Gaming Diary — Page 177

BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea Episode 2 (PC): COMPLETED!

Posted on 07/04/2017 Written by deKay

Who’d have thought that Episode 2 of Burial at Sea would end up, essentially, being Batman in Rapture? Batman as in the Rocksteady series of recent titles. Well, it is. As Elizabeth (spoiler?) you sneak around in the shadows, generally avoiding combat. You use air vents. You get a vigour which essentially gives you detective vision.

Not only that, there are some large rooms where you have to hang from gargoyles, or something. And drop down behind foes and silently dispatch them. Hmm.

That said, it’s the story that’s the main point of the game. What, you were playing it for the mechanics? You’re doing it wrong, in this episode especially. It’s not about the fighting, it’s the sneaking and finding and getting to the end.

Little of which I can talk about because of big spoilers. That, and how I’m not completely sure what actually happened at the end there. I did like the link back to the original BioShock and how this tied in with it though.

And that’s BioShock all done.

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Marvel Land (MD): COMPLETED!

Posted on 05/04/2017 Written by deKay

Marvel Land is a game I had as a kid, but never completed. A while after the original release, it appeared outside of Japan as “Talmit’s Adventure” or something, but I always preferred the Japanese original. So the Japanese one is what I played through here.

It’s a happy fun blue skies platformer with slightly slippy physics. You know the sort – where floors don’t have quite enough friction when you land. It certainly took some time to get used to. Marvel Land’s “thing” is the bizarre attack you can perform by flinging copies of yourself around yourself. You need a power-up to give you a “chain” of clones, and then by pressing up or down you spin them around you, collecting items and attacking baddies. It’s very odd.

Sometimes, you can use these clones to grab a node, which lets you swing around and cross gaps or jump high. The more clones you have (attacking with them depletes them) the higher or further you go.

The other “thing” with Marvel Land is all the warp doors. As is common in many platformers, there are hidden (literally) or hard to reach doors that warp you to other parts of the level or even other levels. Nothing out of the ordinary there. Only in this game, some of the warps take you back to the start of the level. Or back a whole level, or several levels. There’s one particularly evil one in the penultimate level. It takes you right back to the very start of the game. I’ll not deny I reverted to a save state for that one.

Boss battles are a bit strange and thoroughly Japanese. One involves playing Janken, another is a bit Whack-a-Mole. Only the final boss actually involves a fight of any sort!

Marvel Land is a fun, happy, difficult, nonsensical platformer. It reminds me a lot of Magical Flying Hat Turbo Adventure, and that’s a good thing.

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Ys III: Wanderers from Ys (MD): COMPLETED!

Posted on 04/04/2017 Written by deKay

I have never played a Ys game before. I don’t even know how to pronounce it. “Wise”? “Ees”? “Why Ess”? Who knows. Something else I also didn’t know: Ys III is a Castlevania game.

Not an actual Castlevania game from that series of course. No, Ys III just plays a lot like one. There’s a castle, a clocktower, and even a boss that is very much like Dracula. It has the same mechanic for walking up and down stairs. Grinding to level up, just like the Metroidvania CV games, is also a thing here. Even the music sounds like it has comes from a Castlevania game, with a couple of the tracks sounding almost identical to music from that series. It’s also hard as nails. Castlevania, see?

Before I started playing it, I was expecting a party based RPG. Imagine my surprise then, when it was a side scrolling hack and slash game. And that was before I realised the Castlevania parallels. There’s some Zelda II in there too. Unlike those games, however, Ys III is pretty short. There are only four levels, one of which you do twice, and each is impossible until you’ve levelled up enough. The bosses ranged from laughably simple to nigh-on impossible (I really struggled with the fire lion thing), and in Castlevania II tradition poor translation meant I was clueless how to progress at least twice while playing.

Graphically, the sprites are not exactly the Mega Drive’s best, but the parallax backgrounds – especially the sunset – are incredible. Sound effects are nothing special, in contrast to the epic soundtrack. I found the controls a little unresponsive when it came to jumping. This made climbing up out of a cave more difficult that it really should have been.

On the whole though, Ys III is really rather good. If nothing like what I was expecting. There’s a remake available on the PSP and on Steam, the latter of which it seems I own somehow, so I might give that a go.

The post Ys III: Wanderers from Ys (MD): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.

Pang (Arcade): COMPLETED!

Posted on 04/04/2017 Written by deKay

It required all of the credits, which, if I’d not been playing it on RetroPie would have meant re-mortgaging the house, but I completed it. Boy are some of those final few levels hard.

Pang is always a go-to game in the arcades for me. That, Pac-Land, Rampage, TMNT, Street Fighter II, Mappy, Out Run. I never got very far on a single credit in the past. Perhaps level 10 if I was very lucky.

But now, I’ve done it. Life goals, and all that eh?

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Monthly Update – Household Chores

Posted on 03/04/2017 Written by gospvg

I played an April Fools on UGVM (facebook group) saying I have given up gaming, it's never going to happen but I may have some weekends like the one just gone where I do not get time to play the PS4 but mobile gaming will always give me a few minutes of fun.

It's a welcome return to Capitals which has finally been fixed, I was getting constant crashes when starting a new game.

Managed to get the Baby Dragon up to Lvl 5 in Clash Royale but still hovering around the 2750 trophy mark.

Tiny Rails has had another update with a Mexico & Central America area unlocked.

Ran out of pokeballs so had to do quite a bit of pokestop visits to top-up & I managed to catch a Vulpix which was loitering outside my house yesterday. With the time change & sunny days I expect quite a few trips to the local park with the kids to catch Pokemon.

The usual Carcassonne & Lost Cities complete the mobile gaming. Not touched the iPad much for gaming so have not gotten any further in Crashlands.

Good news on the PS4 front, I managed to finish off World of Final Fantasy, in the end I was way too over-leveled for the last boss fight & it was a breeze.

I've started going through the PS+ collection of games to enjoy some of the smaller titles on offer & have started with Tiny Troopers which is a top-down action shooter, you can level up the soldiers by completing missions but if they die in combat you either lose them or have to use medals to revive. It is a simple game & nothing too difficult but I like the character style & it's fun.

I did not purchase Mass Effect Andromeda in the end, the poor reviews put me off, the game obviously needs some more months to fix the various issues but was obviously rushed to release. I will wait on that & pick up later in the year.

Persona 5 is another game I want to enjoy but not purchasing anything at the moment, need to play what I already have on the shelf. I could not go from one JRPG to another so Final Fantasy 15 will have to wait, Abbas is playing XCOM2.

So I went back to have a quick look at my sell pile & decided to give Watch_Dogs 2 a try, gave myself an hour & to my surprise it was very enjoyable, you get to access to some new toys like a RC Car & Drone. There are lot's of side quests including taking selfies to go along with the beefier main missions. There is a lot of profanity in the game which is far too excessive but I enjoy the challenge of the main missions & trying to complete them by stealth.

I'm hoping with the Easter break to play quite a bit of this if I don't get distracted by Destiny of course!

Destiny 2 has been announced & I have pre-ordered the digital edition, September 8th Day 1 !

On that note, until next month keep on gaming.