Don’t remember much, just know that I woke up and some old fella was tellin’ me about how he plucked all the bullet shards out of my head and stapled my face back together. Apparently some sort of cowboy robot dug me out of a shallow grave? I don’t know, it all seems a little far-fetched.
But now I’m wandering around the Mojave Wasteland, aimless, but free. And alive, I guess. We’ll see how long that lasts. Suppose I’ll head out West and see what I can see.
(I’m playing Fallout: New Vegas now)
Shipwreck is a strange little game. To be specific, I mean that it’s strange that it’s a pretty by-the-book Zelda wannabe that doesn’t really do anything to stand out. It’s kind of cute, I guess, but that doesn’t really make an impression on someone who almost exclusively plays cute games.
That’s me, BTW. I play a lot of cute games. Nuts to grizzled shootmans. I’ll take the doofy platforming animals and colourful block-matchers instead.
Anyhow, Shipwreck. From the outset, it just screams Link’s Awakening. You wake up on a beach in the middle of a torrential storm, your ship ostensibly wrecked, and there you find a sword and hack your way to the nearest town. Stay at the inn, and in the morning the mayor tells you that a ghost has been terrorizing the island and you’re quickly recruited to stop it.
Stopping the ghost, of course, requires you to traverse an overworld, searching for dungeons wherein your will find a collection of macguffins that unlock the last place. Along the way, you will collect tools and weapons, increase the number of hearts in your life bar, and maybe play a few simple mini-games. Sound familiar?
Shipwreck is just a little indie game though, so there are only four main dungeons (five if you include the little baby intro dungeon), one town, and a fairly small, barren overworld. Indeed, the overworld is nothing but space in between town and dungeons. It contains little other than trees to block your path and shrubs to chop down. Occasionally a house where mini-games are found. But there are no enemies, no hidden caves, no treasures, no non-tree obstacles. Fortunately, since it’s small, it’s not much of a bother.
Tools are used in exactly the same way as in Link’s Awakening: each one acquired goes into your inventory, and you can equip any two at the same time. Some are a little redundant (apples and bread, sword and pickaxe), but you get the usual adventuring kit like a shield, (cross)bow, and lantern. None of the tools combine to do something neat, à la bomb arrows or rooster boomerang.
Dungeons are where 95% of the game is spent, and thank goodness, because there are actual things to do in them. They don’t have a lot of depth to them, however. The general idea is that you wander forward until you find a) a locked door or b) a key. After you find one, you then wander in the opposite direction until you’ve found the other. Sometimes a treasure chest will contain a map or small amount of coins instead of a key. There is exactly one heart container in each dungeon, noted quite visibly on the map.
Each dungeon has a theme, none very unique. The tree dungeon is a very basic first dungeon. The mine dungeon is dark and requires that you have a lantern on your person at most times. The swamp dungeon doesn’t have any real gimmicks besides making you backtrack a whole lot. The desert dungeon is actually pretty great, having the closest approximation to puzzles in the game, and featuring all sorts of traps. The lighthouse is alright too, but not quite as great as the desert.
Obviously these dungeons aren’t going to be as complex as, say, Eagle’s Tower. But honestly, they feel more like Zelda 1 dungeons than anything. They’re a little more complex because there are switches and holes that you can sometimes fall to lower floors through, but really nothing that required much thought to get past.
Bosses are a pain in the butt. They don’t really require finesse or thought. You just run up and whack ’em until they die. If you don’t have a supply of healing items, you might have to dodge their attacks. The boss of the mines can only be hit with the pickaxe, which I guess is unique, and you’ve got to shoot the swamp boss with arrows. The tree and desert bosses are just jokes.
You may think by this review that I did not like Shipwreck. That’s only a half-truth. I did enjoy playing it, but I was admittedly underwhelmed. I feel like Brushfire Games had a good thing going here, but didn’t really put their all into it. Some sort of justification for the overworld would have been nice, and they could have made the dungeons a little more complex, considering that’s where the meat of the game is. I’m not saying they did a bad job, I’m saying I don’t think they realized their full potential.
