deKay's Gaming Diary

Roundup time!

Kirby and the Amazing Mirror (3DS)

Actually, the GBA version I got as part of the 3DS Ambassador thing. I thought I’d played it before, but I don’t actually remember any of it. It’s very confusing, as there’s no linear progression from level to level (like in Kirby’s Dream Land) or a map where you can replay previous levels (like in Kirby’s Adventure). Instead, there’s a complicated map system where you have to find different exits to access other levels, with occasional mirrors that are found which then leave a permanent link from the main “room” of the game to parts of the map. I suppose it’s a little bit how games like Metroid work, but the map is useless at telling you where you need to go, and it’s too easy to get stuck in a one-way route and have to redo miles of the game before you can try to find another route. I’m sort of enjoying it, but it doesn’t work well with quick bursts of play.

Skyrim (360)

Not progressed much since last time I posted about this, but I have agreed to do some Thieves Guild work (which involves roughing up some locals for money) so started that. I also slaughtered loads of people in the Ratway. I didn’t want to, but they attacked me and things just spiralled into badness. Also: my Flame Atronach is awesome.

VVVVVV (3DS)

Having completed the main game, I was going to go back and collect some more trinkets. However, I got a bit sidetracked with the plethora of other game modes and alternative maps, and so went off and did some of those instead. I also stumbled across some of the “accessibility modes” in the options, so have set the game speed to 60% which makes some of the really hard sections a lot easier. I suppose it’s cheating, but meh – whatdahyahgonnado?

Mario Kart 7 (3DS)

There was a patch for this in the week, so I decided to give it another try online. Had some great games with randoms, and I didn’t even come last most of the time. Unsurprisingly, not a single person chose to play the now-fixed (thanks to the patch) Wuhu Loop track, which certainly made it more varied. I think I was suffering from nasty lag though, as some of the other racers appeared to be invincible to my shells, or seemed to get blown up randomly even though nothing seemed to hit them. That’s my connection though, not the game.

Skylanders (360)

I’ll post more about this another time, but it arrived today and my daughter thinks it’s amazing. I enjoyed the half and hour or so I played it for too, so could be a hit. Glad I got it for about £19 though, not the £60 or whatever it was when it came out last year.

Rayman Origins (Demo) (3DS)

Oh! It looks so lovely!

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!

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.

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!

Although I’d have ended up buying this at some point anyway (it’s a Mario game, so obviously), there was an issue doing so due to last year’s £18 Rule – and Mario games almost never dip much in price. That rule has now expired though, replaced with the far more gruelling Pound-A-Mile Rule, which still encourages finding the lowest price for anything without the limit. Instead, there’s just the limit of how far my little legs can cycle.

But I digress.

As a reward to myself for a full week of biking, I bought this with my hard earned miles. And it is lovely. I expected it would be nothing less, of course. I’ve played it a bit so far, and have just opened up World 4. It’s been very easy up to this point, although I’ve not managed to collect all the big coins in each level yet, and I missed one or two flags too, so I’m going to have to go back.

Really loving it so far. It’s a 2D-style Mario game, on a 3D game world. That is, it’s more like New Super Mario Bros than Mario 64, but it works really well. Nice blue skies too, which is always a plus point, as you don’t get them much these days…

A roundup of some of the games I’ve been playing in the last couple of weeks:

Pullblox (3DS)

Completed this a while back, but have gone back to finish some of the bonus levels that you unlock, and some of the user generated ones I’ve found strewn across the internets. It’s still lovely.

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (360)

Returned to mop up a few more achievements and actually play some of the side missions and games I’d totally missed. There are still Cristina and assorted faction side missions to do, but I think I’m done with the game for now. It was excellent though – I just have other things to play!

