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 …
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 …
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 …
That’s Best Ending done then. Not much fighting (well, acting to allow mercy) went on, just a lot of wandering and then so much chat and finally an end boss who can’t actually kill you. It was alright, I suppose?
No. What, you want me to expand on that? Erm. I’ll try: Lemmings Touch utterly ruins how Lemmings works by reversing the order you command your lemmings. In the proper, unbroken and excellent games, you click on what you want a lemming to do, then click on one or more lemmings to do that task or become that sort of lemming. It’s intuitive and it works. In this game, you tap on a lemming then a circle of options comes …
When I looked up how long a game this is, I read it took about 8 hours to finish. So imagine my surprise when I reached the end credits in about 50 minutes. Afterwards, it became clear that I got just one of many endings. Presumably my choices affect which bird I end up becoming close to, and since I spent all my time choosing the library, I got Nageki’s ending. Nageki who was… a ghost. WoooOOOO! Oh, spoiler. Sorry. …
It has to be said that there were two things harder than the actual game itself, but related to the game itself. Number one: actually getting the damn game to load. I had to download the Benji DLC again, restart the Vita, and sacrifice several virgin goats just to get as far as the menu screen. Number two: actually figuring out how to play the DLC. Turns out you have to choose to replay a scenario and then pick Episode …
Interest started to wane the closer to the end I got. Puzzles continued to make less and less sense, and even the interest with following the plot was becoming difficult as it was taking longer and longer to solve the puzzles so the story was frequently put into stasis for long periods. By the end it had become so drawn out I’d forgotten half the characters and the secretary, Meche and the woman from the hipster club all blurred into …
