recollect the Mass Effect team—at some point, possibly while doing press for 3—discussing that Commander Shepard isn’t the player, but a character the player is guiding (this was in contrast to a more traditional RPG like Dragon Age.) It’s something that’s kind of reflected in the weirdly fuzzy dialogue, where, for some reason, it gives you lines of dialogue to choose from, and your character then might say something almost entirely different (I’ve never understood why they didn’t keep the selections down to verbs: “comfort” vs “admonish” etc.) Yet it’s a tension I ignore—Commander Shepard is me, whether they like it or not. So when something as important as my past is altered, when decisions are made for me that I have no input on, my trust has been violated.
And this got me thinking about consent in these games. Because romance is treated as a system, and I know what they’re aiming for—that action movie scripting; the hero, the admiring female (or male! Shepard can be played as a lady) who falls into your arms before the suicide mission. The problem is—and many people have commented on it, I’m not pretending I’m somehow extra insightful—that your potential paramours basically just stand about and wait for you to force their interest. Talk to them, say the right things enough, and get some action. Push in compliments, get out sex.
The women in this game stopped being characters, or people (and they have to be people, they have to be characters) and became playthings. Here’s me sitting, leading all three up to just the point where I have to “commit” to one—not really sure that I will commit, because I’m still annoyed about Liara—and in fact, I’m probably more interested in “Yeoman Kelly Chambers” who offensively doesn’t even get to be a real romance option because she’s not a main character.
It actually gets to this point where two romanceable characters—Jack and Miranda—have a fight. Now, for a little background, Jack is the survivor of abuse. She’s a character that I’m not sure of the quality of, to be honest—the classic “survivor of abuse that’s really mean and difficult but also promiscuous and risk-taking, because she’s so damaged”—but when given the option of defending Jack—abused by the corporation, Cerberus, Miranda represents—or siding with Miranda who (for no good reason) chose to make a point about how “it wasn’t really Cerberus” I sided with Jack, rather than take the special magic “everyone is made happy” Paragon option.
As a result, I could now never romance Miranda. That’s it, the algorithm decided I didn’t play the game right. I’d pushed in enough compliments but I made a nuanced choice. No sex for me!
This kind of interaction has none of the pleasure of… you know, actually interacting with another human. The idea that I could at least make Miranda “loyal” (important to the wider, non-romance game system) again if I made all the most goody-two-shoes choices to eventually unlock a dialogue choice… it’s ridiculous, boiling Miranda down to a vending machine I have to reset my pin code to use. And consider that I clearly engaged with the story and characters to the point that this bothered me. Why put systems in place where I have to “game” my interaction with characters I saw as people to the point where I see them as robots?
And if you engage with the “game”, the romance narratives feel dangerously naive. Have sex with Miranda and you’re treated with the saddest, 80s soft porn sequence, but your sex sequence with Jack is the culmination of the story where your interest in her “validates” her and she cries as you penetrate her with your magic penis that makes people move on from decades of abuse. That’s awful.
Mass Effect 2’s romance system feels like… well, it feels like a joke about a programmer’s idea of how love works. The kind of thing someone with absolutely no experience would make if they tried to boil it down to the most basic systems. And as a result, consent gets lost in the shuffle. You can make that beautiful woman like you if you just say the right things, whether she’s interested or not. You decide. They don’t. And one dialogue choice “switching off” romance doesn’t make it any better; it’s still my action that made them perform one way other the other, and the system breeds entitlement of the player to the character they want; you just reload rather than role-play.
(And look. It just doesn’t work the way it does in an action film anyway, unless we’re talking about something as stupid as a Bond film, because not every woman you see in an action film immediately has a lob on for the protagonist, and then waits for him to fire into her passively. Yes—I’m actively claiming your average action film has women with more agency when it comes to romance than Mass Effect 2. Things are different if you play as a female character, and I’ll even admit your average action film doesn’t have as many women in it as Mass Effect 2, but the issues of system and consent exist even if you’re a female Shepard firing into Garrus or whatever.)
I didn’t romance anyone in the end. Before the suicide mission, Mathew Shepard stared longingly at his picture of Liara.
“For fuck’s sake,” I said.
Will I ever play it again? No, but I’ve already started Mass Effect 3. While I have very specific complaints, Mass Effect 2 is a pleasant diversion; bad narrative pacing, but nice enough shooting and a grand enough finale to make me want to keep going quite happily. Goodness, it’s almost like you can still enjoy media while acknowledging it has problematic aspects, eh?
Final Thought: I’m cheating here but lets talk about Yeoman Kelly Chambers. At the end of the game, if you’ve romanced no-one, she’ll do a sexy dance for you in your cabin! Anyway, you can meet her fairly early in Mass Effect 3 and she’ll note that she was so disturbed by being kidnapped by “The Collectors” earlier in Mass Effect 2 that she’s suffered serious trauma about being on the Normandy and can never set foot on it again.
That’s right! Sexy dance from a traumatised woman. Probably should have thought that through a bit.
Fancy pillaging a bit of personal history? Well, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars might be interesting because it’s a Julian Gollop-designed tactics title (he of X-Com, Laser Squad, Chaos, and so on) but this write-up is interesting because I believe (though don’t quote me on it) my review of his previous Nintendo tactics-me-up Rebelstar: Tactical Command for Eurogamer is the first game review I was ever paid for. I’m like “2005! Not that long ago” but then I’m suddenly like “fuuu… ten years ago.”
Anyway, give it a read if you want to read a review of a Julian Gollop game that I enjoyed, but was a bit disappointed in because there wasn’t much to it other than the pleasantness of the core systems. Er, before you read me outline roughly the same thing about Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars.
