The Strange Grandstanding of Evo/Wave

 

Every so often on the stream (www.twitch.tv/taurinensis) we do a little segment that I have dubbed the Free Game Dive.  It involves going on Steam or websites like Itch, downloading free to play indie games and playing them through.  I've found some real cool little titles over the course of doing this segment so it's generally a lot of fun.

Recently, one of the games I finished as part of this segment was something on Steam called Evo/Wave, a short collectathon platformer in the same vein of something like Banjo Kazooie or similar titles.  The story is about an old AI called MagnaVex (get it?) drestroying some kind of computer core that causes the world to get all screwed up.  You, playing as a little robot dude, have to go into 3 worlds, collect some shit and reverse the damage that MagnaVex has done. 

According to Alexandre Isidorio, the guy who designed the UI, the game was made as a student project for a university course and as far as the game itself goes it's actually pretty good.  Having just finished Yooka Laylee and absolutely hating it playing a game like this which actually seemed to have a bit of thought and effort put into it was nice.  The final stage as well where you fight MagnaVex in a series of platforming challenges was particularly fun and did a good job of testing your skills with the games various power-ups, worth a shot if you have a couple hours to kill one day for sure.

But there's something weird going on with the games story, what little there is of it.  When you collect all the parts in the games three levels and are about to enter the final encounter with MagnaVex, a cutscene plays where he makes a bit of a speech about the current state of the industry, about how games have become unimaginative, constant installs and updates are annoying and companies are nickle and diming using at every turn and it's done in this sort of "old man yells at cloud" tone and yet, is he wrong though?

The constant installs and updates ARE annoying.  It's not something I've ever been too bothered by because I'm more than happy to just play or do something else while it goes on but the fact that the days of being able to just buy a game, slam it in my machine and just play right away are long gone IS annoying.  The fact that every time I fire up Xenoblade Chronicles on my Switch and it asks me to do a software update on a game made THIRTEEN fucking years ago is cause for minor irritation.

The nickle and diming of the industry as well is also a well documented and often complained about side of things.  Battle passes, microtransactions and bullshit DLC featuring content that should have just been in the initial purchase are rampant not to mention the constant remaking of safe bet, classic games in a thinly veiled attempt to get you to open your wallet for that nostalgia hit

But it's the criticism of people that feel that the creativity has been largely sucked out of games in exchange for varients of the same thing that really rubs the wrong way.  I'm not one to say that ALL of gaming has become stagnant, I'm far too widely versed in the deepest, most obscure realms to honestly think that but I do feel that generally speaking gaming, at least the mainstream stuff, has sacrified being interesting in exchange for being mostly OK.  What I mean by this is that if you look that the libraries of anything from back in the day, take the PS1 for example, the games are widely varied, even within the same genre.  There's a lot of experimentation going on with style, mechanics and presentation and while it makes the sysem interesting there are quite a lot of just flat out stinkers on that system.  Nowadays I feel that everything is sort of made from a template, usually something that worked well in the past and while that means that truly, honest to goodness fucking AWFUL games aren't really all that common anymore the creativity within the medium has suffered greatly as a result.  

It's been a thing in the AAA scene forever but even the indie scene hasn't avoided falling into this trap.  At time of writing there are two big indie games that I am told are very good.  Lies of P and Sea of Stars.  I have yet to play either of these and people who's opinions I don't immdiately disregard have told me that they are good games and they sure as shit look pretty cool but Lies of P is just Bloodborne and Sea of Stars is just Chrono Triggter (it even has Yasunori Mitsuda doing the music, for fucks sake).  I'm always glad to have more of a good thing, sure, but it doesn't make me a cranky old boomer, like Evo/Wave suggests that I sigh a little at all the safe bets and appeals to nostalgia.

Still, Evo/Wave is an pretty good Free2Play thingie if you have some free time and nothing better to do.  The dev might have his head up his own arse on the state of the industry but this is a game that fucking NO ONE gives a fuck about so collect the shiny objects then turn it off and ignore his crap opinions going forward.

Free Indie Game Roundup

 Recently I did a event on my stream that I titled "Free Indie Game Dumpster Diving" and despite the word dumpster in the title, most of the games I played during that stream were actually really good.  Here's a quite roundup of those games 

1) Gun Devil 

Gun Devil, avaliable for free on Steam, is a 2D side scrolling platformer.  It starts with a story sequence about your characters wife being kidnapped and its full of semi-edgy early Newgrounds tier writing that's a little bit cringeworthy but once the game gets going its a rather enjoyable experience.  It has tight controls, some very nice pixel art and despite being a quite a short game has some replay value after you are finished because you can get these giant coins at the end of each stage for doing it no hit and killing all the enemies.  I would have happily paid a few bucks for this one but you can play it right now, for free. 

2) The Backrooms: Lost and Found

The Backrooms are some creepy-pasta thing that I dont fully understand but there seems to be a lot of media surrounding it.  This game involves navigating through the backrooms looking for wooden giraffes while you are on the hunt for an exit.  Depending on how much you explore you can get one of SEVEN endings which I have to admit is quite a lot for a free game.  However, the game has a really stupid stamina system that makes running around sort of tedious and after the first run I can't really see myself ever going back to see what those other 6 endings were.  Not terrible by any means but you can do a lot better in terms of free indie horror

3) Freight Hopper

There was a game that came out a while ago on Steam that cost money called Clustertruck (I think) that involved free running across the tops of trucks as they sped down the stages.  It's the kind of game that's made for speedrunning with its emphasis on clearly levels quickly and movement mechanics.  Well this is just a free version of that.  Not many levels and the controls are sort of floaty and weird but once I got used to them I had a pretty good time.  If you liked Clustertruck and you need some more of it in your life, play this one I guess.

