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Splatoon: still painting

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After the closure of the eShop and turning off the multiplayer servers, there was no real reason not to hack my Wii U. It’s taken a while for me to get around to it due to time constraints aligning with interest, but I’ve finally done it, using the guide at https://wiiu.hacks.guide/.

The main reason to do it was to get back the functionality that had been lost. I now once again have a populated homescreen, with Miiverse messages flying around a random selection of games. Everything seems much more lively and friendly. I can also hide all the ugly homebrew channels in a folder as well.

I have signed up with Pretendo, which meant I had to create a new primary user on the console and copy all my save games over to it, leaving my NNID adrift associated with a Dora the Explorer Mii. There’s something screwy happening with the usernames there, which I will have to sort out some day – my username on the Wii U is Xexyzxyz (since I had to choose a different name to my original NNID) but on the website it seems to just be Xexyzx. This also means that my existing folders and organisation on the homescreen needs to be redone.

But I didn’t just want to hack the Wii U so I could play with menus. I wanted to play games online again. Specifically, I want to play Splatoon. I have the third game in the series, and do occasionally play that online as well, but the Wii U entry feels a lot purer and smoother, particularly using the map on the gamepad to monitor where people are.

Everything still works, even the waiting minigame.

There aren’t that many people on the server, unfortunately – it takes a while to get a game – but it works really well considering it’s been built by hobbyists. The experience is very similar to how it used to be (with me losing most of the time). I can forsee me losing many more hours to this.

Pocket Card Jockey: varied results

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In Pocket Card Jockey, you play as a jockey who controls his horse through the medium of games of solitaire – specifically, a variant of golf solitaire – while managing stamina, steering through the pack, and deciding when to use a boost on the final stretch. It is a wonderfully eclectic collection of game types, and it can feel as if nothing is going right as you run out of draw cards, collide with other horses, and miss out on the blue fire boosts on the course – or, conversely, as your horse hits 100% enthusiasm coming onto the final straight with only two horses ahead, you can feel on top of the world. It’s pretty stressful.

The individual races are part of a wider game was well, with you training up a horse (owned by a variety of odd entrepreneurs) through the racing season for two years, during the ages of 2 and 3, before moving that horse to a more stable game mode where stakes are higher but there are fewer powerups. Once that horse has lost a few races in a row, it’s retired to the farm – where you can pair it with another of the opposite sex to try and get a junior who builds on the speed and stamina the two parents were trained with. At any time you can start a new training regime for a new horse.

I realise that most of these screenshots won’t mean anything to someone who hasn’t played the game.

You can buy upgrades which last for a race, but these can be horrendously expensive. At the start of the race you have an initial game where you have to uncover the largest number of start dots as quickly as possible. At the end of the race you steer the horse up and down to avoid getting blocked in, and use up the stamina cards you have left at the right times. There’s a huge amount in the game, and yet it still feels quite simple.

Robocop: initially like a dalek

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Robocop on the CPC is a great game. Responsive, colourful, fast, full of action. It’s also pretty difficult, and relies on you memorising every enemy pattern throughout its levels.

The majority of the game is a side-scrolling platformer. Enemies include standard gun holders (walking along or appearing at windows above), chainsaw users, and flying kick specialists. The latter are pretty easy; as soon as they appear at the side of the screen, you can duck down and they will jump over you when they reach you anyway. Others need to be hit in a certain pattern at certain times to avoid taking damage; there are limited health recharge powerups, and only three lives for the whole game, so preserving health is important. On the second scrolling level (the third overall) there are bikes that you need to crouch down and shoot as soon as they appear, and even then it’s a toss up as to whether they’ll be destroyed before they hit you. I can get to the end of the third level now without losing a life, but only just.

The second mission is a shootout, where you need to hit a kidnapper without hitting the hostage he’s hiding behind. The fourth mission is a photofit game where you need to match up parts of a face. The fifth mission is another side-on platformer, but now you can walk up stairs and the screen scrolls vertically as well as horizontally. I don’t yet know about levels past this, because the enemies keep killing me as I walk up stairs.

