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

Bendy and the Ink Machine

 

With horror being easily one of my favorite genres of game, I'm always on the lookout for good horror games to sink my teeth into and with all the rave reviews I saw about Bendy and the Ink Machine, I expected this to be pretty good.  To my dismay, however, it's a collosal piece of garbage.

The game follows some dude whos name I can't remember as he goes back to an old animation studio he used to work for only to find the place in complete disrepair.  He throws a switch, turns on an ink machine and everything goes to shit as he gets stalked and chased by all manner of horrors from the studios past.

The game is your standard modern horror fare where you walk around solving some basic puzzles, finding notes and audio logs and hiding from the enemies.  The big problem with the game play in Bendy is that there is no depth to ANY of it and after about the 2 hour mark the whole thing becomes extremely dull.  The puzzles are extremely simple and usually just involve wandering around an area in order to find an item or push a button.  When it does try something more complex than that it's laughably easy, like one section where you have to fill pressure valves or something but you just hold the E key until the little water level touches the line, the kind of puzzle your children might enjoy when waiting in the dentists office.  The combat is super simple where you just walk up to things and left click until the cease to be.  There are some boss fights that try to give some variety to the combat but they are just a case of slowly strafe around enemy until they become hittable.  The stealth also only comes in two flavors of run away or throw a can for a distraction and the sections are always very short and very easy.  The complete lack of challenge or creativity found in this game means that playing it through to the end feels like an absolute chore.

But boring, cliche and unscary horror games are dime-a-dozen on Steam.  If I was to get mad about every game like that I'd be raging longer than the expected life of the universe, but what really sets Bendy apart is that it also just doesn't fucking work.  The game is EXTREMELY buggy with things constantly not working right.  The one that really sticks out in my mind is where the game completely halted my progression because it wanted me to take an elevator.  What is supposed to happen is there's a cutscene where some woman talks to you, the elevator comes down and then you get it to go to the next bit of the game.  In my game, the elevator was already there and if I pushed the elevator button nothing happened.  I even went to every floor in the level and pushed the call button there too to see if that would fix it but nope, I was just stuck.  I had to quit the game, reload, listen to the cutscene again and THEN it worked.

But that's a minor annoyance compared to the fact that the games save system just doesn't fucking work.  If you aren't planning on finishing Bendy in a single session then don't bother.  I had an issue where I was losing a couple of hours of progress at a time because something would screw up with the auto saving system and then when I loaded my game it would just set me back a whole bunch.  I noticed it was possible to tell when the bug kicked in because the save icon would stay perpetually in the corner but it happened A LOT and I was constantly quitting and reloading in order to not potentially lose an hour or two of progress to a shoddily put together game.

Bendy and the Ink Machine is an embarassing example of game design, an embarassing example of horror and an embarassing example of coding ability.  A bad game is one thing, a bad game that doesn't work and wastes the players time is another.  Do not buy it, you can have the same experience with any free to play Unity build student project for free somewhere else

Difficulty Options are Bullshit

The topic of difficulty options have, for some reason, become a hot topic of debate on social media.  I feel that every couple of weeks or so a series of threads turns up on something like Twitter either complaining about games not having difficulty options or people complaining that a game included some kind of "auto-win" mode or something like that and people of course losing their minds and throwing insults at each other.  So I got thinking about it and I have come to the conclusion that in most cases difficulty options are complete dogshit.

As a concept they make sense, skilled players pick hard and new players pick easy, and there are a variety of games where they have been used effectively but in a staggeringly large number of cases, the difficulty settings are just frustrating bullshit that's lazily mismanaged by whatever developers are making the game.  So for the next few paragraphs in this post I will outline just a few of the ways in which having an option AT ALL is a pile of garbage.

1) The Pump and Dump

This is probably the most common thing you'll come across in games, where a playthrough on easy and a playthrough on hard is identical in every way except the numbers on damage done and damage taken are just raised and lowered depending on what mode you're on.  The worst example I can think of this off the top of my head is basically any game made by modern day Naughty Dog.  If you play Uncharted on easy or normal, Nathan Drake can walk right into direct fire of a mounted machine gun, take all of those bullets to the face and the only thing that happens is the screen gets a bit grey and you have to suck your thumb behind a rock for a bit to heal up.  If you then play that game on Crushing Nathan turns into a man made of wet toilet paper and will go rag-dolling off into space if an enemy so much as coughs on him.  Everything else about the game is the same, the only thing your mode choice dictates is how much hiding behind walls you have to do.  This is especially boring if you're the kind of person who likes to play normal first and then hard because unless the game really gripped you, playing the exact same game again in the exact same way again but slower just isn't fun.  

