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Phogs (PS5): COMPLETED!

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One good thing about PS++++++++++, is that in amongst all the crap games and shovelware there are a load of co-op games that are fun for me to play with my daughter. It’s because of an afternoon where we were looking for something to play together that we were trawling through the library and spotted Phogs (or possibly “PHOGS!”), and now we’ve completed it.

In many ways, this game falls into a similar category as other wonky-physics titles like Human Fall Flat and Totally Reliable Delivery Service, in that you have inaccurate control over a character and have to manipulate objects in the environment in order to progress. An additional hinderance here, however, is that each player controls either end of a double-ended dog. Imagine a sausage dog with a head at each end, Push-Me-Pull-You style, with each independently moved by each player. You can make things cosy by sharing a single controller and having a stick each, but we were fine to go with a pad apiece.

Anyway. That’s all logistics waffle – what about the game?

It’s a sort of platformy-puzzley game, where your phog has to reach a big snake at the end of each level who swallows you and moves you on to the next. In the way are gaps you have to fill, plants you have to water, items you have to collect, water spouts you have to plug, and dark areas you have to light up (or vice versa). Mostly, these are achieved by grabbing something with one or both of your phog heads. For example, there’s a watermelon patch that needs watering so the watermelon can grow and create a platform for you to progress. Nearby is a pipe with water coming out. You grab on to the pipe with one phogmouth and then the other phogmouth becomes a hose, and – since you can also stretch your phog – you can use this to reach the patch and water the watermelon.

Cooperation is absolutely key, as you can imagine, especially on the many “swing over this gap” sections, where you can grab hold of a hook (or something) with one phoghead then swing the other phoghead to the next hook and grab hold, repeating until you’ve swung all the way over. Timing is often critical so we found ourselves counting to three a lot. Thankfully, you can’t really die and if you fall off the world (which is inevitable give the wonky physics and lack of coordination) you don’t lose much progress at all.

It’s not a very long game, with us finishing it in about three hours, but we enjoyed it and the silly hats you can unlock (which do nothing except adorn a head). There’s a fair amount of variety across the four main worlds, with bosses of a sort on each. The “night and day” world has some especially clever light-and-dark, awake-and-asleep and perspective puzzles and events. The final world also has a short section where there’s a big change to the game mechanics, although I won’t spoil it. Oh, and eating all the food you find so you get phat phogs never gets old or boring.

It’s nice and colourful and mostly low stress (unlike, say, Overcooked), and we didn’t end up fighting each other or anything so that’s probably a recommendation?

Populous the Beginning: an army of balloons

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When I restarted Populous the Beginning this time I had a sense of foreboding over getting to Bloodlust, which I recall has caused me much anguish in the past. The level is constructed so that your settlement is at the centre of the other three, and as a result you are constantly being invaded. When I completed the level for the first time, I wrote on this blog how it was achieved. Rather than settling my village, I took a small army over to the green tribe and annihilated them first, before reinforcing my position and expanding onto the green plateau. I thought this sounded like a good strategy.

In fact, I didn’t follow it that closely. I concentrated my initial building efforts on a few huts, a firetraining building, and a balloon launching site. I trained seven firewarriors, and put them in four balloons – alongside my shaman – and sent them over the hill to the green base. I cast lightning at the shaman and hypnotise at some of their preachers, and their village was starting to be dismantled. I reinforced this with the destruction of their temple and firetraining.

But I didn’t completely destroy the greens.

Instead, I noted that the green shaman would reappear, and then walk over to a certain location in the middle of the village. And so I put down a few swamps along the path. This meant that I was getting a constant stream of mana each time the green shaman died, and my firewarrior balloons hovered overhead just in case the swamps ran out or she took a different route. This enabled me to go elsewhere with my shaman, and the greens were not building the village back up too quickly.

Which is a good thing, because by this point the yellows and reds had built up their armies and were starting to bother my settlement. They were fighting among each other as well, especially where the bloodlust stone head was located, but they were sending significant numbers of warriors to get me. Yellow, particularly, liked the balloons, and rather than building my own I was able to just steal those that were generously left in my village.

