Over the long weekend I started a series of posts on #S3nd that showcase some #webcomics that have finished their stories (so you don't have to worry that they'll just stop in the middle).
It's a minor project that I've been trying to get around to for a while, and I have more comics in the queue, but for now there are just four. You can use the #completed-webcomics tag over there to see them:
Rohga: Armor Force (Evercade): COMPLETED!
This is a bit of weird one. It’s mainly a side-scrolling shooter, only your big mech (or mecha? I can never remember the difference) can’t fly and at times you can move in and out of the screen which has a similar effect to flying because it’s all on a 2D plane. That’s not the only unusual thing though, as you can “build” your own robot from various parts for different weapons and legs and stuff before you play, and then you collect people (?!) which act as sort of drones. Then there’s the thing where if you get hit too many times you lose your robot for a bit and have to hoof it mech-less.
I played it in co-op which mainly caused the screen to be filled to an also chaotic level, but we had a good time. A bit of an oddity.
Ironclad (Evercade): COMPLETED!
Ironclad is a pretty standard side-scrolling shooter, originally for the NeoGeo but I played it on the NeoGeo Arcade Evercade cartridge. I found it a lot easier than most games in the genre, which is especially odd for an arcade game, but I’m not going to complain!
It’s got a nice weapon upgrade system, a floaty drone thingy and some interesting bosses (like a big train), but the biggest draw is the graphics. Backgrounds seem to be pre-rendered, and remind me a bit of something like OverTop. Sprites are pretty decent too, and they feel a bit like Metal Slug in art style, just zoomed out.
So yeah, it’s OK, nothing incredible but perfectly playable.
Metal Slug (Evercade): COMPLETED!
Yes, yes. We’ve all played Metal Slug before and own it on various compilations a hundred times over but that doesn’t stop it being good. And! This time I completed it in co-op with my daughter, which I’ve never done before.
It has horrible slowdown, which I don’t remember from any other version but apparently even in the arcade it did that. Not what you’d expect from what was, at the time, the most powerful gaming device in the world. Probably.
Doesn’t matter though because it’s great and silly and why isn’t Metal Slug 2 (or 3/4/5/6/7/8/9/X) on the Evercade yet, eh? Ridiculous.
Oh yeah, and I know the screenshot that accompanies this post is rubbish but – again – you can’t take screenshots on an Evercade so it’s from the Evercade website.
It Takes Two (PS5): COMPLETED!
Seems these days that games I’m interested in playing end up free somewhere if I just wait a while. It Takes Two is one of those titles, as there it is, on PS+++++ (I forget how many +).
It’s a two player co-op title, with players each taking control of a heading-for-divorce couple who, because of magic or something prompted by their young child being upset with Mummy and Daddy arguing, have been turned into toys. You know, standard stuff. Each level they’re individually given different abilities, and you use these together to navigate a very Honey I Shrunk The Kids world, from a garden shed to a greenhouse and a tree.
Guiding you (and, clearly, hindering your progress) is a sentient Book of Love who explains that the obstacles and challenges you face are allegories for the relationship issues you’re having and overcoming them will bring you closer together again. There’s platforming, puzzling, spider-riding, shooting, and a wide variety of situations to deal with along the way, and none of the gimmicks last long enough to become stale. Despite the happy colours and generally upbeat and humorous events, there are some pretty dark places the game goes to, with a level where your “mission” is to set out and “kill” your daughter’s favourite stuffed toy (trigger warning: you cut off a limb and horribly maim a cute elephant who is screaming pleas for you to stop) just to make your girl cry. Horrible.
It’s a very pretty game, but I did find some issues in with the audio. Cut scenes suffered from silence (but only the voices), or sound and video went out of sync. Reading up, some others with the same problems suggested changing the PS5’s audio format from (or to) PCM or other possible options, but no matter the setting it made no difference. Seems it affects other platforms too. Jarring, but I have subtitles on so that helped a bit.
Other than that, it was a great, varied, and sometimes clever game, which works really well as a co-op title.
Lego Horizon Adventures (PS5): COMPLETED!
Had some time off ill (yay crippling Covid!) with my daughter so found this cheap to play through together whilst exhaustion drained my life force. It’s a Lego reimagining of the PlayStation Horizon Zero Dawn game, only isn’t really like all the many other Lego games by TT Games perhaps because it isn’t by TT Games. You still go through levels, smashing some Lego stuff and sometimes building Lego stuff, but really it’s more about the combat sections and story.