4) Workaholic

A first person shooter about shooting your co-workers in the face with finger guns.  There isn't really much more to it than that, you just blast your way through 4 stages that have sort of random layouts and then your done.  The art is cool and the gameplay is fast but its way too short and is just begging for some kind of endless mode which I don't think would have been too hard to implement given that the levels are procedurally generated anyway.  There's a fairly impressive selection of weapons for you to find which is cool but picking up a life steal, super kick or dual weild powerup puts a weird filter over the graphics that make it borderline unplayble.  Pretty good as long as you avoid those items, would play again .

5) Ghost Trap 

Very basic precision platformer that doesn't go too crazy with the difficulty.  My only real complaint is that there's a lot of waiting around for the games 2 bosses that make them quite annoying.  Comes with a cool speedrun mode which lets you play all the levels back to back without having to go through the annoying menu every time.  

6) Resonance of the Ocean 

Some kind of art game about a person on a island trying to communicate with someone by copying strange noises that come from another nearby island.  You have to go around picking up and combining items to make the right sound and then take them to a big megaphone to end the stage.  Very basic, very easy and very much has its head shoved up its own ass.  Nice art though

7) The Night that Speaks

When someone in my chat told me about this game they described it as "a game where you fight monsters by giving them the finger" which got me very excited.  Upon playing it though it's just a bland and boring horror game and giving the baddie the finger to make it go away isn't awesome like I thought it would be and it isn't even really all that funny.  Also the game was made to look like it was on Game Boy, which sounds cool but it just makes all the graphics murky and its hard to make anything out.  I got it for free and felt ripped off

8) Self

A interesting platformer where instead of jumping you sort of expand a big rubber band and use it to flick yourself around the level.  Not much more to it than that but its short, sweet and has some really good music.  Comes with some bonus challenge levels that are actually really hard and its very satisfying to clear them after some practice

10) Grippy

A Pico-8 game where you play as a piece of chewing gum that has to grab its way around a bunch of stages.  Its interesting because you play it by using the arrow keys to direct your fists and then you have to hold and release either Z or X for each hand in order to swing around.  Takes a while to get used to but really fun once you get the hang of it.  Also has multiple routes through each section with the harder ones being shorter so the more skilled player can get a faster clear time, which is a nice touch.  Will probably play again some time to get my time down.  

11) 13 Gates

A very basic first person platforming game.  You play the 13 levels, have a sort of good time and then never play it again 

12) Guardian Sphere

The game I chose for this posts header image because it was EASILY the best one I played in the entire 14 hour stream.  A top down shooter that has the cool gimmick of your life points also being your shot power AND a form of currency.  There are 5 stages and each stage has a couple of shops in them where you can spend your HP for various upgrades creating a sort of risk/reward system that can be really satisfying when you gamble all your HP for a sick upgrade and then survive long enough to collect a few more hit points again.  The game also has 8 playable characters to choose from each with there own shot type and 3 difficulty settings.  I did a 1cc run of the game on my first try on normal but that's because I'm an actual shmup God rather than the game being overly easy, I think for your average player this game may be kind tough depending on how lucky you are with the RNG shops.  You coulda put that on Steam for $10 and I woulda been happy but giving it away for free on Itch is just Godlike  

13) Plead with the Mountain God

A PS1-like platforming game which rips off the story of Shadow of the Collossus almost enitirely.  Only instead of having epic battles with giant monsters, you're very clunkily jumping up a tower.  Gameplay gets very dull very fast, has no music and at once point I glitched through the floor but not an awful experience by any stretch.  A forgettable game

14) Ashes 2063

A full, stand alone Doom conversion that I didnt finish during the marathon but happily added to my "now playing" list as it was a ton of fun.  Adds a bunch of stuff that base Doom doesn't have like towns, dialouge and shopping.  Quite challenging as well but there's a chance that I thought that because I was 12 hours deep when I started it.  Will post more about it in the future

15) Mini-Doom

A Doom fan game that I played for about 20 minutes but that seems really good.  A 2D platforming version of Doom that has a Mario 3 style world map and elements of a Metroidvania.  Didn't play enough to form a proper opinion but at a glance it seems very interesting indeed

That was all the games I played during the marathon and overall I had a damn good time.  If we get enough channel points via the stream at www.twitch.tv/taurinensis then we'll do another one!

How about finish your stupid game?

 

I know I was supposed to be using the blog for a sort of diary type thing nowadays but today I have to spend some time going off on one.

If you do care about what I've been playing today and yesterdays its just making the usual rounds with SMT V mainly; grinding, recruiting, dying, you know, all the good stuff.  I also streamed a whole bunch of Yakuza where the combat in that games just swings wildly between insultingly easy and actually impossible.  There's one guy in particular in the collesium who is just consistantly clapping my cheeks and I just cannot seem to get the better of him.  He's not THAT hard but getting hit like, once, means that a quarter of my health vanishes and unlike fights in the story, I can't spam convini energy drinks.

But what I want to go off about today is a game called Ghostrunner.  I bought Ghostrunner after seeing the trailer because it looked like someone took Mirrors Edge and Hotline Miami and then smashed them together.  The atmosphere of the game and the soundtrack are right up my alley so I snapped it up right away.  At first I was having a good time with it but the more I play it the more janky and buggy it seems to get and it all came to a head yesterday with a certain platforming challenge.  

In one level of the game you have to run through these giant spinning discs that have breaks in them.  At first they are spinning too fast so as you approach them you have to right click them to slow down time on them which allows you to either pass through them or run along them.  Now one thing you have to understand about Ghostrunner is that it's not an easy game.  It presents you with pretty rough challenges that you will probably die on a few times but will also give you pretty frequent checkpoints so you can try over and over nice and quickly until you get it.  

I came to one spinning disc section about half way through the stage where the disc was horizontal and was positioned near a wall.  The idea is that you time slow the disc and run along top of it, jump off and wall run along the wall to the next platform.  I will attempt to crudely draw a diagram of the scene in MSPaint

The black thing is the disc and the red thing is the wall, looking at the part of the level sideways on.  So I slow the disc, jump on the wall and screw up my jump to the ledge and die, no problem I'll just start again.  Only problem, when I hit the restart button the scene had changed.

