deKay's Gaming Diary

At last, I’ve been able to get hold of a version of VVVVVV I can actually play! Yeah, I could have played it on the PC, but PC gaming is such a tedious chore I really couldn’t be bothered. I decided to wait (and wait, and wait) for the UK release on the 3DS, and here it is. Pretty sure the US got it months ago. Tch.

Is it ace? YES.

Is it hard? OH GOD YES.

Look at my game record just there. 446 deaths. 446! And most of those were in the same section of the game – the “Doing Things The Hard Way” section. But, with perseverance, I managed to rescue my whole crew and complete the game.

Yes, I still have 6 (actually, 5 now since that screenshot) trinkets left to get, but I’ll get to them, I’m sure. Once completed, I then went on to play (and complete) Notch’s VVVV 4K version of the game (which, along with a load of other versions and modes is included), which was also excellent. And not as hard, thankfully.

Back in the day, I must have completed this a billion times. It’s not a hard game, but there’s something very satisfying about nuking the enemy before they’ve even had a chance to build any catapults.

WE’VE NUKED THEM!

So that’s what I’ve done a lot this week. That, and cornering the enemy in a useless sector of the map, with nought to defend themselves and no resources to create anything, before slaying them horribly with four pikemen, a cannon, and 150 jet fighters.

WE’VE WON!

Also, Mega-lo-Mania is the best source of soundbites ever. “We’re running out of elephants” (actually elements, but the quality isn’t great), “No I don’t think so” (in a super-camp voice) and “Towwer cwitical!”. Awesome.

Completed it overandoverandover this week. And not once did any of the CPU players manage to hibernate any men for the final battle. Tch.

I don’t know why I’ve been playing this throughout the week. I didn’t touch it when I downloaded it for free last year as part of the Nintendo 3DS Ambassador Programme. Not because it isn’t any good, because it’s great, but just because I have so many other things to play.

Anyway, I finished it today. I was surprised how many of the tracks I still remembered – even those that haven’t resurfaced on later Mario Kart games. Strangely, though, some of them’s very existence seems to have been wiped from my brain. Sky Garden? I was convinced that was a Konami Krazy Racers track. Yoshi Desert? Er, don’t remember that.

Oh yeah, and once I’d completed it I realised that I’d never used the jump button (there’s a jump button?!). Oh well!

To begin with, Fez is a Cave Story-looking 2D platformer. Then, about 5 minutes in, a thing happens and suddenly everything is 3D. Sort of. It’s still 2D but with four 2D planes, each mapped to the sides of a cube which you can freely rotate.

Then it becomes a different sort of platform game, which is more puzzley (you have to figure out how to rotate the playfield to progress), and somewhat explorey as you search for  cubes and bits of cubes which eventually open doors.

As you wander the game world, which is mostly lovely with bouncey-bright colours and blue skies and stuff, you take in the architecture. The markings on the walls. The pictures and posters in the rooms. Then you realise – they’re not just for show. They’re telling you things. Secret things.

In fact, there’s a whole alphabet to decipher, a counting system, and even a set of shapes that correspond to buttons on your controller. Figuring these all out, and what to do in certain rooms with these clues and others, is where the real game is. Getting 32 cubes and seeing the end? That’s just platforming. Exploring and getting 100% is a totally different game, with a different way of playing and even a different set of rules and ways of looking at things. Two games in one, pretty much.

It’s funny too, and filled with references to other games. One of the areas of the game is all original Gameboy monochrome too, and accessed via a pipe. The way your hypercubeic guide says “Hey, Listen!” in a homage to Navi was great as well.

Getting the first 32 cubes to complete the game, like I did today, is fun and mostly simple. There’s no real fear of death (you always respawn instantly on the last solid platform you were on), so you don’t have to worry about pixel-perfect jumps. There’s nothing especially tricky, and you don’t even hit many puzzles before the end sequence. After that, in New Game+ (where you restart the game, keeping everything already gained and with the map kept as “open” as before), the puzzles and real quirky stuff starts properly. I’ll certainly be trying to get 100% in this, as it’s fantastic.

Sadly, the game is tinged slightly with silly bugs and performance issues. It’s too easy to “fall out” of the world, especially inside rooms. Moving from area to area is often really jerky, and the sound frequently breaks up. It’s easy to get stuck in a “death loop” where you respawn in an area that instantly kills you, and at least twice I got killed by acid at the same time as being sucked into a black hole, which hangs the game. Still, you never lose more than a few seconds progress, so it’s just a bit disappointing when the rest of the game is so very, very good.

