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91: Slippers Go Under Defeat

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It’s time for Episode 91, so get yourself some warm cocoa, wrap yourself in a woolly slanket and sit by the fireplace to listen to the wireless. Then realise that the Temu slanket you bought isn’t made of actual wool, is melting, and you’ve just made yourself a hot plastic coffin. Ah well.

In this most episodey of episodes, deKay, Toby and Kendrick chat about The Recertification of Balatro (one of Mariah Carey’s lesser known albums), Netease oozing staff, Warner Brothers, er, also oozing staff, and putting David Cage in a box. But that isn’t all! We tell YOU, the listener, about games we have been playing! These games! Ooooh, games.

  • Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight
  • River City Girls 2
  • Thank Goodness You’re Here!
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 3
  • Metaphor ReFantazio
  • Llamatron
  • Macross Shooting Insight
  • Destiny 2
  • Sengoku Basara Samurai Heroes
  • Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
  • Freedom Wars Remastered

Plus! Toby tells you how to cut holes in your car so you can play Atari ST music files. And! More!

(Direct link here)

Intro music credits: The Marrow Song from the Thank Goodness You’re Here! soundtrack.

Don’t forget, if you want to contact us with questions or comments for or about the show, you can email podcast@ugvm.org.uk or publicly shame us https://mas.to/@ugvmpodcast on the Mastodons.

Populous: being unable to flood

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Having got further than ever before in Populous the Beginning (including a couple more levels after I posted previously), I find myself strangely unwilling to finish the game. After the last level I played there was a cutscene which showed my shaman becoming a god and passing the mask on; the last level feels like it may be very different to the rest, and after so many years I don’t know if I want it to end. And so rather than play that, I went back to the original game, with my standard tactic of raising the land a few levels higher than my opponent, and then waiting until I could flood them and destroy the majority of their followers.

And it mostly worked.

I remember that on the Mega Drive I had a sheet of paper on which I wrote down level codes. One of the clever things about Populous was that, while there were 500 levels defined, you didn’t have to play them all on the way to the end. Instead, depending on how you did you would skip over several levels at a time. This also meant that two games, starting from GENESIS, would usually be different, and the tactics you needed to deploy would vary as well.

And so this time I found my standard tactics didn’t work so well on a few early levels. First, there were some mountainous levels where my opponent naturally built high themselves, so the floods didn’t destroy all their settlements. Second, there were some levels where my opponent also had the flood ability – in one case that was their only power – which again meant they were loath to settle too low (although there was one occasion when the enemy had exclusively built on the lowest level, and then used flood, almost wiping themselves out and not me). Third, there were a couple of levels where I didn’t have the flood power either, and so I had to use other abilities to overrun the enemy; mainly through the use of powerful knights.

One key tactic is to farm the large castles by raising a hill next to them, meaning their capacity drops and a new settler emerges to create a new village elsewhere, and then dropping the hill again to reinstate the castle

Reacting to events makes the game interesting, including repairing settlements after swamps have been cast, building around volcanoes, and watching the random rock monster or witch generate a straight line of stones or vegetation straight through both factions. But building high is still key, except on those levels where nobody can flood or use earthquakes …

Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Sadly not the full Metroidvania experience I was expecting (the reason it ended up on my wishlist in the first place, following a review), Momodora still feels like one. Creepy town with a creepy castle, a curse, a map to explore, and pixel graphics? It certainly has the look of one.

What’s missing is all the extra powers that open up new areas. Sure, there are some, but very few. That means it is more a standard explorey platformer, hence my disappointment, but luckily it was still good!

Apart from the ending. I got a bad ending after defeating the final boss, but there was no explanation why it happened and seemingly no exposition as I was playing that it was possible. After that, I returned to the game and found a couple of extra things I’d missed and that allowed me to get the good ending, but it took some extensive exploring without really knowing what I was looking for, or where to look.

Apparently this Momodora is the third game in a series of (currently) four games. The first two are mostly lost to the winds, and the fourth came out fairly recently. I might pick it up if it’s cheap.

River City Girls 2 (Switch): COMPLETED!

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My daughter and I were big fans of the original River City Girls so the sequel was sat on my wishlist for ages waiting for a bit sale. That came around, and we played it through together.

It’s more of the same, really. A side-scrolling, semi-open-world beat-em-up with RPG elements set in the world of Kunio-kun/River City Ransom and made by Wayforward, just like the first game. It has a great cartoon style, loads of in-jokes (with both River City adjacent links, like Double Dragon and Crash And The Boys, and Wayforward properties like Mighty Switch Force) and satisfying and upgradable combat.

As it’s set in the same city as the first game, many locations are back – like school and shopping centre) although they have been modified so aren’t a complete copy-and-paste. There are plenty of new areas though. Similarly, there are both returning and new characters, although I don’t think most of the new ones are as good as the ones in the original. Also returning is another soundtrack from Megan McDuffee, which is also excellent.

The plot is mostly concerned with revenge on the Girls taking down the bad guy in the last game, although there are a couple of twists.

Gameplay-wise there are a few tweaks to improve stuff from before. Shop purchases work slightly differently, and there’s seemingly a lot more money available with which to buy them. The game seems easier too, meaning less death (which causes both progress and money loss).

It’s not all improvements though, sadly. Loading times are particularly bad, but also there are a number of bugs like items getting stuck out of reach, sound cutting out, and a few full crashes. Nothing major because of frequent save points but annoying nonetheless. Some of the new areas, like the overdone game trope of the “forest maze”, aren’t great either, and I’m sure there’s more backtracking this time round too, hindered by the aforementioned loading times.

That said, the fun, humour and style of the game massively outweigh the issues. It’s maybe not quite as enjoyable as the original, but doesn’t miss it by much.

Metaphor ReFantazio (PS5): COMPLETED!

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I seem to have really gotten back into long RPGs again in the last year or so. Sometimes they can seem daunting to start as you know you’ve 75 or 100 hours ahead to invest, and usually they’re a slow burn getting used to the mechanics. But, Metaphor came highly recommended and once Xenoblade 2 was out of the way I gave it a go.

I wrote a bit about it the other day already, so I don’t have a lot more to add now I’ve finished it except to say it continued to entertain, and there were plenty of plot twists along the way. Also, I was worried that going into the final area would lock off both the remaining time in the game (all events have deadlines, time passes each time you do anything, and you’ve a finite number of days to complete the game) and the ability to grind to level up, but luckily the game deals with that do you need not be concerned.

Overall, I’m not sure it’s a good as Persona 4, but then, very little is. It improves on the mechanics of that game, but as intriguing as the characters and world in Metaphor are, those in Persona 4 just beat it. It’s still amazing though.