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Worms: stupidity kills

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For some unknown reason I have the Playstation version of Worms registered on my account, and so when looking over potential reasons to upgrade Playstation Plus I noticed I was able to download it to the PS4. And so I did.

I’ve not played the Playstation version before as far as I’m aware, but I put many hours into the Mega Drive version and also played the original Amiga game at Kevin’s house several times. There’s not a huge amount of difference, to be honest – the Playstation has some pretty cringy FMV segments, where the worms use a different art style to in-game – but the options and game types and presentation is all very familiar. I tried to set up a StOGS team, but fell at the second hurdle when I was told there was already a worm called “John” – part of the Beatles, of course. My team ended up being Timbo, Kieron1, Johnno, and Hiscock.

I chose initially to play against teams where the AI was set as “poor”. This was a mistake, because rather than making the game easier it seems as if the AI was programmed to use up airstrikes and teleportation in the first couple of goes, meaning that I often found that members of my team were killed before I even got a chance to move them.

Moving to compete against other teams, more average in skill, actually made the game easier. I wasn’t that easy to work out which ones to choose, mind – the only place the AI level is noted is in the team editor, and they’re not listed in order of difficulty, so you have to go as if to edit the teams, make a note on which to compete against, and then back out to the menu.

The game still works well, and benefits from a lack of bloat which later games have introduced – there is a focussed and tight selection of weapons here, making weapon drops genuinely exciting. I may suggest we play this next time we have an in-person games day.

It’s almost worth it for the logo nostalgia alone.

Pokémon X: just leave me alone

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Time to go and get the last gym badge, then? No.

Professor Sycamore asked me to meet him in the next town, so I travelled on Route 18 to meet him. At which point he battled me. As you do. Bear him easily, of course, with my Delphox’s flamethrower coming in very handy. Luckily there was no side quest introduced at this point, so I went off to find the next city.

It was a bit of a winding path, through swamps and across bridges. And just as I arrived on the last bridge, my friends turned up. Were they here to support me, to encourage me, to journey with me?

Of course not.

Friends defeated, I went into the next city only to find that the gym leader isn’t there. Another little diversion ahead.

Pokémon X: j’ai Xerneas

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I fly to Lumiose City and wander around looking for signs of Lysandre. Eventually someone hints to me that he likes red and he owns a café which is red, all while standing next to a red café. On entering the shop the two assistants are probably the worst people ever at keeping secrets, and they give away there’s a secret entrance to the underground lair. Down I go, fighting away red-dressed fools, until I find a floor with random arrows that send you spinning in a certain direction until you hit a wall.

I hate rooms which have random arrows that send you spinning in a certain direction until you hit a wall. Particularly when you can’t see the full room and so everything has to be done by trial and error.

I discovered Team Flare’s ultimate plans, to use a weapon that would kill all people and pokémon other than themselves, because … something about overpopulation and scarce resources. This weapon was a thousand years old and had been hidden in plain sight for years. There was another story about a man called AZ who saved his pokémon by sacrificing many others, but that seemed a bit unrelated. I was given the choice of a blue button or an orange button to press – one would launch the weapon, the other wouldn’t.

I chose blue.

In the end it didn’t matter because they decided to launch the weapon anyway, so I set off to stop them in another secret lair underneath Geosenge Town, which has now been largely destroyed by a big crystal appearing in the centre. It turns out that the ultimate weapon was being powered by a thousand-year old pokémon, who I released after beating Team Flare. It then attacked me.

This pokémon was Xerneas, the cover star of the game and the X-shaped legendary creature. They1 were only level 50 and most of my team was at level 62 or above. Luckily I’d saved just before the battle. Double luckily, my first hit with Aurorus took them down to about 10% health, and I caught them on my next move with an ultra ball. A bit of an anti-climax!

I immediately added Xerneas to my team, displacing Pikachu, and then Lysandre decided he wasn’t going to give up and demanded another battle. I one-hit-killed everything he threw at me, including a mega-evolved gyrados2 which didn’t last long against my mega-evolved Lucario. After that he finally gave up.

Everyone was very happy, and it felt like the end of the game – but, of course, for a pokémon trainer saving the world is just one side quest encountered on the way to the Pokémon League.

Yes, we can indeed. Back to Anistar City.

  1. Xerneus appears to be neither male nor female, so I’m using the generic “them”. ↩︎
  2. I don’t give my pokémon names, so my pikachu is called Pikachu, and my gyrados is called Gyrados, but other people don’t own Gyrados, they just own a gyrados. ↩︎

Pokémon X: journeys through the snow

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It’s been a while.

I remembered getting Lucario in Shalour City, and defeating the sixth gym after having travelled North. However, the trail went cold there, both in terms of which gym to visit and what Team Flare were up to. I last saved, in 2017, in Dendemille Town, without a decided path.

So my next thought was to look at which route number I’d just been travelling on. Route 15 goes to Dendemille, and Route 16 goes back to Lumiose City, so I decided to try and journey along Route 17. Easier said than done, since it was under a lot of snow and blocked by boulders, meaning I needed the help of a big Mamoswine to pass it. Luckily there was a Mamoswine nearby, but it was frit because of something happening in Frost Cavern nearby.

It was at this point I remembered my previous thoughts of Pokémon X – that the storyline seemed to include far too many little diversions and side quests. To progress on my quest for the gyms I had to journey though the caverns to find Team Flare being mean to an Abomasnow; defeating them meant that Mamswine’s friend was safe and I was able to finally get a lift to the next town. I picked up quite a few new pokémon while doing so.

So to Anistar City, and I stumble upon the gym pretty quickly. This is the psychic gym, and while none of my pokémon is ideally suited for this battle – I have a team consisting of Aurorus, Blastoise, Delphox, Pikachu, Pidgeot and Lucario – the higher levels mean I have no problems obtaining the seventh badge. One more to go!

Except the Team Flare storyline gets in the way again, and I’m summoned to Lumiose City to talk to Lysander who apparently was the boss there. Something else to do before I fulfil my destiny, then.

Poly Bridge: do you truss me?

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I’m not sure what came first, this or Bridge Constructor, but they are both very similar. I think I prefer Poly Bridge slightly, as it has more of a distinctive visual style as well as having useful section cloning mechanics, but the idea is the same for both games – build a bridge using a variety of materials to carry a car or other vehicle across a gap, with realistic physics determining whether the bridge holds or not.

This means you make lots of trusses.

I’ve completed almost the whole of the first world now, and the game is made more enjoyable by trying to set high scores as I go (in terms of lowest cost of materials). Not against the global leaderboards – those are full of people who’ve fluked a catapult for $5 – but against friends who’ve played the game on Steam. On the first few levels there were quite a few of them to compete against, but in later levels this has tapered off a little.

Although there is a certain challenge to building stable and strong bridges with a minimum of materials (shifting the joint points down a couple of pixels to make the wooden beams very slightly shorter), the biggest challenge for me comes in the sequencing – and particularly the hydraulics.

At the start of each level you’re told the order things happen. There may be a car going first, and then a van going second. There may be a boat coming down the river in the middle. When this happens you can be given access to hydraulic elements that help get the bridge out of the way, but these put their own stress on the bridge (and if you’re not careful can tip the whole bridge over). Alternatively you can try to build around the boat, but this can be much more expensive.

I am fast learning why I’m not a civil engineer.