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The Fairyland Story (Evercade): COMPLETED!

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This is one of the games on the recent Taito cartridge for the Evercade. I’m not 100% on the timings, but it feels very much like a precursor to Bubble Bobble – loads of single screen platforming, baddies to destroy, a particularly nasty baddie that appears if you take too long, and so on. It isn’t anywhere near as much fun as Bubble Bobble though.

The main issue I had is that often, especially on later levels, some of the baddies are really difficult to reach, especially without accidentally colliding with them and dying. There’s a level right near the end – level 95, I think – where the screen is sort of split in two and if you’re playing single player (like I was) then you can’t physically get from the left side of the screen to the right side. I can demonstrate with this screenshot from StrategyWiki:

You’re the witchy looking woman in red. The issue is that there’s no way to do a “small” jump to get over the four blocks at the bottom without jumping too high and ending up on the platform above. Except… there is. Thanks to a web search and a very old post on GameFAQs, I found that if you tap jump and then immediately tap right, then providing you’re standing in the right place, you can do a tiny jump. Get the timings or length of tap wrong and you don’t, so even if you know how it’s still nearly impossible. Literally nowhere in the game does it say this either directly or indirectly. Nowhere else in the game is it necessary. How arcade gamers in the 1980s without GameFAQs managed this I have no idea.

You can also see in that screenshot that neither of the baddies are actually reachable even if you do this. You have to coax them out by climbing higher up the screen than them. Which is a pain.

So, it’s not a great game. I completed it mainly because I’d started so I had to finish, but there are far better single screen arcade games like this out there. Still, if it wasn’t for the mistakes of The Fairyland Story maybe we wouldn’t have Bubble Bobble.

Picross S Namco Legendary Edition (Switch): COMPLETED!

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It’s been a while since I last completed a Picross game, but I’ve actually been playing this one off and on for six months or more. It is, as they always are, more of the same – a polished, Jupiter developed, game of Picross with loads of puzzles.

The difference this time, however, is that it’s Namco themed. Specifically, 8-bit Namco games from the 1980s. Pixel representations of the likes of Dig Dug, The Tower of Druaga, Pac-Man, Rally-X, Mappy, Xevious and several Japanese titles I’ve never heard of, all in Picross puzzle form. Excellent.

Aside from the music. I mean, I love the Mappy theme tune as much as anyone, but the same 8 seconds over it repeating overandoverandoverandover for a 45 minute puzzle? Nah mate, that got turned down fast.

Teddison Inc (Playdate): COMPLETED!

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Teddison Inc is a cookie-clicker type numbers-go-up game. You’re a bear (for no explained reason, except – presumably – to enable the pun in the title) and you’d discovered you can use a bike to generate electricity. So you crank the Playdate and the number of watts goes up.

Then you can spend these watts to buy automations so you no longer have to crank. And more cyclists. And then better electricity generators like solar farms and wind turbines, as well as upgrades like better bike cranks to make existing generators more efficient. Soon you’re generating kilowatts, megawatts, and so on as the number go ever higher.

Unlike some of these clicker games where you have to leave them running overnight to get enough currency to progress, the whole game here is doable in a single sitting of about an hour. Which feels a bit short, but it’s fine. Some irony in a game about generating power using less power to play than other games in the same genre, I suppose.

Holy Potatoes! We’re In Space?! (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Maybe I should have looked up the game before playing, but I naïvely assumed that this follow-up to Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop?! would be more of the same only instead of the sort of fantasy setting of that game, I’d be creating weapons in a more sci-fi environment. Which, I suppose, you do. But actually, it’s a turn based RPG.

Whereas in Weapon Shop you just made weapons for other spuds, here you’re actually pilot of a spaceship and you travel to planets and fight baddies in other space ships. You have a crew (who you can recruit, train and “upgrade”), you have up to four weapons slots on your ship, and you fight in a very JRPG way Only in space with spaceships.

Yes, you create weapons, but that’s nowhere near as in-depth as it was before. So was I disappointed? I was. Very. But only for a while because once I got over the fact it was a totally different game (albeit with at least one connection to Weapon Shop), I really got in to the way it all worked and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Except for one thing.

As part of the plot, you’re being constantly hounded by an evil organisation. You warp to a solar system, then have to travel round the planets, complete some tasks, and then warp out before so many “sols”, the unit of time here, run out and you’re caught. This mechanic totally ruins the game for me. You’re always short of time and every time you fly to a planet, or explore one, or return to the “hub” in the system to refuel, repair your ship or buy resources, you use up sols and there just doesn’t seem to be enough. You go into battles feeling unprepared because you’ve gambled that you might waste too many sols recuperating after the previous one, and you never get a chance to properly explore each region of space as there simply isn’t time to do it. Luckily, you can turn “limited sols” off, so I did. Much better.

That aside, it’s a nice little game with some silly characters and homages to, well, everything, and a really good battle system with action points and stuff.

Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop?! (Switch): COMPLETED!

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89p? Well why not. The two other Holy Potatoes games were also 89p each, so I got them as well. Yes, I know I have them on Steam already. Shut up. You’re not my mum.

I’d played a little bit of this before and seem to remember it’s one of those management type games, like the Kairosoft ones, only you’re potatoes and you run a weapon shop. I mean, you could have discerned much of that from the title of the game, but I was right. That’s exactly what it is.

You make weapons, sell them to heroes, they pay you depending on how well you made it and how close to their preferred weapon type or attributes it is, and you use that money to hire and train staff, buy materials, and purchase shop upgrades and holidays for your overworked tubers. As you advance, you open new areas and have more people to please, weapons to make and so on.

it’s pretty addictive, if a little clunky (it’s clearly designed for a mouse driven system and joypad controls aren’t great), but definitely worth 89p.