Since I presume everyone is exactly like me, I am sure you all have seen Quad Desert Fury about a million times on a certain major auction site while trying to snap of lots of GBA games on the cheap. You've watched the YouTube clips and have been intrigued by the idea of a game running on a 3D engine on a console that was magnificently underpowered even for its time.
Let me tell you: don't be. Quad Desert Fury is a drag and a half. It wasn't good when it was released and it's not good now. It's graphics make it kind of a nifty curio but it barely even works on that level.
The perspective on 3D GBA games has shifted w/ time. Back in 2003, the graphics on this were inevitably compared to GameCube games, and, yeah, they look awful in that light. Nowadays, people see these things are like, "Oh wow, a 3D game on GBA!" The reality is really a mix of these. Quad Desert Fury is, indeed, a smear of brown pixels across a tiny screen but it's a 3D smear of brown pixels and that was impressive for the time.
Unfortunately, when you push a system to its limits--esp. on something that was a budget game even when it was first released--you frequently wind up w/ a glorified tech demo, which is the case here. After Quad Desert Fury's initial impression, it become clear very quickly that there was not much time or budget left for actual gameplay once the 3D engine was completed.
The terrain is indeed 3D but you don't really feel the hills when you are driving on them. You don't need to take into account slopes of find the best racing line, just point your little four wheeler at the next checkpoint and travel hither, tither and yon over whatever ravine or sheer cliff might block your way. You hold the accelerator down and go, go, go.
Because the AI racers all take the same ill-advised rout, this is actually legitimately amusing for the first few races. You and the AI will bungle into each other haphazardly and it at first it feels like some light-heated arcade racing fun. After a while though, it gets pretty easy to just pull ahead at the start of the race and w/ the AI having no means of catching up to you, you are basically on your lonesome for Quad Desert Fury's seven courses, all of which are created by placing checkpoints on different locations on the same terrain. This is your chance to kick back and listen to the same fifteen second loop of pop punky rock music for the entire hour or so it will take you to get through the game.
Quad Desert Fury is not a fully realized game. It is a decent first impression and nothing more. Even though I don't have much good to say about it, I do think that first impression is good enough to be worth the buck or so you'll wind up dropping on this in most cases. It is not something to look out for but if you run across it on the cheap, it's fun enough to see how bad it is to be worth picking up, which, honestly, is the best you are going to get as far as GBA games in this price range.
Wednesday, November 29, 2017
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
Why I Stopped Playing Dishonored - Arkane Studios - 2012 [PC]
First off, I really think this game should use the British spelling for its title, Dishonoured. The lack of a U is just shameful. They should have probably even doubled up on the Us and called it Dishounoured. I can maintain my journalistic perspective on this game in spite of this but I feel it's high time that someone lay these facts bare.
Playing this, I can say w/ all the objectivity that I can muster, that it is one the best and most important stealth games ever made. Subjectively, I hate it. I said I hate it!
Well, hate might be a strong word but after a few decent sessions playing Doushounoured, my desire to play literally any other game on the face of the earth went through the roof whenever I sat down to play more. The game gives you deep and well-executed set of tools to dispatch enemies both lethally and non-lethally and what you chose to do shapes the world and how people react to you. This is the hook of the game, what makes it special. What you do matters and you are encouraged to experiment and find your own way through each mission.
Except you can't. I mean you can if you want but then the game straight-out tells you that killing people is going to lead to a bad ending. There's lots of ways they could have done this through gameplay or in-game storytelling. You could have NPCs telling you that things won't end well if you continue down this path or any number of things. Instead, it just flat-out states as much on a loading screen.
So, yeah, there is your issue. It builds this wonderful system and not only tries to funnel you into exactly one way of playing, the way it does so is such an awful kludge that it is hard to see why people who otherwise made such a wonderful would do such a thing. I dunno about you, but when told there's a bad ending, I avoid it. Just a thing I do. I don't like investing a couple dozen hours into something then having it tell me I did it all wrong.
After seeing this loading screen, it's like, okay, from here on out, stealth all the way. I'll white knuckle it and sneak around these people who framed me for murder and attempt to kill me on sight... Not like I would want to take the most expedient way in ending this conspiracy of people hellbent on destroying both me and the people I'm sworn to protect. The loading screen says to avoid killing people.
Once you are locked in non-lethal stealth mode, the game regresses from a fun and occasionally violent problem solving to trial-and-error save scumming. The actual gameplay (loading screens aside) actually pushes you toward killing people. You are given like ten million ways to kill people but your non-lethal means of suppressing an enemy are very limited. Sneaking around people, you have to do over and over again while you only have to kill them once. I felt like I was going against the grain when playing the game as it seemed to intend for me to.
