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Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain (PS5): COMPLETED!

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Although I’d had access to this via PS++++++++ for some time, I’d never downloaded it as I, erroneously, thought it was that vertically scrolling shooter EDF spin-off rather than a “normal” third-person co-op giant insect/robot apocalypse game. Then I noticed the screenshots and realised I was thinking of Earth Defense Force: Wing Diver The Shooter and Iron Rain is, in fact, more of the game I wanted.

It is, broadly, the same game that most of the other games have been. You’re one of a few remaining soldiers, defending the world from giant ants, spiders and wasps, various alien robots and attack ships, as well as NotGodzilla and a huge sea lizard thing. It differs from others in the series by being – mostly – more serious and realistic. At least, as realistic as such a plot can be, anyway.

There have been tweaks to how you get better weapons and armour, as you now collect credits and spend them rather than just pick up new guns and rocket launchers and so on, which I don’t like as much. Really, though, it doesn’t make enough of a difference to worry about.

Like recent EDFs, I played through in co-op with my daughter. It’s always way better playing EDF as a pair, and it is, perhaps bizarrely, one of her favourite game series. We found it quite a lot easier than earlier titles, although the final level was really difficult.

Angry Birds: completed!

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I have a strange sense of déjà vu. Having completed Angry Birds back in 2010, Rovio continued to update the game with new secrets, levels, and abilities, bringing in new birds and themes from other Angry Bird titles. It has always been the case that a sequel would introduce new concepts, but now, with the ability to update old games, those new concepts can feed backwards as well.

Anyway, I digress. Angry Birds – known on the Apple game centre as AB Classic – is actually no longer available to buy or even redownload. I am fortunate that my installation has carried over a couple of phone migrations, and still works. I understand that others have not been so lucky. Rovio has stated that it would require a complete rebuild to bring their older games up to modern standards, and they are committed to doing this, but that was three years ago.

In any case, I’m not affected by that. I have, for the past few months, been playing through a level at a time, getting three stars on each before moving on. There are some levels where the three stars came due to a lucky physics event, or just grinding the same shot over and over until it hit. There are some where it took a single new attempt to upgrade from 1 or 2 stars to 3. There were even some (a very few) levels I hadn’t played before.

There are a load of add-on mechanics that they added to Angry Birds which interfered with the purity of the game – and I’ve not actually used these during my playthrough. I have various exploding birds, catapult accuracy upgrades, and other things across the top of my screen, but I haven’t looked into how I could use them. Instead, I’ve completed every level using the standard birds and no upgrades.

I’ve also found and completed every golden egg. Some of these required the use of a guide.

The biggest difficulty I faced, other than the odd level which required pinpoint accuracy, was that the game really isn’t designed for the aspect ratio of my current phone. On many occasions I simply couldn’t see high enough to accurately aim the birds, or the catapult itself was too close to the top of the screen (hidden among the powerup icons!) to enable exact positioning. This was the reason for the guide use for golden eggs as well; there were a couple which were off screen and no amount of zooming out would reveal them.

The last set of levels were a departure from the standard objective, with the pigs coming to grab an egg using a variety of machines. To get three stars on these levels, it wasn’t a question of beating a certain score; instead you had to protect the egg (one star), pop all the pigs (one star), and use fewer than the target number of birds (one star). Luckily the pigs seemed to favour building their machines around a TNT crate.

So, again, completed. Three stars on every level. All golden eggs found, and their levels completed. I think I’m done for now – the only things left to do are to buy the golden eagle upgrade to play for feathers (which isn’t actually much fun), and play daily in the mighty league. I think I’m Birdsed out.

Splatoon and the last day of Wii U online

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I’ve enjoyed my time with the Wii U. Most of its best games have since migrated to the Switch, although often with cuts made to fit the single screen. Playing Assassin’s Creed III with a detailed map available at a glance was revolutionary; Kirby & the Rainbow Paintbrush felt very natural to control. Nintendo Land remains a go-to party game to this day, with the asymmetric multiplayer of Mario Chase and Animal Crossing Sweet Day causing heart palpitations like nothing else. Its compatibility with Wii games concretes its position as an essential part of my gaming setup.

One of the more radical games on the Wii U was Splatoon. As you will have seen from previous posts, I quite like first person shooters, but I’m not very good at them. Particularly online – I have neither the speed nor accuracy needed to grace even the top half of a final leaderboard. I still play them, but they can be a dispiriting experience.

Not so with Splatoon. It’s not first-person, for a start, and the objective is not to kill other players, but rather to cover the floor with your particular paint colour. You can target others – and if you splat them they do explode in your paint colour, causing a satisfying area of coverage – but you can also spend the time covering up the other team’s painting efforts and undoing their hard work. There are various weapons, ranging from large paintbrushes and rollers to sniper paint rifles, and you form a random team of four each game. This means that different people can play it in different ways, and everyone contributes to the game in the way they feel best able to.

