Category: Video Games

Just my cluck

I have a cubic buttload of games already in my 3DS backlog, and there are a fair number of big ones coming out before the end of the year. This means I’m in huge trouble, because all I want to do on that system right now is play Chicken Wiggle.

A cute little game that hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention, Chicken Wiggle is the newest game from Atooi, one of the development studios that split off from Renegade Kid. you may or may not recognize that name from Mutant Mudds, which was one of the first truly stellar games to show up on the 3DS eShop (and is now on everything). To nobody’s surprise, Chicken Wiggle bears more than a slight resemblance to Mutant Mudds.

Not only are the two games visually similar, they both feature the same kind of challenging platforming. They move at a more measured pace than say, your Marios or Mega Mans, and each is gifted with very tight, responsive controls. Chicken Wiggle takes the base set by Mutant Mudds and expands on it by switching out the gun and jetpack for a grappling hook. This means the game is far less action-oriented, but adds in more exploration to make up for it.

Also the grappling hook is a worm.

While the story mode in Chicken Wiggle is a fun and moderately challenging experience, the real meat of the game comes from the expansive stage creation mode. It’s incredibly impressive, and lets you use every single tile, object, and monster in the game to design whatever kind of crazy stages your twisted mind can come up with. It’s actually even better than the 3DS version of Super Mario Maker, because while the editor isn’t quite as whimsical, you can share stages with other players online. There’s also a robust system for finding other players’ stages, which makes it much more user-friendly than the Wii U version of Mario Maker’s bare-bones stage discovery features.

There is one massive feature missing, and that’s Mario Maker’s ability to just jump into your custom stage at any point to see how something works. Chicken Wiggle instead forces you to load up the stage each time, rather than having the ability to test seamlessly. Sure, you can move the starting point around to make sure you begin at the point you want to try out, but it’s not quite as handy as being able to jump in and out of the stage while still in the editor.

I am still super happy that Chicken Wiggle came around though, as it has re-ignited my love of stage design. And it’s nice to be working in a game that’s so mechanically different from Mario, too, because it makes you think completely differently about your stages. The only sad part is that I know very few people IRL who own a 3DS, and none of them give even the slightest flip about games like Chicken Wiggle. So I have nobody to share ideas and stages with. Sad face. My fault for not having friends, I guess.

Priorities II: Wii-lectric Boogaloo

I’ve been a lot more involved with the acquisition of and moving into my condo than I was when I bought a house back in 2012. Mostly because I no longer have a wife and in-laws to do all that stuff while I’m at work. So I’ve schlepped and hauled pretty much everything by myself, with a non-insignificant amount of help from my dad, uncle, and grandpa.

One thing that remains the same is me having placed high priority on having Xenoblade Chronicles up and running ASAP.

Mostly it’s for the sake of tradition. But also because I needed a half-hour to unwind. I’ve been working almost non-stop since noon Saturday. I’ve earned a little video game break.

Actual Xenoblade talk: I think it’s notable that when you start a New Game+, all characters are wearing the equipment they had at the end of the game. Which makes the intro weird because Dunban is clearly not wielding the Monado despite constantly talking about it, and Mumkhar is already in a Mechon body. Neat!

Bonus: If you look really closely, you may be able to spot the cutest li’l amiibo ever!

Game of Numbers

I ran some numbers today, and came out with the following information:

I have acquired 100 video games so far this year.

Now, this includes freemium games, free PS+ games, games purchased in bundles, so on and so forth. So it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. Still, the point remains that I really need to stop getting new games, because I don’t have anywhere near enough time to play all this garbage.

Anyway, that’s just a tease. I have a massive spreadsheet from which I plan to come up with all sorts of irrelevant data come yearend. The one thing I haven’t ever kept track of is dollar value spent. Because, quite frankly, I really don’t want to know.

Some more indie games on Steam

Yes, I’m still at it, spending bits and pieces of my free time slowly whittling away at the massive backlog of games that I have sitting in my Steam account. Today, we’re going to take itty-bitty peeks at a couple that I didn’t feel really stood up to snuff. Or at least, I felt no satisfaction from playing and opted to just pass on them before investing too much time. And then also one really good game, because I don’t want to be a complete Negative Nancy.

