August 2018, Just another WordPress site

Jamestown

It took me a while to figure out what was bothering me about Jamestown, when it so clearly seems to be my sort of thing. A vertical shooter with lovely retro pixelart graphics and a great soundtrack is 100% me, but playing Jamestown left me cold.

It was actually while looking for a screenshot to add to this post that it occured to me. A lot of the deaths I had were from some enemy that I had no time to get to getting below my ship and off screen but still shooting at me. The source of this problem is that Jamestown is a vertical shooter entirely oriented horizontally- not only in the screen dimension but also the fact it has a significant amount of horizontal scrolling. Enemies enter from the sides of the screen and are already below the playing area by the time you can even see they exist.

This was coupled with a bug affecting the most recent build that turns all enemy projectiles grey, making them frustratingly hard to see. It’s been that way since 2015 and will likely never get patched at this point, but there’s a way around it by running a Legacy build.

Fin or Bin:

This is a real tough decision. On paper everything’s in place for this to be an obvious Fin, but I wasn’t enjoying my time with Jamestown. Even the level select system is a bizarre choice in this genre- most STGs you play from start to finish, with the main challenge being resource management. Ultimately, I want to give the game another chance to impress now I’ve realised some of the issues were caused by fixable bugs, but I’m going to put in in the Bin, next to Jet Set Radio. I feel like it deserves another chance.

Jamestown is actually the game that has been on my backlog longest, having been bought in December 2011. It took seven years, but I finally justified that purchase!

(Update: I didn’t buy it! I won it! It was one of the prizes available in Steam’s Christmas sale event! My backlog is overloaded with games I somehow received free of charge and it started right here!)

Recommended To:

Hard to say. It reminded me a lot of Axelay on the SNES as I was playing it, but the two aren’t directly comparable. Jamestown is pretty tough, but in a lot of frustrating ways. I probably wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, specifically, but I also definitely wouldn’t caution anyone against it if they were interested.

(Steam)

Master Of Orion (Reboot)

1996′s Master Of Orion 2 is still heralded as one of the finest 4X games ever made, and cetainly it’s one that I still find myself playing a game of every so often. This is a modern reboot of that series.

Right off the bat, it’s far more Civ 5 than the MoO I’m accustomed to. From the diplomacy menu to the scales of production units, everything’s gone a bit Sid Meier. Not a bad thing as Civ 5 is a fantastic 4X game, but I already own it and don’t need another Space Flavour version.

One thing I do not like at all is the change to exploration. In MoO2, you can visit any star in range of your engines- as you develop new technology, this range grows. In the reboot, you navigate by way of starlanes, which greatly restricts how you explore. It feels more like a galaxy-themed dungeon crawler this way and there’s a lot of nonsensical bottlenecks where two stars right next to each other aren’t connected directly but by a convoluted chain of starlanes. It’s very restricting in a game about the expanses of space.

Fin or Bin:

It’s a shame the humans went from Space Richard O’Brien to Generic White Space Man, but my race was always the Klackons and they look REAL cool now. It’s got all the same one-more-turn addictiveness as any good 4X game, but I’ll probably Finish this one game and then put it to bed.

Recommended To:

People have said its relative simplicity lends it well to 4X newbies. I strongly disagree- the tutorial is horrendously bad and it left me more confused than I would have been if I’d just started playing. If you’re familiar with Civ, there’s enough bleed-through that you might enjoy this too.

(Steam)

Trace Vector

Trying to convey Trace Vector in a screenshot is an impossible task, so I’ve put the trailer up instead. Let me tell you a story…

I bought this game in December of 2016, during the annual Winter Sale. I’d wanted it for a long time, mostly enamoured by the OST (and also, if you watch the trailer, it might as well just say “BB Wants To Play This Game”). I managed to play a couple of hours of it, and then I had to move to America to live without a computer for 6 months while I got married.

At the time I was very much into collecting achievements and increasing my achievement percentage which Steam so prominently displays on my profile, and the achievements for this game are hard to get. So much so that, when I finally had a real computer again, I didn’t want to play it. I knew I’d be having a bad time ramming against the same levels over and over to get the fuel cells, most of which I didn’t actually need in order to beat the game. I knew I’d end up hating Trace Vector because of it, so I didn’t even want to give myself the chance.

I came to realise that my achievement score was actually a significant roadblock in playing any of my backlog- if I didn’t enjoy a game, it’d lower my percentage, so I’d have to play it through regardless. It was a mentality that I needed to break- hence the birth of this very blog, and a shedding of my quest for achievements. I’ll still look through what achievements a game offers and if they seem fun I’ll still try to get them, but I’m allowing myself to call BS on anything I don’t want to do. I’m having a lot more fun this way!