My breaking point: I was on a mission where I had to both retrieve an item and interrogate an NPC. I dutifully sneaked around guard after guard. I went out of my way to interrogate the NPC w/o harming him. I sneaked and sneaked back around and out of the complex of buildings I was in. I forgot to collect the item I needed. I started sneaking back around these same guards once again and said, you know what, I hate this. I said I hate it! So I quit. Feels good to get that off my chest.
This is one where I'd like to go back and do things "right" from the get-go to see how it feels. It's not too terribly tough and having gone through the first bit of the game killing people, it makes it harder not to kill people so a second time through should be a bit easier if not faster. There are a lot of games though that don't tick me off to where I don't want want to play anymore halfway through so this goes on the bottom of that pile. Good bye, Doushounourourd, I am sure I will enjoy playing you in a different life.
Monday, November 20, 2017
13 Points on Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor - Monolith Productions - 2014 [PC]
1. If you like games where you climb towers to reveal icons on a map, you will like this Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.
2. You had better believe this is a AAA game, folks. There's like ten million logos when you start up; the voice actors have all had voice acting jobs before; and the sound effects have the basso profundo thunk of a high-budget Hollywood production. Huzzah!
3. This has the entire lore of Lord of the Rings available to it but the main character, Talion, is just Geralt from The Witcher, at least from a functional standpoint. They gave him a different back story to explain his abilities--he's dead, he's got a companion elf spirit, blah, blah, blah--but he's a dude that goes into super power mode to track creatures via little colored trails and caries two swords on his back for some reason. I feel that the influence here is unambiguous.
4. The eschews the standard tower-and-icons open world game type behavior where clearing icons gradually makes the areas of the world you've cleared them from safer to you. No matter what you do, the world remains crawling w/ Uruks, which are identical in all ways to orcs but apparently tougher according to some off-handed remark made in the game.
5. The effect of number 4 is a mixed bag. It makes the entire world seem dangerous and exciting to traverse for the whole game but since the world doesn't improve over the course of the game, the only thing that gives you a sense of progress is the fact that icons disappear from the map as you complete objectives.
6. *sigh*
7. Yeah, fine, there is also an RPG-like character system to give you a sense of progress--and it's a real doozy too. There are three kinds of experience points, skill trees w/o number and several essential combat moves aren't unlocked until a half dozen hours into the game. Nobody is going to accuse these AAA developers of skimping on the character progression, no way.
8. Mercifully, there is no crafting system. Instead, they have both hunt and gather requests which are less annoying but ultimately still just a stupid thing they tacked on that nobody asked for or cares about.
9. There are two open world areas. Neither of them are huge feeling but this actually works in Shadow of Mordor's favor. I found myself eschewing fast travel because it didn't take long to cross the map and I was sure to run into a couple entertaining encounters w/ Uruk that I could tackle in a variety of different ways, spending as much or as little effort as I felt either dispatching them or avoiding them.
10. The combat--esp. once you've unlocked all the various moves in the skill tree--is excellent. It has a similar button mashing flow as an old school beat-em-up. Attack, block and build combos to build up additional combos so you can keep building combos. It also adds a bullet-time type mechanic that you use w/ a bow and arrow, which functions as a sort of get-out-of-jail free card when things get too hairy. It never felt quite right to me to whip out a bow in the midst of a hectic melee fight but, as a game mechanic, it worked. Once you get the swing of things and a few upgrades, taking care of even large groups of enemies is not too much of a challenge but it's all done so stylishly that hacking through enemy waves never feels like a chore.
11. I could not give a hoot or a holler about the story in this game. Some Lord of the Rings stuff goes down and you crush some skulls. The rest felt superfluous, which is honestly fine by me. Gaming is a great storytelling medium but it doesn't have to be.
12. What it does do well is world building. W/ the big budget production and the ability to really lean into some well-known lore, this is a game that really puts you right there. You are in Middle-earth. You are riding on the backs of beasts and slaying evil in slow-mo w/ magic super arrows. Going back to the comparison to The Witcher, this provides the same kind of sense of adventure as those games but does it through gameplay rather than story. In some regards, this actually works better, esp. if you are a bourgeois wage-earner w/ limited free time.
13. The final boss battle is a quick-time event so I am going to half-ass the end of this review too.
2. You had better believe this is a AAA game, folks. There's like ten million logos when you start up; the voice actors have all had voice acting jobs before; and the sound effects have the basso profundo thunk of a high-budget Hollywood production. Huzzah!
