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Bomber Crew: flying low

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This has sat on my Xbox for ages, after I saw Matt playing it once on a stream, and I have finally got around to playing it. It takes cues from FTL, I think, but is structured around shorter missions and a roguelike framework where you can build up your crew and plane capabilities but at any point can lose them and restart. You control the seven members of your plane crew: setting navigation points; tagging enemies for the gunners to shoot at; getting the engineer to run around fixing parts of the plane which have malfunctioned or been shot to pieces; deploying bombs or taking recon photos.

It’s a constant juggle to make sure that the guns have ammo, there’s someone available to fire forwards while the bombardier is crawling into his space and opening the doors, and seven hundred other things are ongoing. The first few missions are relatively easy – drop some supplies to a downed Spitfire pilot with a few enemies buzzing around, or bomb some installations near the coast, all of which can be done at low level – but I’ve now progressed to the point where the installations I am trying to attack are surrounded by flak artillery, so I have to fly at a higher level, meaning my crew need thermal wear and oxygen supplies … oh, and I have to peer through clouds to see the bombing targets. In addition, missions are interrupted by other emergencies – needing to shoot down a V2 rocket, a battle with a German ace – meaning that it’s increasingly difficult to get home safe.

There are two main views – exterior and interior – and I always seem to be in the wrong one

It’s the difficulty and excitement that has kept my interest up. Completing missions and getting home safely is difficult, and there have been multiple time when my plane has limped home on two engines, with my engineer frantically putting out fires and my radio operator administering first aid to a gunner who is lying on the floor bleeding. I am slightly cheating at the game in that every time it looks as if I’m going to crash and burn, I’m quitting the game and restarting missions, rather than just accepting defeat and starting afresh with a new crew – but I’ve made peace with that, in that it means I’m actually enjoying it rather than being afraid to actually take off. The financial constraints feel artificial anyway – I’m pretty sure that in WWII the bomber crews weren’t charged to upgrade their engines based on them earning money in previous missions.

Yoku’s Island Express: completed!

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I have been playing Yoku on and off for a couple of years, on both the Switch and the Xbox One, and while I have a great time while playing it it’s not something I have ever been urged to continue. Whenever I’ve turned a console on, something else has appealed more. Then, on a 13-hour flight to Malaysia, the friendly pinball icon shone brightly, and I played through the rest of the game.

Yoku is a pinball platform adventure game. There’s no jump button; instead you play as an ant who is pushing around a big white ball, which can be fired off pinball flippers and bumpers to get to new areas. Colleting fruit allows new flippers to be unlocked, and you frequently find defined arenas in which you must carry out specific tasks such as unlocking a new door, or knocking out bungs from water spouts, or closing hatches to allow mined materials to pass through. You must go back and forth across the world, talking to people and taking things to them, trying to discover about the enemy who has attacked the island’s gods.

The locations are varied and distinct, despite being on a single island.

Maybe it was this going back and forth which put me off the game a little; the traversal feels just a little slow, with Yoku ambling along and then various pinball routes feeling as if they just get in the way. There are some abilities that are unlocked, including the ability to diver under the water, and to grab hold of purple flowers and swing around them, and occasionally I would spend a significant time trying to get past a certain blockage not realising I needed another ability.

And yet, when I played it for a long period, particularly with few other distractions, it really clicked. Opening the beeline – a fast travel network around the island – helped, but more than anything it was familiarity with the locations and a memory of how to get through them quickly. I delivered some overdue parcels, I helped rescue a spiderling, I found lots of little wicker people (but not enough to make a giant egg hatch). And I played through the story, collecting up the elders of the island, and then helping with the ceremony to cure the massive god in the background. A big plot twist later, I defeated the final boss, and the credits rolled.

Yes, you can carry on playing after the credits …

There are a few things that remain outstanding – there was a large icicle above a lake which I couldn’t break (with someone nearby hinting I needed someone to help me), I’ve not filled up all mailboxes around the island yet. I might return to this on the Xbox and complete it there, with all the side quests as well. It was a lovely game.

Driver: driving through roadblocks

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The tutorial level of Driver is infamous for being an overly restrictive gateway, preventing many people from ever accessing the main game. I learnt about this many years after the game was released, and indeed many years after I’d played it. I can’t recall if I found the tutorial difficult; I just recall that I never managed to complete the final level, which I believe was about escorting the president somewhere.

Anyway. I discovered that I have Driver installed on my Playstation 3, yet I hadn’t played it. It seemed an ideal thing to try. I loaded the game up, somewhat trepidatiously, and started driving around the car park.

It took me four attempts. The first failure was on the slalom, which I quickly realised was because you have to come back on yourself and get around to your starting point. The second and third failures were on the brake check, which I think wasn’t marked off because I wasn’t going fast enough. Other than that, it was pretty simple.