Crysis 2 (360)

This was £7 in the Morrisons sales. I’m about 3-4 hours in, and haven’t really got used to the controls yet – every button on the pad seems to have seventy-three uses in various situations, or whether you press it or hold it down or double-tap it. The game itself seems like a mix of Half-Life 2, The Conduit, and Aliens vs Predator, with various sections, plot points and cut scenes ripped from each. It’s not bad, but I’m not feeling it yet. Mind you, I’m not a big fan of FPSes generally anyway. We’ll see. It looks gorgeous though.

Zen Pinball (3DS)

I’m useless at this. Shaman is my favourite table, but my high score is only a feeble 14 million or so putting me well down my friends’ leaderboard despite everyone else barely playing it as they all hate it (compared to the other tables, anyway). How do I get score multipliers? How can I stop being rubbish at it? Tch.

Mario vs Donkey Kong (3DS)

The GBA game, which I got free for being a Nintendo Ambassador. It’s a direct sequel to the Donkey Kong (’94) Game Boy game I was playing on the 3DS earlier in the year, and is very good indeed. There have been further sequels, but they’re a different sort of platform puzzler – more like Krusty’s Super Fun House. I liked that game, but I don’t like the others in the Mario vs DK series for some reason. You can see the way the series is going in this iteration, as one level per world is a “mini Mario” level, similar to what would become of the later games. I can cope with that though. Up to World 3 so far.

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”.

It took me a while to actually find the final remaining zone (Space Zone) as it was somewhat hidden via an exit from another level, but it was soon completed and Wario’s Castle infiltrated.

And Wario was defeated with ease. All the bosses were pretty easy, actually, and very few of the levels gave much of a challenge. Quite different to Super Mario Bros 3 or Super Mario World, which this is a sort of portable analogue of.

It was great though, despite the easiness and slowdown. Quite impressive for a Game Boy title.

I haven’t actually added up all the puzzles that there are, but it’s over 150. Probably 200-ish. But now, they’re all done!

I was expecting another set of puzzles after completing the Star ones, since there’s a gap on the screen where I thought another option would appear. One did, but it was just a time trial option and used the same puzzles as I’d already done.

So, completed then! And it’s also logged as my 3rd most played 3DS game, just behind Ghost Recon and Street Fighter IV.

I loved Mario’s Super Picross for the SNES, which I picked up on the Wii Virtual Console a few years ago. It did take FOR EVAAR to complete though, so I wasn’t going to get the Game Boy version for the 3DS.

Then, of course, I did.

And it’s excellent, of course. Yes, so there are a few fewer puzzles, and yes, the biggest puzzle is only 15×15, but that’s actually good as it means I don’t get so stuck and hurt my poor little eyes like I did with the SNES one

I’m jumping between “Easy Picross” and whatever the Mushroom set of puzzles are, and have completed about a third of each in total so far.

This was a much longer game than I remember it being, but somehow it seemed much easier. I have memories of having 70-odd lives reaching the final boss, then losing 67 of them on him. That seems like a lot of lives, but they’re very easy to come by (you normally get 2 or 3 each level, then after every four levels when the time score is counted up, you usually get another 5 or 6) and I did die a lot.

Well, I think I died a lot when I played it previously. I died very few times this playthrough, and didn’t die on the end boss at all. Which is odd, as I’m pretty sure my skill at other games has decreased over the years…

In case you’ve never played it, Donkey Kong on the 3DS is actually the 1994 Game Boy title in Virtual Console form. The first four levels are virtually carbon copies of the four levels on the original Donkey Kong arcade game, which means you have to complete the arcade game to even start the main game proper. Erk.

After that, the game changes. It stops being a basic platformer where the goal is to reach the big monkey without dying, and instead becomes an acrobatic puzzle platformer where you have to carry a key to a door to progress. Of course, things block your way, switches need to be pulled, baddies beaten or avoided, and so on. And you can only drop the key for a short time or it returns to its start spot again. Every 4th level is a boss level, with those in the middle of the 8 game worlds being “simple” reach-the-monkey levels, and those at the end of each world being chuck-barrels-at-the-monkey levels. It’s all ace, and Mario is almost as move-filled as in the likes of Mario 64, with handstands and backflips the likes of which no normal plumber could achieve.