Yeah, I realize that’s just about as damning as saying the game is outright bad. It’s like when someone says “I’m not mad, I’m disappointed.” Sorry, Brushfire Games. But hey, it was your first go. It’s pretty darn solid for a first game! I’m sure Shipwreck 2 will set the world on fire.
Shipwreck is available on PC via Steam/Humble, and also on Xbox Live Indie Games.
Um… preamble… I don’t know.
I recently paid to renew my webhosting. Honestly, I wasn’t sure that I really wanted to any more. But I can’t let go. I just… I would be throwing away everything since 2006. You know, I kind of wish I actually could get a do-over and go back to 2006, with one very key piece of information.
Uh, but anyway, video games!
Super Mario 64 (N64) – This has been my go-to Favourite Video Game for over a decade now, and to be completely honest, it’s getting harder and harder to sit through on each replay. Because it’s clunky and old. If there were a remake (with analog controls) I’m sure it’d be fine.
Jazzpunk (PC) – It’s a fairly short little comedy game. Not a lot of “game” to be had, with the exception of a bunch of cheap little mini-games peppered throughout. Mostly you just wander about and enjoy puns and sight gags. Good, but not $15 good.
Heart Beaten (3DS) – Essentially bargain bin Wario Ware, with very few games. It was fun while it lasted, though. And cheap!
Ultimate NES Remix (3DS) – Done and dusted. It’s a really great premise, but a little lopsided in the favour of Mario (to nobody’s surprise). Probably would’ve been even more fun if I hadn’t opted to get rainbow stars on every challenge. I’d love a Game Boy or SNES Remix to follow.
We’re going to mix things up a little this month. I’ve decided that the Game Over section should get first billing, and then have a rundown of what I’m currently playing. I think that putting the focus on my “accomplishments” for the month is a little more interesting. And when I say more interesting, I mean that for myself when I look back on these, not for you reading it right now.
Originally the idea of this feature was to keep track of what I was playing and encourage me to leave fewer games sitting half-done. That hasn’t been the case at all, as you’ll see if you look back at how many Now Playing entries just vanished and never showed up in Game Over. I still just start games on a whim and let them wither and die when something new comes along.
Shadow of the Colossus HD (PS3) – If you’d told me that I could like SotC even more than I already did, I’d have said it wasn’t possible. But then I played it in 3D and here we are. Possibly the best (only?) reason to own a 3D-enabled TV.
BOXBOY! (3DS) – A brilliant little puzzle-platformer by HAL Laboratory. Not surprising, since everything they do is wonderful. The gameplay is incredibly thoughtful and satisfying, and you can dress up the main character, Qbby, as a rapper or a bunny or even a girl. Hooray!
Life is Strange: Episode 2 – Out of Time (PC) – I really liked Episode 1, and Ep.2 might have been even better. I don’t much care for hot button social commentary in my video games, but I think the “Internet Bullying/Slut-Shaming is Bad” theme was handled fairly well. I find myself caring about what happens to these characters, so… Good work, Dontnod. Keep it up. Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – April 2015
A couple months ago, Nintendo rolled out their first freemium Pokémon game for 3DS, Pokémon Shuffle. I’m told that it’s the average mobile F2P match-em-up, but with Squirtles and Lucarios instead of candy beans or whatever. I played the crap out of it, in fact I continue to play a little bit each day, and I still haven’t spent a single cent on it. It helps that it is fairly regularly updated with new content and competitions.
Last week, the second free-to-play Pokémon spinoff came out: Pokémon Rumble World. Like the previous games in the Rumble series, it’s a fairly shallow action game that has you punch your way through scores of toy Pokémon and hoping to maybe take some home with you at the end of each stage. It’s good, simple fun, and World is the best incarnation of it yet.
