the site of uk.games.video.misc
2024 Playstation Wrap, I have played far too much Fortnite this year and glad I have finally broken free from the addiction!
gospvg - getting old and still playing video games
The start of Pokémon Blue1 is pretty slow. After the first couple of set-pieces, where you choose a starter and fetch the pokédex, you are left to go forth into the world, with only the route numbers to guide you. The paths are winding and specifically designed to make you walk through long grass, meaning that you will encounter many wild pokémon along the way. Unfortunately for the first hour or so they are all of one of three or four types, and it gets a little dull when the fifteenth caterpie is dispatched with a single hit from Charmander. Trainers along the way offer some variety but they all have similar pokémon, again, and give very little reward. By the time you get to Pewter City, you’re desperate for just a bit of challenge.
Having chosen Charmander at the start, I got it. Brock’s gym is of ground and rock types, and Charmander’s attacks did little. Luckily I had already caught Spearow and Nidoran
so I had some variety, but my first attempt at Brock’s underling saw all my team of six (which also included Pidgey, Metapod and another Caterpie) being defeated. Before trying again, I went to the South of the city and wandered around in a patch of grass for around 150 hours, battling hundreds of level 3 and 4 pidgeys, caterpies, and rattatas. The time was not spent in vain, however, as Metapod evolved into Butterfree, with the confusion move, and Spearow and Charmander all jumped up several levels. Of course, this being a Generation 1 pokémon game, there was no EXP Share, so all this levelling had to be done by having Metapod in the first slot of my team and manually changing away from it as the first move.
I also caught a Pikachu, who quickly replaced Caterpie in the party, and I spent some time with him levelling up as well. Pikachu is nowhere near as cute in this first game as he later came to be; he is a little chubby.
With a team of level 15 pokémon, I went to Brock and beat him with health to spare; Butterfree performed admirably. And then I departed Pewter City to travel along Route 3, and on to Mt Moon. In the caves on the way to Cerulean City, I encountered approximately 32,649 zubats, with them appearing every few steps along the way. Each and every one was defeated with Pikachu’s thundershock move, as demonstrated in the header image of this post; occasionally they would get an attack in first which drained a point or two of Pikachu’s health. By the time I made it through the mountain, picking up a fossil and defeating Team Rocket on the way, Pikachu was at level 18 and other members of the party were trailing behind.
I may need to do some more grinding before I go to meet Misty.
︎Another two player Evercade game. I’ve played Joe & Mac (Caveman Ninja) before, and the sequel, but hadn’t even heard of this. In fact, I thought it was the sequel when I started it up. As it turns out, it’s a completely different sort of platformer.
Whereas the other two Joe & Mac games were sideways scrolling platformers where you club baddies, Returns is a two player Bubble Bobble/Snowbros/Rodland type single screen “clear the baddies” type game. You still club the baddies, but they now need multiple hits before they get stuffed into a snowball bag and you push the snowball bag into other baddies to knock them out too. Defeat enough baddies with the same snowball bag and you get larger fruit meat and more points. Yes, it’s very much like those other games.
With the exception that each between-level animation has the pervy cavemen spying on, or “accidentally” undressing one of the cave women. You’d never catch Bub or Bob doing that.
We completed it, which was surprisingly easy for an arcade game, and found it enjoyable although it isn’t surprising it never hit the big time like those games it apes as it lacks the cute factor and isn’t quite as much fun. Snowballs and bubbles are more satisfying than bags, obviously.
I broke out the Evercade VS for some games with my daughter, and this was one of those we played. It’s a Final Fight clone by Toaplan, and is very silly and badly translated. You’re wrestlers, I think, one of whom is Elvis Presley, and you have to fight your way through the streets and buildings to take down the bad guys, some of whom join your cause.
It’s hilarious. But not (always) intentionally so. It’s just so ridiculous. Like the hotel level where the bellboys join in the fight and you smash through a Manneken Pis to get to the next section. Some “levels” are pretty much a single screen, like the wrestling ring, and others are longer. None of them make a lot of sense, but it’s playable (“just punch everyone” is an easy enough concept to understand) and just the right amount of button-mashy.
After the success of Rocket League, I’m surprised there’s not been more of a glut of car-based sports. Rocket League itself included modes based on ice hockey and basketball, but the objectives there are pretty much the same – get the object into the goal. It’s taken quite some time for a completely different sport to arrive, and Turbo Golf Racing seeks to do what its name describes – inject a golf game with turbos and racing. The cars look similar in some way to the Rocket League roster, though with large bumpers on the front. The relative size of car and ball is familiar. The speeds you drive, with the possibility of jumping and boosting, are very close, but not exactly the same. You’d be forgiven for assuming this was by Psyonix.
But the driving model isn’t exactly the same, and after having played the PS4 version of Rocket League for over 400 hours, and the Xbox and Switch versions for significant time on top, the differences are just enough to cause me issues. There’s no double jump, for a start, and I have tried numerous times to jump sideways into a ball to nudge it into the hole only to find myself boosting forwards and away from where I need to be. There’s also a different way to get height on the ball when driving – in TGR you need to hold up on the analogue stick to hit the ball upwards, whereas in RL you’d aim your car nose down to get the same effect.
That’s not to say it’s uncontrollable – it’s just a little different. I’ve spent most of my time in the race mode, where you try to get your ball into the hole as quickly as possible, with seven others doing the same. Ordinarily you cannot interact with their balls (or, indeed, them) but there are powerups you can collect such as missiles and ice beams which cause them to lose control. Otherwise it’s almost like a single-player game, with ghosts flying around you. The golf mode, where you have to get the ball into the hole with as few touches as possible, is a completely different pace.
It’s a fun game. Unfortunately it’s full of microtransactions and a focus on cosmetics, learning from the very worst practices of Epic – another way in which it’s like Rocket League. I’ll be content with my purple basic car for now, than you very much; it’s not as if I see anything other than the back of it most of the time.