We begin with Red’s Kingdom. The game opens with an evil king squirrel barging into Red’s house and stealing his acorn stash right out from under him, and then you have to go out and reclaim your acorns. This… seems familiar. Oh, it’s Donkey Kong Country. Probably countless other games, as well, but it makes me think of DKC.

Then you get onto the gameplay, in which you roll Red around the stages, avoiding obstacles and collecting nuts. It’s exactly like those slippery-slidey mazes in so many video games (there’s at least one in every core Pokémon game) where you move in a direction and get locked moving that way until you hit something. You know the type. I’m describing it badly, but you know it.

It’s an entire game of just that. I find those puzzles extremely aggravating when they make up one room or part of a dungeon, so you can imagine that I was not smitten with the idea of putting up with it for a whole game. Nope. I was willing to give it a shot, but 20 minutes in, I could feel my aggravation levels rising far past the recommended level, so I called it quits.

To its credit, Red’s Kingdom is a very pretty game, with really nice, colourful graphics. The cutscenes are cute and mildly humorous, and it seems like as you progress, there will be more depth to the gameplay than just sliding around from one room to the next. I’m sure that for many people, this could be a great game, but it’s definitely not for me.

Candy Thieves: Tale of Gnomes is another obvious port from a mobile phone game. The awarding of an up-to-three-stars ranking at the end of each stage is a dead giveaway. And it’s one of those mobile phone game ports that was very clearly not developed by an English-speaking team. Because the translation is a little shoddy, you see. Not the worst I’ve seen, but the grammatical errors definitely stand out.

The tale, in this case, is of a family moving into their grandfather’s house after he mysteriously disappeared. I’m sure that will be resolved in a happy ending, because so far this has seemed like a family-friendly kind of game. I don’t know, maybe it’s like Frog Fractions and goes completely off the rails after a while. In which case I’d be sad that I gave up on it after only ten minutes. But I guess I’ll never know anyway. So whatever!

Uh, back to the plot, the young boy who is our protagonist finds a mysterious box under his bed that magically produces candy. He is initially elated, but then gnomes show up and try to steal the candy. So I guess what happens is that he goes on a chase though a mystical fantasy land to stop the thieving gnomes. Again, I gave up on this one, so I really have no idea.

The gameplay is this: drag jelly blobs to the machines in the corner to produce a candy. After so long, gnomes will start pouring out of the set dressing to try to steal candy from your pile. You click on gnomes to pop them. Sometimes they have balloons or fishing rods to aid in their thievery. So it’s basically a tower defence game, except that if you pop a gnome who is absconding with a candy, you can drag that candy back to the safety of the pile. It’s a little more forgiving that most games in the genre.

There’s also a feature where you can lay out traps to help defend against the gnomes, but I got bored before earning more than the basic spring, which launches any gnome that steps on it to his doom. Honestly, I think I may have had slightly more fun with this if I’d played on an iPad or something. It’s definitely designed with the idea that you’ll be poking and swiping with your fingers, not a mouse cursor. But even then, it’s just so bland and boring that I can’t imagine that it would have held my attention much longer even on the intended computing machine.

Lastly, we have VOI. I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be pronounced “voy” or “vee-oh-eye.” I suppose it really doesn’t matter, since this thing is written and nobody would know if I’m pronouncing it wrong anyway.

V-O-I has something in common with the two other games on this list. You’ve probably already guessed it: this is a port of a mobile phone game. Or at least that’s what I’m assuming. It has all the hallmarks: minimalist design, gameplay made for touch controls, a simple UI, and bite-sized puzzles. There’s no way this wasn’t an iOS darling for a week at some point.

However! VOI also has a significant feature that separates it from Red’s Kingdom and Candy Thieves: it’s actually fun to play. The puzzles are simple and most of them took me less than a minute to solve, but I was hooked almost instantaneously. And then once the game started pulling out some of its trickier puzzles, I found myself in a wonderland of puzzley goodness.