There’s none of the thing from the other games where you gradually unlock characters that in turn allow you to access new areas or collect things or whatever. You get four characters which can all access everything but have a different weapon each. There’s really no reason to play it through more than once, and we managed to complete it in under 4 hours and then mop up all the achievements and challenges and 100% everything in under 8 in total, so it’s really, really short for a Lego game – even the shortest of the others are over 15 and most are over 30. Still, it was cheap and fun. And now I want to play the Big Boy Horizon Zero Dawn game. Hmm.
Picross S5 (Switch): COMPLETED!
There is nothing to say about Jupiter’s Picross series that I haven’t already said. There’s not much new here that hasn’t been done before, it’s just more brain-wrinkling and relaxing (at the same time, somehow) picross puzzles.
One thing I would like, perhaps, is fewer of the 5×5, 10×10 and even 15×15 puzzles, and more of the 40×30 ones. There are only a handful here, and you only get them if you have save data from previous games in the series, but I’d love to spend an hour on each of these rather than two or three minutes (or two or three seconds, on 5×5 puzzles) on 20 or 30 smaller ones.
Oh, and S5 has both a toilet and toilet paper pictures. Win.
Night in the Woods (PS5): COMPLETED!
After finishing Xenoblade Chronicles X, I was at a loss as to what to play next. I didn’t fancy another 125+ hour epic, so had a flick through what I had installed, and came across Night in the Woods. I’d looked at it before but hadn’t realised I owned it (well, PS+ rented it anyway), and I found it was only a few hours long, so here we are.
It starts with you, an anthropomorphic cat coming back to her home town after dropped out of “school”. I say “school” because it’s a university, and it irks me when people refer to university as school. Anyhoo, Mae turns up at her parents’ house and the first few days involve her reintegrating back into her family and the friends she’d left behind, rejoining her band and hanging out and doing things she used to do as a young teen even though she’s now 20 years old.
Soon it is clear there’s something very wrong with her. She gets headaches, but she’s also constantly tired, has bad dreams, doesn’t want to talk about her reasons for ditching uni and for some reason is happy to jump on rooftops and balance on power lines. Because of course. At the same time, you get to know more about Possum Springs, her run-down town which used to be a thriving and prosperous mining town but now all the work as dried up, the shops are closed or closing, some folk have gone missing, and there’s just nothing to do and everyone is a bit miserable. Oh, and sinkholes keep opening up.
Then Mae sees a ghost kidnap a child.
Or did she? Or is she just going a bit mad and it’s a symptom of everything else she’s struggling with? Things aren’t clear until they are and even then it isn’t entirely.
As a sort of platforming puzzle visual novel, Night in the Woods somehow manages to feel laid back but full of existential dread at the same time. Light hearted banter belies the truly horrific things happening in the town, and the feeling that summat just int right. It’s a great story with some great characters. And a Guitar Hero mini game because why not?
https://www.fogolf.com/1059875/ryan-fox-becomes-guinness-world-record-holder-forms-trio-who-makes-most-par-3s-in-three-minutes/ Ryan Fox becomes Guinness World Record holder, forms trio who makes most par 3s in three minutes #3S #After #Australian #becomes #bradbury #combining #Completed #englishman #Forms #fox #Golf #GolfNews #golfer #guinness #holder #in #make #makes #minutes #most #Par #record #ryan #Team #three #Trio #who #with #WORLD #Zealand
Its rare that i cry to much because of a manwha🥺 #fantasy#reincarnation #bl #completed #manhwa #webtoon #boyslove #cute #lovestory
#Kiev #and #Minsk #were #completed #with 8 #Bazalt# tubes + 8 #reloads , #but #the #Soviets #found #that #reloading #the #tubes #was #too #much #of #a #pain #in #the #ass , #so #the #reloads #were #omitted #from #Novorossiysk #while #Baku #was #given 12 #tubes #on #deck .
Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition (Switch): COMPLETED!
And that’s it. I’ve officially run out of Xenoblade to play. In about a year and a half I’ve completed the entire series of games in some sort of obsessive newfan flurry of activity. Why did I sleep on this series for so long? It’s bloody great.
