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The Fairyland Story (Evercade): COMPLETED!

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This is one of the games on the recent Taito cartridge for the Evercade. I’m not 100% on the timings, but it feels very much like a precursor to Bubble Bobble – loads of single screen platforming, baddies to destroy, a particularly nasty baddie that appears if you take too long, and so on. It isn’t anywhere near as much fun as Bubble Bobble though.

The main issue I had is that often, especially on later levels, some of the baddies are really difficult to reach, especially without accidentally colliding with them and dying. There’s a level right near the end – level 95, I think – where the screen is sort of split in two and if you’re playing single player (like I was) then you can’t physically get from the left side of the screen to the right side. I can demonstrate with this screenshot from StrategyWiki:

You’re the witchy looking woman in red. The issue is that there’s no way to do a “small” jump to get over the four blocks at the bottom without jumping too high and ending up on the platform above. Except… there is. Thanks to a web search and a very old post on GameFAQs, I found that if you tap jump and then immediately tap right, then providing you’re standing in the right place, you can do a tiny jump. Get the timings or length of tap wrong and you don’t, so even if you know how it’s still nearly impossible. Literally nowhere in the game does it say this either directly or indirectly. Nowhere else in the game is it necessary. How arcade gamers in the 1980s without GameFAQs managed this I have no idea.

You can also see in that screenshot that neither of the baddies are actually reachable even if you do this. You have to coax them out by climbing higher up the screen than them. Which is a pain.

So, it’s not a great game. I completed it mainly because I’d started so I had to finish, but there are far better single screen arcade games like this out there. Still, if it wasn’t for the mistakes of The Fairyland Story maybe we wouldn’t have Bubble Bobble.

Picross S Namco Legendary Edition (Switch): COMPLETED!

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It’s been a while since I last completed a Picross game, but I’ve actually been playing this one off and on for six months or more. It is, as they always are, more of the same – a polished, Jupiter developed, game of Picross with loads of puzzles.

The difference this time, however, is that it’s Namco themed. Specifically, 8-bit Namco games from the 1980s. Pixel representations of the likes of Dig Dug, The Tower of Druaga, Pac-Man, Rally-X, Mappy, Xevious and several Japanese titles I’ve never heard of, all in Picross puzzle form. Excellent.

Aside from the music. I mean, I love the Mappy theme tune as much as anyone, but the same 8 seconds over it repeating overandoverandoverandover for a 45 minute puzzle? Nah mate, that got turned down fast.

Grand Theft Auto San Andreas: whatchutalkinbout?

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On one miserable, rainy evening, with a bit of a cold, and with an hour and a half spare before I had to go and collect Nicholas from Scouts, I wanted to do something substantial; cross something off my “to do” list. I could have put up the hooks in the utility room that have sat there for several months. I could have rearranged the loft to get the Christmas decorations properly put away. I could have hung up the artwork that has sat on top of our bookcase for the past four years, wrapped in bubble wrap in case of accidents. Instead I decided to do something that has been overdue for much longer – I decided to start GTA San Andreas.

San Andreas is often cited as the best of the PS2-era GTAs, and one of the best games of all time. I’ve mentioned before that two things put me off playing it.

  • The setting. The 2000s setting of GTA3, and the 1980s setting of GTAVC, felt much more relatable to me than the 1990s rap and gangster world of GTASA. I don’t like rap music, I don’t get the attraction of baggy trousers, I find the general griminess off-putting.
  • The complications. I remember reviews telling us how amazing it was that you could get your hair cut, that you could go to the gym, that you needed to eat to stay healthy, and so on. At the time that seemed unnecessarily complex – could I not just run around the world shooting at other people, stealing cars, and failing missions several times before getting lucky?

I’ve now played a few hours, and while the first is an issue, the second isn’t. Maybe expectations have moved on (while my prejudices have not), but the use of food to recover health is just a clever cover for health packs, and everything else seems to be entirely optional cosmetics. I have bought green trousers and a white shirt, and that’ll do me. There may be more to the mechanics in future (and the immediate view of stats with L1 implies they may be more important) but for now I’m not having to think about much at all.

Some of the lighting effects were very impressive on the PS2 but actually get in the way of gameplay.

The first point is more of an issue. I have very little affinity with any of the characters, even CJ, and everyone is just generally unpleasant to each other all the time. They live in grimy houses, shout at each other in barely comprehensible sentences, and just seem ready to jump into a fight at any moment. It’s not a life I really want to live.

As such, I’m concentrating on completing missions, rather than exploring the world at large. This will no doubt give me a disadvantage in future missions when I don’t know my way around, but for now it’s nice to streamline my objectives.

Teddison Inc (Playdate): COMPLETED!

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Teddison Inc is a cookie-clicker type numbers-go-up game. You’re a bear (for no explained reason, except – presumably – to enable the pun in the title) and you’d discovered you can use a bike to generate electricity. So you crank the Playdate and the number of watts goes up.

Then you can spend these watts to buy automations so you no longer have to crank. And more cyclists. And then better electricity generators like solar farms and wind turbines, as well as upgrades like better bike cranks to make existing generators more efficient. Soon you’re generating kilowatts, megawatts, and so on as the number go ever higher.

Unlike some of these clicker games where you have to leave them running overnight to get enough currency to progress, the whole game here is doable in a single sitting of about an hour. Which feels a bit short, but it’s fine. Some irony in a game about generating power using less power to play than other games in the same genre, I suppose.

Holy Potatoes! We’re In Space?! (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Maybe I should have looked up the game before playing, but I naïvely assumed that this follow-up to Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop?! would be more of the same only instead of the sort of fantasy setting of that game, I’d be creating weapons in a more sci-fi environment. Which, I suppose, you do. But actually, it’s a turn based RPG.

Whereas in Weapon Shop you just made weapons for other spuds, here you’re actually pilot of a spaceship and you travel to planets and fight baddies in other space ships. You have a crew (who you can recruit, train and “upgrade”), you have up to four weapons slots on your ship, and you fight in a very JRPG way Only in space with spaceships.

Yes, you create weapons, but that’s nowhere near as in-depth as it was before. So was I disappointed? I was. Very. But only for a while because once I got over the fact it was a totally different game (albeit with at least one connection to Weapon Shop), I really got in to the way it all worked and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Except for one thing.

As part of the plot, you’re being constantly hounded by an evil organisation. You warp to a solar system, then have to travel round the planets, complete some tasks, and then warp out before so many “sols”, the unit of time here, run out and you’re caught. This mechanic totally ruins the game for me. You’re always short of time and every time you fly to a planet, or explore one, or return to the “hub” in the system to refuel, repair your ship or buy resources, you use up sols and there just doesn’t seem to be enough. You go into battles feeling unprepared because you’ve gambled that you might waste too many sols recuperating after the previous one, and you never get a chance to properly explore each region of space as there simply isn’t time to do it. Luckily, you can turn “limited sols” off, so I did. Much better.

That aside, it’s a nice little game with some silly characters and homages to, well, everything, and a really good battle system with action points and stuff.