The ending of this was much less dramatic than at least the last two Layton games. It didn’t matter, especially since this is a prequel, but I kept expecting something… more. That didn’t happen. Never mind though.

Something else odd was how much easier the puzzles were in this one. I’ve not done them all yet (I think I’ve completed about 105 out of the 155 main ones), but I’m sure that the final few puzzles in the other games have been worth 80 and 99 picarats. Highest here was just 60, and I don’t think I’ve seen any over that yet either – not even the (usually harder) hidden puzzles. I might be wrong, but I certainly didn’t struggle on any.

Aside from two side puzzle ones. Oh my do I hate those. I’m still stuck on the UFO SOS one, but one involving pipes, which could supposedly be completed in about 30 moves, took me over SIX THOUSAND. Urgh. Hate them.

I’ve a few more train and fish (um, that makes sense if you’ve played the game) puzzles left, about half the weekly puzzles, and of course the remaining 50 or so main game puzzles, but as usual I’ll leave them for a while and come back another time.

Never before have I played a game to completion, without any clue as to what the hell I’m supposed to be doing for pretty much the entire duration. And I certainly didn’t expect it to only take an hour to do so. Still – it was an experience, f’shaw.

Here be spoilers:

You start off on a sand dune. You’re some sort of girl (possibly) wearing a scarf. There’s a mountain in the distance which you have to walk to. On the way, you find some flying pieces of rag, which power up your scarf and make you able to jump and glide until the Magic Scarf Energy runs out – after which you need to charge it up again. I think. I’m not entirely sure.

There are what seem like ancient ruins. Sometimes things trigger if you press the Shout A Glyph button near them. There are glowing things that make your scarf longer. Every so often there’s a sort of altar or something which you sit in front of and Kaonashi from Spirited Away appears, nods at you and you get some sort of tapestry story telling you vaguely about the next bit of the game. Probably.

Along the way, other players who you cannot communicate with appear, and you can walk with them. If you walk closely to each other, you recharge your scarves. Apart from that, they seem to serve little purpose.

There are bit of rag, rug, carpet and scarf everywhere. When you “arouse” them by Glyphshouting, they do stuff. Some become creatures, some become bridges, and others just sway or let you jump up them.

You progress through different areas “solving” incredibly simple puzzles, mainly by (again) Glyphshouting at… things. There are a couple of snowboarding sections in the game too, for reasons I don’t understand. Eventually you reach the foot of the mountain and there’s snow and wind and you almost die whilst walking very, very slowly up it.

Then you complete it, and get sent back to the beginning ready to do it all again.

An utterly incomprehensible game, and for that reason I’m going to rate it six and a goose quarks out of lime.

Dear Ubisoft,

I am a big fan of your historically almost-accurate hood-wearing murderous free-runner simulators, but despite having played your three most recent in relatively quick succession and anxiously anticipating the finale of the “Ezio Trilogy” and its associated Revelations, I was shocked to discover that you seem to have forgotten to include any.

Unless, of course, I have to unlock them by playing this poor Welltris/Mirror’s Edge minigame to completion, which, frankly, isn’t going to happen. Not least because it is the worst thing in all of creation.

Once I’d sat through the 462 minute long end credits sequence, where you name each and every person who ever existed throughout the entirety of time and space, before switching on a random name generator and churning out another 14 billion people who never existed throughout the entirety of time and space, I was still awaiting any form of revelation. But none came.

Unless no revelation was the revelation? How very meta of you!

Anyway. Keep up the good work. I hope to be completing Stabby Hood Tomahawk Man Death III later this year.

Love,

deKay xxx

Oh Tony, Tony, Tony. Where did it all go wrong? Why, after the utter perfection that is THPS3 did you let your amazing series of amazing games turn into the shambles that is Ride and Shred? Oh Tony! Why have you forsaken me, your most ardent of skateboard game fans? Me, who has completed every single one of your games, before that sorry pair, so many times on so many platforms. I even completed the original game on the N-Gage! The N-Gage!

With THPS HD on the way soon, I was itching for some proper THPS gaming in preparation. So I dug out my Wavebird, a GC memory card, and THPS3, and jammed them all in my Wii.

GLORIOUS GAMING ENSUED. RAPTURE.

I do wonder if THPS3 is actually the best game ever made ever. Ever. Ever.

After walking the ninety billion miles required to get the necessary coins to buy warriors to slap ghosts and demons about a bit, I finally completed Streetpass Quest II. And got a lovely wig for my trouble. Hurrah!

Also: me so pretty.