The disc had like, pivoted and was now clipping through the wall as it spun around.  I tried to press on anyway only to find that the angle of the disc and the spinning meant that it would make the wall run impossible or, if I could get on the wall, I'd get clipped by the edge of the disc and knocked off to my death.  Completion of the room was impossible and my only solution was to quit the game.

Now while each level has a great number of checkpoints that make dying not a problem, the game DOES NOT save progress at those checkpoints.  So I had to do the entire fucking level over and then hope to God that it doesn't happen again.  Well it DID actually happen again, 2 more times on 2 different discs in the stage only I got lucky the other 2 times and the disc pivot was either not a problem or a minor annoyance at best.  

This has really soured my view of the game now.  When I fire up Ghostrunner now I'm constantly worried about what game-breaking bullshit is going to pop up out of nowhere and force me to restart enitre stages thus wasting god knows how much of my life with this crap.  I went onto the Steam discussion page to see if anyone else had experienced it and while I couldn't find anything about it, I was greeted to thread upon thread of people complaining about other, way more serious bugs and glitches.  

I know game-dev is no easy task and obviously its not really realistic to expect a developer or studio to find and fix every bug before release but this is game breaking shit.  Ghostrunner is 25 pounds and apparently developed in part by 3D fucking Realms of all people so having level geometry just randomly break or game crashes or major performance hiccups just is not acceptable.  

How about finish your fucking game and make sure it works before you charge me money for it, eh? Is that really so much to ask?

Gargoyle's Quest 2

 

As I've been working my way through my 100 game NES challenge on stream, I've started to lose a little faith in the system overall.  It's a system held in such high regard by most people in retro game circles but the thing is absolutely teeming with really awful, trash games that are borderline unplayable.  But then Gargoyle Quest 2 came along and reminded me just how good games on this system can really be.

You play as Firebrand and you are tasked with going through the Ghoul Realm to stop something called the black light.  A simple plot for a simple game but we aren't really here for a detailed narrative experience now are we? We're here for that sweet platforming gameplay.  

The game is split into two sections, top down overworld exploration and side scrolling platforming.  In the overworld sections you walk around a big map, find towns, talk to demons, get items etc. and then when you reach a place of importance the game switches into the side scrolling mode.  When you're platforming you have a standard shot attack to kill enemies and you have a wing meter that lets you hover for a limited time after a jump.  The hover mechanic takes a little bit of getting used to at first but when you get good at it it becomes really satisfying.  As you play through the game you get upgrades that allow you to jump higher, shoot stronger, make platforms and float longer and as you aquire the game throws obstacles at you in just the right intensity to allow you to get used to your new abilities before tasking you with some pretty challenging stuff near the end. 

Now you might recognise Firebrand from a different game, Ghosts and Goblins, also on the NES and as most people know it's a LEGENDARILY difficult game that requires not only precise platforming and some really annoying enemies, but also two consecutive clears to get the proper ending.  This may lead you to believe that Gargoyle's Quest 2 is equally hard but have no fear because you'd be quite wrong.  With the exception of maybe the final two stages, most of the levels in this game are an absolute breeze and even then the last two levels are nothing compared to what the rest of the main series has to offer.  The hover makes a lot of the platfoming extremely lenient and even if you do find yourself struggling, you can farm "vials" in levels and on the world map to buy extra lives very quickly.  The bosses in each stage are also an absolute joke most of them dying in a small number of hits and with patterns that are extremely easy to figure out.  Even the last guy, with his one hit death orbs is an absolute joke when you realize that, by that point, you have infinite hover and anything dangerous he throws at you can be countered by just shooting it.  That said it's not a complete walk in the park but you probably will never end up in a position where you have to repeat a stage ad nausium because some bullshit enemy keeps killing you like in GnG.

It seems that this game is pretty well known and pretty well regarded and I can't believe it took me so long to dicover it for myself.  If you've not played it and you're looking to kill an afternoon with an NES game, then this is a pretty good one to fire up.  Also if you really like it and wan't more, Gargole Quest 1 is avaliable on Game Boy and a sequel to this game called Demon's Crest on the SNES is also waiting for you.  I've not played either of those but I enjoyed this one so much I'm about to go give them a try

Super Benbo Quest Turbo Deluxe

 

Every so often a game (or a film etc.) comes along that falls into the category of "so bad it's good".  An example of these in gaming would be something like Deadly Premonition (although I just think it's good, but whatever) and in film, The Room.  These are the kind of games that people know kind of suck for a plethroa of reasons and yet playing/watching them brings the person great joy.  So people see how favorably these films and games are spoken about and then they try to make something similar but attempts at this kind of film and game making almost always fall flat

Which is what Super Benbo Quest Turbo Deluxe is.  Someone trying to make a game that's "so bad that it's awesome" except it fails at the entire second half of that phrase and ends up just being bad.  The game is about a little blue girl fighting an army of skeletons and she does this by running, jumping and punching her way through 7 or 8 stages.  The dialogue is full of needless cursing and very obviously done on purpose spelling mistakes to try and be all eDgY and while it's going for humor the only thing it achieves is eye rolls.

The gameplay, while not awful is generally not very good and is sort of a chore to play.  Benbo, which I assume is the girls name, is somehow both too floaty while also feeling extremely stiff which makes platforming and absolute pain in the ass.  It's fine in early stages but the last few levels actually require some precision and it's hard to achieve that level of precision when you feel like a cinderblock on an ice rink.  Occasionally you'll have to punch an enemy or two and most enemies die in one hit but the real shittiness comes out in the bossfights which all boil down to running up to the enemy and mashing the attack button until you win.  Sometimes you might die, sometimes the boss will die in the blink of an eye, just keep restarting until the game lets you through.  I think the best way to describe the way Super Benbo Quest plays is just painfully boring.