The firewarriors are anxious to get airborne.

I travelled around the village by balloon, with my shaman casting spells to disperse the enemies as they arrived, but felt that the two enemies were getting more annoying. So I took a single balloon, with my shaman and one firewarrior, and went exploring. I found the red shaman was standing in the shadow of a cliff to the North of my base, again (like the green warrior) returning here whenever she wasn’t leading an assault on an opposing village. I hit her with lightning and killed her, then set a couple of earthquakes and fire rains on her village, and swamps on the path from reincarnation to beachside standing place. I was farming mana from two tribes.

Except green was starting to get too big for their boots, to I took an army over there and destroyed the village once and for all. It took some time, and my efforts had to be paused at one point to repel an invasion from the yellows back home, but they fell. Red was also starting to rebuild, and so I went North and destroyed their village as well. This just left me with the yellows, who were – by this point – absolutely huge. I put firewarriors in balloons at the top of cliffs either side of the passage between our settlements, and then I built huts like there was no tomorrow, even to the point where I wasn’t allowed to build any more. I trained preachers and warriors, and put more firewarriors in more balloons, and I prayed at the stone heads to get bloodlust for myself.

And then I attacked. The battle lasted ages but, again, I headed off the enemy shaman threat through use of swamps on the route she would take after each death (see the header image for this post). I sent increasingly large armies around the outside of the village to destroy everything, and my shaman was on hand to set off tornados in the centre.

Compared to my last effort, this took a lot less time and there was a lot less death and destruction. My shaman died several times, but this was often because I was sending her into a village to destroy buildings until she herself was overwhelmed – it was a sacrifice worth making. The main thing is that I beat the level first time of asking.

Enemy shamans killed 76 times. By swamps.

Populous the Beginning: a four-way rumble

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Level 12, An Easy Target, is the first level in which you have three opponents. This is paving the way for levels such as Bloodlust, where you are constantly attacked from all sides, but in reality the easy target here is the yellow tribe, who starts in the middle of the map with easy access from everyone else. You do need to occasionally intervene to prevent boat excursions from the reds and greens, but generally you can rely on them to fight the yellows and among themselves. This would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that the island you start on is tiny and hilly, with limited space for a village and training huts.

So I decided that the yellow base looked far too tempting. I cast raise spells around the edge of my settlement, creating a wall to prevent attacks from the South, and funneling any enemies into a single bay where I created my boat shed. I set up many guard towers, staffed by fire warriors, along the perimeter, and then built more on top of a hill facing the yellows. With my shaman in one of these guard towers I could cast lightning spells to kill the yellow shaman, over and over again, and I could destroy the temple and warrior huts as well. After building up a smallish army, I set off and quite quickly it was all over, with the yellow land now mine (although mostly unusable due to the smoking ruins of the buildings).

That meant, of course, that the greens and the reds were both heading for me. I made sure there was a landbridge connecting the two other tribes, then cast lots of swamp spells to block their access to me. There was already a natural ridge blocking access between me and the greens, so I built a ramp up to that and constructed a row of guard towers, to prevent access but also as a base from which my shaman could set fire to parts of their settlement.

That green tower isn’t long for this world.

Having reinforced against the greens, I turned my attention to the reds, but the swamps I had put down were a bit too effective for me to make an attack. In the end I had to build a land bridge around the swamps so I could access the vault of knowledge and overrun the red village from behind. Two down, one to go.

Finally, I launched an offensive with 40 warriors, 40 priests, and 40 fire warriors at the greens, and while the shaman there initially put up a fight, I used my hypnotise spell to convert the group of priests and warriors surround here to be blue-aligned, meaning a quick dispatch.

I may not be the fastest at this game, but that’s because I like reinforcing my village at all times.