3. This has the entire lore of Lord of the Rings available to it but the main character, Talion, is just Geralt from The Witcher, at least from a functional standpoint. They gave him a different back story to explain his abilities--he's dead, he's got a companion elf spirit, blah, blah, blah--but he's a dude that goes into super power mode to track creatures via little colored trails and caries two swords on his back for some reason. I feel that the influence here is unambiguous.
4. The eschews the standard tower-and-icons open world game type behavior where clearing icons gradually makes the areas of the world you've cleared them from safer to you. No matter what you do, the world remains crawling w/ Uruks, which are identical in all ways to orcs but apparently tougher according to some off-handed remark made in the game.
5. The effect of number 4 is a mixed bag. It makes the entire world seem dangerous and exciting to traverse for the whole game but since the world doesn't improve over the course of the game, the only thing that gives you a sense of progress is the fact that icons disappear from the map as you complete objectives.
6. *sigh*
7. Yeah, fine, there is also an RPG-like character system to give you a sense of progress--and it's a real doozy too. There are three kinds of experience points, skill trees w/o number and several essential combat moves aren't unlocked until a half dozen hours into the game. Nobody is going to accuse these AAA developers of skimping on the character progression, no way.
8. Mercifully, there is no crafting system. Instead, they have both hunt and gather requests which are less annoying but ultimately still just a stupid thing they tacked on that nobody asked for or cares about.
9. There are two open world areas. Neither of them are huge feeling but this actually works in Shadow of Mordor's favor. I found myself eschewing fast travel because it didn't take long to cross the map and I was sure to run into a couple entertaining encounters w/ Uruk that I could tackle in a variety of different ways, spending as much or as little effort as I felt either dispatching them or avoiding them.
10. The combat--esp. once you've unlocked all the various moves in the skill tree--is excellent. It has a similar button mashing flow as an old school beat-em-up. Attack, block and build combos to build up additional combos so you can keep building combos. It also adds a bullet-time type mechanic that you use w/ a bow and arrow, which functions as a sort of get-out-of-jail free card when things get too hairy. It never felt quite right to me to whip out a bow in the midst of a hectic melee fight but, as a game mechanic, it worked. Once you get the swing of things and a few upgrades, taking care of even large groups of enemies is not too much of a challenge but it's all done so stylishly that hacking through enemy waves never feels like a chore.
11. I could not give a hoot or a holler about the story in this game. Some Lord of the Rings stuff goes down and you crush some skulls. The rest felt superfluous, which is honestly fine by me. Gaming is a great storytelling medium but it doesn't have to be.
12. What it does do well is world building. W/ the big budget production and the ability to really lean into some well-known lore, this is a game that really puts you right there. You are in Middle-earth. You are riding on the backs of beasts and slaying evil in slow-mo w/ magic super arrows. Going back to the comparison to The Witcher, this provides the same kind of sense of adventure as those games but does it through gameplay rather than story. In some regards, this actually works better, esp. if you are a bourgeois wage-earner w/ limited free time.
13. The final boss battle is a quick-time event so I am going to half-ass the end of this review too.
Friday, November 17, 2017
13 Points on Nano Assault EX - Shin'en - 2013 [Nintendo 3DS]
2. There are two basic types of levels in this: free roaming missions where you cruise around the surface of oddly shaped cells, destroying enemies and collecting DNA samples and then there's rail shooter levels in the manner of Star Fox where the object is basically to stay alive until a boss fight.
3. I kinda wish they would have focused exclusively on one type of level or the other. Gameplay on both is good but they both fall a little short of being truly great. This is a game made by a small team and it just feels like they stretched themselves a little bit too far and left little bits that lack polish here and there. There's things like levels that can be beat by just spamming the special weapon or times when it's difficult to tell things that kill you from harmless things in the environment.
4. Even though this was made by a small team, it looks and sounds fantastic. The 3D effect works great. The music is competent if unexceptional. It set the mood quite well but I can't remember a single melody from it a minute after playing the game.
5. The reason abxy works well as a substitute for an actual stick is actually a bit of clever game design. The enemies attack such that the best strategy is to coral them into one area and then go side to side blasting them Space Invaders style. I found myself doing this even when using twin sticks.
6. If you fail a mission, you have to go through the whole process of watching a brief intro and selecting your special weapon again, which is not too bad but annoying regardless.
7. The special weapons are kind of crumby. I tried each one once and went back to the first one they gave you every time. Maybe I am just too dumb to figure this stuff out, I dunno.
