Category: Diary

ESWAT: City Under Siege (Switch): COMPLETED!

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What does ESWAT stand for? Is it like SWAT only with an E like eBook and eLearning and eMail? Or are you supposed to say “es-what”? Who knows. But it’s certainly more interesting than the game. Yes, friends, ESWAT is a proper stinker. A clunky platform shooter with rubbish weapon selection controls and boring levels. A game that suggests, from screenshots and the first level or so, it’s a bit like Rolling Thunder (which is a great game), but disappointingly, …

Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle (Switch): COMPLETED!

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The first of what will hopefully be many games completed on the Sega Mega Drive Classics collection on the Switch. I was going to play Fatal Labyrinth, but the lack of a manual and the terrible video options (which don’t affect Alex Kidd so much) put me off for now. Instead, this. The Mega Drive Alex Kidd game isn’t as good as the Master System “Miracle World” title. There. I said it. It looks prettier (although it’s still almost Master …

Katamari Damacy Reroll (Switch): COMPLETED!

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This came out of nowhere when announced during a Nintendo Direct a while back. Not least in that we’ve not had a Katamari game on a Nintendo console before, and the series has been pretty much dead for ages. Reroll is a remake of the original Katamari Damacy game for the PS2, upping the resolution, reducing the slowdown, making everything look a bit prettier, and removing the loading breaks between certain size increases. The result, is pretty much just perfect …

King Oddball (Vita): COMPLETED

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Imagine a cross between Peggle and Angry Birds. You can’t? Well just play King Oddball instead. The aim (ha!) is to chuck rocks at tanks and helicopters, so as to destroy them all. Of course, there are more things to blow up than you have rocks, so you need to rebound them or make use of other objects to drop on them instead. If you manage to bounce a rock back at your head, or hit one than three baddies …

Knights of the Round (Vita): COMPLETED

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Or technically, PSP, as it’s part of the PSP Capcom Classics compilation. Although technically technically it’s an arcade game. And one I thought I’d played before, but it seems not. It’s basically Golden Axe only set in Arthurian legend times. And your character (I was Arthur) levels up, giving you supposedly more powerful attacks (negated by more powerful colour swapped foes) but ever more impressive looking armour. It was fun, although I missed being able to dash left and right …

TwinBee (Switch): COMPLETED!

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A few years ago, I completed this on the Xbox 360. And now I have completed it on the Switch. As in, the NES game in the NES classics thing. It’s a decent little vertically scrolling shooter with an odd bell shooting system (shoot bells enough and they go blue, collect a blue one to speed up your ship), and I lost my ship’s arms at one point so couldn’t drop bombs. After beating the end boss the game loops …

Dynamite Dux (MS): COMPLETED!

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Bit of a random choice this. I think I’ve played a demo on the Spectrum once before, but that’s all I know of it. And it showed, because it took ages for the “hold punch to wind up your attack” mechanic to make sense. Once it did, though, it was a very easy game. It plays a bit like Double Dragon crossed with Alex Kidd, if Alex was a duck and could pick up machine guns and rocket launchers. Maybe …

Trax (GB): COMPLETED!

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I had no idea this little gem even existed. Not only that, but it’s by the same chaps as Kirby’s Dream Land. Even without knowing that, I think I could have guessed – the music and sound are reminiscent, and even your tank resembles Kirby. Sort of. Even the end sequence is the same as Dedede chasing Kirby, trying to pounce on him. But before that, the game. You drive a cute wee tank and shoot other cute tanks and …

Toki (Arcade): COMPLETED!

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A very long time ago, I played this a lot in the arcade. Then, also a very long time ago but not quite as long ago, I played and completed the Mega Drive version. Which, I noted at the time, was almost completely different. I never went back to the arcade original, until now. It’s one of those games that has lots of sections that seem completely impossible but then, somehow, they become very easy. Like the crystal mammoth boss …

Doshin the Giant (GC): COMPLETED!

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Oh Doshin, you big lump with your slow legs and your slightly inappropriate belly button. Such a relaxing game, even when the disasters come and threaten to destroy all your little people and their houses and monuments and chickens. Slightly spoiling the relaxing gameplay was a bizarre bug I came across which is probably due to the fact I was running this under emulation and via a Steam Link: Two islands I’d set up and had my people building stuff …

Bulb Boy (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Bulb Boy is a nice little walk-and-click adventure game and it was very cheap recently. And by nice, I mean horribly grotesque and full of demonic imagery and guts and dead things and maggots and evil spiders and a giant monster made from your own poo. There’s a story, although nothing is ever spoken or written down. It’s all gestures and speech bubbles with pictures in. Given the content of the game, that’s probably for the best. I don’t really …

Sanrio Characters Picross (3DS): COMPLETED!

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I was convinced this took me around 40 hours, but no, just under 28. It just felt much longer than the other picross titles I’ve played on the 3DS, but it’s about par for them. There’s not a lot else to say, really. It’s picross, with Sanrio (think Hello Kitty) characters as the puzzles. There are loads of stickers to unlock, but they’re of little use as you can’t take screenshots, but the main picross is the same picross as …

Burly Men At Sea (Vita): COMPLETED!

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I was going to buy this for the Switch on a number of occasions, but never got round to it. And then it appeared on PS+. My Vita came out of retirement, and after twice as long updating it as it took to play the game, I’d completed it. And then completed it again. And again. And again. You see, this story about four bearded sailor brothers is somewhat short, but that’s only part of the point. At various points …

Car Quest (Switch): COMPLETED!

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My first impressions of Car Quest were, it has to be said, less than favourable. It had, as I mentioned on Twitter after my first hour’s play, a definite air of “My First Unity” game about it, not least because of the sparse, blocky environment that just screams “I can’t draw but I can sellotape geometric shapes together”. You, a car, don’t fit within this style either thematically or graphically, and it feels like a placeholder that was never replaced …