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Rain On Your Parade (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Rain On Your Parade is one of those silly arcade games that things like Donut County and Pool Panic. In this, you’re a sentient cloud who – initially – is mainly tasked with raining on things. After all, what else can a cloud do? You have to soak so many people or rust so many vehicles, that sort of thing.

Quickly things take a bit of a turn when you’re encouraged to cause chaos, set fire to stuff (you can hover over oil leaks and then rain oil), learn how to cause lightning, and so on. The game is framed within a Princess Bride style man telling a kid a bedtime story about this cloud, and he keeps adding to it to keep it interesting, so there’s the introduction of a baddie – Dr Dryspell – who wants nothing more than make everything dry.

Levels are varied, some short, some mere time or score attacks, and some pretty huge and complex. There’s quite some imagination going on (“rain” coffee into cups, get everyone covered in bird poo) but a special mention is needed to the first person shooter level, and the Legend of Zelda one for really stretching the formula. It’s also fun finding the references to other games, like Katamari, Metal Gear, and Power Wash Simulator.

Most of the levels have a number of “missions”, which usually require you to wet a certain number of things or complete the level without running out of water, and there are optional tasks, and even some optional hidden tasks, if you really want to go down the 100% complete route. There’s also a load of unlockable “costumes” for your cloud, like a frog hat and a chainsaw, and some minigames too.

Rain On Your Parade is quirky and funny, although a bit janky when it comes to things like collision detection and it even crashed on me a couple of times, but don’t let that put you off. A bit more polish would have been nice but it doesn’t detract from the ridiculous gameplay. Oh yes, and it has toilets. Five stars, would play again. Etc.

Club Drive: hardly drivin’

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For Christmas I received the Atari 50 compilation, which collects a large number of Atari’s most celebrated games together and presents them alongside a museum of stories, videos, and artwork spanning the fifty years of the company. It is a fabulous resource, including a lot of arcade and 2600 classics, which I will no doubt talk about in future posts.

As well as games from the early years, there are some titles from the Lynx and the Jaguar. There are some high profile games missing, I presume because of licensing issues or because they weren’t developed by Atari – Aliens v Predator on the Jaguar, and Blue Lightning on the Lynx, are two that stand out. The Jaguar titles therefore seem a little scattergun, but it’s a good opportunity to play some I don’t own the cartridges for.

If you have seen my my to do list over the last decade or so, you’ll have seen I aspired to own Club Drive for the Jaguar. That wish has finally come true, in an approximate way, and I’m glad I didn’t spend more time chasing it. Because Club Drive is pants.

The key problem is that it’s largely uncontrollable. You accelerate with the right trigger, and turn with the d-pad (or left analogue). But to turn more sharply if a corner requires it, you pull back on the d-pad (or stick) as well as holding the direction. No need to slow down, your car suddenly just develops a smaller turning circle.

Get too near to the side of a cliff and the car will often decide to jump off itself. If it does, the game rewinds itself to a point just before you fell, and then the car invariably falls off again. Often this is accompanied with an unexpected change in viewing angle, so you have little hope of recovery, unless you rewind a lot further.

There are three modes: collect ten sphere things dotted around the level; race from one end of the level to the other (and back again); and a tag game for two players only. The collection game is painfully slow and dull. Racing is against the clock only, and I was doing well at this on the Wild West stage until I hit a hidden flashing wall which bizarrely transported me to the front of the Atari office building. It’s just all really janky.

Imagine this moving at 2 frames per second and you’re pretty much there.

I have raced on all four of the levels, plus the super secret course (which isn’t so secret on Atari 50 since there’s a message to press X to select it, I presume because it previously required a combination on the Jaguar keypad) – the latter was absolutely no fun at all since I couldn’t see where to go or control the car on the ramps. I don’t think I’ll persist with it.

Paper Mario: endless wandering

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After beating the Koopa Brothers, there wasn’t an immediate clue where I should be going next. And so I didn’t really go anywhere. I spent half an hour retracing my steps to see what I was missing.

