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Lego City Undercover: an expanding city

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I've now completed 10% of the game, apparently, but I'm not sure what that measures.  There are huge numbers of collectibles and random tasks to carry out in the city, such as finding certain boulders, blowing up silver statues, capturing aliens, and so on. The map is huge and I've not really worked out where things are yet.  There are areas I've not been to and then last night I found out that there's a sewer system as well ...


Some of the sub-missions are quite daft.  I was robbing a bank in order to get into a criminal gang, and one of the tasks I had to perform was to clean the floors.


This was just a little daft, and also rather frustrating as it wasn't obvious what I had to do next - I was running around the inside of the bank worried that the police were going to turn up, when in fact I should have been getting onto the automatic mop.  It controlled like a pig, too.

Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate (Wii-U)

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Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate box artI’m going on a bear hunt! I’m looking for a scary one! As the song goes. Well, I certainly did find a scary one – he’s an Arzuros and his picture is down the bottom there. For this quest, I had to weaken him to a point where the tranquiliser would be effective. This involved wailing on him with dual-blades for a good twenty minutes. The trouble is, the animation is so flawless that it was kind of upsetting to do. Okay, at the start of the level he’s all drool and rage and swipey claws, but by the time I’d worn him down a bit he was limping from area to area and falling over when he tried to charge. Poor beastie.

Arzuros

Anyway, consider him captured. Now – I’m off to farm Great Jaggis to upgrade my armour…

Oh – also, the ability to move the savegame between the 3DS and Wii-U (and back again) is awesome. As long as you remember to move it back again when you’re done :)

Thomas Was Alone: blocks with personality

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I'm not sure how I feel about Thomas Was Alone. Its basic graphic style doesn't subtract anything from the gameplay, and in many ways it enhances the story and narrative, with faceless blocks being given ordinary names. The narration explores the thoughts of these blocks and is really well written. Parts of it have made me laugh a lot.

Claire needed to come up with a superhero name. 'Claire' was rubbish.

But the actual game feels pretty uninspired. The idea of each level is to get all characters into defined positions. Different blocks have different properties - Claire, for example, can float on water. None of the puzzles are particularly taxing, however, and often I'll get to the end of the level before the narration has finished. I can appreciate the style of the game, but it's not the most engaging thing to play.

Papers, Please: sending people off to die

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Quite a grim game, it must be said, and difficult as well.  You play as a border control official in a 1980s communist country, and must verify passport details and grant or deny access.  As you work through the game, the complexity of your task increases - entry tickets, entry permits, work permits, ID cards, fingerprint searches, X-ray scanning ... all of this serves to slow you down, you make mistakes, and you serve fewer travellers in a day.

And serving fewer travellers is bad, as you get paid per traveller and it's not just you relying on your salary.  You will find yourself faced with choices over who gets the needed medicine, and whether food is affordable.  Couple this with days ending early due to terrorist attacks, and you may soon find yourself alone.



The game's currently in beta and ends after a few days.  There are some intriguing plot narratives which start to open, with people asking you to refuse entry to a certain individual to protect them, cards passed across with secret society details, and husbands and wives broken up.  There's a repeat character that turns up with fake details each day, and I'd be intrigued to see if he ever gets everything together.

It's brutally hard to keep your family well, and for the final game I hope there's an easier mode (maybe unlocked after playing the main difficulty, which highlights the difficult conditions in those countries at the time) where you're not expected to earn quite as much.  Even after much practice, the third day still saw me with virtually no savings to carry forwards.


I recommend that you all play this at some point, whether it's now or when it's eventually released.  Details can be found at http://papersplea.se/.

Super Mario World (Wii U): COMPLETED!

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smwLook at all the little eggies! Look at them! I rescued them all! Woooo! Oh yeah, and the princess.

It was certainly harder than I remember, and I’ve only done the main route through the game with very few secret levels – 53 exits in total. The final boss, and the level leading up to him, was far, far easier though. Odd.

Now, I realise that to many this is evil heathenry, but I have to say – SMW is not the best Mario game. It is utterly fantastic and better than 99.9% of all other games, but I always preferred Mario 64. And, having recently played New Super Mario Bros U, I’m able to reconfirm that yes – that game is better than Mario World. It may not have the same impact, and may be lacking (comparatively) in new ideas, but it’s a more fun, more fluid, more vibrant and playable game. It takes nothing away from SMW, but definitely shows itself to be the better game. The best game. In fact. Ever.

Which is digressing a bit as this is supposed to be all about Mario World. Um. Yeah – that’s ace too.