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Lego Marvel Super Heroes (Wii U): COMPLETED!

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Woverine_does_whatever_a_wolverine_does._Has_sharp_claws__is_mostly_harmlessI think this may actually be the first Lego game I’ve completed entirely in co-op. Lego Batman 2 and 3 were both mostly co-op, but Lego Marvel Super Heroes I’ve played only in co-op with my daughter. Which is nice.

There’s a lot of mopping up bricks to do, as usual. We’ve done some, after finishing the story, but we’re still only at around 52/250. Finding the rest is going to be a pain, as although most of them are on the New York City map, it’s often not clear what you need to do when you get to them. Of course, a fair few are going to come from redoing the levels again in Free Play. Having said that, in recent games I’ve not bothered going for 100%. I think Lego Harry Potter 2 was the first where I didn’t, and although I had a pretty good stab at it for Lego Batman 2, I haven’t tried at all for Lego Batman 3. I really should. It’s a lot of fun.

Anyway! This is telling you nothing about this game. Which there isn’t a great deal to talk about, actually. It’s more Lego super heroing, only with Marvel characters instead of DC ones like Batman 2 and 3. Like Batman 2 there’s a massive open hub world (New York City), which seems more dense and full of life than Gotham. The split up mini-hubs of Batman 3 were a step back, I thought. There’s also a handful of things to do on the SHIELD helicarrier, up int he sky above the city.

Galactus__Tiny_devourer_of_worlds__Or_small_objects__at_least.The story revolves around Galactus heading for Earth, and Doctor Doom, Loki and Magneto (as well as a few other less important baddies) seem to be taking advantage of this for a project of their own. As, variously, several Avengers, the Fantastic 4, Spider-Man and a few X-Men, you progress through the levels trying to beat these baddies and take back the Cosmic Bricks they’re stealing. The levels are all pretty standard Lego fare – different characters can activate different things, access different areas, or destroy or build certain types of blocks. They’re pretty varied, with settings underwater, in the Statue of Liberty and on a space station, and the characters you use are swapped frequently so you don’t get bored with the same ones.

The star of the show is Deadpool. He shows up for some of the bonus levels, and has his own room on the helicarrier where you buy found red bricks and watch the in-game movies and so on. In one of of the main levels, Doctor Octopus smashes through the Daily Bugle offices, and then in a bonus level later Deadpool narrates (with silly voices) as you, as Agent Coulson and Doc Ock, have to tidy up the mess. It’s very funny, and a memorable moment.

There aren’t any real surprises in the gameplay, and it’s a shame that two player “screen each” play sometimes makes the framerate nosedive (more so than in Batman 3, in fact, and that was bad at times), but it’s a solid Lego title and probably one of the best too. Although they’re all pretty great, truth be told.

Now I just need to find copies of Lego Lord of the Rings, Lego the Hobbit, and Lego Jurassic World and I’ll be up to date. Apart from Lego Dimensions (so called because your wallet needs a 4th dimension to hold all the money needed for it) which is out soon. Sigh.

Crazy Golf: crazy as in idiotic

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When looking back at the 8-bit consoles, there is a natural tendency to think of them as home to many stone-cold classics, games that stand the test of time and are replayable even now, after countless refinements to gameplay have been developed.  What we don't tend to remember is the dross that got pumped out.  Dross like Crazy Golf.



Golf is a precision sport, and it's important that you can easily judge angles and distances.  But this is crazy golf, so let's stick it in Mode 0 where the pixels are rectangles, not squares, and even better let's make it so you can only hit the ball at twelve predetermined angles.  Oh, but let's make sure the angle the ball travels at isn't actually the same as the indicator used to aim.



This is the second hole.  It took me ages to get here, mainly because of an inability to work out the controls.  It turns out that despite pressing space on the title screen, in-game the only keys which do anything are the cursor keys for aiming and power, Q for quitting to the title screen, and space skips to the next hole.  On WinAPE, the emulator I used, you need to enable a virtual joystick, turning Num Lock off on the PC keyboard, and use the 5 on the keypad as a fire button.

Having finally worked this out, the first hole was cleared using a sort of 'maximum power and hope' strategy.  It was a number of straight vertical walls, and the ball bounced around like a mad thing before finally entering the hole, just one over par.

So, the second hole.  No matter what angle I hit the ball at, it kept going back to the start (which was just below the aiming indicator top-left). I had to reduce power a lot and inch the ball down bit by bit.  It took a while to work out that the power works on the number of pixels, and so you need twice as much power to go down the screen as you do to go across it.