Fin or Bin:

So, returning to Trace Vector with a new goal in mind, I’ll definitely be FInishing it. The music is superb, and I especially enjoy how it builds up as you progress through the levels. The gameplay is tough as nails but absolutely my kind of thing, and it’s telling a neat little story between levels too.

Recommended To:

If you like blisteringly fast arcade thrills, look no further. The OST is worth the purchase by itself- it’s been on my playlist since before I bought the game.

(Steam)

Super Galaxy Squadron EX Turbo

This one’s more my speed. An arcadey-style vertical STG with a staggering 17 different ships to choose from, six stages of explosions and lasers await.

This is more of a frenetic twitchy kind of STG rather than a more pattern/memory-based game like Touhou, and I typically prefer the latter. Super Galaxy Squadron does something pretty unusual in that, rather than having a lives system where one touch means death, you instead have a health bar you can recharge through the level when you take a hit. It’s an interesting way to rebalance things, since there’s no early-game stockpiling of lives to take you through the final levels- every stage is the same clean slate, and you have to get through with what you’re given.

I’m pretty good at these kind of games, so I actually managed to finish the arcade mode during my hour. I think the replay value is a lot higher for someone who would need to practice a few times before getting their 1CC, but there’s also an Endless Mode which is a really neat addition I’ve not seen another game do before.

Fin or Bin:

As stated, I already finished the main game mode, but there’s a Boss Rush mode I didn’t get chance to play during my hour. I’ll be heading back to Finish that.

Recommended To:

The ship selection might be a little overwhelming to STG newbies, but the gameplay itself is pretty simple, and the lower difficulty settings- coupled with the health system- are fairly forgiving. For veterans, there’s a slew of options that make it more difficult. It’s a good package for anyone who has an interest in STG.

(Steam)

Dysfunctional Systems

Another visual novel. I sure bought a lot of these things considering I can never convince myself to start them, huh? Just a cursory glance over my Steam backlog shows there’s another three or four waiting for their turn.

Right off the bat- the protagonist is annoying. Not necessarily a negative; she’s a fourteen year-old girl and fourteen year-olds are annoying (source: I was one). Taken in that context, her characterisation is convincingly written, but nonetheless I feel like a good 1/3 of her lines could be stripped out without really losing anything.

She and Cyrus are Mediators, who travel to paralel/alternate worlds (the game hasn’t actually fully explained this yet) in order to balance chaotic events happening in them- war, and the like. They restore order, but not necessarily in a heroic way, Cyrus’ plan in this case being to assassinate someone.

Fin or Bin:

I was feeling a little disinterested on this one right up to the point it dropped a bomb (in a sense, literally) and the tension suddenly ramped up real high. I’ll be Finishing at least one branch of the story- there are apparently two distinct endings to reach, and depending on how the first resolves I may or may not try the second one.

Recommended to:

I can’t stress enough how annoying Winter is, and you should also know that there’s a sequel in development-hell at the moment and it looks like it’ll never see the light of day. I don’t know if this one ends on a cliffhanger, but if it does, be ready to never see it resolved. If you can stomach all of that, and VNs are your thing, this one’s at a cheerful enough price-point that it’s worth a crack.

(Steam)

Day Of The Tentacle (Remaster)

Uh oh, probably going to get in trouble for this one

Some twenty years ago, my brother got a NES for Christmas, and one of the games he had was Maniac Mansion, a point-n-click adventure about a group of kids breaking into an old man’s house to steal his car and murder his hamster. (Also he’s an evil scientist who kidnapped the lead’s girlfriend.) I was definitely too young to understand it al all, but I did figure out how to get the characters to drown in the swimming pool, and that was funny.

Possible reasons for my younger self to need a good talking to aside, DotT is a sequel to Maniac Mansion featuring Bernard, the worst character from Maniac Mansion, and his two friends who weren’t in it at all, travelling through time to stop Purple Tentacle taking over the world. It’s all very humourous and cartoony, and rife with the typical off-beat solutions to puzzles that adventure games of the time are famous for.

It’s all very reminiscent of the people behind what is now known as Doublefine Productions, but… I don’t know. For some reason it doesn’t work for me in this one. It feels very similar in tone to Psychonauts which I thought was great, but DotT is missing something.

Also, just a personal opinion here, but I really dislike the art direction. It fills me with revulsion and always has for the many years I’ve known about its existence. I know that’s petty, and an opinion probably not shared by many, but this blog isn’t intended to be unbiased!

Fin or Bin:

It’s probably some kind of sacrilege to Bin one of the old LucasArts classics. I’m sure if this blog ever gets a larger following, people will find this post and hound me about it for the rest of time.

Recommended To:

You’ve likely played a Tim Schafer game before- Psychonauts, Broken Age, Brutal Legend, Grim Fandango. If you like what’s on offer in those, there’s enough of a similar direction and tone here that you should give it a try.

