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Rise of the Tomb Raider: killing the bear

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Ten years ago in 2014 I played and completed the 2013 game called Tomb Raider, which is different from the 1996 game called Tomb Raider which I completed in 1998. I’ve done this joke before. I enjoyed the last game in the series, and picked up the sequel in a sale quite soon after its 2015 launch on Xbox 360. I didn’t play it. I then bought it for the PS4 in a sale a couple of years later, when they announced a free DLC which enabled a limited VR mode. I then also didn’t play that. In 2020 Sony gave the game away on PS Plus, which I claimed, and downloaded, and again didn’t play. I can’t recall if I have it on the Xbox One as well, but that wouldn’t surprise me.

I’ve played some of it now. It’s good.

The beginning of the game is a little clichéd, in that you start in the midst of an action-packed sequence, climbing up a mountain during a blizzard and storm, and then the game resets to a few weeks earlier to explain how you got into that situation. This start acts as an introduction to the movement controls, with ice picks making a welcome return from the first game (where they were introduced half way through to allow new areas to open up). It’s nice enough, but the setting doesn’t really show off the game’s main draws. Those don’t come until a little later, when you realise that – although there is a resemblance to the Uncharted games in terms of story progression, platform puzzles, and general story – this game is a lot less linear and allows for greater exploration.

For a while you are pushed through a linear path, exposing the story of Trinity and the prophet they were chasing. Lara’s dad had tracked this down to Syria, but when you get to the tomb it’s empty. Of course, bad guys arrive at the same time and blow everything up. While fleeing, you find a clue which leads you to Siberia – and back to the opening sequence.

After climbing the icy peak, leaving companions behind, you see hidden settlements in the distance but the weather is worsening, leaving you to find shelter and explore. It is here that the open world really shows itself; you must find supplies, set up a campfire, craft a bow and arrows, and hunt for food. I explored the entire area provided, finding a few soldiers who had been left to protect the area, and quickly dispatched them and the deer that they were sitting among. Got to get some meat.

I remember a complaint about the first game (that is, the first game of the modern set) was the number of people that Lara killed, which was quite at odds to the stories of the original Tomb Raider games. This seems to be a little more restrained so far, although that may be because I have only just reached significant numbers of people Up until now, the main violence has been against animals, and in particular, a bear who was guarding the exit to the area in which I’d been hunting and exploring.

Let’s just say I’m not yet fully used to the controls.

After escaping the bear once, I found some poisonous mushrooms, made up an incapacitating concoction to add to my arrows, and then went back to dispatch him. It still took a couple of attempts. I hope my general competence with the controls improves soon.

Pinball Dreams: frighteningly accurate

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When I went to Arcade Club for the RLLMUK anniversary meet last year, I spent a little time on pinball machines, completely failing to get the ball anywhere I wanted – and when I did, I was never quite sure if I was meant to get there anyway. Pinball machines can be very confusing in terms of which routes you should be hitting and how to gain the jackpot. The overload of flashing lights and sounds doesn’t help.

Maybe that’s why I’ve generally preferred videogame pinball. It is often much easier to see where the targets are, the tables can often tell more of a story, and everything’s a little calmer. The extremes of this come to Sonic Spinball, which is hardly a traditional pinball game at all, and Super Mario Ball, where the game is almost adventure-like. A lot rests on the physics of the ball, and whether it’s realistic. Sonic Pinball Party was pretty good apart from the fact the ball felt too light and floaty. Pinball on the CD-i, which was probably the game I played most on that machine, was far too fast and skittery. Pokémon Pinball was a little slow. In recent years, I’ve played a bit of Zen Pinball, which is well known for its accurate ball physics but is a bit too faithful to real pinball tables for my tastes.