For starters, it’s not the “keep giving us money and we’ll let you play more than five rounds a day” kind of F2P model. No, it’s more like you get the game for free, and then you can give up some bucks to unlock more content within it. And that content is all either permanent upgrades or new stages, too. Also, there’s a hard limit on how much money you can spend on the game (about $35), so it’s more like you’re buying a full game bit-by-bit instead of paying it all up front.
This is a pretty great model. Especially since the premium currency (pokédiamonds) are easy enough to come by for free in-game. There are daily challenges that reward skilled players with pretty decent payouts of pokédiamonds, streetpass milestones that award bunches of pokédiamonds, and if you streetpass people or have 3DS friends that are playing the game, their Miis can pop in and sometimes give you a diamond.
So there are two way you can play: take it slow and unlock everything for free, or pony up and have all of the game’s content delivered to you as soon as possible. Not too shabby. If you hit the spending limit, the game even gives you 20 free pokédiamonds every day to fritter away on the usual silly freemium things, like reviving if you’re defeated in a stage, or being able to play a stage again without waiting for the time limit to expire.
The only thing I really don’t like about Rumble World is that adding a specific monster to your stable requires a massive amount of luck. For one, simply getting a defeated Pokémon to join you is random, nothing you can really do about it. Not every Pokémon assigned to a stage appears every time you play that stage, which complicates things further. Worst of all, each world is divided into several areas, each with a pre-set Pokémon loadout, and you get to play one stage per visit to a world, and even then it’s picked randomly.
Certain Pokémon seem to only appear in the “FEVER!” version of each stage, which, as far as I can tell, comes about totally randomly. Like everything else. Needless to say, there are a lot of RNGs working against you if you’re trying to catch ’em all. It’s very much a “hope for the best” kind of situation.
On the upside, it’s still pretty fun to just carve your way through the stages, bopping Pokémon left and right. The way that the game mechanics and pokémon moves and strength levels work, it gives you lots of opportunities to play as monsters that otherwise amount to useless data. For example, I’ve been playing as a really strong Durant lately, and Durant is a Pokémon that has gotten exactly zero respect from me previous to this game. I use it because it’s quick, strong, and has a really efficient Bite attack. Contrast with Golbat, a Pokémon I normally love, but whose Acrobatics attack is really unwieldy in Rumble World, making it difficult to use effectively.
Certainly, Pokémon Rumble World is not a deep game, but it’s a decent way to kill some time now and then. And who doesn’t love the adorable little toy versions of Pokémon? So yeah, I’d recommend it. Besides, it’s free. What do you have to lose?
You know how every once in a while I talk about how something in my environment triggers a loosely-related memory? I had a really strong one of those yesterday. I was listening to Firehouse at work, and for whatever reason, it brought up memories of Mega Man Battle Network 4.
If you’ve actually paid attention to my ramblings over the last however many years, you know that Battle Network 4 and I have a rocky relationship. In fact, I might even say that I hate it. It is, by a wide margin, the worst in its series. And that’s mostly because it’s overdesigned and padded all to heck. However, when we started out, MMBN4 and I got along fairly well.
The Mega Man Battle Network series was an annual release for the first six years of the Game Boy Advance’s lifespan. I got in on the second installment (which many rightly consider to be the best), and lured the eldest of my brothers into its grips before long. From that point on, we would eagerly await the release of the newest entry each year and spend the summer playing through together.
As an incentive to have consumers buy Super Smash Bros 4 on 3DS and Wii U, Nintendo put two promotions in place for anyone who registered both versions on Club Nintendo. The first one was the giveaway of the very first piece of DLC for the game: Mewtwo. The character costs $5 to buy for both versions of the game (or $4 if you only want him on one or the other), but people who cashed in on the promotion get him for free, and a couple of weeks early, to boot.
The second promotion was a special CD set that features 72 tracks from the games’ soundtracks. This is the more elusive one, as Nintendo hasn’t announced any plans to actually sell this CD set to anyone who didn’t qualify for the free giveaway.