What I was missing, apparently, was that there was a new area opened up to the south of Toad Town. It wasn’t immediately obvious to me since I had been told about the port many days beforehand and I just forgot. I don’t like having to resort to a walkthrough, but unfortunately real life just means I can’t remember offhanded comments from random characters between play sessions.

So, off to the desert now.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Switch)

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So I did go back to it! I was prompted to by a Christmas Present though – I received a (physical) copy of Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna -The Golden Country. This is a stand-alone prequel to XC2, but also contains a code for all the additional DLC for XC2, of which there’s rather a lot.

When Xenoblade 2 was originally released, there was a “season pass” type thing going on with DLC drops every so often. Sometimes it’d be in-game items or money, sometimes new sidequests, and sometimes new Blades to find. Additionally, a challenge arena type mode is unlocked, which allows you to gain access – eventually – to Shulk and Fiora from Xenoblade 1 and Elma from, I assume, Xenoblade Chronicles X. These characters act as additional Blades rather than playable party members.

With all this new expanded content, it was time to run round everywhere again, completing more side quests and obtaining all the unique Blades I’d missed as well as tying up some loose ends and getting all my characters up to level 99. With that done, I took the step of changing the difficulty setting to “custom” (another new DLC feature) and tweaking it so that the battles were all over in mere seconds. Then, with another 25-odd hours on the save over and above the main game previously, I went after the end boss again who now could barely scratch me.

Amazing game. But, done. Torna next!

Astro Bot (PS5): COMPLETED!

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Super Mario Galaxy 3 is a real love letter to Nintendo games, especially previous Mario titles. There are so many parts lifted from or referencing bits of the earlier games, as well as other Nintendo titles.

You’ve the Mario 64 Bowser boss fights and Tiny-Huge Island, Super Mario Sunshine’s FLUDD and void levels, Super Mario Galaxy’s worlds and “flying into the level” sequences, a replica of Mario Odyssey’s Lake Kingdom, and characters and enemies from across the series like Thwomp and Wriggler make appearances, as well as Mario game features like a ghost house and switch palaces.

Then there’s a whole level based on Link’s Crossbow Training, another which is Donkey Kong 64, a number of Kirby areas and mechanics, and sections where you’re Samus in morph ball form. There are even a few bits of the game which are taken from Splatoon, a power up to make you a character from Arms, some Wii Bowling, and even a bit based on the Donkey Kong tilting game from Nintendoland on the Wii U. The hub world acts like a Pikmin level too. So much Nintendo crammed into one game!

It is glorious and fun, and slightly confusing, as it doesn’t make any sense that as well as all this Nintendo stuff there’s also a level based on the Sony PSP Loco Roco game, a Minecraft level, about seven million collectible Nathan Drakes, each in minutely different clothes, and the aim of the game is to (re)build a PlayStation 5 console. Plus this is Nintendo’s first game on a Sony platform, perhaps as a response to Sony allowing Lego Horizon Adventures on the Switch? Most queer.

Yes, I am being intentionally facetious but in a positive way. Sure, the whole game looks and feels like a Nintendo game, and yes there are so many bits that seem transplanted directly from a Nintendo title, but it’s done really well. It’s the most Nintendo non-Nintendo game I’ve ever played, and that’s high praise.

Really, this is supposed to be a celebration of PlayStation history, but because Sony doesn’t really have any – not like Nintendo does – most of the referenced games and characters you encounter and collect are actually from the likes of Konami, Activision and Sega. Rez, Katamari, Devil May Cry, Persona, Tony Hawk – they all had a presence on a Sony console but they’re not Sony games. There’s a lot of Ape Escape, Horizon and Uncharted here, but nothing like the amount of first party stuff you could get with Nintendo so it has to be beefed up with cross-platform stuff.

Also, I have no affinity with, love for, or fond memories of Sony stuff so all that passes me by anyway.

What’s left is a great Mario game without Mario in it. And that’s OK.