I thought at first it was trying to emulate the kind of humor you'd find in the early days of sites like Newgrounds but that's sort of an insult to those creators.  Sure, there was plenty of edgy stuff on Newgrounds back in the day but it wasn't edgy just for the sake of being edgy in most cases, there was some sense in a lot of those old animations that the person making it did at least care a little bit about the project they were working on.  Super Benbo Quest feels like it had no effort put into it because it's purposefully trying to go for the "so bad it's good" appeal so anything shitty is just going to be part of the games "charm"

Here's the thing, if you strive to make something good and it turns out shit, people may still fall in love with it because they recognise the vision, the hard work and the passion behind the project.  When you strive to make something shit, the only thing it can possibly be is shit and boy howdy is Super Benbo a pile of shit.

Don't play it

Hard Vs Bullshit

 

Recently I've been playing a game on stream called Wings of Vi.  Wings of Vi is a platform game brought to us by a guy named Solgyrn who is probably the most well known for creating a similar game called I wanna be the Boshy.  I Wanna Be the Boshy was a fan game of the notorious I Wanna Be The Guy, a platform game that was designed to troll just as much as it was to challenge the player.  

Hard games are something I usually quite enjoy.  If you were to come to me and tell me that a game presents an above average challenge I'm probably going to buy it.  When a game has multiple difficulty options I'm the kind of person to jump straight into hard mode and completely ignore the normal or easy settings.  I'm not saying this to flex any kind of gaming cred, of course, I'm merely pointing it out so that when I go on to call Wings of Vi "bullshit" in the next few paragraphs, I'm being genuine rather than just throwing my toys out of the pram because I died a bunch of a couple of bosses.

Difficulty is a hard thing for a lot of developers to get right and generally speaking I find that the best games in this aspect don't even have difficulty settings to speak of.  3D Mario games are one example of this where you can usually beat the game with only 70 of the stars/shines/dragon dildos or whatever but for players looking for extra challenge can find it in post game content or in challenging courses when trying to 100% the game.  Another example would be Celeste, a challenging platformer that presents the player with no difficulty settings in the traditional sense but instead gives a reasonable challenge to all players and then ramps up the difficulty in post game content such as B sides, Golden Berries and Farewell.  Dark Souls would be another good example of this where some basic knowledge of the games systems and adapting to the combat a little will get you through all the games story bosses, but extra bosses and self imposed challenges can help bring up the challenge for people who want a bit of punishment. 

Bad difficulty, I find, usually comes in the form of settings that one must pick at the start of the game.  The one that stands out extremely clear in my mind was Nier on PS3 where the hard mode just increased enemy damage and health to the point where almost all the battles were just long slogfests and death would be brought about by a loss of attention due to boredom rather than the game being actually hard.  The other bad example I can think of is Dante's Inferno, also on PS3 where the higher difficulty levels were designed specifically around New Game Plus and the carrying over of skills and stats.  Sure it's POSSIBLE to beat Dante's Inferno on hard from a new game, but it's not fun because you feel like you're playing with your hands tied behind your back rather than because the game is actually any harder than it was on normal.  From what I understand, Resident Evil 8 does a similar thing but I've still not played that yet so I can't say for sure.

Then there's bullshit games like Wings of Vi.  Funnily enough Wings of Vi actually does present you with difficulty settings that change the number of checkpoints and enemy damage but again, nothing actually interesting out side of "die less and jump better".  But the problems in Wings of Vi are much more than that in both platforming and combat.  Platforming bullshit comes in the form of challenges and obstacles that 1) You can't see before it's too late and 2) Aren't obviously clear how to get around them.  Platforming in Vi is extremely precise and the game is almost more of a puzzle experience in this regard than a straight platformer.  Working out which combination of jumps and wing flutters you have to do is difficulty and can be pretty satisfying to achieve when you get it down.  However there are often points in the game where you will be presented with a jumping challenge, you practice and die and attempt to clear it and eventually you get it, only for the screen to shift and you get given more instant death spikes with no time to react and no time to work out what the hell you were supposed to do.  Back to the checkpoint with you, idiot.   A good example of this is a section that involves dashing through rhythmically moving worms.  The timing on the jumps and dashes to get through but when you get above the section you have to make a diagonal dash to safety through an enemy and onto a platform that you CANT FUCKING SEE.  So yeah, har har you got me with the sudden direction change and enemy placement but the death isn't my fault.  Maybe if you had shown me that before I would have made it through but you just covered my eyes for a stupid "gotcha" moment.

The bosses aren't much better where the first 10-50 attempts will be just adapting to whatever attack pattern the enemy has and then every attempt after that is just doing it until you can that one "in the zone" run where you pull it all off.  One boss however, a giant 3 headed worm in a perpetually moving tunnel with floating platforms can make you lose runs to it just not working.  The bosses chases you left to right in phase 1, top to bottom in pase 2 and the left to right in phase 3.  The shift from phase 2 to phase 3 will ALWAYS bug out, I never saw it work properly once and you will die to platformings not spawning and leaving you trapped to take a big chunk of damage.  Bosses that do work right, like Ancient Constructs, aren't any better though, starting off reasonable and then just becoming jank Touhou by the end.

Sure, Wings of Vi and games like it are extremely satisfying to get through but "bet you didn't see that coming" platforming and "bullet hell with a jumbo jet" aren't fun to experience, it's just bullshit bad design so that idiots like me can say that we bashed our head off the wall long enough to get it done.  There's a reason Celeste, Dark Souls and games like it will be celebrated forever and shit like Wings of Vi will be forgotten and fade into obscurity

Little Nightmares

 

Little Nightmares is one of those games I just don't get.  I was told by multiple people that I know that it was awesome, that it was an excellent game that is going to terrify me and leave me awestruck by the end.  Well I didn't get that, not even a little bit.  I don't think Little Nightmares is a shitty game at all but it has to go on the ever growing pile of mediocre games with large followings that I just can't comprehend.

