The Textorcist: The Story of Ray Bibbia

 

This game may go down as one of my favorite games ever, so prepare for a bit of a gush.

Some people may be aware of the Typing of the Dead games.  For those that aren't they are remakes of The House of the Dead, a series of arcade rail shooters, but repurposed as a typing tutor.  Zombies appear on screen with words underneath them and you have to type the words to "shoot" them.  It may sound a bit dull if you haven't seen it before but trust me, they are real good.

Trying to teach people how to type by turning it into some kind of game isn't exactly a new thing.  Most typing tutors I've seen have come with some sort of "game" mode where you are timed or tested on accuracy or something but it always feels like you're using some kind of corporate "Edutainment" bullshit.  Even Typing of the Dead, despite being awesome, feels more typing tutor than video game, something about the overall presentation I guess.  But then comes The Textorcist which is, despite being a game about typing, isn't really a typing tutor and is actually a full on game.  Not only is it focused on being a game, the developers decided to mash typing with bullet hell shooting of all fucking things and the result is awesome.

The story is kind of bare bones but it's about a priest called Ray who is an outcast from the Vatican going around doing exorcisms.  In doing this he stumbles on a conspiracy involving the Vatican actually being evil and summoning demons to wipe people off the face of the Earth for sinning too much or something.  It's not the deepest thing in the world but it's full of humor and serves as a nice little intro and outro to each stage.  Between stages you actually have to do some light investigating which involves searching a fake google or going through your files so it's a nice bit of flavor.

But forget plots, demon exorcisms is what we're all really here for so lets talk about how that works.  In each level an enemy will be at the top of the screen and you'll be at the bottom.  At the bottom of the screen there will be bible verses that you have to type, the current word of which will appear above your head.  While you are trying to type your Bible verses the enemy will, of course, be shooting shit at you.  So while you dodge with the arrow keys you have to type with the letter keys and at the start of the game it's very easy to dodge, and then use both hands to type a verse real quick but by the end you'll be frantically dodging while trying to type with one hand and it's all very frantic.  If you are hit, you drop your book and you have to run to go pick it up.  If you take too long to pick it up though Ray forgets his place and you have to restart the verse.  If you get hit while you are not carrying the book, you take a point of damage and after 3 hits you die.  It's a forgiving system but the game still manages to be quite challenging.  

There are items that you get at the end of each stage with various effects that modify your score depending on what it does.  For example you can get a bookmark which increases the amount of time you have to pick the book up if you get hit but it lowers your score by 20%.  You can also get a spiked collar for example, which gives you less health but increases your score by 20%.  There's also a monocle that you get at the end of the game which activates a "hard mode" where enemies do a weird glitch effect and you only have 1hp.  Wearing it gives you a +666% score modifier AND killing a boss in this mode gets you a piece of rock and if you get all of them something happens but I'm not sure because I haven't done it yet.

 I only really have 2 complaints about the game.  The first is that I kept encountering a bug during a demon change mechanic where my bible verses would overlap over the magic words I had to type.  Not a huge problem since the magic words are the same every time but it's annoying to look at.  The other is that the third to last boss that you fight is just WAYYYYY fucking harder than every other enemy in the game.  I spent the better part of 2 hours fighting that boss only to move on and do the last 2 first try.  It feels like something got mixed up somewhere.

Basically, the Textorcist is like someone took Mavis Bacon Teaches Typing, Donpachi, Hotline Miami and Christian conspiracy theories and put them in a big blender.  The result is a fun, challenging and extremely replayable little game that should keep you entertained for hours or until your hand starts to cramp up

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

Parappa the Rapper is Shit (still love it though)

 

I have fond memories of Parappa the Rapper, as a kid I had a demo where I would play the first stage with the onion man over and over again.  I also have fond memories of playing the full game through during my first year of university but rhythm games have come a long way and going back and playing Parappa now feels like pulling teeth.

We do however, have to give the game some credit for being essentially THE FIRST rhythm game ever made and while playing it now feels terrible it and it's popularity essentially put the groundwork down for all the rhythm games that we enjoy today.  Also you cannot fault Parappa for it's music, the tunes found in each level are wholesome, catchy and stick in your head for YEARS.  I can still personally sing the entirety of stage 1 and 2 from memory and will, even today, find myself occasionally humming bits of the baking stage or the flea market.  Most of the content is Parappa is fun, bright, memorable and will never fail to put a smile on your face.

