deKay

Kick & Fennick (Vita): COMPLETED!

Posted on 08/03/2015 Written by deKay

This was a surprise. It looked a bit rubbish, and some of the reviews suggested it was average at best, but it’s actually a really good fun platformer, with a novel jump mechanic.

You have a gun which you can use to both shoot baddies and switches, but also use the recoil to jump and boost. The levels have walls to blast through, electricity beams to avoid (and slip through when they turn off temporarily), bounce plates, portals, conveyors, and all sorts of other gimmicks and hazards. Some of these add puzzles to the levels, others require dexterity or timing. Or both.

At the end of each chapter there’s a boss battle against a giant robot. You can’t actually harm it directly, so have to use the environment to do that instead – which is also puzzling on a couple of them.

There’s nothing in particular that the game does amazingly well, but it’s solidly put together, the controls and the recoil feel perfectly suited, and although some levels frustrate, it never gets too hard for its own good. It’s a little short, and some good ideas aren’t used enough (like the red “extra powerful” recoil), but I suppose they need to hold something back for a sequel. Maybe.

Papo & Yo (PS3): COMPLETED!

Posted on 07/03/2015 Written by deKay

I renewed my PS+ subscription and upgraded my (full) PS3 hard drive, so picked this up for a rental. Thought I’d give it a try as I’d heard good things, but had no idea what it was about or the type of game it was.

As it turned out, it was a sort of platform puzzler where the events of the game are actually some sort of dream (or something) metaphor, where the main character has what appears to be an alcoholic father who has killed someone by running them over. Or something. That’s what it seemed to me, anyway.

It’s set in what appears to be a deserted Rio de Janeiro shanty town, with chalk cogs, keys and other items that you can activate to open areas, move buildings and make other absurd things happen. Your dad is seen as a lazy, but benign monster, who you convince to move around by tempting him with coconuts, and using his fat belly as a trampoline when he falls asleep.

Sometimes, the puzzles will involve giant frogs, which you can pick up and throw against walls to get rid of them. Or let the monster eat them which will cause him to turn into a flaming demon who hunts you down and flings you round like a ragdoll. The frogs are obviously a metaphor for drink, you see.

None of the puzzles were especially difficult, but some were a bit frustrating due to the difficulty of making some of the platforming jumps. Could I not quite make the jump because I was doing it wrong, or was it that I shouldn’t be able to make the jump and I need to find a different route? It wasn’t always clear. Some platforms which appear to be reachable are actually behind an invisible wall, and twice I fell down between two walls and was unable to escape. There was a puzzle early on which stumped me, because somehow not enough coconuts had spawned, so the monster wouldn’t go to sleep. Reloading fixed it though.

Papo & Yo was a short game, clocking in at under three hours, but was interesting and arty. In many ways, it reminded me of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. It’s definitely worth a play, but you need to ignore some of the roughness and dodgy collision detection. Thankfully they don’t detract too much from the experience. Might want to bring some tissues with you, though.

Assassin’s Creed: Rogue (360): COMPLETED!

Posted on 05/03/2015 Written by deKay

Oh 360. It’s been a while. Certainly since I completed anything on you, anyway. How unloved you are these days. But, since Ubisoft failed to release Rogue on the Wii U, I was left with little choice.

And it’s a shame, because much as I hate the recent boating bits in recent Assassin’s Creed games, they’re made much more bearable (especially in the ludicrous “boat stealth” sections) by being able to use the Wii U gamepad’s massive map. In fact, on Black Flag, I would usually steer the boat entirely by looking at the map. It made it much easier and – most importantly – made the boat bits shorter as a result. Anyway.

In the latter half of the game, Shay starts to wonder if his turncoatedness was actually wise, as he started systematically wiping out his former chums (and chumette) in the Brotherhood. As a result, it was pretty obvious how things were going to turn out, but the trip to get there was enjoyable enough.

Although, in terms of the story at least, Rogue was definitely the shortest “main” Assassin’s Creed game. There’s plenty of optional filler, of course, but the end of the plot seemed to come around rather too quickly. I like what Ubi did to tie it in with Unity though, bumping off Arno’s dad (after briefly meeting Arno himself, as a child) in the final epilogue mission.