In total, it took me about 6 hours to finish. There were a few hard levels, but mainly due to the puzzle elements rather than the death bits. It’s certainly one of the best Game Boy games, that’s for sure, and well worth the £3.60, or however much it is on the 3DS eShop.

Well, this was quick. I bought, downloaded, played and completed Super Mario Land (the original Game Boy one, now on the 3DS Virtual Console) all in just over an hour. And I only died once. And finished it with 40+ lives.

And it was ace.

Haven’t had an update post in a while, and I’ve been trying out lots of different games over the last couple of weeks and not made mention of them here, so here’s a roundup:

Say What You See (iOS)
A series of pictures with hidden clues to game titles, films, etc. Like a cross between Where’s Wally? and a cryptic crossword. There are number of “canvases”, and I’ve been playing the Arcade Games one. Completed it, but some of them were a complete pig. Like, which arcade game is denoted by a picture of a goat’s head on a piece of paper? No idea? Exactly.

Super Mario All-Stars (Wii)
I got this for my birthday. Yeah, it’s a bit cheeky being nothing more than the SNES Mario All-Stars cartridge on a Wii disc, but it is a collection of some of the best platformers ever. So there.

Little Big Planet (PS3)
One of the free “Sorry our security was crap, everyone – here, have some old games for free ‘cos everyone has stopped buying them now anyway” games from Sony. It took three thousand years to download, and I’ve played the tutorial level and a couple of other levels. Thoughts: it looks nice, but controls horribly. The into and out-of the screen moving (especially when jumping up) is rubbish. Sackboy’s physics feel wrong. The pop-up menu to access stickers and stuff is annoying, particularly when the camera zooms into your face meaning you can’t see where on the playfield you’re putting your stickers. I might get used to it all, but, y’know, I still have the woeful PS3 controller to contend with.

James Pond 2: Robocod (PS1 on PS3)
Free for the duration of my free month’s worth of PS+. And an utterly horrible, bastardised version of one of my favourite platformers ever – it’s even worse than the DS version. I never want to play it again.

Street Gangs (NES on Wii)
It’s like playing a retro version of Scott Pilgrim! Lovely game. Not far in though.

Muscle March (Wii)
Why didn’t I get this not-gay, manly game for manly men a long time ago? It’s like Hole in the Wall, only less camp! Amazing.

Lasercat (360)
The ugvm people recommended this Indie game as a sort of Jet Set Willy-alike. I can see what they mean, but the sparseness of the rooms (many of which are completely devoid of, well, anything) and the lack of things to collect (only 20 keys), in addition to the silly trivia questions, put me off a bit. I think I’d have enjoyed it more if JSW hadn’t been mentioned. It’s not bad, but not what I wanted.

Contra (360)
This XBLA game was on offer at 200 Microsoft Moon Points a few weeks ago, so I bought it. Never really was a fan of Contra (or “Probotector”, as I always knew it), but it’s fun, if totally impossible. Managed to get to the boss of level 3 before I ran out of credits.

I’ve been playing this since completing Bioshock 2 the other week, and last night I claimed my 70th Star, beat Bowser, saw the credits roll, then played for another couple of stars afterwards.

And I got this message on my Wii:

Obviously, the game is excellent. And yes, I’ll be returning to get the rest of the stars. It’s also at least as good as the first game, with the “hub world” being much better to navigate. However, I’m surprised at how easy the game has been (so far). With all the reviews suggesting it’s much harder than the original, I’m wondering why I’ve not found a single tricky level so far. And every single boss has been beaten first time – most without even taking a hit.

Maybe I’m just ace?

How can so many amazing ideas be crammed into one game? Some levels in Super Mario Galaxy 2 have more fantastic, original, gameplay ideas than most entire games. Even more amazing, is how they managed this even after already filling an entire game with them!