But it SUCKS as a rhythm game

Rhythm games are supposed to be a simple concept.  Music plays, notes appear on the screen and you make the inputs in time with the music.  This happens in Parappa, prompts appear at the top of the screen in time with the music and you push those buttons but it's basically a crap shoot if the game gives you a positive or a negative evaluation at the end of each bar.  I'm not bad at rhythm games, I play an absolute shit ton of them both at home and in my local arcades so I'm fairly confident that I don't just lack rhythm but after the first stage Parappa the Rapper just does whatever the fuck it was.

Out of curiosity I looked up videos of people getting Cool ranks in every stage and to my utter dismay it seems that getting good scores in that game have very little to do with the prompts.  Spamming inputs semi in time with the tunes is what seems to get you a good score and after the first displayed it almost doesn't matter what you do after that.  When you eventually DO get a cool rank the prompts just fuck off altogether and you are left do freestyle, which I suppose fits the theme of being a rapper but doesn't really make for a good rhythm game experience.

As a rhythm game Parappa the Rapper is fucking awful and it got away with it by basically being the only one of its kind.  That of course quickly changed but the catchy tunes and wholesome vibe of game basically left rose tinted memories in the brains of everyone that had a PS1 back in the day.  One thing I am probably going to do after this post though, is go and dig out my copy of Um Jammer Lammy to see if the timing problems that I have with this game, carried over to later titles.  It would be interesting to test it with Parappa 2 on the PS2 as well but I've not been able to find a copy of that.

Maybe I'm being a BIT harsh when I say it's shit because there is a lot to like about Parappa, it just sucks that it fails so hard at the one thing it's supposed to be good at which is being on rhythm

Otogirisou

 

Spike Chunsoft is a developer that you will be quite familiar with if you're into games like 999 or Danganrompa but I became familiar a few years back when I picked up a copy of Kamaitachi no Yoru in a used book store for about 100 yen.  After being quite impressed by that I took it upon myself to seek out their other games and came across their first foray into the sound novel genre with Otogirisou.

For those unfamiliar, a Sound Novel is basically a choose your own adventure book that you play on a console.  The difference between a sound novel and the much more popular visual novel genres is that while a visual novel will have elaborate art and CGs, a sound novel is basically just text with a couple of crap background pictures but tries to create more of an atmosphere using sound and writing.  While you may want to put Sound Novels in the same boat as something like walking simulators, they differ in the fact that a lot of them still have fail states and puzzles to solve.  For example in Kamaitachi no Yoru it's pretty easy to make a string of incorrect decisions and either blunder into death or pin the who-dun-it murder on the wrong guy.  There's a mystery to get the the bottom of and a killer to avoid in that game so while it is just text on a screen there's still a fair amount to think about.

Otogirisou on the other hand is a bit less like that, there aren't really any fail states and you essentially are just playing a Goosebumps choose your own adventure book but on a Super Nintendo Cartridge.  It feels more like a proof of concept for later games in the genre rather than an actually fully developed thing but it's story is still interesting enough to make it fun to play.

The game follows two characters, which you can name, as they are involved in a car crash and end up stranded in the middle of nowhere on a dark and stormy night.  The two of them make their way to a mansion and then shit starts to get spooky.  In my playthrough the two of them explored the mansion for a while before accidentally triggering a bunch of memories in the female lead where she remembered that she actually used to live here and severely injured her long lost sister in a boiler fire many years ago.  The twin sister stalks the house trying to kill the both of you for a while before you set the house on fire (again, lol) and make your escape.  There's more to it than that but I'm not spoiling the whole damn plot line in the blog post in case you want to play it yourself.

