deKay

Yooka-Laylee (Switch): COMPLETED!

Posted on 30/05/2019 Written by deKay

Yooka-Laylee, or Yooka hyphen hyphen Laylee if we are to take the logo as canon, is – in case you’re not aware – the most Banjo-Kazooie game since Banjo-Kazooie. This is, of course, completely intentional and the entire point of the game’s Kickstarter campaign. It’s also the reason I (eventually) bought it.

Many people have slated Yooka-Laylee for a number of reasons. It’s a relic of a past age of collect-em-up 3D platformers. It’s rather too close to the source material. It suffers from weird glitches and framerate issues. It’s just not very good. To all of these I mostly agree, except the last one. Because it’s very good.

This puzzle room took me ages to figure out. Hint: look at the floor tiles.

OK, so it isn’t as good as Banjo-Kazooie. But it is almost as much fun and certainly much more accessible. It looks and sounds how you remember that game did rather than actually how that game did. All the characters have Rare-Eyes. Everyone speaks in that grating nonsensetalk way. The music! Oh my, the glorious music. The casino level in particular is incredible, but more than just the compositions, it’s the way – like the older games – as you move around the levels the music changes with you. It becomes more sinister, more happy, more… dirty, depending where you go. It’s The Best Music.

But we don’t usually play games for the music (OutRun excepted). Thankfully, Yooka-Laylee is great other than that. Big worlds (that can be made bigger), funny characters and dialogue, and tough but fair challenges to get Pagies – the main collectable. I say main because this is Rare^H^H^H^HPlaytonic we’re talking about – there’s Pagies, quills, coins, tokens, ghosts, and all sorts to pick up.

The freedom to the levels is clever too. You don’t have to 100% each to move on, and you can expand each in any order providing you have enough Pagies to do so. I was a little worried it was possible to do stuff out of order in such a way you were locked out of Pagies for progression, but it seems not. With 140 of these things in total (and 100, how many I got) needed to complete the game, it isn’t a short task either.

So, if you were a fan of Banjo-Kazooie, you need to get this. Don’t expect everything to have been 100% updated for the modern gamer, but be pleasantly surprised that it isn’t as old-hat as you were expecting.

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Yoshi’s Crafted World (Switch): COMPLETED!

Posted on 26/05/2019 Written by deKay

One of the (few) complaints I’ve seen people level at Yoshi’s Crafted World is that it is too easy. That none of the levels are a challenge. That the bosses are all a breeze to take down. Indeed, I’ve reached the end and beaten the final boss and I’ve barely a scratch. But that’s not the point.

Like previous Yoshi games, it’s easy for anyone to “complete”. To get all the secrets – all the flowers, red coins, hidden souvenirs, finish each level with full health, find all the Poochies on the flip side, finish the extra levels unlocked after the final boss – to get all of that, requires a heroic effort.

I’ve not given this game such an effort yet. But I did enjoy my path to the end. I tried to 100% it on the way but after a couple of levels where I didn’t on my first try I thought I’d leave it and come back. It’s a beautiful looking game, and it does that great Nintendo thing of being crammed with a million different brilliant ideas (in most graphics and gameplay), rarely to ever re-use them. You can imagine an entire game based around the Rhinono level or the creepy teddies with axes level or the duelling boats level or the solar powered racers level, but here Nintendo throw it at you then discard it immediately. How do they come up with so many ideas?

Judging from some of the requirements to get 100% I’m not sure I’ll ever make it, but I’ll certainly try for a higher percentage than I’m currently at!

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Golden Axe II (Switch): COMPLETED!

Posted on 12/05/2019 Written by deKay

I was pretty sure that Golden Axe II was a better game than Golden Axe I. And I’d remembered correctly – as it is. But it’s still almost exactly the same game only with more pink and purple, a better (for Gilius at least – I only ever play as him) special attack.

Both “tricks” from the previous game still happen here, and for this one Sega Mega Drive Classics actually has an achievement for doing it enough times:

A hole new world

The other trick is the “running headbutt” one, and that’s still alive and well here too. Some of the baddies have evolved to make it a little harder – the giant dog things with maces, for example, now try to Tiger Knee you mid-dash. I also found a new trick which I don’t think worked before:

Mmm, pink

The bosses were also quite a bit easier than the original game, especially the final boss who rarely actually hits you. The big headless knights can’t be beaten like their headed counterparts (headbutt or jump-slash), but if you walk diagonally into them you can axe them before they attack so they’re actually easier to dispatch.