8. If you like epic bosses, this has some epic bosses. The very final boss is decidedly less epic than some that come before it though. Whose design choice was that?
9. This game has several modes. You start out w/ story mode. As you beat levels in that, it unlocks them for arcade mode. Once you've beat all the levels, it unlocks boss attack mode. Once you beat boss attack mode, it unlocks survival mode. Story mode is pretty short but those who are tenacious arcade style gamers will get a ton of playtime trying to complete the extra modes.
10. All of the modes are exactly what you'd expect and I appreciate the clear naming conventions. The only caveat is that there is no story in story mode. I mean, there is, but it's like "something bad has happened, now you need to kill stuff."
11. My one complaint as far as gameplay is that even w/ the 3D on it can sometimes be difficult to judge how far enemy projectiles are from you. Also, when things get intense, it can be hard to keep your 3DS in the right spot.
12. The overall feel of this is old school but it is really not all that traditional. I suppose the rail shooter levels are a pretty spot on imitation of games past but the free roaming levels add a dimension (literally and figuratively) that is not something you frequently see in vintage shooters. Still, this somehow puts me in the same mood as playing an old scrolling shmup.
13. I can't shake this feeling of being disappointing that this game is not even better (see number 3) but I can give it my full recommendation because, simply put, it is a hell of a lot of fun while you play it. It could be more but what it is is wholly good.
Monday, November 13, 2017
Sort by Lowest Price: Driver: Renegade 3D - Ubisoft - 2011 [Nintendo 3DS]
Do you ever get curious about those bargain bin games that look interesting but are poorly reviewed? I am playing these games so you don't have to.
I played the original Driver way back when it was released so I took note of this when it first came out and proceeded not to buy it because it's a handheld exclusive from Ubisoft and thus likely to be a half-assed pile of dreck. I was right, of course, but couldn't resist picking this up for about a fiver from the webstore of a particularly prominent used games retailer.
The hell of it is Driver: Renegade 3D has the bones of a good game. It looks pretty decent. It's maybe a not a full step up from a DS game w/ its muddy textures and jagged edges all over the place but it's functional enough. The driving mechanics are damn solid too. It is basically on par w/ any arcade style driving game and while I wouldn't call the controls exceptional--they feel maybe a might bit twitchy on the 3DS analog stick--they certainly aren't broken. The music is fine if generic and about the same can be said about the sound in general. Overall, the presentation and gamplay here is passable at least.
The plot is kind of hilariously bad. It's camp but I can't really tell if it's intentional or not. It the kind of power fantasy where a man delivers justice w/o the frustrating shackles of due process or common decency, somewhere along the lines of Dirty Harry or Death Wish. It's delivered via minimally animated comic book style clip scenes, which is an economical but effective story telling means and I appreciate that. The voice acting is definitely not grade A but it seems they did at least hire actors rather than just getting people around the office to read the lines. Again, I'd classify the strorytelling as passable.
Where Renegade really breaks down is its maps and mission structure. For starters, this is strictly mission based and does not even have minimal open world elements like driving to start point of your next mission. That's actually fine by me--you get to go straight to the real action--but all the missions are on the same bland map.
It's set in New York City in theory but it's a New York City w/ less cars on the road than your average country highway. I get that replicating the actual traffic jam style of NYC driving in a game wouldn't exactly be fun but, really, if you want to have a game where you drive on roads where there's almost no other cars, just don't set it in NYC. I do kinda dig that you get to cross the bridge from Jersey to Manhattan to Brooklyn but the whole setting is so half baked,
Even this would be forgivable if the missions weren't just so repetitive. There's only twenty of them and they still get boring because they are all based on one of four concepts: follow a car to some pre designated space, follow a car and blow it up, blow up all the cars and smash through various items on the maps. The AI is nowhere near good enough to spice up these simple formulas and often times does ridiculous or gets stuck in corners meaning completing missions is frequently just based on getting lucky enough to have the AI do something really stupid that makes it easy for you to win. You do the same thing over and over, getting frustrated when things don't work out how you want and when you win, you know all you did was beat an idiotic AI so you don't get much satisfaction out of it.
This is not to say there aren't enjoyable moments to this game. The hammy story is good for some laughs and there's sections where the AI happens to be firing on all cylinders that bring some legit white-knuckle thrills. This game is not a total disaster by any means. It just seems like they built a decent engine, threw the assets of a dying franchise at it and just left that at that. Had they been inclined to put a little more effort into this, Ubisoft could have made a really great game and being as there was not much out for the 3DS in September 2011, it could have even been something of a hit. Oh well, I suppose it is safer to not to bet big money on new platforms and just put some garbage out there in the hopes it makes a buck or two.