(Steam)

Doki Doki Literarture Club

I’ve largely managed to avoid spoilers for this title, beyond the rampant “Just Monika” spam that followed its release. I don’t have much context for what that means, but I do know that the three separate content warnings before the game loads aren’t jokes. People are legitimately freaked out by this game for reasons I didn’t encounter in the hour I played it.

The trouble with games like this (and any other medium, really), where they present themselves in a certain manner and then pull the rug out from under your feet, is that it takes time to get to The Good Bit. The part of the story where things turn from run-of-the-mill to something really special comes much later, meaning you need to enjoy what it’s presenting itself as in the first place.

‘Generic Boy Joins A Club Full Of Cute And Single Girls And Has To Pick One’ isn’t a genre that holds any interest for me. (The inverse is also true, though rarer.) I know it’s deliberately lampooning that style of game in order to set expectations, but as it stands, I’m playing… at least one hour, possibly several hours, of a game I’m not interested in, so I can get to the interesting bit later on. If I was already a fan of these sorts of games it’d definitely be worth it, but personally speaking I don’t have the endurance.

Fin or Bin:

I do really like the poetry system as a means to choose which girl’s path you end up on, it’s a lot more interesting than just choosing the dialogue option they’d obviously like best. However, even that isn’t enough to keep me interested. It’s a shame because I know everyone’s raving about this game and from what I gather it gets REALLY GOOD once the beat drops, but like a poorly-made sandwich, the good bit is in the middle of all this plain white bread I have to eat through first. I’m gonna put it in the Bin and grab a hot pocket instead.

Recommended to:

Hatoful Boyfriend did something similar, although in that one the Gotcha comes from not expecting a goofy pigeon dating sim to get that dark. If you enjoyed the twists in that tale, you might like this too. Regardless, it’s free, so give it a chance if it sounds interesting.

Touhou 16.5- Violet Detector

The latest installment of the series was released at this week’s Comiket event, and it’s another .5 game in the vein of Shoot The Bullet. Sumireko is having some kinda fever dream where she’s combatting the residents of Gensokyo while trying to take selfies featuring the bullet patterns coming her way.

Unlike the previous photography games, you actually have to beat the spellcards in the same way as any of the mainline titles- shoot down the opponent. It’s kind of a weird, not-quite-fully-baked mishmash of the two where taking photos doesn’t really matter, so it’s kind of questionable why it’s there in the first place. Taking a photo with the boss visible in the frame will do a little chunk of extra damage to them, but good luck getting close enough to actually pull that off more than once per battle.

Sumireko has another trick up her sleeve, the ability to teleport a short distance. While on paper this could open up some really cool spellcard ideas (like featured in the absolutely superb Th14.3 Impossible Spellcard), the controls to activate the teleport are so finicky and imprecise that it’s almost useless. Having to double-tap shift, which you’ll likely already be pressing in order to Focus, and then pick a direction, in a game requiring frame-perfect reactions, is baffling. Why not just map it to C and teleport the direction you’re already moving??? Troubles are compacted further when the teleport sometimes simply refuses to acknowledge the direction you’ve chosen, and Sumireko just blankly stares down the incoming barrage.

Fin or Bin:

I am a huge, huge megafan of the Touhou series, and have been for almost ten years. I don’t think I’m enjoying this one very much, but it’s a Touhou game, and I’ll be Finishing it regardless.

Recommended to:

If you’re an established fan of the series, play one of the other photo games before this one to get a feel for them done properly, then try this one. New fans should absolutely not start here.

Satellite Reign

I think I broke it…

When Humble started giving this game away a little while back, I was initially adamant that I’d stop grabbing free games just because they’re free- that is, after all, one of the biggest contributors to the Backlog I’m trying to take down. But then I looked into the game, and got excited- it’s pretty much a modern-day remake of Syndicate, a game which was (and remains) very popular, but I was too young to really understand it at the time. Couple that with a near cyberpunk aesthetic, and Satellite Reign looks very much my kind of thing.

I played it for an hour, and was… sort of on the fence for most of it. I didn’t realise it was entirely open-world (with a lot of it inaccessible without a high Hacking stat) which honestly put me off. I’d rather it had a mission structure so I didn’t have to traipse my units halfway across the city to figure out good strategic openings. It feels like a game that would benefit from being more snappy and bite-sized.

I wasn’t having a bad time, though, and towards the end of the hour I was unsure which way to call it.

Fin or Bin:

And then, right at the end of the hour, I completed a mission, but it didn’t update or unlock the next mission, and despite trying a lot of things I can’t seem to get it to move on. I’ll take that as a sign that I should stop playing this one. Into the Bin it goes, but it might come back out later.

(Steam)