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Mario’s Tennis: what a racquet

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I have only played on a Virtual Boy twice: once at a museum, and once at a UGVM meeting in honour of Owen. Both times were brief, uncomfortable, and underwhelming. I suspect there were some hardware adjustments which may have helped, but the screens were dim and blurry, and I had to sit at an awkward angle to use it. Nevertheless, the 3D nature of the console was very clever, and the games I played (3D Tetris and Golf, I believe) used that to good effect. I did once try Virtual Boy emulation on my computer, and it just seemed a bit pointless because of the fact it lacked the third dimension, meaning you are left with middling games in monochrome.

Having modified my 3DS, however, I now have access to a 3D screen which is perfect for trying out Virtual Boy games as they are supposed to be seen. The screen is, obviously, of a much higher quality as well, and there’s no restricted positioning. All good, yes?

Mostly. I started with Mario’s Tennis, having recently been playing the N64 game with Edward. It’s a pretty standard tennis game, but with a much lower viewpoint than normal. This would make it more difficult to place the ball, but of course the 3D is supposed to help with that. It sort of did, but it took some time to work out the best way to judge and also when to press the button. I lost my first match 6-0 to Toad, but by the second I was mostly keeping serve, and I narrowly lost to Peach after a very long game of alternating advantages and deuces. I won my third match, against Yoshi, quite comprehensively. Maybe I should move off the easy difficulty level.

Of course, I can’t really show the 3D nature of the games here

Things improved a lot when I investigated the options for the emulator and found that I am not constrained to the original red and black. You can set any colour you like, but there are two presets – red and grey – and the latter makes the games a lot easier to see and play.

I completely forgot about those options when I played other games.

Night in the Woods (PS5): COMPLETED!

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After finishing Xenoblade Chronicles X, I was at a loss as to what to play next. I didn’t fancy another 125+ hour epic, so had a flick through what I had installed, and came across Night in the Woods. I’d looked at it before but hadn’t realised I owned it (well, PS+ rented it anyway), and I found it was only a few hours long, so here we are.

It starts with you, an anthropomorphic cat coming back to her home town after dropped out of “school”. I say “school” because it’s a university, and it irks me when people refer to university as school. Anyhoo, Mae turns up at her parents’ house and the first few days involve her reintegrating back into her family and the friends she’d left behind, rejoining her band and hanging out and doing things she used to do as a young teen even though she’s now 20 years old.

Soon it is clear there’s something very wrong with her. She gets headaches, but she’s also constantly tired, has bad dreams, doesn’t want to talk about her reasons for ditching uni and for some reason is happy to jump on rooftops and balance on power lines. Because of course. At the same time, you get to know more about Possum Springs, her run-down town which used to be a thriving and prosperous mining town but now all the work as dried up, the shops are closed or closing, some folk have gone missing, and there’s just nothing to do and everyone is a bit miserable. Oh, and sinkholes keep opening up.

Then Mae sees a ghost kidnap a child.

Or did she? Or is she just going a bit mad and it’s a symptom of everything else she’s struggling with? Things aren’t clear until they are and even then it isn’t entirely.

As a sort of platforming puzzle visual novel, Night in the Woods somehow manages to feel laid back but full of existential dread at the same time. Light hearted banter belies the truly horrific things happening in the town, and the feeling that summat just int right. It’s a great story with some great characters. And a Guitar Hero mini game because why not?

Return to Ravenhearst: completed!

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Back in 2016 there was a sale on the 3DS eShop which included a few hidden object games. This wasn’t a genre I had a lot of experience with, but I quite fancied trying it; and at £1 each there wasn’t a huge financial risk. I bought Ravenhearst, and since it was only another pound, the sequel Return to Ravenhearst. I then played Ravenhearst occasionally over the next seven years or so, largely regretting my purchases.

