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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.

Aero the Acro-Bat: completed!

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The museum turned out to be the last level, and it was indeed significantly more difficult than the rest of the game. Much of this difficulty came in the narrowing of platforms, which would ordinarily be easy to land on but required the awful diagonal jumps to get high enough. It reminded me of the Dizzy games, where you had to work out which pixel to jump off in order to land in the right place, except more frantic and (often) with death awaiting if you fell.

Despite the setting and the increased difficulty, there were few innovations which set apart the last levels. There was an annoying obstacle which saw a laser shooting around a frame which you had to avoid, and flames shooting out of gargoyles at seemingly random intervals, and circular saws embedded in many platforms. Some of the enemies were immune to my diagonal attacks, or rather were sometimes immune (but at other times they popped, for no discernible reason). It was getting a bit frustrating and boring.

I quickly realised that it was pointless spending hours waiting for appropriate windows in obstacle attacks, since there were normally multiple life pickups – the As in the bottom-right corner – following any difficult section. As a result I often just barrelled straight through and dealt with healing afterwards. This wasn’t always the case, but due to the beauty of regular save states I had sixty-odd lives available anyway.

And then I got to the final level. The boss came in three stages, and before each battle there was a frantic vertical platforming section, with an ever-rising laser beam ready to cut the climb short. This took a fair while to do, even with saving, because of the awkward placement of platforms and the inaccuracy of Aero’s jumping. In the third section there were countless spikes and other enemies to avoid while also trying to land on minute platforms. Whenever I caught up with the boss, there was fight where he put out floating clowns to get in the way, and also streams of water coming from his giant clown face flying vehicle; while I tried to know his jaw off.

At the end of the second fight, the lower jaw came off, but that didn’t stop him from spawning clowns and generally being a pain the posterior. Instead of the jaw I had to hit his red nose, and after doing that 32,977,421 times he admitted defeat.

This wasn’t a great game. It was tolerable, and there was a nice fluidity to it – but there was perhaps just a bit too much inertia to allow for accurate jumping and platforming. Whoever designed the diagonal attacks should never have worked in the industry again. The jankiness with the controls may well have been an emulator problem, but I did see at least one review mention it.

Will I replay it, or play the sequel? I’ve got quite a lot of other stuff to do first.

Another Crab’s Treasure: sharing a drinks can

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I like the idea of the Souls games. Difficult games which you gradually improve at, learning patterns and strategies, exploring the best route to go. The thing is that they’re just a bit … grimy. Everything’s grey and brown and dark, and dirty and smelly and tacky and it makes me project senses that aren’t there. Anyway.

Another Crab’s Treasure is a Souls-like, but it’s not like that. Everything’s quite happy and colourful, at least until you meet other crabs.

It’s got a cute story as well. There’s a new ruler of the coast, and they’ve bumped up taxes to the point where little crabby here can’t afford them. So they take his shell instead. This means I’ve got to travel to the castle to ask for it back.

I took a wrong turn at first, and found an enemy who killed me six times in a row. Luckily, when you get near said enemies the game creates a checkpoint, so you can just get your stuff back quickly and run away when you realise you’re too underpowered. I then followed the coloured confetti until I met an enemy I could defeat, where I gained a new shell. I say a shell; it’s actually a drinks can. At least it gives me a little protection.

Metroid Zero Mission (Switch): COMPLETED!

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An actual Metroid Metroidvania game! Released on the Switch Game Boy Advance Online Service Thing presumably to tie in with the re-announcement (and gameplay footage) of the upcoming Metroid Prime 4, I thought, why the hell not eh?

It’s good. Oh so good. Yes, I’ve played it before, but almost 20 years ago so I remembered very little of it. In fact, I’d even forgotten about the whole “zero suit” bit where Samus loses her armour and you have to sneak around a Space Pirate ship with a weedy little gun. A bit which inspired the whole premise of Metroid Dread, I’m sure, but still – totally forgot it. And didn’t really enjoy that section too much either, truth be told, but it’s fine as it’s only about 15 minutes of the whole game.

The rest of Zero Mission is glorious ‘vania exploration and traversal and it hasn’t really aged either. Being a GBA game, it’s a shame nothing was done to make use of the Switch’s extra buttons as some of the moves are a little tricky using just ABLR. Specifically, swapping between missiles and super missiles has to be done with the Select button, which on the Switch is next to your left hand, not your right like on a GBA, so that’s a minor pain. You only really need them for Mother Brain though.

What I also hadn’t remembered, is how bloody easy the game is. I’m used to Metroid games, and the genre generally, being pretty difficult. At least, more difficult than this. I died once. On Mother Brain if you’re interested. Perhaps it’s just because I’ve played a lot of these games recently, or I was especially careful here, but I was very surprised at how easy I found it.

Metroid Zero Mission (Switch): COMPLETED!

Posted on Written by

An actual Metroid Metroidvania game! Released on the Switch Game Boy Advance Online Service Thing presumably to tie in with the re-announcement (and gameplay footage) of the upcoming Metroid Prime 4, I thought, why the hell not eh?

It’s good. Oh so good. Yes, I’ve played it before, but almost 20 years ago so I remembered very little of it. In fact, I’d even forgotten about the whole “zero suit” bit where Samus loses her armour and you have to sneak around a Space Pirate ship with a weedy little gun. A bit which inspired the whole premise of Metroid Dread, I’m sure, but still – totally forgot it. And didn’t really enjoy that section too much either, truth be told, but it’s fine as it’s only about 15 minutes of the whole game.

The rest of Zero Mission is glorious ‘vania exploration and traversal and it hasn’t really aged either. Being a GBA game, it’s a shame nothing was done to make use of the Switch’s extra buttons as some of the moves are a little tricky using just ABLR. Specifically, swapping between missiles and super missiles has to be done with the Select button, which on the Switch is next to your left hand, not your right like on a GBA, so that’s a minor pain. You only really need them for Mother Brain though.

What I also hadn’t remembered, is how bloody easy the game is. I’m used to Metroid games, and the genre generally, being pretty difficult. At least, more difficult than this. I died once. On Mother Brain if you’re interested. Perhaps it’s just because I’ve played a lot of these games recently, or I was especially careful here, but I was very surprised at how easy I found it.