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Cat Quest (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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My daughter picked this up on the Switch some time ago and loved it (and the sequel) so much she actually preordered Cat Quest III the day it was announced. She had never preordered a game before! I’ve always liked the look of it – 2D sprites on a map in a way that sort of feels a bit like Paper Mario but the game is more like Zelda and the camera angle is like those 2D-HD remakes of old 8-bit RPGs.

Anyway, after getting it for free on about twelftynine different platforms via PS+++ and Epic giveaways and stuff I finally got round to playing it on my Steam Deck (Lord bless the Steam Deck and its infinite supply of free games) and you know what – it’s really good. She was right.

It’s much more simple than Zelda, but it’s cute and mostly laid back. You, as a cat, travel the world and sword up baddies and enter dungeons and find better weapons and armour and level up your various magics like fire and ice and healing, and there’s nothing especially new or difficult here, but it’s all done in a polished way with great humour and silly events and characters. And I love the art style.

Street Fighter Alpha (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Anyone would think I’d recently bought both the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection pack and the Capcom Fighting Collection pack on the Switch eShop for super cheap recently or something. And if they thunk that, they’d be thunking right because I have.

Now, I’ve said before that Street Fighter Alpha 2 is my favourite Street Fighter game (and, probably, my favourite one-on-one fighting game of all time), but that doesn’t mean I don’t like Street Fighter Alpha, er, One. It doesn’t have as many characters, it doesn’t have as many moves, and it doesn’t have quite as much flash and sparkle, but it still has Sir Kenneth “Ken” Masters and he’s still the best of all the animals.

Naturally, I whipped through the game pretty quick. Not that I’m really good at it or anything despite how much I love the Alpha games, but probably because the default difficulty is pretty low? I don’t actually know as I didn’t check, but it seemed a fair bit easier than I remember from last time I played it.

Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Yes, it isn’t the best two player competitive blocks-in-wells based puzzle game (that would be Puyo Puyo), but you can’t not like Super Puzzle Fighter with it’s super-deformed Capcom fighters and just the sheer absurdity of it.

The aim I much like other similar games – match up blocks and send them over to the other player’s well to fill it up a bit and bugger up their plans. Each character has a special pattern of blocks that, when you form them, unleashes hell on the opponent. In my playthrough, I found creating these patterns were literally impossible and also, completely unnecessary. But it doesn’t matter, it was all fun anyway, although a lot easier than I remember.

And yes, I played as Ken. Obviously.

Vampire Savior (Switch): COMPLETED!

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No, not the horde-based twin stick only one stick sort of shooter. That’s Vampire Survivors, even though I keep getting the two names mixed up. No, this is the Capcom 1-on-1 fighting game from the late 90s heyday of Capcom 1-on-1 fighting games. There was a cheap bundle of bundles (a bundle^2, if you like) on the eShop recently where you could get Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection and Capcom Fighting Collection together for less money than either collection had ever been on sale for individually. Ah, gwan then.

Vampire Savior (the lack of a U is making me queasy), or Darkstalkers 3, depending on region, is a CPS2 based game, much like Street Fighter Alpha and X-Men: Children of the Atom, so it has big ol’ sprites and loads of animation. The fighters are generally based on monsters like a mummy, a vampire, and a Definitely Not Frankenstein’s Monster.

I played as newcomer-to-the-series Baby Bonnie Hood, who absolutely isn’t supposed to be Little Red Riding Hood, and has a machine gun and a dog. It was silly fun.

Kolibri: eaten by a frog

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Kolibri is certainly colourful, fast, and with plenty of sprites flying around the screen. Flying being a key word – as a hummingbird, everything takes place in the air, with very occasional ground-based enemies. Frustratingly the development team have obviously seen nature videos where the hummingbirds move around slightly in the air, because they’ve implemented that here – my bird was shifting around a little when I really wanted it to just stay still and let a projective pass.

It is a bit of a frustrating game in places. In order for the game to look as natural as possible, they have dispensed with an on-screen display. You can’t see how much health you have left unless you get hit or collect an energy ball, at which point one, two, three or four little hummingbirds appear around you to show you how many hits you can absorb. You also can’t easily see what weapon you are holding, though of course that can be fixed by firing it. I think that your bird colour changes depending on the weapon as well, but I’m not entirely sure.

I’ve played through the first five or six levels now, and there’s a bit of variety there. In Aero the Acro-Bat, you were given some instructions when you started each level on what the goal was – jump on certain platforms, or defeat a certain number of specific enemies – but here you just need to work out what’s going on before you die. Not always possible, but at least there appear to be infinite lives; you just start again at the beginning of the level you died on.

[A side note: screenshots taken on this emulator often come out a bit odd, I think because of the way the Mega Drive and 32X outputs are being combined. The third screenshot here, for example, only has the background on the upper half the screen, whereas actually there was a hill there.]

The other issue is that the powerups are a bit too similar to each other and easy to pick up. Normally ease of collection would be a good thing, but here there are about six or seven weapons and you can collect the powerup for the one you want. I am particularly fond of the homing energy balls, or the lasers, but often find that I’m accidentally collecting other weapons instead. Homing weapons are useful because enemies can come from both sides, and the controls are a bit picky in terms of turning around.

It’s a breath of fresh air for horizontal shooters – look, no spaceships! – but it’s a little frustrating to control, which ruins it somewhat.