Despite the game’s simplicity, VOI’s gameplay is a little more complex to describe. It’s a little like tangrams, but instead of mashing all the pieces into a larger shape, you have to layer them on top of each other to replicate a pattern. But it’s not that simple! When you lay one of the black pieces on top of another, any area where they intersect becomes white. Add a third piece to the pile, and it becomes black again. So you have a sort of mix-and-match thing going on where not only do you have to align the black pieces correctly, but you also have to make sure that certain parts get whited out.

Like I said, it’s not overly challenging, but it feels very rewarding to solve these puzzles. I will admit that on a couple of them, I resorted to somewhat brute-forcing my way through, just randomly slapping pieces down to see what happens. For the most part, though, I was able to look at the pattern and pieces and visualize what went where.

I had so much fun with VOI, in fact, that when I finished the 66th and final puzzle, it hit me like a ton a bricks and I was left a little disappointed that it was already over. I still think that if you have a buck-fifty burning a hole in your pocket and an hour to kill, VOI is an excellent way to spend both your extra time and money. Highly recommended!

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – July 2017

~ Game Over ~

Mighty Gunvolt Burst (Switch) – I really adore this one. Played through twice now, as both Beck and Gunvolt, and then just kept playing. Also, the Ekoro DLC came out late in the month, so…

Vaccine War (PC) – I wrote a thing. Kinda meh.

Blaster Master Zero (Switch) – They’re releasing more DLC characters now so I opted to go back and play with the already-out DLC guys. Gunvolt is awesome and makes the game feel new!

Until Dawn (PS4) – I try not to use this word about video games, but I loved this one.

Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse (NES) – The Netflix series and a nice My Nintendo discount inspired me to try one of the few ‘Vania games I’ve never played. Decent, but steeped in bulls**t.

Citadale: Curse of Darkness (WiiU) – Second chapter in the trilogy, solidifying the Casltevania “homage” by using an exact Castlevania subtitle. Perfectly average in all ways.

Super Mario 64 (N64) – I did something new this time and finished the game in a single sitting. Only to the requisite 71 stars, but hey, I’m not some kind of superman.

Tales from the Borderlands (PS4) – I wasn’t impressed with Episode 1, to the point where I was calling it Tales from the Snore-derlands. However, it got so much better once Gortys showed up.

BioShock Infinite (360) – A significantly more interesting tale than the original BioShock, but for some reason the gameplay still feels hollow to me, and I can’t figure out why.

Azure Striker Gunvolt (3DS) – Bought this in August of 2014 when it originally launched, haven’t played it until now. Massive oversight. It is excellent, but very difficult to actually be good at.

Resident Evil HD (PS4) – You know, initially I figured I’d do a one-sitting run of this. And then said run took nearly two months to complete. Damned distractions.

Red’s Kingdom (PC) – Quit playing after 20 minutes because I wasn’t having any fun.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – July 2017

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

I had the week off work last week, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t think I did enough with it. I mean, usually that’s how I spend my time off anyway because I’m poor and can’t afford to go anywhere on vacation, except for maybe a day trip to Selkirk. But for some reason I feel as though I should have “accomplished” more, even though I did get a handful of important things done, and had plenty of fun.

Monday was a good day, but not productive in any way. Edwin and I spent nearly the entire day clearing Super Mario 64 in a single sitting, and banging our heads against Syphon Filter. Not the usual write-off, because I spent the day playing video games with a friend instead of all by my lonesome. I also briefly visited with a number of out-of-town relatives in the evening, as there was a gathering and dinner at my grandparent’s place. Mmmm… delicious steak. Also I put gas in my car for the first time in probably two months. Closed out the evening by staying up too late after purchasing Citadale: the Legends Trilogy and hacking my way through the second chapter.