It turns out that hidden object games are OK. I enjoy the scavenger hunts included in Two Dots; there were parts in the Layton games with similar mechanics. The issue is that I don’t like too much of them. I quickly got bored of the format, after a few puzzles, which is why it took many years to complete the first game.

The biggest issue with the Ravenhearst games is that they were made for the PC, and have been shoehorned onto the 3DS. There are lots of games which have great conversions; these aren’t a good example. The pictures you have to search for are fuzzy and indistinct; what’s more, the list of objects you have to find is frequently vague. The objects are early 20-century in style (meaning that if you are told to search for a phone it is often one that has the separate speaker), and use the American terms for things. Being asked to search for a “top” was an exercise in frustration, particularly when the eventual item looked nothing like a spinning top anyway.

The first game was restricted to the hidden objects puzzles, with occasional jigsaws which progressed the story. The sequel has expanded the scope a lot, to the point where there is now a whole map to explore, with a subterranean town accessed beneath the manor’s fireplace, and you find hidden object puzzles by searching for the sparkles. Completing the puzzle gives you an object, and you have to use these objects to progress, either directly or by using them in a different type of puzzle contraption. Again, these contraptions are very difficult to use because you often can’t see the buttons due to screen resolution. There are often clues written around the puzzles as well, but in some cases these were again unclear.

In the end I followed a walkthrough to complete the game. I got stuck at a point where I’d opened a new location, in a cemetery overlooking some cliffs, but there seemed to be nothing I needed there. I had found a puzzle over the fireplace which required a sun and a moon, and I had found the moon, but searching everywhere revealed no sun. Following the walkthrough, I was supposed to notice that the cemetery is overgrown near the tree, and then use the shears I found previously to cut it down – but I had to use them three times, and there was no noticeable difference in scenery after I used them once. Even if I had guessed this was what I had to do, after the first attempt I wouldn’t have tried again.

The game took quite some time to finish, even while following the walkthrough, and the story turned quite unpleasant. Finding the tomb for a woman and her twin daughters, who the manor’s owner had used to gain life force for him and his (unrequited) love, was pretty disturbing. Releasing their ghosts was creepy – even though I had to read about that in the walkthrough to understand what the fuzzy visuals were meant to be showing.

I don’t think I’ll bother with any of the other games in the series.

Cannon Fodder: wayward roofs

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I deliberated for far too long there whether the plural was roof or rooves.

I have played Cannon Fodder many times before. I think, but I can’t actually remember, that I completed it on the Mega Drive; I certainly got pretty far, but without unearthing the cartridge (and the passwords in the manual) from my loft I can’t be sure. I have also played it on an Amiga emulator, but my preferred method nowadays is via the GOG copy I bought for virtually nothing a few years ago. The game was made for mouse control, and going back to the Mega Drive (via emulator) really does emphasise that.

I have a terrible tendency to restart levels if anyone dies, and play through the levels incredibly slowly as a result. I edge through the maps, often with just one or two of my squad, which works OK to start with but when you get to the bazooka-wielding enemies any delay in movement can be fatal. I will reload a level many times rather than accept a single death.

Don’t worry RJ, I’ll probably just reload

I’ve played up to the fifth mission this evening, and was doing well through the first phase (with bazookas at the end of the long river) and the second, but then when destroying a building the roof, which always flies off in a random direction, landed on my squad. This is when save states would come in useful.

Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition (Switch): COMPLETED!

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And that’s it. I’ve officially run out of Xenoblade to play. In about a year and a half I’ve completed the entire series of games in some sort of obsessive newfan flurry of activity. Why did I sleep on this series for so long? It’s bloody great.

Anyway, I’ve said a lot about the three numbered games in the series, and I have to say I was a little worried coming to X because I’d heard it wasn’t quite the same, didn’t exist in the same chronology, and was originally the second game released so might not have the graphics, controls and gameplay improvements the series gained over time. So, how was it?