Anyway, I’ve said a lot about the three numbered games in the series, and I have to say I was a little worried coming to X because I’d heard it wasn’t quite the same, didn’t exist in the same chronology, and was originally the second game released so might not have the graphics, controls and gameplay improvements the series gained over time. So, how was it?
The first thing to address is how it fits into the series, because despite all the internet fora saying it doesn’t, it bloody does. I mentioned in the writeup of the Xenoblade 3 DLC that X is referenced there quite explicitly, but it’s not hard to see that the event that caused the creation of the worlds of 1, 2 and 3 is (or at least, could be) the same event that causes the mass exodus of humans from Earth, setting up the plot for Xenoblade X. Two alien races are fighting over Earth, which then blows up, and you are one of an ark of survivors (perhaps the only ark that made it) that escaped only to crash on a planet called Mira. A planet which, somehow, has Nopon. Curious. Plus, in chapter 13, the events of Xenoblades 1 and 2 are directly referenced.
The second thing is the gameplay. In terms of basic combat mechanics, Xenoblade X is very similar to Xenoblade 1, with the attack moves laid out across the bottom of the screen, each with cooldowns, and so on. However, it’s vastly more complex, as you can tweak your skills, arts, weapons, armour and (later) your big mech-like “Skell” to the nth degree with items similar to the weapon gems in the original game, only now you can gem up everything. And add more gem slots. I read a while back that the developers wanted to use X1 as a basic for the gameplay here, but make the focus of the game the combat rather than the plot, and it shows.
Because, you see, the plot isn’t fantastic. Well, it’s fantastic in the old sense of the word, but it’s a bit poo compared to X1/2/3. You crash on this planet, your ship has become a small city, and you have to find other parts of the ship that broke off in order to ensure the continued survival of the human race. Only you do very little actual hunting for the parts, and you get the “main” missing part right near the end of the main game without really working too hard for it. No, instead the game consists of more side quests (some of which, although classed as side quests aren’t actually optional) than probably the other three games put together mainly as a way of getting you to level up so you can progress the story. The day to day stuff, these quests, exploration, chats with NPCs and asides with your teammates are great, but the over-arching plot isn’t amazing.
Graphically, it’s bump up from the original Wii U version of the game. In addition to that, I’m playing it on the Switch 2 which although doesn’t do anything specifically to the graphics, it does make the framerate rock solid (something that wasn’t the case with the other games on the Switch 1) and some of the sunrises and sunsets look absolutely incredible, so I do wonder if there’s some upscaling or smoothing or something going on.
The main differences in the game come down to the setting, the addition of Skells, the number of possible characters in your party (something like 16 are possible, with four in your party at any one time), the music (which is more rock, guitar and rap – some of it sounds very Sonic Adventure 2 Pumpkin Hill), and a thing where you put probes into the world map.
This latter feature splits the map of Mira up into hexagons, with some of them suitable places to plant a probe. You obtain different types from quests and loot, and they can mine (miranium, used to make weapons and weapon mods) or generate money, every hour or so. Or, later on, buff your attack, defence, and so on in the region they’re planted. You can swap round your probes (for a small fee) when you want, and you get bonuses for probes of the same type placed next to each other. There are a few side missions that challenge you to arrange them in a way so as to generate large amounts of miranium or money in a single “cycle”. It’s diverting, and reminds me of the business/empire building side stories of the Yakuza games.
In all, I really did enjoy Xenoblade Chronicles X. There’s nothing really wrong with it but it just didn’t entertain me and push me to reveal the “truth” of the story in the same way the other games did. The combat is satisfying, and generally quicker and more flexible than in 1/2/3, it looks great, sounds great, and is a lot of fun, but there’s just something missing. Maybe it’s the characters, as your main character is generally mute (although you can choose his/her “combat calls” voice from a number of actors, include those from other games in the series) and almost everyone has a boring American accent. No Welsh catgirls or aussie pirates here. Two of the other alien races – the Prone and the Ma-non have horrible pitch-shifted voices too. Maybe it’s missing something else. I can’t quite explain it.
That said, it’s still better than 95% of other games. It’s just the worst Xenoblade, is all.
Now what? There’s no Xenoblade 4 or X2 on the (known) horizon. Boo.
Buen Miércoles hoy os traigo por aquí esto que he visto.
No sé si opináis igual pero a día de hoy se quiere todo ¡para ya! Y la paciencia no existe.
¿Quién de vosotros ha vivido esta época tan mágica?