I played the original Driver way back when it was released so I took note of this when it first came out and proceeded not to buy it because it's a handheld exclusive from Ubisoft and thus likely to be a half-assed pile of dreck. I was right, of course, but couldn't resist picking this up for about a fiver from the webstore of a particularly prominent used games retailer.
The hell of it is Driver: Renegade 3D has the bones of a good game. It looks pretty decent. It's maybe a not a full step up from a DS game w/ its muddy textures and jagged edges all over the place but it's functional enough. The driving mechanics are damn solid too. It is basically on par w/ any arcade style driving game and while I wouldn't call the controls exceptional--they feel maybe a might bit twitchy on the 3DS analog stick--they certainly aren't broken. The music is fine if generic and about the same can be said about the sound in general. Overall, the presentation and gamplay here is passable at least.
The plot is kind of hilariously bad. It's camp but I can't really tell if it's intentional or not. It the kind of power fantasy where a man delivers justice w/o the frustrating shackles of due process or common decency, somewhere along the lines of Dirty Harry or Death Wish. It's delivered via minimally animated comic book style clip scenes, which is an economical but effective story telling means and I appreciate that. The voice acting is definitely not grade A but it seems they did at least hire actors rather than just getting people around the office to read the lines. Again, I'd classify the strorytelling as passable.
Where Renegade really breaks down is its maps and mission structure. For starters, this is strictly mission based and does not even have minimal open world elements like driving to start point of your next mission. That's actually fine by me--you get to go straight to the real action--but all the missions are on the same bland map.
It's set in New York City in theory but it's a New York City w/ less cars on the road than your average country highway. I get that replicating the actual traffic jam style of NYC driving in a game wouldn't exactly be fun but, really, if you want to have a game where you drive on roads where there's almost no other cars, just don't set it in NYC. I do kinda dig that you get to cross the bridge from Jersey to Manhattan to Brooklyn but the whole setting is so half baked,
Even this would be forgivable if the missions weren't just so repetitive. There's only twenty of them and they still get boring because they are all based on one of four concepts: follow a car to some pre designated space, follow a car and blow it up, blow up all the cars and smash through various items on the maps. The AI is nowhere near good enough to spice up these simple formulas and often times does ridiculous or gets stuck in corners meaning completing missions is frequently just based on getting lucky enough to have the AI do something really stupid that makes it easy for you to win. You do the same thing over and over, getting frustrated when things don't work out how you want and when you win, you know all you did was beat an idiotic AI so you don't get much satisfaction out of it.
This is not to say there aren't enjoyable moments to this game. The hammy story is good for some laughs and there's sections where the AI happens to be firing on all cylinders that bring some legit white-knuckle thrills. This game is not a total disaster by any means. It just seems like they built a decent engine, threw the assets of a dying franchise at it and just left that at that. Had they been inclined to put a little more effort into this, Ubisoft could have made a really great game and being as there was not much out for the 3DS in September 2011, it could have even been something of a hit. Oh well, I suppose it is safer to not to bet big money on new platforms and just put some garbage out there in the hopes it makes a buck or two.
Wednesday, November 8, 2017
13 Points on Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker - Nintendo - 2014 [Wii U]
1. Long story short: there have been two Mario-related games in the last decade that I feel actually gave you something new and worth playing. One of those games is Super Mario Maker and the other one is Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. If you have a Wii U, get this.
2. I suppose you might damn this by calling it a kids game but I prefer to think of it as suitable for all ages.
3. I see this often classified as puzzle game but this really isn't about puzzle solving. It's about exploration and discovery. Certainly, there are puzzle solving elements but if you are looking for Portal, play The Talos Principle.
4. Actually, this does have something in common w/ Talos in so far as it pieces together assets from a better known game into something rather different. The Mario tie in is more obvious here than the Serious Sam basis of Talos but both games give you the feeling that the developers pushed themselves to do something new and different and that's what makes them fun.
5. I have a metric for judging Mario games which is how far in I get before I get sick of collecting the optional collectables. This never happened in Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. I never got sick of collecting the three optional gems on each level. Never.
6. There are also additional bonus challenges for each level that I only completed when they seemed fun to me. One of my few complaints about this game is to meet the requirements of these challenges, you sometimes couldn't also collect all three gems. It's no big deal unless you want to do 100% speed runs or something.