There isn't much of a story to speak of.  You play as Six, a little girl (I think) trapped in a giant ship called The Maw.  The Maw seems to host some kind of event where these disfigured "people" come on board and just gorge themselves on food and you are the main course so you have to get out.  The game itself however, doesn't tell you this.  This information is given to you on the Steam store page of all things, I had no idea until AFTER I was finished with the game that my character was called Six and the big ship was called The Maw.  There's no cutscenes or notes to read or anything, which is fine since they are clearly going for a more environmental storytelling approach, but the story isn't interesting enough so it all just comes off as a bit pretentious.

Game play wise it's just a platformer.  You run, you jump, you pull blocks, push buttons and turn valves and shit to progress.  Every so often the game will throw a big monster at you which you have to hide from as you go from room to room.  There is no combat, you can't fend off the big bad unless you are scripted to do so which means if you are caught, most often you are going to get killed.  Getting killed though doesn't matter because check points are extremely frequent which means that not only is Little Nightmares pathetically easy to finish but it also sucks all the tension out of the horror.  I'm not scared of the blind creature with massive spider arms if I know that I'm only going to lose 30 seconds of progress if he gets me.  

I'm trying to keep this post spoiler free but there's one game play section I just HAVE to talk about because it pissed me off so hard.  There's a bit where you have to run along a table, food is haphazardly strewn everywhere and the weirdos that inhabit the ship and just guzzling it up Hungry Hungry Hippo style.  You have to weave between the people as to not get grabbed but it's extremely tight and the hitboxes for what counts as a grab and what counts as a near miss just don't make any sense.  The checkpoint for this section however, is right near the table, so all you get is a feeling of rage welling within you as you have to creep your way down the table for the 17th fucking time because the slow, fat, lumbering monsters suddenly have reflexes like the flash.

I will say though, visually the game is quite interesting.  I remember watching the Rohl Dahl movie James and the Giant Peach as a kid and I haven't seen it since then and I'm not going to look it up before publishing this post but it was giving me those vibes.  The art style is quite striking and everything looks nice and spooky.  It's got this weird dollhouse vibe to it all that gives it a nice creepy vibe making me think that Little Nightmares would have served better as an animated short film rather than a game.

Little Nightmare isn't a bad game, a lot of effort went into it and it shows, it's a perfectly serviceable little platformer, I just don't understand all the hype that surrounds it.  So if a short, simple little horror adventure is what you want then I'd still recommend picking it up just don't expect anything more than that.  There's also a Little Nightmares 2 and I didn't hate this first one enough to not give that a try at some point so maybe some of my gripes are fixed with the sequel, we shall see

Monster Party

Now that I've finally finished Famicom Wars my NES 100 game challenge continues and the first game out of the 100 years war was a weird little title called Monster Party.

The game starts innocently enough, your character gets approached by a weird gargoyle dude who tells you that his world is full of demons and he wants you to go there and deal with the.  You get swooped into demon land and then have to play through 8 stages beating enemies and killing bosses until you get to the end.

All but one of the levels is your standard move to the left and kill all the enemies and throughout those levels are little doors.  Going into a little door will take you to a room that will either have a boss enemy or nothing and the goal is to find all the bosses, get the key and go to the next stage.

What makes this game so weird is that it seems almost as if it was developed by two entirely different people.  One of these people was trying to make a sort of cutesy platformer about a young boy and his gargoyle friend beating some monsters and the other guy was trying his damn hardest to make a spooky horror game complete with some really gruesome imagery.  If you've ever played a game called Eversion it has a sort of similar feel to that in places.

This is spoiler territory but the game gets really weird in its final cutscene where your gargoyle friend gives you a treasure box that, upon opening you find a princess inside.  Mail order princesses for heroes is weird in and of itself but after that she begins to melt, corrupting the area around her and causing you to melt as well and all this accompanied by some quite harrowing 8 bit imagery.

Despite the games sort of fucked up nature in places its actually really fun to play and if you get find a way to get your hands on it then I recommend it!  It's not very long but its a great way to kill a few hours.

Tau and Friends Play Shovel Knight Part 4

Nihilumbra

So here's another one of those games I got for free as part of my PS+ subscription.  When I downloaded it and fired it up I had absolutely no idea what to expect but what I got was pleasantly surprising.  At time of writing I'm on the final world and I've not finished it but I was so elated to play this game that I had to talk about it early. 

Nihilumbra is a puzzle platformer developed by BeautiFun Games and was originally released for iOS back in 2012 but later ported to Windows, Vita, WiiU and Android.  The game follows the adventures of a little creature as he tries to run from an all consuming void.  The character itself is mute but bits of story are given to you by a narrator as you travel from screen to screen and I'm dropping that voice actor along side the guy from Bastion in my bag of "sexy narrators".  The game itself revolves around using colors to solve the various puzzles in each world.  For example the first color you get is blue which makes the surfaces slippy allowing for faster movement and increased jumping to scale large gaps.  As you get further and further you have to use all these colors together to defeat enemies and make it through the traps that stand in your way.  At the end of each stage you get a sequence where the void chases you.  In game play terms this is a auto scrolling section which tasks you with solving puzzles on a strict time limit.  These sections are probably my personal favorite parts of the game since they create a sort of intensity and pressure that I really enjoy.  It's also got a really nice soundtrack composed by Álvaro Lafuente which is worth going and looking up even if you haven't played the game.  It's ambient and I can see myself using the tracks from this game to accompany my study or writing.

My only real complaint about Nihilumbra is that it's WAY too easy.  I don't want to toot my own horn and say that I'm some kind of big brain Mensa bad ass (because I'm not) but none of the puzzles in Nihilumbra really taxed me.  The solutions all seem extremely obvious and when it does throw a difficult section at you the checkpoints are disgustingly nice and will never set you too far back.  There was an extra mode which I've not tried out yet so I'm hoping that there will be some more challenge there but the main story is VERY easy.  The game is also quite short which may be a put off for some but considering it's only £5 on Steam it's a reasonable length for the price.