As such, I’ve uploaded the entirety of both discs for you to download at your leisure. They’re lazily tagged, but they’re good to go. It’s really excellent stuff if you’re at all into video game music.
Yeesh, it’s April already. Funny to think that as of today, I’ll have been a homeowner for exactly three years.
Fooled you! It’s actually May 1st that I took possession of my house.
That… that was terrible. Let’s just get onto the video game stuff.
Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate (3DS) – As much as I love Smash Bros, I have to say that if I were restricted to one single game for the rest of my days, it’d be a MonHun game. Preferably this one.
Majora’s Mask 3D (3DS) – If I had to choose only one Zelda to play forever? It’d be Wind Waker, but Majora is a very close second.
Were you just aching to have me type more words about the New 3DS? Then you’re in luck!
If you weren’t… Well, I’m sorry. It’s just not your day.
Firstly, I just want to say how much I love the fancy Monster Hunter 4 edition that I was able to snag. The silvery colour is perfect, and I honestly think it wouldn’t look as nice without the fur pattern. The focal point, the monster emblem, is also really cool. I think it’s a pretty nice cover design all around, since it manages to be flashy and simple at the same time.
I’ll admit, I’m a little puzzled why the emblem is of Najarala, of all monsters. But I won’t complain since it still looks neat.
To speak about the system in general, it’s got a ton of little improvements here and there, most of which I never imagined that I’d appreciate so much. The one downgrade to the system is that it only fits a MicroSD card now, so that was an extra expense for me. Also the SD slot is on the back of the system, hidden underneath the outer shell. You have to have a teeny-tiny screwdriver to access it, which is inconvenient if you’ve been using multiple SD cards for some reason. I only had to open it once, and I don’t anticipate ever having to do it again.
The button layout has changed yet again, relocating the start and select buttons to the side of the system, instead of below the touchscreen. Now it’s set up more like the DSi. This is a great change, because I always felt that it was weird to reach over to push those buttons. Also they’ve added ZL and ZR buttons, which I (and probably most people) have no use for at this point. I guess some game might eventually come along that needs four shoulder buttons, but I haven’t met one yet.
The big addition as far as control options go is the C-stick. Though it’s more like a C-nub. It’s about the size of a pencil eraser, and feels pretty similar. It’s really odd at first because it doesn’t really move at all, but it’s perfectly receptive to how you’re pushing on it. I didn’t give a flip about it at first, but I’ve really come to love it. It makes playing Monster Hunter 4 a lot more convenient, and it’s nice to have free camera control in Majora’s Mask 3D as well.
New 3DS has a few more horses under its hood than its cousins, though that added power won’t be noticeable at all until early April, when Xenoblade Chronicles 3D is released. It’s currently the only game on the horizon that requires New 3DS’ extra power, though it’s still visually inferior to the Wii version. Rumours abound that MH4 looks a little better on New 3DS, but I haven’t really dug deep enough to see if there’s any hard evidence to support that. Final verdict: at the moment, the New 3DS’ power-up is insignificant. We’ll have to see how many desirable exclusives end up existing.
What makes the New 3DS truly amazing is the super-stable 3D technology. On the old 3DS, I almost never played with the 3D effect turned on, because it had a very narrow viewing angle, and shifting even a bit would break the illusion. It just didn’t look very good, so I didn’t make use of it. New 3DS has some sort of spooky face-tracking camera (it’s watching you) built in that keeps track of where your eyes are in relation to the screen and adjusts the 3D accordingly, keeping the effect solid even if you’re moving around a bit.
Super-stable 3D works really well. I spend about half of my time with Monster Hunter 4 in 3D, and to this point, I haven’t played Majora’s Mask in 2D at all. Since it’s built into the hardware, it works just fine with older games too, so games like Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse and Kirby Triple Deluxe can be played in their full 3D glory without having to worry about the effect constantly mucking up.