It has faults, like all Assassin’s Creed games, and it has bugs (again, like all Assassin’s Creed games), but Rogue is the best one since at least Revelations. I do really want to play Unity now. Only I’ve nothing to play it on. Hmm.

Shantae (3DS)

Posted on 28/02/2015 Written by deKay

You know when you stumble into the eShop and you’ve credit in your account and you see a game you’d been intending to get for a while but haven’t because you’ve loads of other games to play and you “accidentally” buy it? That.

Shantae is a gorgeous looking GBC platformer, with some fantastic sprites and animation layered on top of a pretty hard platformer. It’s essentially a Metroidvania, where you enter labyrinths (which have several puzzle elements) to both rescue a genie (each of whom provide you with a new power) and recover a mystical stone (protected by a boss).

So far, I’ve completed two such labyrinths, and it’s been a lot of fun. I’ve two powers, activated by dancing specific combinations of moves, so can turn into a monkey who can scale walls and an elephant who can smash through blocks.

Less fun is navigating the world between towns – it’s a long way and some of the monster you run in to are very hard to defeat unscathed. It seems you can collect warp squid to allow you to teleport from town to town, but at the moment I can’t, and things are compounded by poor signposting. I’m told where to go, but not how, meaning I can spend half an hour going in one direction only to end up in the wrong place and have to backtrack. A bit annoying.

But Shantae can shake her pixel bottom so it doesn’t really matter.

Pokémon Shuffle (3DS): COMPLETED!

Posted on 28/02/2015 Written by deKay

A few years ago, I stopped (with rare exceptions) playing games on my iPhone. The App Store had become swamped with F2P games with IAPs and other abbreviations, and even “traditional” games had been drugged with mechanisms designed to only allow play if you keep buying gold, or gems, or whatever for ridiculous prices. “Sonic had run out of jumps! Buy 10 jumps for £2.99?”. No.

And yet here is Nintendo, perhaps the last bastion of proper games, releasing a free to play match-three puzzle game, complete with all the evil in-app purchases you could ever wish for. All filled with Pokémon. Rubbish.

But, because it’s Pokémon, and Nintendo, I thought I’d give it a go. And what do you know? You can complete the game without spending a penny, without being restricted in any way (bar being unable to play for hours at a time), and it’s actually pretty good.

You know how these games work. You match three (or more) of each Pokémon, and they disappear. The Pokémon twist adds a little more depth. Each level is a fight with another Pokémon, and you get to choose which of your previously captured monsters to put up against it. Each has an affinity, so some are better at dealing damage to different types than others, and this damage is applied when you match them up. Some have Mega transformations which allow special moves that wipe out large areas of the board. You’ve a fixed number of turns for each stage, but if you defeat the monster before the counter hits zero, you get a chance at capturing it.

Sometimes the chance, measured as a percentage, is laughably low, but you can improve your chances by buying a Great Ball with coins. It’s here where the IAPs come in. To buy more moves, or Great Balls, require coins or jewels (the in game currencies). To obtain coins, you spend jewels (or win matches), and to get jewels, you spend Real Actual Money. You’re also limited to playing five stages (or attempts at stages) – you spend a third currency, hearts, each time you want to play. How do you get more hearts? IAPs. Yay.

Here’s the thing though. Hearts replenish, up to 5 at a time, by just not playing the game. You get another heart every half an hour, so if you play the game in spurts here and there, you’ll never feel the need to buy more. Every so often, and more frequently if you get lots of streetpasses, the game bungs you a heart or two anyway. Coins can be won in the game, so you never need to buy those either, and jewels? I was given about 20 for free across the course of the game, and I finished the game with 4 left. Basically, the IAPs are totally unnecessary.

The game is pretty addictive, which is clearly required if you’re Nintendo and want to make some money out of this, but if you’re like me and can be patient, you can play the game as a fun diversion a few times a day, completely for free without ever feeling restricted.

The irony is, if Nintendo had ditched IAPs and charged maybe a fiver for Pokémon Shuffle, I’d have happily given them the money and they’d have made some cash out of me. Instead, they’ve tried (and failed) to extract IAP cash from my pocket and ended up with nothing. Here endeth the lesson.