The first thing to address is how it fits into the series, because despite all the internet fora saying it doesn’t, it bloody does. I mentioned in the writeup of the Xenoblade 3 DLC that X is referenced there quite explicitly, but it’s not hard to see that the event that caused the creation of the worlds of 1, 2 and 3 is (or at least, could be) the same event that causes the mass exodus of humans from Earth, setting up the plot for Xenoblade X. Two alien races are fighting over Earth, which then blows up, and you are one of an ark of survivors (perhaps the only ark that made it) that escaped only to crash on a planet called Mira. A planet which, somehow, has Nopon. Curious. Plus, in chapter 13, the events of Xenoblades 1 and 2 are directly referenced.

The second thing is the gameplay. In terms of basic combat mechanics, Xenoblade X is very similar to Xenoblade 1, with the attack moves laid out across the bottom of the screen, each with cooldowns, and so on. However, it’s vastly more complex, as you can tweak your skills, arts, weapons, armour and (later) your big mech-like “Skell” to the nth degree with items similar to the weapon gems in the original game, only now you can gem up everything. And add more gem slots. I read a while back that the developers wanted to use X1 as a basic for the gameplay here, but make the focus of the game the combat rather than the plot, and it shows.

Because, you see, the plot isn’t fantastic. Well, it’s fantastic in the old sense of the word, but it’s a bit poo compared to X1/2/3. You crash on this planet, your ship has become a small city, and you have to find other parts of the ship that broke off in order to ensure the continued survival of the human race. Only you do very little actual hunting for the parts, and you get the “main” missing part right near the end of the main game without really working too hard for it. No, instead the game consists of more side quests (some of which, although classed as side quests aren’t actually optional) than probably the other three games put together mainly as a way of getting you to level up so you can progress the story. The day to day stuff, these quests, exploration, chats with NPCs and asides with your teammates are great, but the over-arching plot isn’t amazing.

Graphically, it’s bump up from the original Wii U version of the game. In addition to that, I’m playing it on the Switch 2 which although doesn’t do anything specifically to the graphics, it does make the framerate rock solid (something that wasn’t the case with the other games on the Switch 1) and some of the sunrises and sunsets look absolutely incredible, so I do wonder if there’s some upscaling or smoothing or something going on.

The main differences in the game come down to the setting, the addition of Skells, the number of possible characters in your party (something like 16 are possible, with four in your party at any one time), the music (which is more rock, guitar and rap – some of it sounds very Sonic Adventure 2 Pumpkin Hill), and a thing where you put probes into the world map.

This latter feature splits the map of Mira up into hexagons, with some of them suitable places to plant a probe. You obtain different types from quests and loot, and they can mine (miranium, used to make weapons and weapon mods) or generate money, every hour or so. Or, later on, buff your attack, defence, and so on in the region they’re planted. You can swap round your probes (for a small fee) when you want, and you get bonuses for probes of the same type placed next to each other. There are a few side missions that challenge you to arrange them in a way so as to generate large amounts of miranium or money in a single “cycle”. It’s diverting, and reminds me of the business/empire building side stories of the Yakuza games.

In all, I really did enjoy Xenoblade Chronicles X. There’s nothing really wrong with it but it just didn’t entertain me and push me to reveal the “truth” of the story in the same way the other games did. The combat is satisfying, and generally quicker and more flexible than in 1/2/3, it looks great, sounds great, and is a lot of fun, but there’s just something missing. Maybe it’s the characters, as your main character is generally mute (although you can choose his/her “combat calls” voice from a number of actors, include those from other games in the series) and almost everyone has a boring American accent. No Welsh catgirls or aussie pirates here. Two of the other alien races – the Prone and the Ma-non have horrible pitch-shifted voices too. Maybe it’s missing something else. I can’t quite explain it.

That said, it’s still better than 95% of other games. It’s just the worst Xenoblade, is all.

Now what? There’s no Xenoblade 4 or X2 on the (known) horizon. Boo.