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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.

Virtua Fighter 2: no not that one

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Released late in the life of the Mega Drive, Virtua Fighter 2 is a very accomplished rework of Sega’s 3D fighting game. It’s been reimagined in 2D, using sprites, but it feels very similar to the fighting in the 3D game – or the Saturn version of it, at least. The controls map well, with a button for each of punch, kick, and block. Some of the combos also seemed to work (Jacky’s dash hammer kick in particular) but I’m not sure if this is universal, due to my general incompetence in pulling these off.

It’s a very pretty and colourful game, and runs really smoothly as well. Had I had this before the Saturn released (and before I got a PlayStation) I imagine I’d have put a lot of time into it. Nowadays, despite it being a really good approximation, I would probably just play VF3b on the Dreamcast instead.

Blue blue skies.

Tomb Raider: completed!

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The final levels, which I understand are set in Atlantis but in fact are set in some creepy pyramid on an island which appears to be constructed from living flesh, were a step up in difficulty from the previous ones. The biggest change came from the enemies, who were more aggressive, more in number, and required more bullets to dispatch. I moved away from using my standard pistols, to a combination of the Uzis and the Magnums – the shotgun seemed a bit useless, with long reload time and poor aiming – in order to prevent enemies getting too close. The tactics I’d used before (of finding a ledge to stand on) no longer worked, with enemies who could throw fireballs and shoot, and others who flew around the room. They were horrible things too, seemingly with no skin, just flesh and muscle.

Of the levels set in Atlantis, the first was relatively normal. At the end of the Egyptian levels Lara was captured and escaped by diving off a cliff, and it turns out that she’s lost all her guns (but for some reasons still had some ammunition). To find her weapons you had to explore some mines, finding three fuses which were needed to lower a suspended building containing pistols. With pistols equipped, the mines led (via lava rivers, concrete mazes, and underwater tunnels) to three human enemies: a cowboy, a skateboarder, and a bouncer, each using some of Lara’s guns. The skateboard fight was very tricky to start with, until I found a passage I could take to come out on a ledge above the level, where I could wait for him to skate past and get shot multiple times.

Armoury reclaimed, I set off for Natla, who was using the scion thingy in the pyramid. I caught up with her and she unleashed a big enemy which I initially thought was the game’s end boss, until I killed it first try (somersaulting from side to side put me out of reach, and I could just shoot it many times). I then had to continue through the pyramid, finding a route back to the scion for me to destroy it. The levels became increasingly icky, with pods growing on the walls which burst to release enemies as I approached them. I’m not entirely sure what the cutscenes showed, but eventually I found Natla in a room at the top of the pyramid, and I fought and killed her using my favourite tactic of running away and finding a ledge to shoot from. Being shot to death wasn’t enough; she woke up and I had to do it all over again.

After a while I was desperate to see anything green.

With her dead again, all that was left was for Lara to run away, through a pyramid which was shuddering and collapsing (but not actually collapsing; this wasn’t a timed run). A few nasty jumps nearly had me throwing the controller in frustration, but I got out in the end – Lara swam out to the boat and took off just as the island exploded.

As a game, it’s aged, but only in that other games have taken the same sort of formula and made it more fluid to play. The way that the platforming is almost puzzle-like at times remains very clever, and the game’s pacing is really well thought out. I don’t think I’ll be going back to find all the secret areas, nor find more efficient routes through the levels – but that’s mainly because I’ve got Tomb Raider II waiting for me.

It felt like I used a lot more than 32 medipacks.

Mr Driller 2: completed!

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Is it possible to complete a Mr Driller game? Well, there is a story, and a set of difficulty levels with a narrative connecting them, and once I completed the highest difficulty level I saw an ending scene and credits and a screen that said “The End” on it. So yes, it is possible. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to play it again, though; it probably means that I’ll stick to normal difficulty rather than hard.

I have a Mr Driller 2 cartridge for the GBA (which, I believe, I bought for a pittance in the US once), and I have played it a lot on the Game Boy Micro at various times over the last couple of decades. I’ve never completed the Egypt stage, though, but recently I noticed the game’s release on the Switch Online service and thought I’d give it a go.

Maybe the Game Boy Micro d-pad wasn’t up to the task, since on the fourth attempt on the Switch – using my 8bitdo controller – I got to the bottom of the well. It being a US translation, everything’s measured in feet instead of metres, and the target depth is 10,000ft. I understand in the original Japanese this was 2,000m, meaning that Mr Driller in the US is 52% taller than his Japanese counterpart. There are breaks every 500m, transitioning to new types of level – the number of colours, prevalence of X blocks, appearance of star blocks, formation of X blocks around the air capsules – and quite often I would finish a level with very limited air, hoping the next would be either a two-colour stage (where chain reactions clear half the level, allowing you to grab multiple air cannisters at once) or one with helpful X block obstacles. I was crushed once, and ran out of air twice, but having been awarded an extra life on the way down (for, I guess, score related reasons) I was able to complete the game with 10% air left.

I don’t think I physically breathed for the last 500m.

The resolution betrays this as a handheld game.

I may have completed the main game, but there was one more surprise. On starting again, there’s a new extra hard stage – the North (Pole). Once again it’s 10,000m, but the levels are much harder. The first two have virtually no air available, meaning the third level is a welcome break with capsules here there and everywhere. The pattern repeats a few times, with levels starved of oxygen, meaning that if you don’t start them with a full tank you’re going to die. There are other levels where the air is buried under many patterns of X blocks, necessitating an excavation to release the air. It’s not easy; my best is 9610ft which was agonisingly close, but the last level is one of those with virtually no air and I started it on my last life with 25% in reserve.