If you're into your dark indie platformers and you're looking for something new then absolutely give Nihilumbra a try.  It's a short, sweet and satisfying experience and given you can get it for a series of portable systems it suits short commutes perfectly.  Pick it up and give it ago, jump into the void.  

Crash Bandicoot HD Marathon Update

So as you may or may not know, the incentive for the Crash Bandicoot HD marathon was met a little while ago and now I have some information regarding the event for you.

So I'm planning to run the event on the 24th February and I will play Crash Bandicoot HD on PS4 until I have either finished all 3 games or played for 24 hours.  Now I feel that Crash 1 is a little bit of a challenge but Crash 2 and 3, if memory serves, are pretty easy to at least finish.  So in order to spice things up a bit, I'm adding a stretch incentive to make things a little bit more interesting.

Between now and the end of Crash 3 if an additional £100 are donated to the charity I will play the 3 games to 100% (no DLC) or until I hit the 24 hour mark.  As a backup, if that goal gets met and for some reason I at least don't finish the 3 games in 24 hours, I'll take a rest and then dedicate the 25th to playing even more Crash HD to get as close to 100% as I possibly can.

As always, big thanks to everyone who has donated for this and everything else so far!  Keep the kindness coming and keep supporting IG! It means a lot!

Eggggg and Illi

Every week a paid app on the app store goes free for a while and I always take the chance to grab that shit because fuck paying money for app games.  However sometimes I download a title that makes me feel a little guilty for not directly supporting the creator and while I'm not about to go and pay for a game I already own, I want to highlight a couple of titles I got for free so many you can go and support the better side of the mobile game spectrum.

The first game is Egggg, I'm not sure exactly how many Gs are in there but it's more than usual.  Egggg is a two button platform game and the aim is just to get from one end of the stage to the other without dying.  The thing is though that once you press a direction button, you can't stop.  If you push the way you're running you jump and the other button will make you turn around.  While you're running from one end of the stage to the other there are things to collect and little hidden areas of each stage for you to explore which net you stars at the end.  Simply finishing a level isn't too much of a challenge but getting 3 stars on a stage will require some strategising.  The game also mixes things up every so often by giving you a stage specific mechanic or having you fight a boss but generally just reaching the end of the stage is your only worry.  Still, it's a nice, pure little platforming experience and it's the kind of thing you'd easily find on something like Steam for a few pounds but instead its phone exclusive.

EDIT: As soon as I posted this thing I googled Egg and found a Steam page for it and it's "coming soon", so worth buying there if you don't like playing games on a shitty phone screen.  Seriously, it's a goodun

The second game I want to talk about briefly is Illi.  It's a very simple, cute little platform puzzle game that will eat through your commutes like nothing else.  The game play is super simple with each stage being made up of a number of squares or rectangles and you must jump your way to the exit by tapping the screen.  Illy moves around each square by himself and which way he falls depends on which side of the cube you're on when you press jump.  So press jump on the top and you'll fall down but press it on the right hand side and you'll fall to the left.  Illi does not respect the laws of physics.  Each stage comes with a number of "quests" which involve collecting a thing, getting to the exit in a certain number of jumps or beating a stage in a certain time and finishing these quests unlocks more levels.

The good thing about Illi compared to other puzzle games I've played is that it's not bullshit difficult like other shitty iPhone games like Cut the Rope.  The solutions to certain levels in things like Cut the Rope where there's no way you'd figure that shit out without spending money on a solution fairy or whatever piss me off but Illi has that nice level of challenge sort of similar to Portal.  Things that look hard but if you take a moment to think about them carefully are actually quite simple.

I got these games for free but if it wasn't such a stingy piece of shit and someone had told me about them beforehand, I would have easily dropped a few pounds on these titles.  So go check them out because instead of complaining about the sorry state of mobile gaming we should be supporting the people who are actually at least TRYING to do a good job.

Dr Green

So this is a game I finished a month or two ago that I got off Steam for essentially no money and while I wasn't really expecting anything I was pleasantly surprised by this simple yet fun platformer.

So the game starts out and you are introduced to Dr Green, a kid who was abandoned in the forest and grew up with the critters.  Eventually some evil dudes come and try to tear his forest down in order to put up a parking lot (not literally) and it is up to you as Dr Green to fight them off and send their evil building projects packing.

The game itself is very simple, just move to the right, shoot the dudes and reach the end of the stage.  Once you get there fight a boss then rinse and repeat the process until the end of the game.  The game, which it admits to on the steam page, is clearly inspired by games like Megaman which is fine but the game doesn't really try to do anything new or unique.  You aren't going to be getting any kind of breath of fresh air here but what you are getting is a solid platformer with some pretty good level design and nice music.

Since the game is so simple and so solidly put together its really hard to find anything to complain about but there were a few little things that pissed me off.  The levels themselves, especially the later ones are actually quite challenging which was nice but every single boss the game has to offer is a complete easy mode pushover.  If you are any kind of good at mashing the fire button then the bosses will be even less challenging and it's a shame that each level ends on such a low note.  Also while I didn't run into many glitches there was one moment where I died during a boss phase transition and the game soft locked and I had to do the whole fucking stage over.  Nothing deal breaking but just a few annoyances.

The game was obviously designed for speed running as each stage has a timer and the game itself isn't particularly long.  Then again, it's insanely cheap at £2 and it is worth picking up if you're looking for something short, cheap and fun in order to kill a lazy weekend with.  Give it a go, if you like this kind of thing you won't be disappointed

Geometry Dash

Geometry Dash is a game that came out on Steam a little while ago and as far as I understand it the thing is a port of a phone game.  That said, it is actually pretty good if not stupidly frustrating,

The idea of the game is very simple, the little block slides automatically across the level and you have to time your jumps in order to get to the end.  Sometimes you go through a ring and it will change into a little flying thing or take some other form where the game play might vary ever so slightly but all you're really doing is pressing A to not die.