But even if I DID spoil the whole plot line in this post it wouldn't matter because the very story being told in Otogirisou changes with the decisions that you make.  The car crash on a dark stormy night will remain constant every playthrough but what happens after that is up to the selections you make.  Other examples of plots that I haven't played through yet include an ancient curse, a mystery regarding the history of the houses construction and being chased by a giant fish monster.  The game doesn't have a chapter select feature so while that's kind of annoying for repeat playthroughs but the game is short so skipping through the repeat bits is more of a mild annoyance rather than a huge time sink

I played the SNES version but there does also exist a PS1 version and if that's anything like the PS1 version of Kamaitachi then it probably has chapter select and section skipping as well as a nice tree so you can see how many of the story lines you've finished.  I'm not sure if that's ACTUALLY the case, I'm just making assumptions based on how the other games are.

I don't think an English version of this game has ever been released or an English patch made available by fans so it's sort of hard to play unless you know Japanese or are willing to learn a boat load of Kanji to get through it, which is a shame really.  There's also a movie based on this game that is available through through Hulu and Amazon Prime if you wanted to watch a version of it rather than play it but I don't have those services so I'm unsure if they are subtitled in English either.  IF you can play Otogirisou though, I recommend it because the genre has come a long way since the SNES days and it's nice to see where it all started.

Final Fantasy 7 Mobile Games

 

First thing I saw when I woke up this morning was announcements for some FF7 mobile games so I'm going to take a moment to talk about what I think of those.  There was apparently an announcement for some Yuffie-based DLC for FF7 remake but that's exclusive to PS5 which I don't currently own so it can fuck off.  It does seem however if you own FF7R on the PS4 you can get it for PS5 for free which is pretty nice I guess.

The first game that got announced was Final Fantasy 7: The First Soldier which is a Final Fantasy......Battle Royale game.  In the same vain as Fortnight, PUBG or Knives Out (if that's still even a thing), the usual deal of dropping into a map and shooting at each other with guns until there is only one person or one team left.  Only this time it has an FF7 skin wrapped around it.  I'm indifferent about this one since Battle Royale is kind of uninteresting to me, the genre lost its appeal pretty quick.

Final Fantasy Ever Crisis on the other hand, looks a lot more interesting.  From what I understand it's an episodic, more traditional style of RPG that involves dudes standing in a line and you picking commands from a menu.  There isn't much gameplay in the trailer to speak of but from what I can tell it seems that Ever Crisis will cover the whole FF7 universe including things like Crisis Core.  Considering that the only things I play on my phone right how are a Hatsune Miku rhythm game and a Mahjong game, having a proper RPG to fiddle with might actually be a welcome addition 

There are some people though that seem to be dismissing these games, not because they are battle royale games or episodic games but purely for the reason that they are on Mobile.  This makes no sense to me because if anything, Square are one of the only companies that make a least somewhat half decent little distractions.  Sure Record Keeper and Brave Exvius aren't the best games in the world and they are full of gatcha bullshit but you could do a lot worse.  Let's not forget as well, there are still people, people who will happily look down on Ever Crisis, that still beg for re-releases of Before Crisis which isn't just a mobile game, but a mobile game released on FLIP PHONES.

I'm not holding out for these games to be the next hot ticket, especially not The First Soldier, but I am hoping they will make some nice little distractions while I'm riding the god awful Japanese subways

EVO: Search for Eden

 

When I think about the games in the SNES library that the lame retro game fans on Twitter like to talk about, E.V.O isn't one that gets talked about all that often.  That's not to say it's completely forgotten, when it does get mentioned people do usually like to chime in with an "oh yeah, that game is awesome!" but unlike your Final Fantasies, Chrono Triggers and Marios, E.V.O isn't brought up all that much.

The story is simple, you play as a small creature and you must evolve your way through various time periods to reach Eden and become Gaia's right hand man.  Eat your way through a bunch of fish, dinos, mammals and birds and get to her to win.  It's a simple premise but the plot is sort of secondary here, we're not here for story time, we're here to eat some smaller, weaker animals.

The game starts you off as a fish and you must bite a few creatures nearby to kill them and gain Evo Points. Once you have enough Evo Points you can open a menu that has a pretty high number of options (later on at least) and you must evolve your creature to bring up its stats so you can kill and eat more things to evolve even further.  As you do this, you'll eventually reach a boss and upon killing the boss you'll be teleported to the next age where you'll do it all over again but as a different animal instead.  Later on in the game it's possible to evolve in specific ways to get specific creatures but I never worked this out.  For example I know for a fact you can become a human at some point but I ended up finishing the game as a weird horse-lizard thing with massive fangs.

