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Another SNK cartridge (actually, two) arrived for the Evercade and since my daughter and I enjoyed playing the first Metal Slug in co-op recently, we did the same with the sequel.
Naturally, it’s more of the same. Only now you can ride camels as well as tanks, and after a few levels it becomes clear that Definitely Not Any Real Middle Eastern Military Dictator is in cahoots with actual aliens.
It still has the slowdown issues of the first game, but it’s silly fun regardless.
I do like a Kaz Ayabe game. I’ve played a few recently, including the previous Shin chan tie-in. They’re all set in sleepy Japanese villages where very little happens and this one is the same. However! Shin chan’s dog, Shiro, wanders off and finds a mysterious train that take him (and, when he is led there, Shin chan) to Coal Town – a mining town that nobody in the village seems to have heard of.
Your days are split between the usual Ayabe tasks of catching fish and bugs, running errands for your family and neighbours, doing a bit of gardening, and making friends with the local kids. It is never explained why there are children and pensioners in this village, but nobody inbetween (aside from one childless woman and a visiting chef) so who are the parents? And why doesn’t anyone care they’re all out after dark? Anyway, yes, your time is split doing that stuff, and also visiting Coal Town and helping out there.
It seems the mayor of Coal Town has, now the mine is running low on coal, gone a bit mad and is doing evil nefarious things which I won’t spoil. It’s your job, as a five year old so obviously best qualified, to help out and stop this happening. Which mostly involves cooking things, collecting items for an inventor, and – crucially – mine cart racing. Of course. Without giving too much away, the plot seems heavily borrowed from the Your Name anime, wrapped up in a Ghibi bow. No bad thing, though.
Unlike other games in the series, there’s no deadline for getting everything done. In previous titles, you’d have a summer, or a month, or a repeating week timeloop, but here you don’t seem to be able to run out of days. Which makes the whole thing even more laid back and relaxing than before. In fact, only the arcadey mine cart races are anything but.
So not a huge change to the formula. It’s back to mostly static (as in, not fully 3D) environments of the past after the Natsu-mon game changed it, but then I’m not sure which order the games were originally released in in Japan. It does mean a return of the “hold left to walk off the screen and enter to the left on the next screen and so walk off again immediately” issue, but it’s a minor thing.
Definitely a recommended play if you’re a fan of Ayabe’s work.
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.
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.
A little Pico-8 game which I picked up from itch a while back, Explorers has you boating about a randomly generated archipelago, finding treasure, meeting other people who you can try to convince to trade with you or help you, and sometimes stealing their boats.
The aim is to complete your map, which you can do by visiting everywhere, but you can also fill it in more quickly by asking the people you meet about where they’re from or have been and they’ll draw some of it for you.
It isn’t particularly complicated, but it’s an incredible example of what you can do with Pico-8!
Obviously the reason I started playing this is because of the absurd name. How I came to own it in the first place, however, is a mystery. Was it free on Amazon? Did I get it in one of those itch.io charity bundles? Ghosts? Who knows.
CCFWTBT is a platformer where you, as an acrobat called Belle (along with her pet bell called Chime) have to rescue her boyfriend who is kidnapped by an ex-friend. It plays out like a 8-bit title, different levels, tricky platforming, bosses, and so on. You use Chime as a sort of boomerang that can activate things but also help you reach places higher up. Getting used to Chime and how to use it took a while.
Between levels you have a map you can freely navigate, with various places to visit like an inn and a town, where characters give you side missions. Most of these involve revisiting levels once you’ve obtained extra items or abilities. This was one of the reasons that I got a strong Shantae vibe from the game, which is no bad thing. It’s not as good as games in that series, but it’s better than the vast majority of these retro-styled platformers.
I loved the cast of characters and their relationships. There’s a fun twist near the end regarding the kidnapper too (which I won’t reveal) which meant the game was a fair bit longer than I was expecting. I didn’t complete every side mission but I did a fair few of them, and (of course) completed the main game. If I didn’t have such a huge backlog of games I’d probably go back and mop up some more bits but, sigh, time, eh?