Robots are very slow at walking up stairs.

The game is similar to the spectrum version but 34,218% more colourful.

I must admit it took me a while to even know I could walk up the stairs. In the first couple of scrolling sections, you can’t, even though the stairs look exactly the same as they do in the factory level. To walk up stairs you need to be in the correct spot and then press diagonally up, meaning that you are pretty vulnerable to enemies who aren’t standing obligingly at the top.

So it has some foibles, but it’s also a really fun game. I think I have found an exploit on the first and third level, though. The game can only cope with five sprites at a time, meaning that if you can shepherd four enemies along with you, no others will appear. Most enemies will come in from one side, shoot at you or hit you with a chainsaw, and then walk back to the side; they’ll then come back in to get you again. If instead you just walk along behind them, they’ll carry on walking away from you all the way to the end of the level. If four of the flying kick people are clustering you, you can just keep on ducking their attacks and walking along when they’re off screen.

Zuma: still struggling

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I can’t remember when I first played Zuma, but suffice to say it was in the early days of the Xbox 360. In the years since then, I have completed five of the twelve levels.

I don’t know why I find it so hard. Playing it yesterday I think I understood some of the mechanics better than I had before – the ways in which higher points can give you a quicker completion with balls stopping spawning earlier, and how to best use explosions and other power-ups. I also remembered to swap the balls I was firing sometimes, trying to set up combos. And yet I still failed at level 6-4, losing all three lives.

Kieron is unfeasibly good.

Maybe one day I’ll get to level 7. I have Zuma’s Revenge sitting mockingly on my Xbox, ready to be played when the first game is completed.

Chase HQ: completed!

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Everyone remembers the synthesised speech of “Let’s go, Mr Driver!”, but in fact there are other sayings in different levels; the one that I noticed as I played through today was “Giddy up, boy!”. I wonder how many people have heard the full set.

Chase HQ on the CPC is one of the best 8-bit computer arcade conversions of all time. Comparing it to the arcade machine there are obvious differences – smaller sprites, digital controls, less accurate handling and lower framerate – but given the constraints of the hardware the game plays amazingly well. I remember when we first bought the game, on disk, from the basement of Hamleys in London – I’d read the review in Amstrad Action and knew it was meant to be good, but when we got home and I played it for the first time it was better than I could imagine. So colourful, so fast, and speech as well. Amazing.

There’s not so much amazement nowadays, since we can, if we want, play the actual arcade game emulated on a computer, and driving games like Need for Speed Most Wanted have provide a more coherent ramming-the-baddies experience. Nostalgia is still a powerful thing, though.

Getting the game to run wasn’t easy. I had a CPC core in RetroArch, and Caprice32 as a standalone emulator. The latter crashed immediately on startup. The former worked fine, until I loaded the game in – and found that it was a pre-hacked disk file which offered me the option of infinite time and infinite turbos. I didn’t want these, so pressed “N” … and found that the keyboard didn’t work. To be exact, some of the keys didn’t work – they’re mapped to RetroArch shortcuts – and some did. I could get into the game by choosing “O” (for ‘oui’) and the “W” key seemed to be mapped to RETURN. Once in game I could use a joypad, or the cursor keys (with X changing gears and A operating the turbo). The joypad was OK apart from the fact that the accelerator was mapped to UP on the d-pad, which got a bit painful after a while.

I committed to only using three turbos per stage, and roughly timed 60 seconds to get to the criminal and then another 60 seconds to take them out. I think I just about managed it, but it’s hard to be sure.

Who puts massive columns at the side of the road anyway?

The game is still great, if a little samey after you’ve completed the first few levels. There are five in total, and the only thing that seems to change is traffic density and the length of the stage – meaning the last level is pretty tricky to complete. Well, complete in the right time limit anyway. I’ll try to find an unhacked ROM and try that one out next time.