2) Built for Upgrades

I feel like I never noticed this being a problem until semi recently but another way difficulty is mis-managed is linking it directly to the games upgrade system and new game + playthroughs.  The game that really hit home just how bad this gets is Dante's Inferno on PS3.  In that game you can pick at the start if you want to play on easy, normal or hard but if you pick hard mode from a new game file then you are going to have a hell of a hard time (lol).  But, if you play through the game once, get a bunch of upgrades and soul points, beat the game and then carry that shit over into a hard mode run, the challenge becomes a lot more manageable.  This is bullshit because when you die it starts to feel like it's not your fault.  Like imagine someone comes up to you and says "hey solve this jigsaw puzzle" but then the set of pieces they give you is just missing a bunch of pieces.  That wouldn't be fun, right? and that's exactly what it feels like to play a game on hard mode when it's been built around an upgrade system.

3) Locked

This is a real pet peeve of mine as someone who likes to play games on a harder mode most of the time but locking a hard mode behind a full game clear is an UNFORGIVEABLE practice and any developer that has done this deserves to stub their toe on the leg of a metal coffee table.  One thing people love to complain about when they talk about difficulty is that "they don't have time to learn the game and get good", which personally I think is a dogshit argument but OK I'll roll with it.  But by that same logic, I'm also a busy man with a large backlog of games and I do not have all the time in the world to play through a game twice just to get the experience that I mainly enjoy.  I can understand locking challenge modes behind a clear like Dante Must Die in Devil May Cry but when I buy a game, load it up and my options for difficulty are "easy, normal and LOCKED" I want to start swinging at people

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This is just 3 ways that I pulled off the top of my head and I'm sure if you gave me a stack of games and a couple of days I could probably come up with a lot more.  But what is the solution?  Well, it's to probably get rid of difficulty settings altogether.  A game that springs right to the forefront of my mind in this regard is Celeste.  The base game where you get the story of the girl going up the mountain is a challenging yet fair experience that I think anyone can clear with a little bit of practice.  When you finish the game, you can either fuck off and never play it again OR you can go and hunt down the B-Sides, C-Sides, Golden Berries etc. which are all challenging extras that players who want to push themselves with absolutely enjoy.  The game is designed in such a way so that EVERYONE can get a win but those who want to master the mechanics and platforming can get even more satisfaction after the credits roll

Another example of this would be a game like Bastion.  When you start Bastion up you aren't given any difficulty settings but a short ways into the game you unlock the shrine.  In the shrine you can unlock little statues that you activate and for each active statue you get an experience and currency bonus in return for the game becoming harder.  This allows players to customize their own experience to make the game as hard or as easy and they would like and players who do go for the extra challenge are appropriately rewarded.  If you don't like a hard game and just want the story, leave the shrine alone, but if you want to show just how good you are at Bastion then head into that shrine and activate EVERYTHING and see how hard the game gets.  The annoying thing about this example in particular is the time it takes to get the shrine and the statues but my point is that instead of having an "easy, normal, hard" mode setting, let players tweak certain aspects of the game themselves to get the challenge that they would like.

Obviously difficulty settings aren't just going to dissapear and like I said, they CAN be used well in certain cases but the point is that most devs are very lazy with them and in a lot of cases just letting the creators deliver the experience THEY want to give you is probably the better option.  Game too hard and has no modes? Just play something else.  Game has an easy mode that's far too easy for you? Just don't use it.  More importantly, shut the fuck up about it on Twitter

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

Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance

 Baldurs Gate is a series one might be quite familar with if you're into the Dungeons and Dragons RPG games for PC but if you have never played Dark Alliance and expected something similar to those PC entries, then you're in for a bit of a surprise.

Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance, released for the PS2 in 2001, does away with the slow, methodical RPG-based in table top style game play of the PC versions and instead goes for a more action oriented approach.  You start the game by picking a Dwarf fighter, a human archer or an elven mage and as far as character creation goes that's where it ends.  You watch a cutscene and then are quickly thrust in a sewer to go kill a bunch of rats, as is common for these kind of games.  The game probably bares more similarity to something like Diablo more than anything else where you go through dungeons, hack and slash your way through hordes of enemies and hopefully collect some sweet loot on the way.