Graphically, the game seems better looking but the giant turtle and eagle based levels are replaced with just normal paths and caves, and the previously mentioned pink and purple enemies are a bit garish. The music, as ever, is great though.

Fire in the disco
Magic frogs
Rock on, doggy
More pink

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Golden Axe (Switch): COMPLETED!

Posted on 06/05/2019 Written by deKay

Golden Axe is not a good game. It’s a clunky, short, repetitive arcade game with some stupid AI and just isn’t fun.

Take this “trick” for example, where you beat baddies by them jumping to their doom:

Or this easy way to fight one or two baddies:

Stupid. But I completed it anyway.

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The Mystery Of Woolley Mountain (Switch): COMPLETED!

Posted on 05/05/2019 Written by deKay

I’d never heard of this point-and-click adventure game but it seems it was a Kickstarter project a while back. Looking at the credits, now I’ve finished it, there are a number of high profile backers and a fair few people I know or follow on Twitter, so I’m surprised I’d not seen it mentioned before now. Anyway, the lovely @IndieGamerChick gave me a copy via her IndieSelect initiative earlier in the week so here’s my Contactually Obliged Comments. I mean, I would have talked about it anyway because that’s the point of this blog but there you go.

First off, before I even get into the game properly, I want to get some negative stuff out of the way. I’ve already had most of these comments picked up on by the devs and there’s a patch coming soon (and a workaround available now) to fix the main one, so I’m not going to dwell on most of them. The main problem is a game-breaking bug where you’re unable to move. I’m assuming it’s intermittent, or caused only by a specific but unnecessary sequence of events because otherwise there’s no way this would have passed testing.

A second issue isn’t so serious but jarred. All the dialogue is spoken, but the quality of the voice acting isn’t… well, it’s not great for some of the time. I can see from the credits it’s probably because they’re not voice actors, but the main issue is that lines of dialogue that follow each other were clearly not always recorded together, so the flow from sentence to sentence feels off. That said, well done for the range of accents from the prim to the silly. Also on the voices – there’s a lot of chat. Sometimes, too much. It doesn’t seem to be as much of a problem nearer the end of the game but I don’t know if that’s because it was cut back or I just got used to it.

Finally, the graphics and animation. There’s something a bit “Flash game” about the sprites and how they move and scale, and it just doesn’t work for me.

Problems over, what is good about The Mystery of Woolley Mountain will partly depend on whether or not you were a geeky kid in the UK in the 1980s. There are references to films, TV and – of course – games from that era coming out of your ears. Some feel a little forced (Roland Ropeman listing all his collectables, for example) but many are incidental (like the Jamie and his Magic Torch poster, or The Adventure Game area). You don’t need to “get” these references to complete, or even enjoy, the game, but if you do it adds a lot to the experience.

As a point-and-click game the quality of the puzzles make or break it. Some games suffer from having too many obscure solutions where items are used in such an abstract way you wonder how you were supposed to figure it out at all, and descend into “use everything on everything” just to progress. That, thankfully, doesn’t happen much here, with plenty of hints or nudges in the right direction. The few times it does come up, it’s helped by being able to press a button to highlight which items on the screen are interact-able – it’s harder to miss items that you might consider just part of the scenery that way. The puzzles themselves are pretty varied, with some requiring you to combine items, some requiring you to work out letter or colour combinations, and others where you have to find specific items for characters.

If you ignore the incorrect aspect ratio and palette, this is a Spectrum.

I would go into the plot but it’s not really necessary to tell you more than it’s about a bunch of odd chaps on a submarine who have to rescue one of their own, and a load of kids, from a witch. There’s a robot, time travel, monsters, a pub and a horde of strange characters with puzzle-exploitable foibles to interact with along the way.

The Mystery of Woolley Mountain is not the best game in the genre you will play, and it’s very rough edged and quirky – and not always in the good way. But it’s funny, it’s not too difficult, and it’s well worth a few quid especially if you’re a fan of this sort of game. Especially if you too were a Spectrum owning 80s geek.