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Minecraft: Story Mode – Episode 1 (PS4): COMPLETED!

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Minecraft: Story Mode is another of those games I bought in a PSN sale at some forgotten point in the past. Which I then played for half an hour and then didn’t again. But now I did. Done. Have did.

Unlike most 12 year olds, I have no interest in Minecraft. Certainly, I’ve played it to a tiny degree, but it’s all too blocky and tedious for me to find any real fun it it. Aside from dropping TNT all over the place, of course. As a result, I came to this game solely from enjoying Telltale’s other adventure games, hoping my lack of Minecraft knowledge wouldn’t hinder me.

In this first episode, it hasn’t, really. There’s a lot of “lore”, but it’s mostly irrelevant to how you actually play. You have to craft stuff, but you’re literally told how, and essentially given all the ingredients. Perhaps you have to solve a puzzle to get something, but that’s it. So far, those puzzles haven’t been any more difficult than “flip this switch”, so perhaps “puzzle” isn’t the right word.

Unlike most other Telltale adventures, there’s some combat. This combat is little more than a QTE, however, but then there’s a million other QTEs that appear too. In fact, there are more QTEs that actual puzzle interaction, so the game feels more Dragon’s Lair and less Sam & Max. Not a good thing, in my opinion.

Still, there’s a good story to follow, right? Um. Maybe? It’s that lore issue. Some stuff about a witherstorm and traveling through “the Nether” and honestly? I have no idea. There are choices to be made with the characters but they don’t seem to make a lot of difference to how things play out.

Hopefully things will improve in later episodes. This one did seem to just be the setup – bad guy unleashes really bad thing, historical heroes need to be found, some temple “base” of said heroes is reached, and so on. Thing is, the game has been a combination of too-simple puzzles and too-rubbish QTEs so far, and I can’t really see them changing the mechanics.

The post Minecraft: Story Mode – Episode 1 (PS4): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.

Murder Dog IV: Trial of the Murder Dog (PC): COMPLETED!

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Imagine if Phoenix Wright consisted only of the courtroom bits. And the graphics were all photos of plasticine and paper characters. And Phoenix Wright was a murder dog who had murdered thousands of people. And you can murder the jurors during the trial. That’s Murder Dog IV: Trial of the Murder Dog.

No, I don’t know if there were three previous games.

The aim of the game is to get Murder Dog acquitted of his obvious crimes. He is defending himself, and also appears to be narrating the game at the same time, so it’s a little unusual to follow. He can examine and present evidence, or destroy it. He can question witnesses, go on a killing spree, and lie through his teeth. It also appears that Murder Dog used to be a police dog whose job it was to murder people. Bad people, presumably.

I played through it twice (it’s very short). I was executed the first time, and had my conviction overturned the second time. I didn’t get away scot-free that time though, as I was jailed for 5 years on a lesser charge of tampering with evidence or something.

‘Tis a silly game.

The post Murder Dog IV: Trial of the Murder Dog (PC): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.

Nekopara Vol. 0 (PC): COMPLETED!

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What. The. Hell.

Nekopara is a barely interactive “story” about a load of cat girls and the mundane things they get up to while their master is out of the house. Such incredible events such as making lunch! And cleaning!

There’s supposed titillation when it’s bath time, but it’s just awkward and creepy. Maybe that’s the point.

I did get all the achievements though, with most of them being for petting the catgirls. That’s pretty much the only interaction this “game” has. Should I bother with Nekopara Vol. 1, which I also have?

The post Nekopara Vol. 0 (PC): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.

Unravel (PS4): COMPLETED!

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Unravel was bought about a year ago, but after playing the first level, I didn’t play it again. I’d enjoyed it, but as is so often the case, something else came along immediately and I forgot all about it, until the other day.

I picked up where I left off, and after just a few hours (not all in one sitting), it was all over.

The story follows, erm, I’m not entirely sure. A little yarn man who revisits the life a man and woman as they gradually age, by entering photos of places they’d been. As he navigates each level, filled with minor platforming and mostly simple puzzles, he slowly unravels himself. Because he’s made of wool, see – and that’s the name of the game. Checkpoints allow you to “refill” your wool, but care needs to be taken you choose the correct route – sometimes untying knots you’ve made to release some slack – or you won’t reach!

Unravel

All of the levels look beautiful. Genuinely photorealistic fore- and backgrounds, coupled with gorgeous woollyman animation and great environmental and lighting effects combine to create one of the best looking games ever. One of the snowy areas (complete with a pine cone you roll into a snowball) being perhaps the pinnacle.

It’s short, clever, gorgeous and – perhaps a spoiler – sad, but I loved it from start to finish.

The post Unravel (PS4): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.

Games Museum content update

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Whenever I buy one of those humongous Humble Bundles I sometimes think: At some point, I’ve got to add all these to my game museum database and that is going to be a right old pain in the backside.

And you know what? It was.

But, I’ve done it. I’ve also added everything else I’ve bought in the last six months or so, including all the stuff for my Nintendo Switch (which means two new platforms!), bringing the total number of games listed to 2831. I’ve also fixed some errors in the database that I’d noticed – a couple of Xbox Live games were listed as disc based, a handful of spelling mistakes, and some transposition gaffes.

More than all this, though, is that I’ve completely remade all the game museum pages from scratch! This actually happened more than six months ago, but I’ve been tweaking it since. Instead of being a PHP bodge inside a slightly broken WordPress theme shell, it’s all written with the Bootstrap framework. It’s quite bare looking, but I like that. Importantly, it’s really very fast now, works properly on mobile devices, and a lot easier to work with and make changes to. One such change, is the box art thumbnail preview on the main index page.

There’s ajax and jQuery and all sorts going on now. It’s all very swish. Oh, and I’ve had to fix it all already because I hadn’t realised that upgrading to PHP7 would break all the SQL calls. Sigh.

Anyway, go and take a look here.