Tuesday morning was spent finishing off the final episode of Tales From the Borderlands, which was as excellent as the first episode was boring. In the afternoon, I had a very successful dentist appointment. No new cavities, and they showed me before and after photos so that I could see exactly how much crap was piling up between my teeth because I don’t floss. Also I finally made appointments to get a crown placed on my tooth that got a root canal two years ago, so that’s nice. Later on, watched The Bachelorette with my family, as we do. As for the rest of the evening? Probably spent watching Mike Tyson Mysteries or Game Grumps. I’m sure I stayed up way too late again, because I distinctly remember thinking “Welp, I’m definitely not going to feel like accomplishing anything on Wednesday morning.”

Wednesday came along, and much like Tuesday evening, I have no recollection of how I spent it. I know I played a few stages in Azure Striker Gunvolt, but where the rest of that time went is a mystery. ARMS, maybe? I had to take my brother to a doctor’s appointment in the afternoon, after which we picked up pizza for lunch and then I finally began playing Final Fantasy XV. That evening, like most Wednesday evenings, I spent hanging out with Edwin again. On our quest to find dinner, we discovered that the Freshii by my parents’ house was finally open, so we opted to try it out. Then came a notable amount of progress in BioShock Infinite, which I am so torn on. I am quite enjoying the world and the story, and almost wish that there wasn’t any combat, because it’s really more of an annoyance than anything.

Thursday was the day I feel like I really accomplished something. I woke up early and took my car into the shop, as it had recently become very loud. Turned out that it just blew a gasket, not the whole muffler, so it was a relatively cheap fix. I got some exercise by walking home after dropping off the car, and even made a belated phone call about getting free internet in my new condo on the way. Then I ran back once the repairs were done, which pretty well burned me out. I spent the entire afternoon with FFXV, though I did take a short break to go out for another half-hour run. Then, dinner and more FFXV. It was that night when I realized that FFXV was going to stop me doing anything productive until it was done.

Friday morning was very busy! Splatoon Day! Zack and I drove all over creation looking for amiibos and the fabled Splatoon 2 pro controller for Switch. We found most of the amiibos, but no pro controllers, although we did luck into stumbling across a good birthday gift for my dad. By the time we were done, we had been out shopping for so long that on the way home we picked up Fatburger for lunch. I took in a couple episodes of Bob’s Burgers while I ate, and then spent the afternoon playing Splatoon 2, which had easily been my most anticipated Switch game. Then a couple hours break to log some more time in FFXV, and then back to Splatoon 2. I played Salmon Run all evening, only stopping because my Switch’s battery died and the wi-fi signal in my room is spotty at best, so TV play is currently not an option for online games.

There were a number of other grown-up things I could have accomplished during my week, but put off in favour of having fun. Even a lot of fun things got sidelined. No movies, no reading, no drawing; all put off in favour of sinking more hours into Final Fantasy XV. In the end, though, I had a good week. I spent way too much money on junk food and amiibos, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles, I suppose. At least when you’re me.

8 Teenagers, 1 Ski Lodge – Until Dawn

*Please note now that Until Dawn is a story-driven game and I am about to spoil the hell out of it*

I have been meaning to cancel my PS+ subscription for several months now. Originally, I only signed up for it so that I could play Day of the Tentacle Remastered for free and get a deep, deep discount on TMNT: Mutants in Manhattan. Day after day in June, I kept telling myself to turn off the auto-renewal. And then July 1st came around and I got the email saying that Sony had charged my credit card for another month. Rats!

But this worked out nicely for me in the end, because one of July’s free PS+ games is Until Dawn. I had no idea what it was before seeing it in the PS+ menu, but the description sold it as a horror adventure game (which is 100% in my wheelhouse), so I decided that I might as well take advantage, as my $11 was already spent.

When I began playing the game, it immediately became clear what was going on: a bunch of sexy teens are for some reason caught in a secluded ski lodge and would be killed off one-by-one. Well, that’s maybe generalizing a little too hard. The game has plenty of surprises tucked away in its sleeve. Its gameplay, for instance. You wander around, waving your flashlight at things, occasionally stopping to look at a point of interest or pick up clues. Then spooky things happen, and you slowly unravel the greater mystery. Also you occasionally stop for brief interludes in which you are talked down to by an arrogant psychiatrist and asked to complete simple tasks that will vaguely influence things you see in the game. Sound familiar?

