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A Building Full of Cats: up on the roof

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I like cats. I like Little Kitty Big City, I like Pix the Cat, I even liked Blinx. If I like games with a few cats in, then I am almost certain to love games with hundreds of cats in, right?

In this case, yes. A Building Full of Cats is a hidden object game where the objects are cats. Lots of cats. Each floor of the building has fifty cats in plain sight, and some (I think ten) hidden in cupboards, behind curtains, and so on. There are two rooms per floor, including a bathroom, meaning that you can’t see everything at once, and there’s one cat who moves when you click on them, until you find their final hiding place. When you start a level, there are a great many cats who are easily visible, but by the time you get to the last few you’re searching for a couple of ears sticking out of a vase or similar.

The monochrome art style makes the cats pop out once you click on them.

I’ve completed floors 1 and 2, and also the roof off the top of floor 5. I find it a very relaxing game, so am saving other floors when I need to destress.

I’ve actually played and completed another game by the same people, Hidden Cats in London. I mainly started that because I needed the trophies for one of the TrueTrophies events a while ago, but it was just as charming as A Building Full. I see there are others set in Paris and other cities, so I may need to investigate those in future.

Lonely Mountains Downhill: feeling stylish

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One of the things I really appreciate in a game is if it makes me look good, full of style, skilled in a way that I’m not in real life. Elaborate swordplay leading to combination hits; parkour across a cityscape; flying through buildings and structures with no effort and no fear. Many games make me feel stylish – or maybe the correct word is cool? – but there’s something about Lonely Mountains Downhill which excels in this aspect.

It seems an unlikely match. Mountain biking is hardly the most graceful of sports, with constant bumps and rattles; the game isn’t effortless either, with me constantly feeling just a tiny bit out of control. Nothing illustrates this better than the Free Rider mode of each mountain, which loses all checkpoints and tasks you with getting to the end without crashing; I’m managed to do this on just two courses. By the end of the course I was almost shaking with nerves, so much so that on one attempt, with just a couple of corners to go, I just cycled into a tree.

Not stylish at all, right? But the feeling when you get through a checkpoint, when you successfully land a jump off a cliff onto a sloped stone below, when you barrel down a steep hill and turn sharply at the bottom to meet the longer path – it’s exhilarating, and makes you feel that you can do anything.

Oddly enough I don’t get the same feeling from Lonely Mountains Snow Riders. Maybe it’s because that is a bit easier to control (skis are less unwieldy than a bike) so I don’t feel like I’ve beaten the odds every time I complete a section.

I’ve finished all the beginner challenges from the first two mountains now, and a few of the expert ones. The game is really lovely to look at, with a stylised art design which feels solid and complete. Sometimes scenery gets in the way of the path you’re following, which is an intentional decision but maybe removes you from the game a little. It’s pretty much never getting in the way though.

Which is more than you can say for the trees.

Sonic CD: comparing time periods

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When playing through Sonic CD, there are frequently ledges that seem inaccessible, or slopes that seem to stop abruptly. I noted when writing about my completion of the game that the level design felt a little bit off in places, preventing you from getting up too high a speed; on reflection this may well be another deliberate puzzle, to work out how to time travel, but I thought it might also be where the levels had been adjusted for multiple realities. So I did a little investigating.

The maps I’ve used here have come straight from Sonic Retro, which is an amazing site that I used when I couldn’t find the generator on Stardust Speedway Act 2 when replaying on the Xbox 360.

First, this comparison shows the same locations in the past and in the present; the slope in the present is actually a useful place to get up speed to time travel. The level flows a lot better in the past, with fewer springs and a new exit from the slope. Note how the trees have grown from the past to the future as well.

Past and Present

There are greater differences when moving from the present to the (good) future. You can see the way that the future is built over the top of the present, and there’s a lower slope that is inaccessible as a result. Another key difference is the lack of enemies in the good future.