Short, apart from the absolutely NAILS final level (with surprise boss!), but utterly glorious. It’s something different to any other platformer I’ve played, yet feels like a load of old 16 bit games like Metal Slug and stuff. Fantastic, and well worth £5.40 of anyone’s money.

Yes, the original Super Mario Bros.

Yes, I’ve completed it before. Lots of times. But I’d not completed it for a while (how did it get harder?!) and certainly not on the 3DS, where I’d barely played it. So today I completed it. And very lovely, and hard, it was too.

This is not the time or the place to bring up that I said I wasn’t going to buy it. Nor is it the time or the place to say I played and completed the 3DS version, which was pants, already. All it is sufficient to do is say this: Mistakes Were Made.

Let us begin with how rubbish the 360 version is. Let us say how many times I ran through walls or fell through the floor and died. This many times: 7. Let us now say how I died once for no discernible reason, by having lots of rings, running along a badnikless corridor, and suddenly the game loaded again and put me back at the most recent checkpoint. Let us also tell you how at one point I couldn’t progress on the Planet Wisp level because even though I had the Rocket Wisp power, pressing Y did nothing, and I had to quit and reload the stage. Let us tell you all these things.

Let us now complain about the Modern Sonic levels. Let us anguish over how, despite being far, far better than most Modern Sonic games previously, they still end up not actually being very good. Even the very best Modern Sonic level (Green Hill Zone) is worse than the very worst (Crisis City) Classic Sonic level.

Let us take a moment to recount the horror that is the requirement to replay bits of previous levels, as “challenges”, just to open up the Boss Gates. Let us try hard to forget the Vector the Crocodile level challenge, for it is the worst piece of videogaming created in the last 25 years. Let us never have to homing attack musical notes while the camera spins like a drunken mouse dancing on a Wonder Stuff LP as it plays, ever again.

Let us burn from our eyes, and especially our ears, the array of beastly chums Sonic has dragged along. Let us hope in the next game when they get sucked into a Time Vortex, that time they stay gone forever.

Let us briefly mention how poor the bosses are. Let us also mention how they get worse through the game, and how with all the amazing bosses Sega could have plucked from the Sonic series, they managed to pull exactly none of them into Sonic Generations. And the final boss is a shambling, random mess of polygons and purple with graphical glitching and seemingly irrelevant controls.

Let us list all of the good things about the game: The music. The nostalgia. Some of the Classic Sonic levels. The inclusion of the original Sonic game. This is all.

Somehow, this version was even worse than the 3DS game. It improved in some ways (Classic Sonic remains Classic Sonic, so the later levels still feel like two different Sonics – this was not the case on the 3DS), but broke it in others (mainly the Boss Gates and the challenge level completion requirements).

Let us say this, however: Sonic Generations is the best home console based Sonic game in years. Given the other games out in that time, though, that’s not really a complement.

And it was AWESOME.

Many people complained that it wasn’t a proper follow up to Mario 64, with big open worlds and a world “hub”. Some people complained that it wasn’t a proper 2D Mario game, like New Super Mario Bros. And some people complained it was basically just Super Mario Bros. 3 in 3D.

Pff to them all. They’ve clearly not played it, for if they had, they’d realise it doesn’t matter. It’s a new Mario game, close enough to older games to be Mario, different enough to be a new entry into the series. Yes, it has the raccoon suit from SMB3, and even some of the Koopa Kids, and the airships, but it isn’t even close to being like it in any more than a nod in its general direction. Sure, you collect big coins like you do in NSMB, and yes, it’s 3D (as in, you can run into the screen) like Mario 64 – but it’s new. All new.

And anything not new is done differently.

Anyway. It isn’t important what it is and isn’t like, because it’s fantastic. And I’ve completed it, which means I’m about 30% through the game.

Why is this? Well, spoilers! But lets just say that once you’ve beaten Bowser on World 8, there’s a completely separate Special set of worlds that opens up. And, someone else to play through the whole game as. Then I have all the missing coins to collect too. It’s the game that keeps giving!

Goldeneye 007 (it’s important to add the 007, apparently) was another of those games I picked up cheap from Morrisons just after Christmas. I’m not sure why I chose to play it, but I did. And it was surprisingly good. Was? Yes, because I completed it. It was quite easy and short.

Bad points first, then. The default controls (with the remote and nunchuck) are rubbish. Thankfully, I have a swanky black Classic Controller Pro, and that works much better. Secondly, Pierce Brosnan has been replaced with cardboard actor and presence-less tool Daniel Craig. He’s so useless I found myself siding with Trevelyan, and was actually a bit disappointed that I had to kill him. Oh well. Finally, the use of the smart phone to hack and photograph was woefully underutilised and could have added so much more to the game.

