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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.

Wii-U

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Worst. Setup. Ever.

Tonight consisted of:

1. Putting the hardware together, cabling up etc.

2. Wrestling with the networking for the best part of an hour to get it to connect. In the end – I took all the spaces out of the SSID, did a manual setup and used static IP addressing and Google’s nameservers. Then it worked. Sadly, it demonstrated it was working by…

3. Spending two hours downloading an update.

4. Next up, I made a backup copy of my 3DS’s 32Gb memory card (and lucky I did – as you’ll soon hear).

5. Spent an hour doing a content migration from the Wii to the Wii-U.

6. Created profiles, added friends, stuck monster hunter in the drive.

7. Discovered a slight hiccup in the Monster Hunter 3DS<->Wii-U migration system. It moves the WHOLE DATAFILE, not individual users. Which is annoying as #2 Son has a fairly advanced player on my 3DS. The idea is we’d be able to do multiplayer between the 3DS and Wii-U. But the saves can only exist in one place at a time. Wait! Remember that backup I took of the 3DS SD card? You guessed it. Created #2 son an account on the Wii-U. Each account has its own datastore. Moved the save (including his player) to his account. Turned off the 3DS. Stuck the SD card in the Mac and copied the backup I made over. Booted up – yuss! Saves recovered to the 3DS. So, we can both play on the Wii-U and 3DS – we just need to be careful who copies what where…

 

It’s all going to end in tears, isn’t it?

 

I’m going to bed. I might get a go tomorrow :)

New Game – Scurvy Scallywags

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Not really s new game I have been playing for a few weeks, sucked into yet another match three iOS game.

It's quite enjoyable with the pirate theme, treasure hunting & boat building.

There is a trick to get lots of gold I found out when you are on the boss fight of an island. The rock monster in the screenshot does not move around the screen like other monsters instead at regular intervals he turns all power tiles to stone.

So keep him away from you and just concentrate on collecting the gold.

You obviously need gold to purchase ship parts, weapons, new skills & an extra life heart if needed.