That's not to say that ALL Dungeons and Dragons stuff has gone completely out of the window.  Each monster you slay gives experience and when you fill up your bar you gain a level.  Gaining a level grants you skill points to apply to various feats which are things ranging from hit harder and die less to all new skills to play with depending on which starting class you picked.  The last playthrough I did I chose the Dwarf fighter, so all my feats were pretty much hit harder and die less but I did get one skill called Bull Rush which made traversing the environment a bit less dull sometimes.

There is also a cool multiplayer mode where you and a friend can slay things at the same time but the game doesn't automate any of the loot sharing, it's all first come first serve so if you have a particularly greedy buddy you can expect a few arguments from time to time. My recent play of this game was solo so I'm not entirely sure but I think that experience isn't shared either which is extra annoying if you can't get any killing blows in because your buddy who stole all the good swords is doing all the killing instead.  I'm basing this on a memory from when I played this with some school buddies though so there's a chance my memory is flawed on this one.  

The one thing I can complain about for sure is the bullshit damage values on hard mode.  When I played this game in my younger days, I played it on Normal, a time before I made playing games on hard my personal standard.  Going back to it to record for the stream I thought to myself "this game is easy, I'll play it on hard!" and while it's no Dark Souls by any stretch, sometimes this game takes the piss with how much damage enemies do.  Damage in this game is always done in a range of values, for example a weapon you pick up will have a strength rating of, lets say, 4-19 or something like that.  So when you hit something it's taking that range, plus whatever stat bonuses you have and then it's applied to your strike.  The same goes for the enemies too only I think their ranges are jacked up in hard because sometimes you'll get hit and less than 1% of your HP will fall away and then a moment later you'll get hit by the same guy only he'll one shot you and cause you to reload a save.  The game IS pretty easy and almost all enemies can be beaten hitless by running in little circles around them but it can be annoying when you take a hit and either have to run away chugging HP potions like some kind of addict or you just flat out die.

Overall though it was fun coming back to Dark Alliance.  If you're looking for a sort of brain-off hit the goblins till they die kind of action game then give it a go.  Even if you aren't into table top games AT ALL it's a fun little romp through a bunch of location severing scalps from heads for EXP and gold and it's just generally very much worth playing

SMT: If...

 

Persona is now a pretty popular series for RPG fans.  Persona 3 roped in a few weebs with it's dating sim elements, Persona 4 got even more popular with it's Scooby Doo-esque setting and story and then P5 really came along and really got people excited.  It's sort of a joke about the fandom ignoring the first two games in the series due to a lack of social links and much clunkier game play but the one game that next to nobody talks about is Shin Megami Tensei If..., the entry in the series that sort of kicked the whole thing off.

Shin Megami Tensei If... starts out with you doing a personality test which will decide a bunch of stuff and then you are thrust into the halls of Karukozaka high school where you do a bit of wandering around and all hell breaks loose.  You find a partner to join you on your quest and then you go dungeon crawling around a bunch of areas loosly based on the seven deadly sins.  For people who have become confortable with the more modern entries in Persona or even mainline, SMT If... may be a little hard to play at first since it's a traditional first person dungeon crawler but if you can stick with it you're in for a good time.

The gameplay is standard first person dungeon crawling affair where you wander around, get lost, find gear, blunder into traps and so on and so forth.  The usual Megami Tensei mechanic of demon negotiation makes an appearance where almost every enemy you come across in a dungeon can be talked to and if your negotiation goes well they well join your party.  Right now it sounds almost entirely like a mainline SMT game and not like a Persona title at all but the seeds of the franchise turn up in something called the Guardian System.

In SMT: If... there are no game overs, death just isn't a thing for the protagonists here.  When you die you are instead given a nice mode 7 sweeping shot of some grassy lands and then an old man gives you a guardian.  A guardian will give your characters stat boosts (or reductions) and in the case of your partner, the guardian will dictate what spells they have throughout the game.  Entering the status menu allows you to see a "guardian meter" which fills as you defeat enemies.  If you die when the bar is yellow then your guardian gets downgraded and if you die while it's red it gets upgraded.  So while you'll never have to worry about a nasty insta-death spell killing you and sending you back to your last save, dying before you're ready for an upgrade can be just as, if not more annoying than a traditional game over.  

The guardian system is pretty much what laid the foundation for the personas in the Persona games.  Obviously later games would do away with demon negotiation and just have full parties of human characters but it's very clear to see where all the inspiration came from.