The game has a fair bit of jank to it though, with stiff controls and pretty awful jumping even with all the upgrades to make your jumps better but the game is so pathetically easy overall that it doesn't really feel like much of a problem.  Some of the bosses can be a bit annoying but doing an evolution fully restores your HP and there's usually an option that costs basically nothing so once you work this out dying is ALMOST impossible.

The other irritating thing is that whenever you enter a new age and become a new animal, your stats are decreased into oblivion so while in the previous section you had massive teeth and a billion HP, once that area is over your back to being a small rat with 5hp that does no damage to anything.  This means that you have to do some annoying grinding which brings down the pace of the game but once you get going again the fun comes back pretty quickly.

So despite its pretty glaring flaws E.V.O is a really good game that's very much worth checking out.  I don't think it's been released on anything so you may have to get dodgy about it but in my opinion, it's worth the effort.

Nintendo's Obsession with Faff

 

I've been slowly making my way through the big Switch releases to try and convince myself that I didn't waste my wife's money asking for it as a gift for my birthday with varying amounts of success but if there's one thread that goes through the big franchises I've played so far it's that Nintendo games are OBSESSED with faffing around.

Faffing around is a British term that means doing a whole bunch of shit that is ultimately a waste of time and it feels like with the Switch Nintendo put up a big poster in the lead developer office with the words "faffing around" in huge block capitals to constantly remind their teams what to focus on.

The first huge game I finished on the Switch was Breath of the Wild and I've commented plenty on how I feel about that one but there is A LOT of faffing in that game.  Searching around for weapons, searching around for korok seeds, pointless side quests, filling in the encyclopedia, cooking and much more all just feels like stupid bullshit to do for the sake of doing it.  In old Zelda games you just....went...and sure there were some side activities you could faff around with but in Breath it feels like the faff has become the focus.  Even the shrines feel like faff because they are so small and easy and once you get a couple of upgrades under your belt they become essentially pointless to even do unless you are a weirdo that wants to 100% it or something.

Mario Odyssey was the second game to showcase Nintendo's obsession with faffing around.  Most Mario games have had 120 collectibles spread out over a number of levels.  Well crafted and fun to play courses with a nice little McGuffin at the end to give you a dopamine hit when the jingle plays.  Odyssey on the other hand has A THOUSAND fucking moons and most of them involve faffing around.  Herd some sheep, guide a dog around to certain points, posses a thing, run around collecting coins, do children's puzzles.  It has so much more to get while somehow also having significantly less REAL content.  The actual moons that you have to get are actually quite fun and Odyssey sports some of the best 3D platforming I've ever played with but Jesus lord Christ in heaven is it padded to fuck with FAFF.

But the game that loves Faff more than a child loves its own mother is Fire Emblem.  Good LORD does this game love some faff.  Most of the Fire Emblem games I've played are just a linear series of missions where you and your army fight off the big bad.  The series is focused on what's important which is this SRPG combat and while there are things like support levels and stuff a lot of that was done ON the battlefield.  You'd have your big burly axe man walk up to the fast sword man and they would go "It's sure great to have such a good buddy by my side on the battlefield" and then it would play a jingle and some stats would go up.  3 Houses however has taken all that and turned the whole thing into a faffing around simulator.  Now you're a teacher in a school so you have to faff around with lessons, faff around on the school ground doing "quests' for students, faff around raising support levels by taking people out to lunch and tea time, faff around fishing and the list goes on and on and on.  But you can't just skip the faff and go to the combat because the faff is INTEGRAL to having a good party.  When you get to the combat it's great, I really enjoy the actual SRPG part of the SRPG I spent 6000 yen to play but it's everything in between that pisses me the fuck off.

Side content is cool and all, gives some extra distractions or an excuse to get stuff to make a character or party stronger but with some of these Switch titles Nintendo have gone WAY fucking overboard with it and now it feels like annoying padding rather than fun side-shows.  Bravely Default 2 comes out tomorrow and I'm hoping for a tight, well crafted RPG experience but my body is in fact ready for large amounts of faffing around.