I remember sitting in Kevin’s house one afternoon, back in around 1993, and him showing us Pinball Dreams on the Amiga. We took turns in playing on the four different tables, and I remember being really impressed with how realistic it felt, while also being a bit frustrated with the fact that sometimes you couldn’t see far enough up the table to know where you should be aiming. Background graphics indicating the pathways were OK to a point, but I made some shots which narrowly missed the openings. Still, it was excellent and I came away very impressed. I played Pinball Dreams on WinUAE a few years ago and those memories came flooding back: this was probably the best videogame version of pinball, with clearly laid out tables, great ball physics, and a great competitive element to it. At the time I had a Mega Drive and a CPC on which to play games, and neither had a pinball game that could match it.

That’s quite a preamble but by now you may have joined the dots. Pinball Dreams, CPC, couldn’t I just have bought the port which you’ve no doubt seen in the cover image? Well, no. Pinball Dreams for the CPC is an official conversion which was released in 2019 – initially intended for a commercial release, but after that fell through it was freely distributed. With such a late release, the team behind the game has been able to make use of all manner of clever tricks to get the game running, and it’s an astounding success.

All four of the tables from the Amiga original are included, with the game requiring 128k and a disk drive to run. There are obvious graphical compromises – the CPC can manage at most 16 from a selection of 27 colours, and the tables are significantly more zoomed out (I understand to allow for a more limited scrolling requirement). Yet the physics and controls are spot on, feeling accurate and realistic throughout. There has been only one occasion where the physics model went a little wonky, with the ball balancing on top of one of the bumpers.

My favourite table is probably Beat Box, with Nightmare a close second. Both of these have some clever routing of ball paths around the table, and Beat Box in particular has a good variety of targets. There is actually a real benefit to the tables being zoomed out, as alluded to above – you can get a much better feeling for where to aim for.

I am still pretty hopeless at the game, mind. I managed to get fourth place on the high score table for Steel Wheel once. More practice is needed.

Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain (PS5): COMPLETED!

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Although I’d had access to this via PS++++++++ for some time, I’d never downloaded it as I, erroneously, thought it was that vertically scrolling shooter EDF spin-off rather than a “normal” third-person co-op giant insect/robot apocalypse game. Then I noticed the screenshots and realised I was thinking of Earth Defense Force: Wing Diver The Shooter and Iron Rain is, in fact, more of the game I wanted.

It is, broadly, the same game that most of the other games have been. You’re one of a few remaining soldiers, defending the world from giant ants, spiders and wasps, various alien robots and attack ships, as well as NotGodzilla and a huge sea lizard thing. It differs from others in the series by being – mostly – more serious and realistic. At least, as realistic as such a plot can be, anyway.

There have been tweaks to how you get better weapons and armour, as you now collect credits and spend them rather than just pick up new guns and rocket launchers and so on, which I don’t like as much. Really, though, it doesn’t make enough of a difference to worry about.

Like recent EDFs, I played through in co-op with my daughter. It’s always way better playing EDF as a pair, and it is, perhaps bizarrely, one of her favourite game series. We found it quite a lot easier than earlier titles, although the final level was really difficult.

Angry Birds: completed!

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I have a strange sense of déjà vu. Having completed Angry Birds back in 2010, Rovio continued to update the game with new secrets, levels, and abilities, bringing in new birds and themes from other Angry Bird titles. It has always been the case that a sequel would introduce new concepts, but now, with the ability to update old games, those new concepts can feed backwards as well.

Anyway, I digress. Angry Birds – known on the Apple game centre as AB Classic – is actually no longer available to buy or even redownload. I am fortunate that my installation has carried over a couple of phone migrations, and still works. I understand that others have not been so lucky. Rovio has stated that it would require a complete rebuild to bring their older games up to modern standards, and they are committed to doing this, but that was three years ago.

In any case, I’m not affected by that. I have, for the past few months, been playing through a level at a time, getting three stars on each before moving on. There are some levels where the three stars came due to a lucky physics event, or just grinding the same shot over and over until it hit. There are some where it took a single new attempt to upgrade from 1 or 2 stars to 3. There were even some (a very few) levels I hadn’t played before.

There are a load of add-on mechanics that they added to Angry Birds which interfered with the purity of the game – and I’ve not actually used these during my playthrough. I have various exploding birds, catapult accuracy upgrades, and other things across the top of my screen, but I haven’t looked into how I could use them. Instead, I’ve completed every level using the standard birds and no upgrades.