I’m now up to 24 stars collected, on the 3rd “World” (you can’t really have worlds containing galaxies, can you?), and really loving it. It’s still very easy though – easier than the original was at this stage, I think. Even the Prankster Comet that I’ve done was pretty simple, and I’ve only died three times in total so far.

For just one level. For a reason.

I have my daughter to thank for buying me the game, which ordinarily I’d have had to have waited months and months for, since it’d take an age to drop in price to below my self-imposed £20 limit.

But that level? Glorious. Blue skies, happy music, bopping Goombas, bright colours and everything lovely about great games. Hurrah!

It’s the first game I’ve played of the year, and Its also the first game I’ve completed this year.

Admittedly, I’ve only completed it on 50CC so far (although will be returning to do the rest), but I did come first in every race.

I think this is the best console Mario Kart since the SNES version too. It’s not that I didn’t like the N64 and GC versions, it’s just the N64 tracks seemed big and empty, and the two character mechanic of the GC Mario Kart was a bit superfluous. This one, however, has great tracks and the new “stunt gimmick” is actually pretty good.

Of course, I’ve merely defeated the end of game boss. And I even accidentally found a warp from World 5 to World 8, so haven’t even done 6 and 7 yet. Or got all the gold coins so far. Or rescued all the Toads. But I do have 42 lives and haven’t seen the Super Guide or the Game Over screen yet, so that’s all good, yes?

And, of course, I will go back. In fact, I’m going back now to finish World 5

Yes, after 15 and a bit months, I’m still working through this. And now, I have just FOUR puzzles remaining! So, almost there! Yay!

I’ve been playing quite a few different things on my Wii today:

Cubello
I’m up to level 6 (although I’ve not done all of the lettered variants on previous levels) now, and although I can get it down to just a few blocks each time, I can’t complete it. It gives me too few of each colour, and insists on giving me colours I’ve already removed all of, which is annoying. It seems I can only do it if I fluke it, or I get a Bonus Time or something.

Mayhem in Monsterland
The jumping is really annoying me now. Why can’t I map jump to a button instead of up? It just doesn’t work often enough, and as a result I died a lot from not jumping properly. Which is a shame, as it’s a pretty nice game otherwise.

Mario’s Super Picross
I’m onto Level 10 now. This game has kept me going for quite a while, hasn’t it? I’ve dipped in and out for months and months now. I have only 8 or so puzzles remaining now though.

Pit Crew Panic!
That’s it. I’ve had enough. As soon as I realised it isn’t a game, but a drag-and-drop simulator crossed with a Game and Watch, I stopped liking it. It’s quirky and sort of fun, but it’s not great really. So off onto the SD card it goes. Bye!

Just three more puzzles on Level 9 today. Um, that’s it really.

N64 on Wii, of course. Even though I have it on the N64 too. Tch.

But I completed it for the first time ever! I know it isn’t a hard game, and the main point is to use it as a sort of Score Attack thing, but still. It really was very good too. And I finished up with three non-dead Yoshis!

I haven’t played this in ages! I think I was a little put off last time as I thought I’d finally completed all the levels, only to find I’s opened up a million more.

Completed the rest of Level 8, and three puzzles in Level 9.

Having played this at my in-laws earlier in the week, my arm was twisted to buy it. And, having played it today, my arm was twisted some more. Literally.

The thing is, the events are either far too easy (Skeet Shooting, 100m) or far too hard (Swimming, Long Jump). The swimming in particular – I can do the first 50m easily (in first place), but then without changing rhythm, somehow get overtaken instantly and then come 8th. It makes no sense!

I’m at the in-laws at the moment, and they have this game. So we all played it for a while. It seems very good, but the games vary wildly from very easy (skeet shooting) to very hard (swimming) to seemingly random (long jump).

I was either very good, or absolutely terrible, as a result.