I finally got around the bottom, and over to the right of the screen.  Amazing I was able to bounce straight through the pink wall at the bottom, but ended up along the top.


Now, what do you think would happen if I fired off a shot now?  Oh, note that the indicator is showing the direction the club comes from, not the way the ball goes.  I know, that got me as well.  You'd expect it to bounce off the lower green wall, up to the upper green wall, and then back.  But, oh no.  Angled walls don't affect the ball.  It bounces straight back along the same path.  It's basically reacting to the pixel it hits, not the slope of the wall. That doesn't matter on this stage so much because obviously (almost) all the 45-degree angles come in pairs.  But ...


This stage is begging you to start off by bouncing the ball straight down and off that angled wall at the bottom left.  If you do that, the ball goes straight back up!  You actually have to bounce the ball off the left wall yourself, then slowly along the bottom until you get to the bottom-right corner.  And then it's just a case of hitting it up the passageway, bouncing it off the flat wall, and up to the flag.

Oh, no.  The angle of the passageway does not correspond to an angle that you can set the ball at - neither in terms of the indicator at the top right, or the path which the ball goes along (did I mention that they're not the same?)  That wouldn't be a problem if the ball could bounce off the walls on the way up, but remember that the angle it bounces off is due to the pixel sides, not the overall wall, so you are likely to see the ball bouncing backwards down the path.

But look at the screenshot again.  Not only have I managed to get the ball to bounce backwards off one wall, it's gone straight through another into an area with no gap to escape.  I had to fire off random shots for five minutes until the ball glitched through a different wall; which of course was the bottom side of the triangle, meaning I had to work my way up around the path again.

But all that effort was worthwhile.



Because I was tired of being able to see colours and was looking for a solution to make me blind.  I mean, what is this meant to be?  It's actually a far easier hole than the last one, because all the angles are straight, but of course it's still a nightmare due to the use of Mode 0.


And then you come to this.  Again, the angle of the walls isn't matched by a shot angle, so you have the pain of getting the ball down to the bottom and ten through that tiny gap where the green and red walls join.  Remember that the top-right angled wall won't bounce your ball towards the flag as you go up.  After dealing with the horrendous comb at the bottom and the tiny gap, you have to make it through a set of pixels which are pretty much random, and of ocurse affect your ball in random ways, until you get to the flag.

There are more, but they don't get any better.  The entire game is an exercise in frustration, mostly cased by the limited number of angles your ball can travel at.  This is all the more frustrating because the Amstrad is capable of so much more; even in BASIC I wrote a program a few years ago which drew a ball moving at a defined angle, and then bouncing off walls and even being affected by gravity spots on the screen.  Had it even just been in Mode 1, everything would have been much better defined, easier to calculate, and probably less garish.

Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D: completed!

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It's a while since I wrote about this, but I have continued to play it regularly.  Back in June I had finished three of the four temples, and had one more to go.  But before I did that, I wanted to try and do some of the sidequests, since my Bombers' Notebook was full of rumours and half-complete quests.  That's what I've been doing for the past two months.




I've reformed frog choirs.  I've cleansed souls.  I've freed postmen from their duties.  I've found bits of fairies and forged swords.  I've cleared out dungeons and helped facilitate arranged marriages.  And I've tried, as best I can, to make everyone happy.  I had to use an online guide for a few bits and pieces - particularly the long marriage back-and-forth - but I wanted to clear as much as I could because I'm unlikely to replay the game.

It's difficult to be happy when you have a huge moon over your head, threatening to kill you in three days. In the end, I had completed most of the sidequests and moved to the last dungeon.  It wasn't nice.





This bit, in particular, was annoying.  You had to charge up a mirror, then run into its beam of light and charge up another mirror using the shield, and then run into that new beam of light and shine it into the door.  Not easy on a moving train, where motion control makes the beam wiggle everywhere.

The end boss was difficult but fun.  Putting on the giant's mask, it was just a case of jumping out of the way of a flying centipede and thumping it over and over.  Last dungeon done, all giants freed, and off to confront the Skull Kid.

He went up to the moon.


I wasn't expecting the moon to be so lush and verdant.  This seemed to be a bit of a dream, meeting children dressed in boss masks, who played hide and seek sending me into little dungeons and puzzles.  They took all my masks from me.  In the end I found a child wearing Majora's mask sitting under the tree, who gave me the Fierce Deity mask and started the boss battle.

And that was really, really easy.  I can see how it could be difficult normally, but wearing the Fierce Deity mask made me effectively invulnerable and able to hit the mask's various forms without having the sneak around everywhere.