That probably makes the game sound shit but trust me it's not.  The game sells and presents itself as a sort of rhythm game.  The idea is that it has a bunch of cool techno sounding songs and each level sort of matches the music so the more intense the track then the more intense the obstacles.  It's pretty fun and it's one of those games you can pick up, play for about 10 minutes and then put down again.

The game also features a level editor where you can put up your own stages and have other people download them.  Some of the stuff people make is actually pretty cool and given that the levels that come packaged with the game are sort of limited then this is a very welcome addition.

If the game sold itself as a platform game with a techno soundtrack I'd probably be a lot happier with it but when I bought it I was kind of expecting a rhythm game.  Despite the fact the obstacles loosely match up with what you're hearing the game is still very trail and error.  For example, I can go play Sound Voltex Booth and play a high level song I've never heard before and still manage because I'm good at the game.  With Geometry Dash you never know what the fucks coming until its already too late so you have to start the whole level over.

It's not a bad game by any stretch but it is VERY challenging so unless you're willing to burn a few hours learning the levels then don't bother.  Then again, for gaming masochists like me it's pretty damn good.

Guacamelee: Gold Edition

If there's one thing I love it's a good Metroid type game and Guacamelee just happens to be one of those.

The story follows the adventures of Juan who is on his way to some kind of festival in his nearby town.  When he arrives the presidents daughter gets kidnapped and Juan is killed by an evil skeleton dude called Calaca.  Juan wakes up in the world of the dead and is gifted a legendary luchador mask and is revived in order to save the presidents daughter and bring an end to Calaca's evil plans.

The story isn't exactly all that but the game play is really fun.  Like every Metroid-esque game you start with not much and as you explore the map and defeat bosses you gain access to new powers which allow you to reach new areas.  Combat involves punching skeletons in the face until the explode and you can do all sorts of fancy shit like juggle them or give them a suplex to make them explode faster.

The game play for Guacamelee really shines in it's platforming though.  The game is fast paced and controls really tightly so the platforming sections are really fun to play.  There's no unfair jumps or anything I found that one could consider bullshit so if you mess up it's YOUR fault.  The game does a good job of making you feel like a massive badass as you navigate your way through it's areas with some segments that look difficult but are actually rather simple.

I do have a few problems with this game though but none of these are enough to ruin the experience.  First, the game seems a LITTLE buggy.  When I first fired up the game after installing none of the characters or backgrounds loaded in properly but this was fixed after a restart.  There was also a problem with the frame rate where if I had the V-Sync turned on the game would run at a million frames per second and be uncontrollable. 

The combat is also a bit boring.  They make an effort by giving you all these powers that assist with creating combos and the game teaches you how to juggle enemies for days but none of the enemies are actually a threat at all and being fancy doesn't really net you any reward.  However usually after a dull combat segment you are rewarded with a fun platforming section and those alone are worth slogging through the games combat.

Also the game is really fucking easy.  There are checkpoints all over the place so if you die you don't get sent all that far back.  Falling off a ledge into an abyss just sends you back to the last piece of solid ground you were on but with no penalty.  You don't lose any health and just zip back to where you were to try again which kind of kills any tension in the platforming sometimes.   There is a challenge area that's genuinely difficult and requires you to do things under certain conditions but that's just one special area. The game also has a hard mode but this is only available after you beat the game one time so you have to play through the easefest before you can get any kind of challenge.

That said, Guacamelee: Gold Edition was a really fun game and I'd suggest anyone who is into Metroid style exploration games give it a go.  It's got a great style and plays really well and the difficulty, while I personally dislike it, is great for people new to the genre.  There is another version available on Steam that has 4 player co-op or something but I don't have any friends that want to play this stuff with me.  If you did though you'd probably have a grand old time

Rayman Origins

Well shit, I was late to this party.  But better late than never, right?

Rayman Origins is a game I bought a long long time ago on my Vita but because of Project Diva F and other games in my backlog, I only got around to playing it recently.  However I'm glad I did eventually decide to pop it in because Rayman Origins is one of  the best platformers that I've ever played.

The game is extremely thin on story but given the genre and the series that it's part of then it can be forgiven.  Basically, Rayman and his buddies are sleeping and their constant snoring pisses off a bunch of twats that live underground.  These twats start causing trouble and it's up to you to put them back in their place.

The gameplay in Rayman Origins is fucking amazing.  It's fast, fluid, responsive and navigating your way through the stages is just satisfying.  If you get killed it doesn't feel like the game was being bullshit, it's because YOU fucked up and the only way to unfuck yourself is to get good.  The levels also contains a little bit of exploration as you hunt for Lums (little fairy things) and secret cages.

There is a ton of content in this game too so you can get a hell of a lot of play time out of it.  Every level has a bunch of Electoons that need to be rescued, kind of like Rayman 1.  On each stage there is 1 set of electoons at the end of the stage and 2 hidden in the level.  Upon finishing the stage the game counts the Lums you found and there are 2 more available that way.  On top of that, there's an extra electoon for speed running the stage within a time limit.  This sounds like it would be bullshit because it means you have to play through every stage twice but it's not because the way you approach a stage normally and the way you approach it to do it fast are totally different.

This isn't true for every level in the game as there are some stages that mix up the formula a bit, but generally speaking that's how it works.

Then on top of all that, there are special stages where you find little red gems from chests.  Collecting all 10 of these gems unlocks a hidden world that is pretty fucking challenging and sort of acts like a final exam for all that skill you built up over the course of the game.

But challenge is the major problem I have with Rayman Origins, it's too fuckin' easy.  I blasted through all the stages and got all the Electoons first try with very little resistance.  The game grows some balls in the final and secret levels but the challenge comes in way too late and there isn't enough of it to satisfy masochists like myself.  Still though, the games easiness doesn't really affect it too badly because generally speaking the thing is just outright fun to play.