7. This is a pretty deliberate game so maybe not appropriate for speed-running anyway. Even more than the fact that you can't jump, I'd say this difference in pacing is what sets it apart from a standard Mario game. The focus here is on planning your path through a level and examining every last inch of it, rather than avoiding hazards in a precise manner.
8. This plays to the Wii U's strengths, graphically. The levels are small but camera scrolling is super smooth, polygons are sharp and the colors are bold and bright. Basically, it's a first party Nintendo game. Yay!
9. The sound design is decent too but the most standout part to me is when Toad shouts what sounds like "Diaper adventrure!" before each level.
10. The story here is Captain Toad and Girl Captain Toad take turns getting kidnapped by a giant owl and you need to find each other by collecting stars and three optional gems.
11. There is something about the gameplay that I find very relaxing w/o it becoming boring. The levels are mostly pretty short, which helps since you don't lose much progress when you die. It is just a combination of basically getting to take as much time as you'd like to look around and explore but then also having it spiced up by some brief dexterity challenges here and there. There is a real kind of flow to it.
12. This is a pretty streamlined package overall.There's sixty some levels to begin w/ and then an additional bunch of bonus levels once you've finished. There are really no lengthy cut scenes or special modes or any of that kind of thing. You get the game and some optional objectives and that's all you really need. For what it does have, there is a good amount between how the levels play w/ some boss battles and even a couple minecart levels that play like rail shooters.
13. Playing a game called Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker kinda brings to mind that old adage about riding a moped and your friends finding out but, honestly, I've been telling everyone I know w/ a Wii U to play this game. (Note: this is two people.)
2. I suppose you might damn this by calling it a kids game but I prefer to think of it as suitable for all ages.
3. I see this often classified as puzzle game but this really isn't about puzzle solving. It's about exploration and discovery. Certainly, there are puzzle solving elements but if you are looking for Portal, play The Talos Principle.
4. Actually, this does have something in common w/ Talos in so far as it pieces together assets from a better known game into something rather different. The Mario tie in is more obvious here than the Serious Sam basis of Talos but both games give you the feeling that the developers pushed themselves to do something new and different and that's what makes them fun.
5. I have a metric for judging Mario games which is how far in I get before I get sick of collecting the optional collectables. This never happened in Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. I never got sick of collecting the three optional gems on each level. Never.
6. There are also additional bonus challenges for each level that I only completed when they seemed fun to me. One of my few complaints about this game is to meet the requirements of these challenges, you sometimes couldn't also collect all three gems. It's no big deal unless you want to do 100% speed runs or something.
7. This is a pretty deliberate game so maybe not appropriate for speed-running anyway. Even more than the fact that you can't jump, I'd say this difference in pacing is what sets it apart from a standard Mario game. The focus here is on planning your path through a level and examining every last inch of it, rather than avoiding hazards in a precise manner.
8. This plays to the Wii U's strengths, graphically. The levels are small but camera scrolling is super smooth, polygons are sharp and the colors are bold and bright. Basically, it's a first party Nintendo game. Yay!
9. The sound design is decent too but the most standout part to me is when Toad shouts what sounds like "Diaper adventrure!" before each level.
10. The story here is Captain Toad and Girl Captain Toad take turns getting kidnapped by a giant owl and you need to find each other by collecting stars and three optional gems.
11. There is something about the gameplay that I find very relaxing w/o it becoming boring. The levels are mostly pretty short, which helps since you don't lose much progress when you die. It is just a combination of basically getting to take as much time as you'd like to look around and explore but then also having it spiced up by some brief dexterity challenges here and there. There is a real kind of flow to it.
12. This is a pretty streamlined package overall.There's sixty some levels to begin w/ and then an additional bunch of bonus levels once you've finished. There are really no lengthy cut scenes or special modes or any of that kind of thing. You get the game and some optional objectives and that's all you really need. For what it does have, there is a good amount between how the levels play w/ some boss battles and even a couple minecart levels that play like rail shooters.
13. Playing a game called Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker kinda brings to mind that old adage about riding a moped and your friends finding out but, honestly, I've been telling everyone I know w/ a Wii U to play this game. (Note: this is two people.)
Friday, November 3, 2017
Why I Stopped Playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown - Firaxis Games - 2012 [PlayStation Vita]
Like many, my gaming time is limited. This is a series where I outline why I decided to shelf a particular game.
I have been a longtime advocate for busy people (read: adults) to check out modern handhelds for their gaming fix. The ability to stop and resume games on a dime is priceless if your free time comes in twenty minute spurts. I'm always excited to see a new franchise come to handheld from console or PC and tend to be especially excited when the game you get is the real deal and not cut down to size to fit the handheld.