Adventure: when the bat carries the dragon

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I was quite surprised to see that I didn’t have a category for Atari 2600 games until now, but on reflection that’s because there’s not a huge amount to say about most of them. Playing through the games included on the Atari 50 compilation, most titles require little strategy or thought, instead relying on pure reflexes and quick action. The most successful games are the arcade conversions in the main, although their quality is somewhat varied – and the fact that on the compilation you have access to both the arcade original as well as the 2600 port means that the home conversion is generally a curio only.

There are, of course, exceptions. Haunted House and Adventure were much more in-depth than other games on the platform, despite their short length. I must have played through Adventure a hundred times over the past forty years, mostly in game variant 3.

  • Variant 1 is an easy introduction with a single maze and only two dragons.
  • Variant 2 expands the map with more castles, mazes, dragons and items, and also introduces the bat
  • Variant 3 is the same as variant 2, but all the items are placed in random places

The bat is possibly the most annoying part of the game. In variant 2 it starts by flying down the screen and stealing your sword, meaning you are defenceless against the roaming dragons – unless you manage to catch the bat itself in the screen to the South. My favourite strategy to minimise danger and reduce the randomness is to catch the bat, and carry it to kill the first dragon in the maze to the West of the starting position, and then hopefully the bat will then drop the sword and carry the dead dragon off and deposit it somewhere else.

The black castle always feels ominous.

It doesn’t always work like that, though. There have been occasions where the sword doesn’t kill the dragon but instead the bat grabs the live dragon and carries it off. After this you never know when you’re going to be surprised when you enter a new room. Even worse is when the bat grabs the live dragon, which then swallows you, and you are carried from screen to screen until the bat decides to deposit you somewhere.

Or, as shown in the header image of this post, the bat drops a dead dragon and steals the bridge, trapping you in a small area in the maze with no escape.

Variant 3 deals with this randomness by institutionalising it. Every item – keys, swords, dragons – is randomised at the start, and this means that you need quick reactions and a certain amount of patience to find what’s needed while avoiding the dragons. And the bat’s back as well. I will win every time when playing variants 1 and 2, but variant 3 has no guarantee of the sword being available before the dragons, and there are only a certain number of rooms you can run away to.

The game holds up remarkably well. It’s short, no doubt, but because of this it’s really replayable and fun. So many games have developed from this, but it’s still worth going back to the roots. Needless to say, I completed this, several times.

Metaphor: ReFantazio (PS5)

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It’s rare I post about a game before I’ve completed it these days, but I felt I had to write something about Metaphor: ReFantazio. I’m only about 10 hours in, with the last five of those being mostly spent in the first proper dungeon, so it’s early doors, but oh my, is this a game.

To begin with, I was a little disappointed in the graphics. I’m not All About The Graphics, as regular readers would know, but it’s sometimes nice to play a PS5 game and have All The Graphics. Sadly, although it’s pretty, for the most part so far Metaphor isn’t an improvement on Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Until it comes to the UI, where it is utterly mental. If you thought, as I did, that Persona 4 Golden had UI diarrhoea (in a good way), then get a load of the exploded fontbook that is the Metaphor menu system and battle UI. Everything moves and has different fonts and styles and it’s all circular and spirals and flashy overlays and and and… there’s no reason for it! It doesn’t affect the gameplay in any way! My guess is the UI designer got bored after their task on the game only took a week.

Look at that beautiful mess on the left there.

That’s the first thing that hit me. The second was more subtle to begin with and is to do with the Metaphor title. After reaching Grand Trad, the (first?) big city in the game, and chatting to everyone and finding out what’s going on, my mission, and the general state of various races, religion, and relationships, added to a class system and a man who wants to change everything and be King, the real story was then as subtle as a brick to the face. It’s all about real life issues and politics under the guise of fantasy and magic. Clever.

That aside, the gameplay is Persona. So I’m loving it. The dungeon I’m in might be big and hard but it’s so slick and the turn-based combat is tuned to be fast and clear and stupidly over the top. It’s a shame the graphics aren’t quite there, but as I said, not a big loss for me.