Moving onto the game, and things became even easier on the first mission, with a single police car giving me chase towards the end of my journey. The second mission, delivering a tainted car for dismantling, was more difficult, with the police setting up a roadblock on one of the major roads. Luckily I skipped straight through that, and it caught the police cars which were chasing me instead.

It’s not easy to capture exciting pictures of this game.

It looks pretty basic nowadays, and the comparisons to GTA3 don’t do it any favours. At its heart, though, this is a fun game which I’ll probably play more of, given its convenience.

Road Rash: it’s a big game

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I saw Road Rash for the Playstation on the shelf at CEX, which seemed an ideal opportunity to try out the last of the sprite scaler games in the series (using the backwards-compatible PS3 for a decent output). Having previously played, and completed, Road Rash, Road Rash II, and Road Rash 3 (yes, the numbering scheme is annoying) on the Mega Drive, I’d never experienced the other game in the series – confusingly called Road Rash, and released on the 3DO and later the Playstation and Saturn. Even more confusingly, this was released before Road Rash 3, making this the third game and the Mega Drive RR3 the fourth game.

Road Rash for the 32-bit consoles is certainly a step up in graphics from Road Rash II, with a combination of colourful opponents, smoother scaling for roadside (and on-road) obstacles, and the use of textured polygons for buildings. It runs at a faster pace, and feels a lot more responsive while riding the bike, although there remains a bit of a lag when hitting the punch button. It is still a lot of fun, but there are a few things which feel a little off – maybe because the 16-bit games are so ingrained in me.

First, while the graphics are certainly better, they’re nowhere near what the Playstation is capable of. This is probably a result of the game’s origins on the 3DO (and, apparently, the Mega CD). What is more odd is the variety of art styles throughout. The in-game graphics appear to be higher resolution pixel art, looking much better than the digitised riders in Road Rash 3. These compare well to the grainy pink-tinged videos shown before and after races. Both these are preferably to the awful caricatured cartoons used to illustrate menus and represent the other riders.

The videos have some of the worst acting committed to film

Second, there are some elements of the game which have been changed for the worse since RRII. One of the staples of the series is the small selection of riders who will catch up to you throughout the race. In the Mega Drive games there are typically three groups of riders – those in places 10-15, those in places 4-9, and those in places 1-3 – which are roughly grouped throughout the stage. As you make your way past each group, you then have a break where one of the overtaken riders comes back and pulls up beside you, trying to knock you off – giving you an opportunity to punch them back, take their weapon, or push them over. That doesn’t happen here; no riders caught back up with me after being overtaken unless I crashed, and as a result I never actually knocked anyone off their bike.

The weapons are treated differently. I seem to have started with a baseball bat, and as a result (and because of other riders not travelling alongside me) I can’t access any other weapons – I don’t even know if it’s possible to steal them. The baseball bat doesn’t seem to do a lot of damage at all, but since I never hit anyone more than once it’s academic anyway.

Third, the menus are really badly designed. There’s a huge lag between selecting something and the menu changing, and the menu tree is needlessly confusing. There are two modes you can choose from at the start of the game – Thrash and Big Game – although it seems as if you can change between them through the options menu at any point. Thrash is effectively a quick race, with no progression saved, although it does seem to keep track of which races you’ve qualified in. Big Game is the main mode where you must earn money and qualify to be able to buy better bikes to compete at higher levels. More focus is placed on Thrash at the start of the game, and then the options menus list options not available in that mode.

Those are all relatively minor complaints, and I’m pleased I got hold of this. I’m halfway through the second level now, having just got a new bike, and the police have finally properly turned up. Combined with denser traffic and narrower roads, this makes some stages a bit more of a challenge.

Broken Sword – Shadow of the Templars: completed!

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I went to Syria, spent some time faffing around in the bar’s toilets, travelled up to the mountain shaped like a bull’s head, found a hidden cave with a dead body and a lens in it, went to Spain and faffed around in a mausoleum for a bit until I found something there that nobody else had seen for years, buried in a candle. I went back to the church in Paris and reassembled a telescope that showed me part of a stained glass window, went to an archaeological dig which had a funny picture on the floor which was resolved by putting a certain-shaped chalice on the floor, went back to Spain and uncovered the mystery of the missing children, got on a train to Scotland and narrowly avoided being shot, and then ended up in the ruins of a church.

Compared to the start of the game, the end seems to be a bit too frantic, travelling all over Europe (and the Middle East) with relatively little to do at each location. Maybe I was playing this too intensively, but I felt increasingly restless with the improbability of some of the leaps of logic the game was guiding me through, and felt there was an unneeded sense of urgency to the last part of the story. The very end was more abrupt than I remember, and as a result pretty unsatisfying.

The locations were varied, at least.

My aim was to play through all the Broken Sword games, with the stories fresh in my mind, but I may have a little break before moving to the second.