Turn-based strategy games seem a perfect fit for this. They rely not on spectacle and fast pacing, where the less comfortable controls and lower graphical power of a handheld would be much more of an issue, but on slow, contemplative decision making. Unfortunately, this game just never clicked for me. This is partly my fault, partly the design of the game and party the port to Vita.
On my end, I went into this knowing perma-death is a hallmark of the series and just couldn't help really wanting it to be Fire Emblem. It's not, obviously. Your characters are persistent mission to mission but they don't have personalities other than whatever you might come up w/ roll playing in your head. You learn how to use them tactically but your attachment to them is based on their usefulness to you and not to them as characters. This is all fine but it took me a while to get used to an essential aspect of playing XCOM: some of your characters are supposed to die.
Playing through, I eventually realized that this is actually a strength of the game. It adds a shade of military realism to it. You don't get to soldiers alive at the expense of the mission just because you like them. You make choices that put people in harm's way and sometimes the result of that is, well, harm to those people. This is not a game where you dominate w/ perfect strategy but one where strategy is the means by which you squeak by by the skin of your teeth.
The downside to this is you can lose. You can put a dozen hours into a campaign and have one mission go sideways, lose all your best characters and find yourself in basically and untenable position. Fire Emblem (usually) deals w/ this by letting you grind through relatively easy random encounters to rebuild your party. In XCOM, you restart the whole game or save scum your way through.
This, again, is one of the game's strengths ultimately. You have to employ both a broad strategy and tactics in individual missions to be able to win. You can't just lean on your best characters and maximize their stats by only bringing them along on missions because if things go south, you are left w/ almost nothing. You need to make sure to bring rookies up through the ranks quickly and always keep some of your best characters in reserve so getting nailed in an encounter doesn't leave you helpless. You need to make best use of your limited technology and resources so that you
This all actually sounds awesome to me, honestly. Reading back what I just wrote, I feel an intense urge to pick XCOM back up, like, right now. The thing is every time I do go back to play it, it's just feels like a slog.
For starters, the tactics lean on what they call a flanking mechanic but is really just line-of-sight based cover. From a gaming standpoint, I see what this is supposed to do. If you've got line of sight on an enemy, they've got line of sight on you. It's a high-risk/high-reward proposition. It works fine but why settle for fine? Make it so which way the units are facing matter. Allow players to engage the enemy w/ one unit and then route said enemy from the side with a different unit. This is how flanking actually works in military tactics and I think this one additional element would add a ton of depth to combat.
The other factor that really killed me is when you run into an enemy, it immediately gets to move against you. Like, right in the middle of your turn it gets to move. The character you are moving stops dead and the enemy gets an extra turn then your character finally gets to finish moving--and you don't even get to adjust your move in reaction to the new situation. This seems to almost always leave your one unfortunate character helpless unless you've played extremely cautiously.
Ultimately, the one strategy I found that consistently worked was to always move all my units as one group. Move slowly and throw every character into a defensive mode called overwatch that allows you to fire back in the event you run into hostiles. Never attempt to flank the enemy unless you have them greatly outnumbered. When in doubt, stay hunkered down.
In short, XCOM seems to want you to play aggressively w/ its flanking system but then has a mechanic where you will almost always get rocked if you actually do so. The end result is a crawling pace.
I didn't want to but I eventually ended up save scumming. One thing was glitches, which I'm not sure are unique to the Vita version, but could be real party killers. If you accidentally move one step farther than you intended, you sometimes aren't able to shoot which turns a substantial chance to get a kill into a substantial chance to be killed. So I started save scumming to avoid that. Then I slowly let myself start restarting missions rather than take heavy losses just so I did not have to restart the whole game. Then I started allowing myself to return to my safety saves just because my turn went badly to avoid having to restart the mission. So, yeah, I am a damn, dirty cheater and I don't deserve a game like XCOM.
Having said all this, I feel like the two main arguments I will get will boil down to "Git gud" and "That's XCOM baby!" and, whatever, fair enough. Everything that drives me nuts about this has a positive side--well, except the glitches aren't the funny kind and the load times are terrible on the Vita--and I would never say its a bad game. It's just not for me. If it makes you feel any better, I will put it on my long list for a replay next time it goes on sale for PC and I find myself w/ a few dozen hours to kill on a Friday evening.