Thankfully, none of that was really very important, and I enjoyed pretty much the whole game despite them. Even the took-me-by-surprise QTE bits, which I really had no idea were in the game. The action was fast, I didn’t get any slowdown, and some of the levels looked utterly fantastic. Juggling soldiers with the rocket launcher on one of the final levels was amusing too. I completely forgot it was “only” a Wii game. Definitely worth the fiver I paid for it, and probably worth several times that, in fact.

I haven’t played multiplayer (partly as I know it’ll be full of cheats – all Wii games are online), but I expect it would be ACE, simply so you can shoot Daniel Craig.

Back in the day, I completed this on the GBA. But that was about 8 years ago, and it is such a good game that I really got into playing it again when I got it for free on my 3DS.

It is still excellent, and still the best Wario Ware title. Not that the others were bad – just that this one is the most pure. Or something.

Completed it today, and found it far easier than I remember it being on the GBA. I suspect that’s because part of me remembered what I was supposed to do in each game. Or I’m just a better gamer now (not true).

You know how I said it was a bit meh to start with? Well, it got a lot better and I was really getting into it. And then the final level happened. What follows is spoilers, so you may wish to look away.

The last section of the game takes place in Central Park. Which has mostly been raised into the sky. As you walk (or run) through it, bits crumble away so paths are cut off and stuff. Except that barely affected anything. There are baddies to kill, or stealth past and ignore. Then you get to a section where there are stealthed baddies, except I had a suit upgrade that negated that, and they’re stupidly easy to kill – any that got close were punched in the face, and most got stuck trying to jump up to the platform I was on so were easy pickings for my gun. I don’t think I took any damage at all.

Finally, a tunnel opens. “The final boss?” I thought, “Or a huge fight at least?”. No. Nothing. Game completed.

Like they forgot to include a whole level or something. Damp squib. Oh well.

My first completed game of 2012! Unlike Super Street Fighter IV, I didn’t class this as complete by beating the final boss as every character. Instead, I’m basing it on completing Story Mode (or Chronicle, as it’s called).

In this mode, you play through the plot of all the Dead or Alive series, one after another. Well, I say plot – it’s all a bit bizarre and doesn’t make a lot of sense. Mind you, I’ve never really played Dead or Alive much previously so perhaps that’s why.

The 3DS game is fantastic. It looks amazing, and the fighting is fluid and as complex as you’d expect from “big console” beat ‘em ups. Lots of moves, combos, special moves, and techniques (blocks, throws, counters, etc.). I really enjoyed it. And not just because of the boobs and knickers. If I’d have known it was this good, I’ve have paid more for it and bought it earlier, but the £7 from Morrisons price? Bargain.

Despite enjoying the original Scribblenauts, I didn’t buy the sequel (until I saw it for a fiver in Morrisons this week) for several reasons. Firstly, the later levels on the original were too hard. Not hard to find the items you have to draw, but more hard because of the fiddly controls (mainly moving Maxwell) and trying not to knock stuff over or position things slightly wrongly. There were also a lot of platforming sections, or “peril” situations where it was all too easy for you or someone else to die inadvertently, even when you were doing things “the right way”. Not to mention that 90% of the levels could be completed using the same 4 or 5 items – usually a rope, a ladder, a helicopter, a gun and/or some meat.

This fixes pretty much all of that. The levels are now more about creating the right items, rather than how or where you use them, and there is very little in the way of platforming. Since you now have adjectives to work with as well as nouns, there’s a lot more variety too, and I spent a good half an hour or more just on the title screen, creating “giant scary radioactive zombie dinosaur” and “tiny evil dead pink cat” and stuff like that.

It’s easier than the original (although I’ve completed it there are still a third or more levels left to do so it might get harder), but importantly it was more fun, and varied, and clever and funny. The fact you can choose to now control Maxwell directly with the d-pad rather than tap-to-move improves things exponentially too.

I got this for Christmas, and it’s the main thing I’ve been playing then and all this week. I’ve come to the conclusion that it is the best Mario Kart game yet. It doesn’t have the silly gimmicks of the GC and Wii games. It’s graphically better than all previous titles. It doesn’t have the big empty tracks of the N64 version. And it has a return of the coins from the GBA and SNES games. It also seems that the powerups are distributed a bit more fairly too, especially with regards to the blue shell – it’s rare to get more than a couple each race now, rather than get hit over and over and over by them.

