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Pikmin 2: almost paid off by day 34

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I told you it was going slowly.  I have now completely cleared all treasures from the Valley of Repose, and almost all from Awakening Wood.  My total value collected stands at 9,895 wotsits, so the debt of 10,000 is well within reach.

Some of the caves have been tricky, mainly due to one or two areas where the combination of enemies makes it difficult to plan well.  However, I've found that returning to these levels normally has a higher success rate, so I'm guessing it's just a case of being more familiar with the territory.  In the Subterranean Complex, for example, I lost half my pikmin in the first few levels the first time I went down there, leading to an early escape, but on my second excursion ...



Collecting bulmin helped as well!


Completing the Subterranean Complex gave me a light bulb, which the robot space ship thing told me would be used to light up the caverns more.  I've not really noticed a difference.



The end boss of the Frontier Cavern was tricky - the Empress Bulblax returned but this time was giving birth to bulborbs throughout the level, making it tricky to even get to her in the first place.  The first time I battled her, I was left with only 14 pikmin at the end, but luckily some of those were purple and they were able to carry the treasure.


Day 32 was one of heavy casualties.


So, nearly finished.  I'm sure there's meant to be a fourth area on the selection screen - maybe it appears once I've paid off the debt?  I wonder if I will ever 100% complete this game ...

SigCorp Holiday Special: completed!

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It seems that once the story for this little additional chapter had been completed, the developers decided they'd done enough and didn't bother to update To The Moon to link to it, or even add in any saving ability.  It's short enough to not need saving, but the fact that I didn't even know that it had been sitting on my hard drive for a few months indicates that there should have been some effort to integrate it into Steam.  Instead, I had to find the game folders on my hard drive and launch the game manually.


It's not much of a game, to be honest.  There's very little exploring to be done, and it's all very linear in giving you one task to do at a time.  To The Moon may have been similarly linear, but it didn't always feel like it.


After a brief explore of the facility, and learning that people are picketing outside, the game within a game provides a reasonable distraction, being a very basic and surreal version of the first game's story.  Piloting Neil through top-down levels, avoiding "zombievas", and collecting some of the memory triggers from River and John's story.  There was a bit of challenge here, but not much.


It was nice to see Neil and Eva again, and it's certainly renewed my interest in the next game.  I can't help but feel that it would have been better to release this at a later date though ...



Sonic Dash: offputting microtransactions

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Sonic Dash may be the best Sonic game for years - in that it's not trying to be anything other than a fast run through scenery.  It's an endless runner, with controls which match Sonic's standard abilities - jumping in a ball, rolling in a ball, and running fast.  You have to jump over, roll under or dodge obstacles, and roll into enemies to kill them.  From time to time there's an easy boss battle.


There's a bit of added complexity which sits behind the main game.  By completing missions, which vary from simple things like "collect 200 rings in a game" to difficult things like "avoid rings for 1000m", you can build up the multiplier applied to your score.  You can also double the multiplier by filling up the dash meter (the bar in the bottom-right, filled by collecting rings) and not activating it.  By doing this I now have an X38 multiplier, and my high score is 997,000 (compared to the next highest on my friends list of 67,000).

One thing to note that I couldn't find elsewhere on the Internet - one of the missions is to "use 5 revives in one run" which I assumed meant that you had to revive Sonic five times; since the number of tokens required doubles each time I assumed this meant I'd need 31 tokens.  Instead, the mission completed when I revived for the third time, which was annoying after I'd been saving up revive tokens for two weeks.

There are other bits to the game as well.  Over Easter there was a special event whereby collecting eggs randomly placed throughout the levels let you earn additional unlockables.  I managed to collect about 220 eggs over the period, which meant that I unlocked Cream the Rabbit.  Yes, real name.


So, all rosy.  The downside to the game is that it's full of microtransaction rubbish, where you spend rings to get new characters or upgrades, and collecting the rings in-game takes ages so you feel like spending real money to get more rings.  And it's not as if it's really hidden.


It's odd, I would happily have paid a few pounds for this game given how well it works and its production values, but I won't spend 69p on virtual currency in the game even though I got the whole game for free.  They're making significantly less money from me.

Pikmin 2: a veritable army by day 18

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After finding the yellow pikmin, I spent a couple of in-game days building up the numbers to around 150, before exploring the Awakening Wood and finding electrified gates that I could now break down.  Some of these led me to the blue pikmin, meaning that I now have some of each type.  I've also ventured back into the White Flower Garden, so I have 15 white pikmin and 18 purple pikmin in the rockets - but the white pikmin came at a cost, since I lost around 30 reds in the fight at the end of the cave.


The blue pikmin are extremely useful in gaining access to new areas.  Annoyingly, I've rolled out a few bridges over water which other pikmin don't seem to be too keen on keeping to - I've lost a fair few yellows and reds (and a couple of purples) when they've decided that walking on the bridge was far too sensible and they wanted to skirt around the outside into the river instead.  Survival of the fittest.