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North (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I read a couple of reviews for North, and although they weren’t exactly high scoring, they all said the story was interesting if a little short. Someone referenced Blade Runner. Another mentioned Papers Please. For reasons that became obvious when playing, specifics were missing somewhat from these reviews.

Then I saw it was only £2.79, and more than that I had some free eShop credit. Not only that, but I’d get some money back now Nintendo have that rewards points thing. Why not, I thought.

North is a narrative discovery game, and starts with you – a refugee from the (seemingly literally on fire) South – having just made it to a city in the North. Before you can apply for asylum, you have to prove you’ve been persecuted in your own country, convert to the local religion, and be fit for work.

This plays out in the form of walking round mostly pitch black areas, writing letters to your sister who is still back in your old country, and some slight interaction with alien figures and switches. It’s important to mention the pitch black areas, because on the Switch at least (Youtube videos of other platforms suggest it’s a Switch thing), some areas are too dark to see anything. Walls, slopes and space are all just black. I missed a door for ages because it was so dark.

One of your first tasks (and the only one that requires any sort of skill or dexterity) is to work. You get a drink from a vending machine which allows you to run, then enter the mines. Here, you have three jackhammers you have to activate (and collect the stones they produce), only you die if you stay in the mines too long. You can recover health by running back to the entrance before you die.

Dying just repawns you outside the mines, but I encountered a bug in doing so: I was unable to get more drink, so was unable to run, and therefore unable to complete the mines. If you can’t complete the mines, you can’t prove you’re able to work, and so can’t progress in the game, so I was stuck. I had to restart the game. There were a few other bugs – sometimes the wrong name of a door appeared on a door, for instance – but this was a biggie.

Hardness to see and game breaking glitches aside, the game’s story was enough to keep me playing. I can’t go into details here much as almost everything is a spoiler, but when you realise why the player is being persecuted, you suddenly realise how politically charged the game is. Especially since it comes from Moscow…

For some reason, it feels a lot like Bernband only more oppressive and more lonely. It’s amateurish in the way it’s built, with unfinished rooms and what I sense are Unity assets, but it seems like that’s just the means used to tell the story. It could have been done in Twine, or Inform, or PICO-8, so I can’t really mark it poorly for that. Apart from the lighting and bugs, of course!

Having played it, I can see how the reviewers had a hard time scoring North highly. It’s like trying to assess a film using the rules of reviewing a concert. Is North a great game? No. Is it a great story? No. Is it an important story to “play”? Absolutely.

Oh, and the title music track is a lovely Vangelis-style thing so it’s almost worth it just for that.

The post North (Switch): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.

Life Is Strange: Before the Storm Bonus Episode: Farewell (PS4): COMPLETED!

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Well this was a surprise! Sure, I knew it was coming, but to appear today with no warning… that I’d seen anyway.

Farewell is set a few days before Max left for Seattle. Her and Chloe seem to be 13 or so, and much of the episode is about them reminiscing over when they were younger. Indeed, the “aim” is to uncover a treasure they hid when playing as pirates five years previously.

It’s much shorter than other episodes (less than an hour long, in fact), and aside from the spoiler (which shouldn’t be a spoiler if you’ve played the rest of the game), not much actually happens. There’s happy chat between Max and Chloe, a bit of house exploring, and Max finally manages to tell Chloe she’s leaving soon. And that’s it.

Farewell doesn’t really tie up any loose ends, nor does it tell you much you didn’t already know. What it does do, however, is cement how close the two girls were and explicitly show just how hard it was for Chloe when Max left. Making the choice at the end of the original game harder still if you’ve yet to play that.

If you want to watch my playthrough, it’s here. Spoilers and stuff, of course:

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SNK Gals’ Fighters (NGPC): COMPLETED!

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No, I don’t know why I decided to play this either. I mean, I’d just set my Raspberry Pi back up with a fresh install of Retropie, and yeah, I’d added this as one of the games, but still. Why this and not something else, I can’t say.

But these Neo Geo Pocket fighting games are just so good, aren’t they? So slick and responsive and fun. It wasn’t that long ago I played KOFR2 and it was great as well. In fact, there’s a lot of great NGP games. Best console. For a while, anyway.