Continue reading 8 Teenagers, 1 Ski Lodge – Until Dawn

Follow-up: Blaster Master Zero

I wrote many, many nice words about Blaster Master Zero a few months ago. Between then and now, Inti Creates has released a Hard Mode update and three DLC characters, with at least one more on the way. I think you can see where this is going; I’ve been playing Blaster Master Zero again.

The nicest thing about the DLC characters is that while they are paid content ($2 a pop), they were all free for the first two weeks that they were available. Nice! The three currently available characters are Gunvolt (from Azure Striker Gunvolt), Eiko (from Gal*Gun) and Shantae (from Shantae), and coming next month is… Shovel Knight! (From Shovel Knight.) That’s a pretty outstanding lineup of crossover characters!

I’m not going to lie, what I hope most is that this means that Shantae and Shovel Knight will also be DLC characters for Mighty Gunvolt Burst. But that’s besides the point.

I am still a little bit afraid of Hard Mode, but I recently took up the challenge of playing through BMZ as Gunvolt. I didn’t quite get how he was supposed to play at first, and was getting awfully fed up that his dart gun took twenty shots or so to take down monsters. And then by chance I realized that the dart gun is for tagging enemies, not causing damage. Once you’ve tagged a foe, you can use your Flashfield ability to blast them with lightning. And if you’ve got the energy, Gunvolt’s prevasion skill will have him automatically avoid taking hits. Of course, I would have known all this already if I’d bothered to play either of the Azure Striker Gunvolt games.

And that’s just in the top-down sections. Where Gunvolt really amazes is in the side-scrolling areas. For one, he doesn’t take fall damage. That’s already reason enough to never play as Jason again. Gunvolt also has a better jump in general, and can wall-jump infinitely, which can be a major sequence breaker on its own. Lastly, you can trigger the Flashfield mid-air to have Gunvolt drift more slowly to the ground, making tricky landings much easier to pull off. Of course, the dart/Flashfield combo is also your offensive bread-and-butter here, but I don’t think prevasion works on the overworld. Needless to say, Gunvolt’s amazing extra mobility makes him an absolute blast to play as, and the dart/Flashfield combat style is very cool and makes you feel like a real badass. The only drawback, really, is that the darts don’t piece through walls. Boo.

In the final areas, Gunvolt begins to feel a little bit out of his league, but it was a nice challenge bump, as his unique abilities completely broke the bulk of the game. In the end, I think that playing as Gunvolt actually made the game more fun than playing as Jason, and I’d consider that the mark of some really great DLC!

I haven’t bothered to try our Ekoro yet, but I was chomping at the bit to try out Shantae, so I started a new run with her next. My impressions so far (I’ve only played through the first area) are that Shantae is going to require a lot more finesse than either Jason or Gunvolt. For one, her main attack is still the hair whip, and you can imagine that a short-range melee attack isn’t especially great in a game designed for a character with a gun. Shantae has a slew of magic attacks and transformations to round out her arsenal, though, and so far the Elephant transformation has been my go-to when I need to muscle my way through a stage. I’ll likely have a more detailed write-up when I’ve finished the game again, and when I finally bother to give Ekoro a chance.

Vania Mania

Last weekend, I went a little Castlevania crazy. Firstly, I read that Nintendo had put up some discounts for the Virtual Console versions of the original NES Castlevania trilogy on My Nintendo. Having nothing better to do with all the My Nintendo coins or tokens or whatever that had been piling up in my account, I got myself a nice 40% discount on Castlevania III and loaded ‘er up on my 3DS. Then, because I often forget about things even when I am incredibly excited for them, I read that the Netflix Castlevania series went live on Friday. So I watched all of that in a single sitting.

It all turned out to be a beautiful coincidence, because the animated Castlevania series is loosely based on Castlevania III. I had no idea!