Present and Good Future

There are fewer differences between the good and bad futures. The below pictures show part of the map in the present, and in the good and bad versions of the future. The pipe on the right changes from the present to the future, but the two future levels have the same layout. The rings in the centre show how the slope has moved between time periods, making some rings accessible.

The past version of this is shown at the top of this post.

The more I look at the game, the more impressed I am.

Sonic CD: completed!

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Stardust Speedway remains a low point for the game, I think, which is a shame because the ornamentation (of the brass instruments in the present, and overgrown pipework in the past) is evocative of the Starlight Zone, probably my favourite levels of the original Sonic game. The route to find the generator, and get to it in the past, is overly convoluted and seems to require luck as well as skill. I did explore a lot to find the route that worked for me, but maybe I was missing something.

It’s taken a while, but I’ve now completed this, getting the good future in every zone, and even destroying the Metal Sonic holograms hidden throughout. The game is very different to Sonics 1 and 2, rewarding exploration as well as speed, finding the best places and routes to run along, rather than just always moving to the right. Maybe this is why I found it oppressive; it was just too different, while looking the same. Having explored everything, though, and now with a better knowledge of routes, its become much more like classic Sonic, and I feel like it has the same sort of replay value.

In fact, I know it does, because having completed the game on the PS3, I immediately restarted it on the Xbox 360 (well, the 360 version running on the Xbox One), to unlock some long-standing achievements. I played through it all the way to Stardust Speedway Act 2, where I found I couldn’t remember how to find the generator and I had to look it up. Having done that, I proceeded through and completed it again.

The game is full of surprises, like Mini Sonic, endless loops, and Amy Rose being kept in a dungeon.

It’s not perfect by any stretch. The final boss battle is a bit of an anticlimax, especially when you compare it to the iconic Sonic 2 last stage. Metal Sonic’s race is a bit too much of a difficulty spike. Some of the level design, especially in the present, is a bit confusing, where they have tried to vary the routes in the past, but leaving rings in the same places. The special stages, even though I now know what to do, are rubbish and uncontrollable; I managed to get four time stones at most. And yet, despite all this, it’s a really good solid game, well up with the best platformers I’ve played.

Having completed the main game, I then looked at the time trials, which are more traditional Sonic material with the time travel removed, and the sole aim is to get through the present version of the level as quickly as possible. I hadn’t explored looking for the most efficient route; maybe that’s something to do in the future.

Super Mario Odyssey: completed!

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It seems a little contrived to say it’s completed, really, since I can see that there are over half the moons I am yet to discover, and the game is still throwing new ideas at me each time I play. However, Peach has been rescued, Bowser is defeated, and the world is a better place. I stopped the wedding, which I hasten to add wouldn’t have been legally binding in any case as Peach was not entering it of her own free will. I’ve seen the credits. I have explored the Moon, and I have travelled back to the Mushroom Kingdom.

The inside of Peach’s castle is a clever nod to Super Mario 64, although many of the doors are missing (and my daughter was disappointed we couldn’t go upstairs to see where she sleeps). I have found a number of other rooms around the kingdom, which again look similar to the rooms from SM64, which enable me to fight the bosses again, but I haven’t because I’m more interested in finding new stuff.

I had travelled between previous worlds a fair bit, exploring and finding hidden moons, before deciding to go to Bowser’s kingdom to finish the game – only to find I was diverted to a ruined kingdom, and it turns out that Bowser’s palace wasn’t the end point in any case. I played through the last few areas over the course of contiguous days, not wanting to stop until the story was complete; and then I had to keep playing, to find out what Peach was up to, to talk to Toadette, and to see what those silvery cubes were all about. It turns out that they’ve roughly doubled the size of the game after the credits roll – and I’ve not even been to the dark side of the Moon yet.

I very rarely engage in character dress-up in games, but Mario’s outfits are fun to experiment with – and you need to get changed to access some moons, as well as seeing the 2D representations

With that rush to finish, I’ve taken a bit of a step back in terms of playing the game, because I want it to last a bit longer. A fantastic game, which looks even more amazing on the Switch 2.