Keep in mind of course, it’s built for normal usage. If you’re wobbling around like a madman and/or trying to break the illusion, it’s still going to break. It’s not perfect, but it’s more than good enough to make playing with 3D on a real joy.
I guess there are maybe some other things about the New 3DS to mention. The stylus is different. Fatter and shorter. People seem to hate it, but I don’t much care. I don’t like that it’s tucked into the bottom edge of the system. It’s much harder to slide out from there than it was when it was on the side or top. Also, in North America, the New 3DS only comes in the XL variety. Again, I don’t care. I was rocking a 3DS XL anyway, so it’s NBD to me.
In conclusion, I’d have to say that while the New 3DS is a worthy upgrade, it’s not a totally necessary one. But then again, when has an incremental hardware revision ever been necessary? Never, that’s when. But New 3DS has been great for me, and if you’re in the market for a 3DS, there’s really no reason not to go with the fancy New one. If you already own a 3DS and don’t care about the 3D effect or Xenoblade, I can’t really recommend it. Still, it’s a nice machine, and it’s only further solidifying the 3DS as my preferred gaming system.
Hey so it’s been weeks now but check it out, I bought myself a New Nintendo 3DS. Note that it’s New and not just new. I mean, yes, it’s both, but it’s the New that matters. The New is what makes it different than simply being new.
This thing has a terrible name.
Anyway, I’d like to recount the story of how I came into possession of this little gadget first, if that’s alright. I mean, we all know that I’m very likely going to buy new Nintendo hardware. It’s part of what makes me the person that I am; mindless consumerism.
When the New 3DS was first announced for Japan, I didn’t give a spit. Oh okay, sure there’s more stable 3D visuals and a weird little C-nub and it’s got a few more horses under the hood. But really, it didn’t seem like it was important for anything but playing a portable version of Xenoblade Chronicles. Which is a decent reason to own the thing, mind you, but it still didn’t “Wow!” me.
And yet despite this, I started putting a little money away here and there because I knew that I was going to end up buying one anyway.
Months later, it’s officially announced to be releasing in North America, and there was a sweet, sweet Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate-themed version, exclusive to EB Games/GameStop. I figured that special edition 3DSes have always been pretty plentiful, and almost nobody in North America gives a toot about Monster Hunter, so I’ll skip the pre-ordering and just pick one up on release day. WHOOPS. Pre-orders were sold out by the end of the same day, and local EB Games staff were fairly certain that they weren’t going to get any extra units for walk-in customers.
So I booked release day off and got to the mall with the littlest bro before the EB opened. We sat down near the store, not anticipating a crowd. But then a couple other young people stared sitting at adjacent tables and a young woman planted right in front of the door. Another fellow got up and stood behind her, and we quickly followed suit. Not a minute later, a rather large line had queued up behind us.
A single employee opened the store, and we shuffled in to be helped one-by-one. The lady got her stuff, and the guy in front of me (let’s call him Paul) went up to bat. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to what was happening, but Paul had a bunch of stuff pre-ordered, though he decided against actually purchasing all of it.
I got up and asked if the store had gotten any extra Monster Hunter 3DSes. The guy said they didn’t get any, but that he had one since one of the items that Paul had left behind was a Monster Hunter 3DS, and that it was mine if I wanted it. I heard a cry of sorrow from behind me. The guy behind me had come looking for the exact same thing, and I had been lucky enough to scoop up the one stray unit.
Think about it: If I had gotten in line mere seconds earlier or later, I would have gone home a disappointed little boy. But the entire friggin’ cosmos aligned that day, and the universe did me a solid. It’s not often that I catch a lucky break like that. A new toy isn’t exactly the solution to the crap I’ve been going through lately, but it certainly takes the edge off.
And look at that. I’ve put down too many words about simply obtaining this thing. Maybe I’ll talk about the actual machine another day. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe I’ll forget or just not bother. Who knows? Think of it as a fun surprise from me to you.