#nostalgia #miercoles #julio #paciencia #añosluz #volveratras #completed
Word Trails (iOS): COMPLETED!
As I have a Netflix subscription, I get access to a number of games on iOS as a bonus. Most of them are shovelware nonsense. Some are tie-ins with Netflix shows like Squid Game or Queen’s Gambit. Some, are “indie hits” like Kentucky Route Zero. Some fit into more than one of these categories.
Word Trails is probably shovelware. It’s one of $hlmun games which litter the App Store that are effectively identical, and when you see the screenshots you’ll realise you’ve seen a hundred variants of it already, often as an advert in some other shovelware game. So I played it almost daily for two whole years and finally completed it. All 6070 levels.
Some people have asked me, “deKay. You’re a man with an extensive knowledge of games and you know what is good and what is bad in the gaming sphere. You have played many strange and unusual games, often eschewing the popular and mainstream for the niche and unusual. With that in mind, why the hell are you playing some ostensibly IAP-based, albeit with the IAPs removed for Netflix, tosh like this when you yourself frequently say telephone games are not games and don’t deserve your time or eyeballs?”. And to those people I say “Because it’s there”.
Now, readers of my diary will remember when I played many hundreds of levels of a dreadful iOS based, Doctor Who themed hidden object game which falls into a similar category as this and you may wonder why I’d put myself through something like that again. Word Trails at least requires a little bit of intelligence to play, even if it’s just as dull, but it’s just a Boring Boggle Clone.
The idea is to make words using the letters in the “wheel” at the bottom of the screen. Find all the words to fit in the puzzle, and you move on to the next level. That’s it – the whole game. 6070 times. You can, if you like, do a bonus puzzle each day where you do the same thing but have to try and do the words in a specific order. Manage that, and you get points which eventually unlock pictures of and related text about animals or mountains or something. Worst way to use an Encyclopaedia Britannica ever. Sometimes, in the main puzzles, you unlock gold squares or jigsaw pieces which eventually complete some other puzzle or list of items at, say, a beach, but there’s literally no reason to do this. You get some (in-game) currency, which is totally unnecessary because they’ve ripped all the IAPs out.
Quickly, I found that although the “longest word” was rarely the same (although sometimes I did get the same two or three puzzles repeated in a row), the same combinations of letters came up very frequently. For example, if AEMT are in the list, I could immediately tick off MATE, TEAM, TAME, MEAT. When you’ve done this 3035 times out of 6070, the already very samey game becomes even more samey. The game will add “allowed” words that aren’t on the board to a bonus pot for more currency when it fills up.
To make things wonderfully inconsistent and stupid, sometimes there’s a word you’ve never heard of which turns out to be an archaic legal term. Sometimes you can use both the UK and US spellings of words (like COLOR and COLOUR), sometimes you can’t (like it allows MOULD but not MOLD). Sometimes it seems to allow a word but then in a different puzzle it won’t. And, for some reason, it won’t ever allow the word ROTA, but will allow ROTAS. Actually, plurals themselves are irritatingly facile and when I found the long seven letter word is just one of the six letter words with an S on the end a little piece of me died each time.
Oh, and some rude words it allows, but only as bonus words, not as words on the actual puzzle. Some, it won’t allow at all. There also seem to be an unexpected number of religious words – mainly Christian, relating to church objects or processes – that are allowed, but although BIBLE is possible, neither KORAN or QURAN is allowed. Hmm.
So, should you play this game? Absolutely not. But, it did kill some time for a few minutes in my day. For TWO YEARS.
Gradius: The Interstellar Assault (Switch): COMPLETED!
No, I don’t know why I played this either. It wasn’t that great, with very flickery graphics, was very short, and did nothing much other games (even at the time of original release) hadn’t already done far better.
Probably a miracle it managed as well as it did on the Game Boy hardware, although, I suspect, impossible to see on the original device’s blurry screen – it’s bad enough on the telly – but still average at best.
to a T (PS5): COMPLETED!
Keita Takahashi makes some really odd games. Most well known (and probably still his best) is Katamari Damacy, but I’ve also played, enjoyed and got thoroughly confuddled by Noby Noby Boy (the refrain from which is still a thing in my house), Wattam and Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure. to a T, completed with a lower case t at the start, is his newest and yeah, it’s a concept.