Finally there is multiplayer, but I didn't do it even once so I can't comment.

So yeah, go play it if you haven't already, it's awesome.

Electronic Super Joy

How in FUCK has it taken me this long to talk about this game?  Well probably because it's really good and I can't stop playing it.

.ESJ is an indie platform game on Steam created by a guy called Michael Todd of Michael Todd Games.  In it's story you play as some guy who has had his ass stolen by a disco wizard or something insane like that but fuck the story just shut up and start jumping!

Yes, ESJ doesn't give a flying fuck about plot and instead it just has 3 worlds worth of really solid platforming to enjoy.  You can jump and you can also do a sort of ground pound move as your most basic methods of getting around a stage but as the game progresses it adds other little things such as double jumping or flying or even one very short level where you pilot a ship and shoot at a guy in another ship.

One thing this game has in absolute spades is variety with almost every level having something unique about it.  It prevents the game from ever becoming stale because you know as soon as you jump through the end of level portal you're going to get another level that's vastly different on the other side.

One of this games strongest points by far though is it's sound design.  It's kind of a weird way to phrase this but right now I can't think of a better way to describe it. It sort of feels like ESJs world is made of music;  If you play it you'll know what I mean by that extremely stupid sounding line.  The sound track is fantastic consisting of all these thumping electronic/techno tracks that get you all fired up and then on top of that you have the slightly sexual "oh yeah" sounds when you hit a check point which are both satisfying to hear and rather funny.

I can't really do this game a decent amount of justice with words, I implore you to go and play it.  Playing Electronic Super Joy is like having a really nice burger.  The appealing visuals are like the bun while the sound design functions as the trimmings with the core gameplay acting as the delicious juicy patty..........that didn't really make much sense either, just fucking play the damn game.

Gunman Clive

You have have noticed that a game popped up in the Awesome Games list on the right hand side so I guess now is about the time I said something about it.

Gunman Clive is a little indie platformer, developed by Horberg Productions and is available for Steam, 3DS and Android...I think.  To give a quick summary of the game, Gunman Clive is a platforming game that takes inspiration for all the best side scrollers of yore and then slams them together in a wild west setting.

At the start of the game a woman is kidnapped and it is up to you as Clive to go and save her.  Although at the start of the game there is a character select screen so you can also play as the woman saving....herself...it's strange.  If you do choose to play as the female character she has a little bit of a different jump but her and Clive both play about the same way.

The game play is standard side scrolling action and it's quite clear to see right from the get go that Megaman was a pretty clear inspiration for the game play.

Remind you of anything?

You jump and shoot your way through a bunch of levels and then there is a boss.  Each boss has a unique design but you kill them all in exactly the same way, by shooting them in the face.  It's a shame the bosses weren't made to be a little more complex because the levels change up their design as you go through but it's not going to ruin the experience.

It's also got this really sleek art style that makes it look like something out of a story book but the soundtrack is a bit forgettable.  My only other real complaint with this game is that it's very short.  I finished the whole thing in about an hour,  but then again the game costs only £1.50, so it's an appropriate price for what you get I guess.

That said, upon completion of the game you unlock a Duck mode, where you have to play the entire game as a duck that can't attack.  I've not played much of this mode so I'm not sure how you'd kill bosses but it's something I'll go and look at some day soon.

Still, if you have a little bit of spare change and you need to kill a few hours in an afternoon, Gunman Clive is a fun little way to do so.  Replaying for speed or damageless runs is also something that may extend your game time, so there is definitely £1.50s worth of content here.

Where Did The Difficulty Go, Mario?

Look at this old motherfucker right here.  Whenever someone mentions video games, Mario is that one character that absolutely 100% of people will be able to recognise.  It doesn't matter if you're the hardest of core, super turbo nerd game enthusiast or the kind of person who doesn't know which way on a controller is up, you know this fucking  guy.

So yesterday, in a fit of absolute boredom I decided to fire up a bit of Super Mario Bros and play it through without using any of the warp zones, because I always use the damn things and I've forgotten what most of the game looks like.

Now I've not played any old school Mario game for a long long time.  Hell, the last Mario game I played a great deal of was Galaxy 2, but my memory of recent Mario games has been that they are all fun, but not exactly challenging.  Basically everything after Sunshine has had the challenge stripped from it in order to appeal to a wider audience, which is fine for a series like this with broad appeal, but Jesus Christ the old ones especially don't fuck around.

The first few stages are an absolute cakewalk, but once you hit world 3 or 4, the stages actually get pretty tricky with precise jumps, fiendish enemy placement and game overs that mean that you have to start over from 1-1 meaning that beating Mario Bros is no easy feat.

Let's not forget Super Mario Bros 2 as well, and no, not fucking Doki Doki Panic, real Mario 2.  Real Mario 2 was so fucking hard that they didn't even bother to release that shit overseas, they just re skinned an easier game and gave that to the west.  There are parts in Mario 3 and World that would make even veteran players groan at it's difficulty and I'm sure there is plenty of other shit in the older games that would make me lose a few continues even now.

The new Mario games are all good and fun and whatnot, but like I said before, the series hasn't seen a real challenge since Sunshine.  I don't blame Nintendo for wanting to get Mario in the hands of as many people as possible, but they should make a game sometime with that old school level of challenge.  I'm not just talking about bits that might have one tricky jump or something, I mean proper, full on, challenge out the arse Lost Levels type of difficulty.

Make it happen Nintendo, gimme some New Super Mario Bros EX Masters Edition or something, I'll even fund it for you.

I streamed a Speed Run! and filmed it!

Well I just finished streaming a run of They Bleed Pixels.  I managed to do the whole game in 43 minutes 21 seconds.  Doesn't quite match my personal best time but I'm glad to finally have a speed run up on YouTube. 

You can view it here

Enjoy!