Aside from that, SMT If... is also bursting with content, with slightly different story routes depending on which partner you pick at the start of the game as well as a special New Game + character that does away with the sin themed dungeons and instead has a completely different dungeons to explore and bosses to kill, it's almost like having two games in one.

There are some annoyances though that come par for the course with a Megami Tensei game.  For example it's extremely easy to get blindsided by a nasty Mudo or Hama spell in some of the later dungeons, instant death attacks that will have you tearing your hair out although there is at least some counter play when you know it's coming.  The worst part of the game that isn't well known to MegaTen fans is the Dungeon of Sloth.  A slow, boring part of the game where you have to wait for students to dig tunnels by just mindlessly walking up and down the level until the in game moon cycle ticks enough times.  If you were going to get pissed off and give up on the game, it would probably be in this exact part and I absolutely couldn't blame you for doing so.

That said though, Sloth dungeon aside SMT If... is an pretty good game and if you're a Persona fan looking to experience a bit more MegaTen, this is a pretty good place to come since it's challenging but not overly brutal.  The game was never officially released outside of Japan but if you're willing to get your emulation on then a fan translation does exist for this game so you can enjoy it in English.

So go check it out, go see where it all began

Zombie Night Terror

 Lemmings is a name that may not be some commonly recognisable with some of today's younger gamers won't remember which is sort of a shame but when the only thing that series has come out with is a crappy mobile game that no one plays, it's sort of to be expected.  Well the lads over at NoClip have us covered with Zombie Night Terror, a game that has clearly taken a lot of inspiration from Lemmings but added it's own post apocolyptic twist.  

In most zombie games you play as survivors trying to fend off the hordes of the undead but Zombie Night Terror flips that around and instead puts you in charge of a horde of zombies that you must command through various levels and tasks the player in most cases with infecting a certain number of people or getting the zombies from point A to point B so the outbreak can continue.  There's more to it than just that but in a nutshell that makes up most of what you'll be doing.

If you're not sure why I mentioned Lemmings at the top of this post it's because gameplay wise it's basically the same thing.  For those that haven't seen Lemmings I'll take a moment to explain.  You don't actually control the zombie horde directly, instead they are dropped in in to the stage and in most cases will just aimlessly walk from left to right with no regard for anything that might stop them or kill them.  Your job is to direct them around the map with little arrows on staircases, for example, or mutate them into diffent zombie forms to help them avoid or get through an obstacle.  For example you may be faced with a situation where your zombies will mindlessly walk themselves off a cliff so you must mutate the first zombie in the line into an overlord, which will turn the zombies around and prevent them falling to their doom.  Aside from mutations you get a number of skills which a zombie can perform such a run to get past falling objects or close the gap on their prey or a jump to well.....jump.

What makes the game interesting is that you can combine the mutations and skills to come up with pretty clever solutions for various puzzles.  For example the basic one is to turn a zombie into a direction altering overlord and then using the jump skill on it which will permenantly change the overlord into a sort of catapult so you can lob zombies into hard to reach places.  Another example is using the tank mutation with the scream skill.  Scream on a regular zombie will make it scream either scaring nearby humans or waking up zombies that aren't currently part of your horde, mainly used for paralyzing guys with guns so you can bite them.  If you use the tank mutation to turn a regular zombie into a big strong lad though, scream will send targets in front of the tank flying away from it allowing you to cross gaps or send smaller lads towards their targets much faster.

The regular levels are pretty fun to work out and get through but there's a number of stages where the game starts to get cute with it's design and I don't mean that in a good way.  One bad example of this is an auto scrolling platforming stage where you have to use mutations and skills to get away from a vehicle that kills your zombies on touch.  At the start it's fine but you end up losing a great deal of guys and ending up in an unwinnable position because you got fucked by some trap you had no idea was coming and had way too little time to react to.  That's only a mild annoyance in comparison to the dark levels.  Long stages in pitch black where the only way to see is one radioactive zombie and the rest are just 2 blinking eyes in the darkness.  Somewhat maze like and full of pitfalls you can't see until you've already thrown a few zombies down there they are hair-pullinglly annoying and whoever decided to include these in the game deserves a slap hard enough to maybe cause a tooth to go flying.

Thankfully though, those levels are few and far between and overall Zombie Night Terror is a fun little puzzle game that will leave you feeling pretty satisfied when you eventually solve a level.  So if you're a puzzle game fan looking to scratch an itch then maybe check this one out and if you're an old school Lemmings fan looking for a similar kind of game then absolutely check this one out.