Steam Summer Sale

Just as I'm promising myself to try and not buy any more new games so that I can whittle through my backlog, the steam Summer sale starts up and my wallet is about to take another beatdown.

The weird thing is, for someone who has owned Steam for a long time the sale season isn't really such a big deal anymore.  Sure, there will always be some games that I'd like to pick up on the cheap but I already own a lot of what's worth playing and at time of writing I've been feeling a little underwhelmed by the current sales.  Obviously something off my wishlist will crop up for an insanely low price but the phase of me buying everything ever because it costs about 80p is long gone, which is a little sad for me really.

Anyway, this year Steam have decided to roll out a little mini game that goes with the sale.  The Monster Summer Game is a clicker game where players work together to kill as many square looking monster things as they can within a day.  As people kill the monsters it unlocks sales on certain games so there is actually a pretty decent benefit to playing this thing.  Also as you play you can be granted up to 3 steam summer sale trading cards a day which is great if you're like me and just sell them off instantly.  Get some discounts on those already cheap games.

Granted a clicker game isn't going to blow anyone's minds but it's nice to see Steam trying to inject just a little bit more fun into their sale events.  It gives steam users something to look forward too ever sale other than just reduced prices on games.  If you have a few minutes to kill then it's worth just checking out but if you have a decent amount of free time you SHOULD be cracking through all those delicious cheap games you just bought.

Ultraman: Towards the Future

First of all, apologies for missing a post yesterday, I was rather sick and in no condition to be writing anything, but having made a speedy recovery I'm now back and ready to continue!

So, ever since beating that SNES Empire Strikes Back game, I've been wanting to go back and beat all the games that I never beat as a child, and Ultraman: Towards the Future was one of those games.

At this point I'd tell you what Ultraman is exactly, but to be honest I'm not entirely sure.  From what I can tell Ultraman is a popular kids series in Japan which has a similar vibe to the Power Rangers which used to be popular back in my day (which itself takes scenes cut for cut from Super Sentai, another similar kids TV show in Japan)

So the whole deal with the show is that big monsters come and attack and its up to Ultraman to give them a beatdown.  The game has the exact same premise, where each stage is a different monster, which I assume is from the show, and you have to give them a thrashing.

Whats strange is that despite the fact that Ultraman never made an appearance outside of Japan, his game was available in the UK and in America.  I got my copy when one of the staff members at my old primary school sold it to my mother for about £5 and it was then passed on to me as a present.

So Ultraman is a fighting game, but a really fucking bad one.  Basically, you fight the monster, but when you empty his bar, you don't win, it just says "FINISH".  To win the fight you have to let the meter in the middle charge all the way to L4 and hit him with that when the finish sign appears.  This makes some enemy's way harder than they should be since you end up dying before your thing can charge despite having beat them 2 minutes ago.

When you run out of lives, you go all the way back to stage one, but despite that I managed to beat the game on my third try.  Unless your a fan of something like Ultraman, don't bother trying to play this one, it's a piece of shit, I just had an axe to grind from my childhood.