I’ve also found and completed every golden egg. Some of these required the use of a guide.

The biggest difficulty I faced, other than the odd level which required pinpoint accuracy, was that the game really isn’t designed for the aspect ratio of my current phone. On many occasions I simply couldn’t see high enough to accurately aim the birds, or the catapult itself was too close to the top of the screen (hidden among the powerup icons!) to enable exact positioning. This was the reason for the guide use for golden eggs as well; there were a couple which were off screen and no amount of zooming out would reveal them.

The last set of levels were a departure from the standard objective, with the pigs coming to grab an egg using a variety of machines. To get three stars on these levels, it wasn’t a question of beating a certain score; instead you had to protect the egg (one star), pop all the pigs (one star), and use fewer than the target number of birds (one star). Luckily the pigs seemed to favour building their machines around a TNT crate.

So, again, completed. Three stars on every level. All golden eggs found, and their levels completed. I think I’m done for now – the only things left to do are to buy the golden eagle upgrade to play for feathers (which isn’t actually much fun), and play daily in the mighty league. I think I’m Birdsed out.

Splatoon and the last day of Wii U online

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I’ve enjoyed my time with the Wii U. Most of its best games have since migrated to the Switch, although often with cuts made to fit the single screen. Playing Assassin’s Creed III with a detailed map available at a glance was revolutionary; Kirby & the Rainbow Paintbrush felt very natural to control. Nintendo Land remains a go-to party game to this day, with the asymmetric multiplayer of Mario Chase and Animal Crossing Sweet Day causing heart palpitations like nothing else. Its compatibility with Wii games concretes its position as an essential part of my gaming setup.

One of the more radical games on the Wii U was Splatoon. As you will have seen from previous posts, I quite like first person shooters, but I’m not very good at them. Particularly online – I have neither the speed nor accuracy needed to grace even the top half of a final leaderboard. I still play them, but they can be a dispiriting experience.

Not so with Splatoon. It’s not first-person, for a start, and the objective is not to kill other players, but rather to cover the floor with your particular paint colour. You can target others – and if you splat them they do explode in your paint colour, causing a satisfying area of coverage – but you can also spend the time covering up the other team’s painting efforts and undoing their hard work. There are various weapons, ranging from large paintbrushes and rollers to sniper paint rifles, and you form a random team of four each game. This means that different people can play it in different ways, and everyone contributes to the game in the way they feel best able to.

I favour the paint roller, which lets me cover large areas but does leave me exposed to people coming in with paint guns – so I try to avoid confrontation where possible.

I haven’t played the game as much as some, who have sunk hundreds of hours into it, but I have played both the offline and online games a fair bit. I’m up to level 16 now, playing almost exclusively on the unranked mode (I never progressed past C+ in ranked). And 16 is where I will stay.

Last night saw the closure of the Nintendo Network for the Wii U and 3DS. All online games on those consoles no longer function – the errors vary, but errors there be. To mark this I spent an hour playing Splatoon for the last time, and the lobbies were full of others doing the same. I played eight or nine games in total, and I was reminded almost immediately of how the use of the gamepad to allow you to jump around the map led to a fluency that’s missing from Splatoon 2 and 3 on the Switch – being able to jump to help a teammate without having to switch view is amazing.

I think I won the majority of games, but I suspect that’s because many people were online not to compete but to commemorate.

I spent most of my time on Splatoon, but did also visit Mario Kart 8 (I finish with an online score of around 2800), Wii Sports Club, and Super Mario Maker’s 100 Mario mode. I’ve downloaded a bunch of courses for future use on Mario Maker as well.

There is a replacement network being launched called Pretendo, and at some point I will try to configure that – but it’ll require a mod for my Wii and 3DS and I’ve not got around to that yet. I think it’ll also mean a reset to my progress on a number of games, which I’m loathe to do.

Farewell, Nintendo Network. It’s been fun.