I favour the paint roller, which lets me cover large areas but does leave me exposed to people coming in with paint guns – so I try to avoid confrontation where possible.

I haven’t played the game as much as some, who have sunk hundreds of hours into it, but I have played both the offline and online games a fair bit. I’m up to level 16 now, playing almost exclusively on the unranked mode (I never progressed past C+ in ranked). And 16 is where I will stay.

Last night saw the closure of the Nintendo Network for the Wii U and 3DS. All online games on those consoles no longer function – the errors vary, but errors there be. To mark this I spent an hour playing Splatoon for the last time, and the lobbies were full of others doing the same. I played eight or nine games in total, and I was reminded almost immediately of how the use of the gamepad to allow you to jump around the map led to a fluency that’s missing from Splatoon 2 and 3 on the Switch – being able to jump to help a teammate without having to switch view is amazing.

I think I won the majority of games, but I suspect that’s because many people were online not to compete but to commemorate.

I spent most of my time on Splatoon, but did also visit Mario Kart 8 (I finish with an online score of around 2800), Wii Sports Club, and Super Mario Maker’s 100 Mario mode. I’ve downloaded a bunch of courses for future use on Mario Maker as well.

There is a replacement network being launched called Pretendo, and at some point I will try to configure that – but it’ll require a mod for my Wii and 3DS and I’ve not got around to that yet. I think it’ll also mean a reset to my progress on a number of games, which I’m loathe to do.

Farewell, Nintendo Network. It’s been fun.

Pikmin 3 Deluxe: completed!

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I knew the Formidable Oak was to be the last level, but I wasn’t expecting quite how different it would be. Travelling to the top of the tree, I found Olimar being tended to by a strange gold being. This was, of course, the boss battle; I jumped into the clearing, and faced up to the newly-grown golden blob.

I had come prepared with a varied party – 20 of each pikmin. In the end, this wasn’t needed, because after a short pounding with red and rock pikmin, the golden blob died and dissolved into the ground. This was probably the easiest boss in the game. So, let’s get Olimar back to the Drake and we can set off home.

Of course not. Nintendo don’t do things like that. The final boss is always the most difficult bit. As soon as I’d entered the tunnel off the tree platform, I was ambushed by the golden blob again – who then started to chase me. I had to get pikmin to carry Olimar behind us, while I navigated a labyrinth of enemies and hazards.

This seemed to go on forever, and on the first day I lost a large number of pikmin (about 40!) to enemies I wasn’t expecting. The golden blob also kept catching up with me, and each time it did I had to attack it to release Olimar anew. However, I realised after a short time that there were things I could do to make the path to the exit easier on subsequent runs – pushing down ramps, lowering bridges, even exploding a barrier right next to the start – and so on the third day I had a quick, clear run through the inside of the tree.

With that done, a final boss battle took its toll on my army – I’m ashamed to say it took me far too long to realise I had to attack the cubes it sent out with the appropriate elemental pikmin – and for the first time in the game I noticed that the crew were also taking a little damage. With only 45 pikmin left in my party, and all but one yellow pikmin having been drowned when I threw them into a ball of water by mistake, the golden blob fell for the last time.

Pikmin games are always relatively short, and that adds to their charm – having completed this I am tempted to try again, with a shorter time and fewer lost souls. I was never particularly careful with my pikmin, as I knew I always had many in reserve, and most boss battles were won not on strategy but on pure strength. Every one of those 400 deaths was probably preventable.

But before that, there are some side stories to play, and other missions to investigate. Maybe in the future.

Rental (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Rental is (or at least, was at time of writing, who knows what the Terrifying Future holds) a free game on Steam and nothing is more important in gaming than low, low prices. So why the hell not, eh?

Perhaps the best way to describe the game, assuming you can’t see the screenshots here, is What if Animal Crossing was Resident Evil on the PS1? Or maybe, Silent Hill: Sylvanian Families. It has the cute animals and the quaint little house and then Horrors.

As you take your cute little bunny into this holiday cabin, you quickly realise something isn’t right. In full BBC Ghost Watch style, you catch a glimpse of a thing. Or there’s a noise. Or a voice. It’s a bit creepy, especially given all the tweeity in the graphics.

I won’t spoil what happens, especially as it’s so short so, coupled with the freeness of the game, you’ve no excuse not to discover it for yourself, but after some hunting for items it gets even more disturbing and weird. Do you like cute free games that subvert your expectations and turn disturbing and weird? Then you’ll like Rental.