So let’s talk about the show first. Straight up, I loved it. It’s got plenty of flaws, but I thought that it was still a fairly strong show. It was cool, violent, and sometimes funny, though truth be told, a lot of the humour was a little more adolescent than it probably should have been. Trevor Belmot is a massive jackass that I expect we’re supposed to eventually like, but he hasn’t quite gotten to that point yet. Maybe in season 2. Sypha and Alucard are awesome right from the word go, and it’s a massive tragedy that the season ends just as things are really getting good.

And I think that’s my biggest gripe with Castlevania: season one is only four 30-minute episodes, and only tells about a third of the story. Which, I suppose is right on target, as the upcoming second season is going to be eight episodes. Don’t get me wrong, they wrote in a lot of great supplemental material to flesh out the world and characters, but it still feels like this was just a test to see if there would be interest enough for the real story. Imagine if season two hadn’t been given the green light! We’d be left with nothing but an elongated prologue! Forever wondering what could have been!

The absolute best parts of the show were in fact the opening and closing scenes. The series begins with a very long cold open that serves to give Dracula personality and motivation. It’s a bit misleading because this part of the story is pulled more or less from Symphony of the Night, so I was double-surprised that the rest of the series followed Castlevania III instead. It makes perfect sense, though, as they’re telling the story in chronological order (though they did skip right past Lament of Innocence). The final scene is a -and I hesitate to use this word- epic battle between Trevor and Alucard. It was brilliant and incredibly cool. It also served to increase my hype levels to maximum and then slapped me right in the face with the hard truth that I would be left waiting for an indeterminate amount of time for this series to continue.

In a stunning turn of events, I enjoyed playing Castlevania III much less than I did watching it. I am fairly certain that it’s one of only two Castlevania titles that I hadn’t ever played (the other being Lords of Shadow 2). All the classic-style Castlevania are tough as balls, but none of them have ever felt quite as insurmountable as Castlevania III. It’s ridiculous how hard it is. So difficult, in fact, that I got frustrated to the point where I would put down a save state after every monster I defeated. It didn’t even feel that cheap, because you basically need a full life bar to have any hope at all against the bosses in the last few stages.

I’ve done a little reading up on the game in the meantime, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I should not have played the North American version. Apparently, in a stunning reversal of the usual “dumbing-down for Americans” trope, the Japanese version of Castlevania III is significantly less difficult. Fewer monsters, more generous checkpoints, and at least one character that has a useful long-range attack.

The biggest, and what I believe is the most important change, is the way your characters take damage. In the Japanese version, every monster deals a set amount of damage. So a medusa head that hits you for 1 HP in the second stage will still hit you for 1 HP in the ninth stage. However, in the North American version, all monsters hit for the same amount of damage based on how far you are in the game. So in the first stage, you’ll take 1 HP damage from every hit, while in the final stage, you’ll take 4 HP damage from every hit, regardless of monster type. This is crazy and significantly upsets the difficulty balance.

I can’t in good conscience say that the game is bad, because it’s mostly just that the difficulty level is broken. If the game was just a little friendlier, I probably would have really liked it. I found myself on more than one occasion amazed by the visuals (it’s a beautiful NES game), and it retains the tight, methodical Castlevania gameplay that made the series so popular in the first place. Let’s not forget the incredible soundtrack! It’s a huge game with ten stages and a number of alternate paths, and you can pick up several partner characters along the way that can tag in for Trevor at any time. The only game design part that I thought was actively terrible is one section where you have to climb a tower of falling blocks. It’s incredibly slow and long, easy to get killed on, and is boring as all heck. Plus there’s no checkpoint after it, so if you get killed by monsters afterward… enjoy slogging up that section again. It must have been my seventh or eight climb up that tower that I decided to start abusing save states.

And so ends my Castlevania craziness for now. I actually find myself wanting to play Lords of Shadow again for some reason, but I just can’t be bothered to unpack and hook up my Xbox 360 right now. Perhaps in a month’s time when I’m moved and settled into my new home. But hey, by that point, my Castlevania fever might have already subsided.