Anyway.

I’m not sure what else to say about the game. It has a nonsense story about “Miss X” holding a Queen of Fighters contest (do you see what they did there?), but of course Miss X is – spoilers – Iori. And not a “gal” at all. Hilarious and we all fell about in stitches, didn’t we? Then there’s the cut scenes like this one:

Which are great. Just the right about of wonky translation mixed with a limited text area to perfectly ruin any depth to the conversation. Nobody cares about that though, because what is important is how good the punching and kicking is and in that regard, it’s lovely and fluid.

If you’re taking notes, I played through as Yuri. And if you don’t know how she plays, she’s basically Ken from Street Fighter. Which is why she is Best.

Oh yeah, and there’s a sequel of sorts to this coming out on the Switch soon! Yesss.

The post SNK Gals’ Fighters (NGPC): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.

Super Bomberman R (Switch): COMPLETED!

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A lot of people derided this at launch, but I know Konami have changed a lot since then. In fact, the multiplayer mode is – baffling graphics choices aside – a decent enough Bomberman game. Today, I discovered that you could change the viewing angle of the single player game with the L and R buttons and you know what? Single player is just fine now too.

Sure, the camera angle, even when fixed, is a bit odd and sometimes it’s hard to see what “level” you’re on as a result, but mostly it’s not an issue. I’d have liked it to be a touch more overhead (perhaps I missed another button combo) but it hardly caused an issue.

In fact, I completed it. And it was fun, and it wasn’t too long and you know what? It’s the only Bomberman game with a single player mode I’ve completed since the SNES/PC Engine/Mega Drive versions. Which says more than any description I could stick here would.

Obviously it isn’t perfect, but all the necessary power-ups are there, each world has gimmicks that work, the levels are pretty varied (some have “survive for” time limits, some require you to kill everything, some have you saving people), and the bosses are decent too.

Of course with a Bomberman game, the actual game is in the multiplayer modes. But Super Bomberman R’s (haha! R’s!) is a solid 3/5 on it’s own. How much has changed in the last year I don’t know, but that’s where I’d stick it now. And yes, I played the “bonus” world after completing the game too, in case you were wondering.

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Grand Theft Auto V (PS4): COMPLETED!

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I started it about a year ago, but after around 15 hours play GTAV was put away because I bought a Nintendo Switch. And Zelda happened. And then I thought actually getting back into GTA would be hard and I’d have no idea what I was doing any more. A few weeks ago, however, I gave it a go and was sucked back in.

My aim was to just concentrate on the story. A lot of fun is to be had in GTA games just messing around, doing the side missions, or (my favourite) Taking A Bike Where A Bike Shouldn’t Go, but my priority was to get the main missions done to clear the game off my backlog. And that’s what I did, although often it was difficult to tell what was a main mission and what was a side mission. Sometimes the mission “trail” went cold, and I’d have to do some other tasks before I was back on the path.

There’s not a lot to say about the game that hasn’t be said elsewhere, not least because it’s pretty old now. What I found, however, was that it was really rather good, but it’s too big. There’s too much in here. You can’t mark it down for that, but for me, so much of it was wasted. Case in point: in the end credits I saw a golf course. Did I see a golf course in the game? No. Can you play on it? It seems yes. Wasted.

Oh ho. Did you see what I did there.

Mechanically, the game is fine. I pressed the wrong buttons hundreds of times because there are so many and they change function depending what you’re doing, but that’s mostly my fault. I never managed to find a camera position when driving that I was completely happy with, but I coped.

Importantly, the story is pretty good. I’m not convinced that in any real world, Michael, Trevor and Frankin would ever even give each other the time of day let alone cooperate on a massively dangerous bank heist, but it sort of works in the game. Where the story isn’t perfect, the characters are. They’re excellent.

I suppose to summarise, it’s not perfect, there’s a lot more I could do (but probably won’t), it was fun, funny, varied and I enjoyed it. It’s no Vice City, but then nothing is.

Anyway. Here are some videos:

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