Actually, that’s unfair! Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars was a game I found totally entertaining. I’d say it overstays its welcome a bit in length, and it’s interesting to consider how harshly simplified it is even from Rebelstar—for example, your characters have no action point systems, it’s just one move and one shoot, unless you get up to certain shenanigans—but it’s still a perfectly fun diversion if you’re looking for a tactics-em-up.
The biggest problem—and probably the main reason it gets a bit tiresome towards the end—is that it’s saddled with the whole “Tom Clancy’s Tom Clancy” thing. As a result, it goes out of its way to be super boring. There’s a plot that’s pretty much ripped from the headlines before they knew what the headlines were going to be (Russia invading Ukraine) but it’s about as exciting as if the game had come in a brown paper bag labelled “video game” and everything in the game was a cube (note: that is probably actually more interesting.) Yes, there’s some (mild) banter between your squad, but they’re rarely ever more than their class to you.
That’s fine though! The classes are fun, from exploding a whole squad of dudes with a rocket launcher to (my personal favourite) manipulating “command points” to allow your stealthiest Ghost Banshee kill several enemies in a single turn (I think my record was six or seven enemies, which felt amazing.)
When it comes down to it, talking up Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars feels sorta like trying to talk up a puzzle game like Sudoku, or something. It’s like… it’s fun! But how to make it sound exciting when the wrapper is so—intentionally, in some respects—dull?
Wait… I hate Sudoku. Forget that. Basically: I enjoyed Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars and I’m glad I played it. There.
Will I ever play it again? Nope!
Final Thought: You don’t see it in the game, really, but if you look at the top-screen art for the game in the 3DS menu, you’ll see that the character models have a really cool, low-poly style. Really made me sad that wasn’t more on show.
Developed/Published by: Roll7 Released: 21st January, 2014 Completed: 19th February, 2015 Completion: Finished all the challenges in career mode. Trophies / Achievements: 50%
About half-way through OlliOlli’s playthrough—by which I mean, as I was reaching the end of the “amateur” section of the career—I was thinking to myself “god, I’ll probably never finish this. It’s so demanding, dexterity-wise. I’ll get tired of it, and put it down, and come back to it months later, and having lost all of my muscle memory, I’ll just be immediately frustrated.”
I was sort of imagining I’d write an article here about these games that require this kind of dexterity—memorisation if not of exact moves, of movements and flicks and combinations of presses—and how they live in this dangerous space where if they’re too hard to learn or to master you give up, but if they’re too easy there’s no challenge, and no point in continuing.
Anyway, I was imagining that, probably ultimately moaning that OlliOlli just overshot it, when the strangest thing happened. Right as I finished OlliOlli’s “amateur” mode—which I absolutely struggled with—it ‘clicked’. I was in pro mode, and I finally felt like a pro at the game.
Now, that’s not to say I breezed through the rest of the game. I’ve actually been super ill with a crummy cold/flu, and one day, in the depths of it, I spent what must have been about five hours just trying to beat the last couple of challenges I had in the game. Five hours or something spent on the same, tiny, repetitive two levels of a wee game. And I didn’t even notice the time passing (pro tip, kids: podcasts, radio shows… they are your friend.) I was having fun.
Of course—whose to say when this game would click for you, or for any other person? Maybe you’d give up long before I did, or maybe you would end up putting the game down for a while thinking you’ll come back to it. But here’s the thing I’ve forgotten to say! Even if you did, I think OlliOlli’s totally worth it. It’s the pleasant lovechild of a messy ménage à trois of Uniracers, Canabalt and Tony Hawk (yes, it’s true, Tony Hawk once got drunk and shagged an SNES cartridge and his iPad) and whatever time spent it is totally worth it, I think.
Will I ever play it again? No, but I’ll happily play the sequel. I didn’t originally expect I’d want to but I would.
Final Thought: Of course, I can say “whatever time spent it is totally worth it” but what if I’d spent five hours trying to beat those two levels and still not managed it? Weird thing is I think I’d just have kept trying. It always felt within reach. I think Roll7 know what they’re doing. Thumbs up.
Developed/Published by: Intelligent Systems, Nintendo SPD / Nintendo Released: 29th April, 2009 Completed: 10th February, 2015 Completion: Finished all the Nintendo-developed Wario Ware games and read all the 4-koma! Trophies / Achievements: n/a
Aye, so… I actually started this in, like… March 2014, because that was around when Nintendo had announced it was closing the servers for a whole raft of Nintendo DS and Wii games, and this was one of them. I was all “oh no! I’ll need to download all of those good levels people made and save them to my cart!”
However, turns out that while my Nintendo DSi will connect to my router, a lot of these (all?) of the Nintendo DS games don’t actually use the on-system wi-fi connection (or something?) and so couldn’t actually connect to my modern router. I could have faffed about with my router settings, but I wasn’t actually bothered, so I forgot all about it after finishing Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (which I finished, ok, shut up.)
Without the ability to upload levels I’ll be honest I didn’t actually bother my arse trying out the level creation stuff, and anyway that’s my actual job so fuck that for a game of soldiers. And without the ability to download levels, I was stuck with the pre-installed ones, which, much like Wario Ware: Touched! all use the touch screen, so they’re crap compared to the brilliant ones on the GBA. Totally forgettable and dull.
But at least there aren’t too many of them! The best thing about Wario Ware D.I.Y. is, however, the weird inclusion of loads of 4-koma. If you’re not familiar, 4-koma are a very Japanese style of four panel comic strip, usually super absurdist and often quite wordy compared to your usual, western style of three panel comic strip. These are great. They’re all super funny and you have to unlock them by playing Wario Ware D.I.Y. every day, which sucks, but it’s something to return to, which I did every time I remembered, which, apparently, was rarely, because it nearly took me a full year.
However, the 150-odd 4-koma were worth every penny, even if nothing else about this is particularly good post server shut down.
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