I have been a longtime advocate for busy people (read: adults) to check out modern handhelds for their gaming fix. The ability to stop and resume games on a dime is priceless if your free time comes in twenty minute spurts. I'm always excited to see a new franchise come to handheld from console or PC and tend to be especially excited when the game you get is the real deal and not cut down to size to fit the handheld.
Turn-based strategy games seem a perfect fit for this. They rely not on spectacle and fast pacing, where the less comfortable controls and lower graphical power of a handheld would be much more of an issue, but on slow, contemplative decision making. Unfortunately, this game just never clicked for me. This is partly my fault, partly the design of the game and party the port to Vita.
On my end, I went into this knowing perma-death is a hallmark of the series and just couldn't help really wanting it to be Fire Emblem. It's not, obviously. Your characters are persistent mission to mission but they don't have personalities other than whatever you might come up w/ roll playing in your head. You learn how to use them tactically but your attachment to them is based on their usefulness to you and not to them as characters. This is all fine but it took me a while to get used to an essential aspect of playing XCOM: some of your characters are supposed to die.
Playing through, I eventually realized that this is actually a strength of the game. It adds a shade of military realism to it. You don't get to soldiers alive at the expense of the mission just because you like them. You make choices that put people in harm's way and sometimes the result of that is, well, harm to those people. This is not a game where you dominate w/ perfect strategy but one where strategy is the means by which you squeak by by the skin of your teeth.
The downside to this is you can lose. You can put a dozen hours into a campaign and have one mission go sideways, lose all your best characters and find yourself in basically and untenable position. Fire Emblem (usually) deals w/ this by letting you grind through relatively easy random encounters to rebuild your party. In XCOM, you restart the whole game or save scum your way through.
This, again, is one of the game's strengths ultimately. You have to employ both a broad strategy and tactics in individual missions to be able to win. You can't just lean on your best characters and maximize their stats by only bringing them along on missions because if things go south, you are left w/ almost nothing. You need to make sure to bring rookies up through the ranks quickly and always keep some of your best characters in reserve so getting nailed in an encounter doesn't leave you helpless. You need to make best use of your limited technology and resources so that you
This all actually sounds awesome to me, honestly. Reading back what I just wrote, I feel an intense urge to pick XCOM back up, like, right now. The thing is every time I do go back to play it, it's just feels like a slog.
For starters, the tactics lean on what they call a flanking mechanic but is really just line-of-sight based cover. From a gaming standpoint, I see what this is supposed to do. If you've got line of sight on an enemy, they've got line of sight on you. It's a high-risk/high-reward proposition. It works fine but why settle for fine? Make it so which way the units are facing matter. Allow players to engage the enemy w/ one unit and then route said enemy from the side with a different unit. This is how flanking actually works in military tactics and I think this one additional element would add a ton of depth to combat.
The other factor that really killed me is when you run into an enemy, it immediately gets to move against you. Like, right in the middle of your turn it gets to move. The character you are moving stops dead and the enemy gets an extra turn then your character finally gets to finish moving--and you don't even get to adjust your move in reaction to the new situation. This seems to almost always leave your one unfortunate character helpless unless you've played extremely cautiously.
Ultimately, the one strategy I found that consistently worked was to always move all my units as one group. Move slowly and throw every character into a defensive mode called overwatch that allows you to fire back in the event you run into hostiles. Never attempt to flank the enemy unless you have them greatly outnumbered. When in doubt, stay hunkered down.
In short, XCOM seems to want you to play aggressively w/ its flanking system but then has a mechanic where you will almost always get rocked if you actually do so. The end result is a crawling pace.
I didn't want to but I eventually ended up save scumming. One thing was glitches, which I'm not sure are unique to the Vita version, but could be real party killers. If you accidentally move one step farther than you intended, you sometimes aren't able to shoot which turns a substantial chance to get a kill into a substantial chance to be killed. So I started save scumming to avoid that. Then I slowly let myself start restarting missions rather than take heavy losses just so I did not have to restart the whole game. Then I started allowing myself to return to my safety saves just because my turn went badly to avoid having to restart the mission. So, yeah, I am a damn, dirty cheater and I don't deserve a game like XCOM.
Having said all this, I feel like the two main arguments I will get will boil down to "Git gud" and "That's XCOM baby!" and, whatever, fair enough. Everything that drives me nuts about this has a positive side--well, except the glitches aren't the funny kind and the load times are terrible on the Vita--and I would never say its a bad game. It's just not for me. If it makes you feel any better, I will put it on my long list for a replay next time it goes on sale for PC and I find myself w/ a few dozen hours to kill on a Friday evening.
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