Mask defeated, evil vanquished, moon then disintegrates and I worry that I have chaos on the world with no tides and unbalanced gravity.  Evidently not; the part starts and I leave, galloping through the forest.


Luigi wasn't happy.

Not just completed, but 100% completed with everything seen and everything done.  A superb game.


Capitals – Stats (iOS)

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I've had a bad run & my win rate dropped to 32%, slowly I've been working my way back to 50%.

I've changed my play style after a good tip from witty to focus not on longer words but letters that hurt your opponent & get you close to attacking their capital.

Now if only I could win more games against witty & satsuma.

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (PS4): COMPLETED!

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Everybody's Gone To The Rapture™_20150811211404I find the term “walking around simulator”, which games like this have often been categorised as, somewhat derogatory.  It’s as if there’s nothing to the game at all, bar walking around, and it should be derided because of this. Which is missing the point.  The aim of these games is not to “win”, not to solve puzzles and leap gaps and shoot Nazis, but to discover the story. Yes, you do this by walking around, but there’s more to it than that.

Everybody's Gone To The Rapture™_20150811214804In Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, erm, everybody’s gone to the rapture. You start off as an unknown person on the outskirts of a Shropshire village in 1984, near an observatory. You can’t enter the observatory as the gates are locked, so you need to travel a massive loop of the village to try and get in the back way. As soon as you set off you hear a radio message which alerts you to “an event”, and as you explore the village radios and telephones start to fill in some of the story behind what happened.

Everybody's Gone To The Rapture™_20150812212352

Along the way, orbs of light direct you to places of interest, where you see some conversations and actions leading up to The Event played out. Technically, you can just walk past everything and head for the end of the game, but then you really do have just a walking around simulator on your hands, and you’re missing both the point and the game.

When you reach the end, there’s no decisive conclusion and no full exposition of exactly what happened. It’s up to you to formulate in your head what you think occurred based on what you’ve seen and heard, and how you interpret what the “glowing light” actually is.

Almost as much fun as putting this together yourself, is reading what other people thought and how their theories compare to your own. With that in mind, here’s a big spoiler:

Spoiler Inside SelectShow

Everybody's Gone To The Rapture™_20150813222415

Obviously, there’s more to it than all this, but I’m not intending to write a dissertation! There are a lot of side stories as well, like the love triangle between Stephen, Lizzie and Kate, or Frank’s difficult relationship with his sister, all of which are explored literally by exploring. It’s intriguing and compelling finding out everything you can from the clues left behind, and the English village setting is beautiful to wander round.

Everybody's Gone To The Rapture™_20150811212930The only minor negatives I have are that sometimes the walking pace, even with the “jog” button, is much too slow (especially when you realise you’ve missed something and have to backtrack for miles), and that there is a huge amount of asset reuse. The same shed, greenhouse, plastic garden table, white sheets on the washing line, Raleigh Burner-alike BMX bike and books are everywhere, repeated over and over again. Houses all have the same kitchen. Even the two pubs in the village have exactly the same “special offers board” and virtually the same layout inside. The worst copy and paste job is the large number of cars that are around the village – of which there are only about 5 or 6 types. This wouldn’t be a problem but they’re not just the same type of car, they’re exactly the same car with the same colour and same number plate.

Everybody's Gone To The Rapture™_20150812223056Sometimes you can see that it’s intentional, with, for example, a car appearing in one location with a Peter Pan hat and swords inside, then appearing later at the holiday camp where the kids were performing Peter Pan, but most of the time it’s just jarring. In one case there’s a carpark with two instances of the exact same van in it! There’s no reason why they couldn’t have replaced the number plates and colour-swapped the cars to mix it up a bit, surely? Or had a red-and-yellow Burner instead of a blue-and-yellow one occasionally? I realise it was a small team making the game, but this would surely have been a tiny job compared to the rest?

Everybody's Gone To The Rapture™_20150812221952Another thing which was unimportant in the end but seemed necessary to record along the way was all the numbers broadcast on the radios (identical radios…). I started to get a little paranoid that I might miss one. Then I wondered if the names of the books were important. Or the times on the clocks (which were all stopped at the same time, as it turned out). Or the car number plates. I ended up documenting everything and – of course – none of it was needed. In fact, there was nothing you could even do with this information anyway.  This wasn’t the game’s fault of course, more mine for not having any idea what to expect and not wanting to miss anything that may be required later on. For new players: read and listen, but don’t bother making notes.

Should you play Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture? Absolutely. Will you understand what you’ve just played when you come to the end? Possibly. Will it matter if you don’t? No, I don’t think so.