Your main character, who I think is a girl but maybe you just interpret how you want, is a normal human teenager living a normal human life except for some reason your arms are permanently stretched out to the side like you’re locked in I’m-a-aeroplane mode. You attempt to do normal human tasks like get dressed, have a poo, brush your teeth and eat (increasingly weird flavours of) King Pig Breakfast Cereal whilst unable to move your shoulders or elbows. Luckily, you have your dog to assist.
Quickly, things get even more bizarre when a freak accident at school makes you realise you can fly like a helicopter, and because you use this ability to save the life of one of the schoolkids who bullies you for being a T, you make some new friends.
The gameplay is mostly walking round town looking for things or people, and using the controller to try and perform actions like your morning routine or taking part in PE or science lessons in your unique T-shaped way. Each day is essentially a new “episode”, so they start with the opening credits and catchy theme tune and song, and finish with the bizarre “giraffe learns to be a chef and grows vegetables and gets up at 4am to bake bread” song. It’s nuts and awesome.
Eventually, you find out the reason you’re a T. And there’s no way in hell you’ll guess why before you get there. You also take a little detour spending a day controlling your dog for Reasons. Oh, and at one point you have to race a train. Also, when you play (and please do play it because it’s like nothing else) do look out for the easter eggs referencing Takahashi’s other works – they’re pretty much all there, somewhere.
to a T defies a full description (at least, without ruining too much), but it is great. My only real issue with it is the way the camera angles change at various parts of the map which got me a bit lost, but on the up side I did find some secrets as a result. And that catchy stupid song which you can’t unhear. Glorious.
Dig Dig Dino! (Playdate): COMPLETED!
Season Two of the Playdate games have started arriving, and the first one I worked through is this lovely little archaeology title, where you dig down and find bones and… well, you do that a lot.
It reminds me a lot of SteamWorld Dig, although it isn’t a platformer and has (almost) no combat, but progression is similar. The deeper you dig, the more energy it takes to dig, so you buy upgrades (with money earned from things you’ve dug up) that give you more energy or let you dig more easily or deeper. Unlike SteamWorld Dig, it’s viewed from above rather than the side, so you have wider areas of things to uncover, and there’s a bit of a puzzle element as some rocks and things need to be fully uncovered before you can destroy them and dig underneath.
Another thing that is similar to SteamWorld Dig is the twist that I won’t be revealing. If you’ve played that game, then when you get to a certain point in this game you’ll realise the same thing!
It’s a pretty simple game, but there’s a moreish gameplay loop as you finish each run with usually just enough money to buy upgrades to get you just a little further next time. It’s clearly been tuned to keep you coming back, as every run seems to get you something new.
Donkey Kong (Switch): COMPLETED!
I’ve always loved this game. It’s the Game Boy version of Donkey Kong, also sometimes referred to as “Donkey Kong ’94”. I talked about it more last time I played it, which I thought was maybe three years ago but it turns out it was FOURTEEN years ago. Cripes.
This time, I played it on the Switch’s Game Boy game service thingy, but it’s just the same game as it ever was before. It’s still really slick, and plays well to the Game Boy’s limitations.
Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club (Switch): COMPLETED!
This Famicom Detective Club game differs from the others in a number of ways. Firstly, for some reason, “Famicom Detective Club” is now the subtitle rather than the title. Secondly, there are a few tweaks to the dialogue system (which I’ll explain in a bit), but the big one is that this isn’t a remake of a 40 year old Famicom title – it’s a completely new game in the series, with the murder mystery story written by the same person as those games were all that time ago.
This time round, you’re needed to investigate the creepy case of a child has seemingly been murdered by a man wearing a paper bag with a face drawn on it, and is actually quite scary. As you uncover more, you find that it would appear to be linked to a series of murders from about 18 years prior (which, coincidentally, your boss investigated at the time) as well as the disappearance of two people, one of whom is the brother of the police officer assigned to the current case. It’s all a bit twisty and it’s really good.
Although it obviously uses the same game engine as the other two games, this one is improved a bit. The biggest change is the (optional) highlighting of words in your conversations that may link to questions or actions you can choose from the menu, and provide new information. This gets rid of most of the press-everything-until-the-right-thing-happens issue from the other games, although it isn’t a complete fix. Still, a massive improvement.
I can’t say much more about the game as it’ll ruin it for anyone who is going to play it, but it is much darker in tone than the first two titles, which weren’t exactly light to start with. If you like murder mysteries, this is an essential play.