Although I’ve played online a bit (which was fun and worked really well), I’ve mainly been playing offline, completing the Grand Prix races. Today, I won the final 150cc cup, having done 50 and 100cc previously. It seemed a bit easier than the last Mario Kart games (the Wii one) I played too, but that could be due to me carefully choosing kart customisations.

Fantastic game, and will get a lot more play from me still even though it’s “over”.

Another game series ruined by Sega. The first two Super Monkey Ball games were awesome, but they slid down to this – an overly simplified, challenge-free entry into the series. Levels have barriers or “grooves” so you don’t die. There are no tricky turns, no jumps, no difficult levels at all. In fact, I found myself finishing most worlds with more lives than I started with.

Still, it was fun. Ish. Shame it didn’t carry on with another 8 worlds that were harder, as without them it was just too short and easy.

14 hours in, and the main 198 levels are, finally, completed! There were some real head scratchers in the last few sets of puzzles, but thankfully my “tactic” of leaving a level I was finding impossible, then returning the next day, seemed to help.

Of course, there are now the 50 or so bonus levels, and untold user-made levels to work through, so it isn’t the end really.

Fantastic game, well worth the £5.40 or whatever it was, and far more fun and much longer and more playable than Sonic sodding Generations.

I was expecting to be disappointed. After all, how could I be anything but? Although if you’re set up to be disappointed and your low expectations are pretty much met, how could you actually be disappointed? Deep.

Things started out surprisingly well. Classic Sonic’s first few levels were pretty good, actually, even if they did still feel like the physics were on the wonk. Even Modern Sonic’s levels were bearable for a while, but as the game progressed things just got worse and worse. I think the breaking point was when the game proudly punched me in the face with the line “Classic Sonic can now use Homing Attack!”. Sigh.

Things were at their worst for the re-rendition of Sonic Colours, particularly for Classic Sonic, with the level being full of bottomless death pits and required homing attack-to-grab sections where the moved failed to work properly half the time.

And the end boss? Not epic like in other Sonic games – just tedious. I did have all the Chaos Emeralds though (the special stages are not only endlessly repeatable whenever you want, but laughably simple) so had Super Sonic(s) for the fight. If that makes a difference.

Sure, there have been far worse Sonic games (pretty much all of them since Sonic Adventure 2, bar the GBA and DS titles), but that isn’t really a positive thing given how bad all the others were. Poor.

There was an update to the 3DS last week which added a few features (like 3D video recording and marginally better friend list management), and as part of it there was a new Streetpass Quest II “mission” for the Mii Plaza. Hurrah!

Unfortunately, you can’t do it unless you’ve completed the first Quest twice, when I’d only done it once. So, armed with 300 play coins, I set about doing it again. Surprisingly, I managed it with “just” 240 coins used, mainly because I had a White Cat exactly when I needed one, whereas before I wasted 100+ coins waiting for one. I also had a decent strategy too, using a Purple Cat (when I had one) first to poison the enemies the maximum number of times (one for each Hero), then Orange next (if possible) to add an extra attack to each of the remaining 8 Heroes, and finally using magic on any armoured ghost when my Heroes were only Level 1.

I also got lucky with some Green magic attacks – managed to wipe a load of HP off some of the ghosts (including the final one!) while they were napping. Ace.

Now I have all the original hats! Hurrah!

Well, I wasn’t expecting that.

I mean, I was expecting to finish it, of course – but I didn’t expect to play though Sequence 5 and get to the end and have “Sequence 9 Complete” come up. Turns out I was much further through the game than I thought. Since I’ve spent about 80% of the game “off-story”, that means the main story was very, very short compared to Assassin’s Creed 2. I don’t really mind as there’s been plenty to do (and I still have lots of Lairs and Machines and some of the DLC left as well), and I’ve spent well over 20 hours on it so far, but if I were just going for the main plot I’d be a bit disappointed, I think.

Still, it was fantastic. Although I hated the end bit with Desmond. It was like that bit in Prey that I didn’t want to play all over again. Tch.

Jumped straight back in and continued sending my recruits on missions and buying up property. Aces.

All done!

I don’t know whether or not the final episode was shorter, or if the puzzles were just more obvious, but it didn’t seem to take me very long to save Hell (and by extension, the world). A very Soda Poppers (sorry, %$&* Poppers) heavy episode, but that was OK given the outcome. Is that spoilers?

I might give Sam and Max a bit of a break now though, until the next series is found cheap somewhere!