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It was time to play this again. I mean, sure, it’s almost always time to play this, but it was especially time to play this just now.
Choosing Madcap this time, for no real reason, I made it through to the final level where I was once more unopposed. So an instant win, again. Ah well. The real fun was the fun we had along the way, or something.
Yes, I have a Playdate! Finally! And yes, this is the first game I’ve completed on it!
Casual Birder is a little like that Bit Orchard or Toem in a way. It’s a sort of adventure game set in a town obsessed with taking photos of birds. The aim is to take part in a bird photography competition, but of course things are made difficult in a number of ways. For starters, some of the birds are a bit shy, or fast, or hide in the dark, so you must perform various tasks to make them photographable. Worse, is that the local yoofs have elected themselves as the gatekeepers of bird photography so you have to placate them before you’re allowed to enter the contest.
Taking photos is done by moving your camera’s viewfinder around the screen, but you usually need to focus the shot with the Playdate’s crank to get a perfect picture for your album. It’s not always obvious which way you’re supposed to wind, what with the photo subjects being tiny and a black and white screen not being the most useful way of showing depth so “blurring” is more “stippling”, but it’s not really a problem.
The game is filled with silly characters and events, and although short (90 minutes, tops, I’d say), it’s a nice little thing and certainly more in-depth and “proper game”-like than the other Playdate titles I’ve played so far.
I did so love Fallout 3 when it came out. I completed it, did all the DLC, got pretty much all the achievements and milked it for everything it had to offer. So why has it taken me so long to replay it? Well, it was so big that doing that again was a bit off-putting. But then, Epic gave it away for free and I now have a Steam Deck to play it on, so I thought, why not? Handheld Fallout 3? Which I can play without worrying about how I’m affecting the story because I’ve already done the story? Sold. Well, not sold because it was free, like I said.
So in I went. Considering how old the game is (14 years old? What?!) it still looks pretty incredible. Part of this is probably due to being able to whack up the detail to max on the Deck, and part of it is probably just how impressive it is that Fallout 3 is now on a handheld. Thing of dreams, that is.
I do want to make one note about it on the Deck, however. Because it is an Epic game (and possibly because it had Games for Windows Live surgically extracted from it), it’s a bit crashy. Or rather, very, very crashy. Almost all of the crashes I attributed to Epic signing me out about once an hour, causing it to quit every time that happened. There were also a few “things are really busy” (read: giblets everywhere) freezes, which could be that I’m running a Windows game under Proton. Thankfully, though, I saved frequently and the loading times – even running from an SD card – are almost zero. That in itself is a game-changer, as Fallout 3 on the 360 was really, really slow to load (especially when “checking DLC”) but here you can’t even read the text on the loading screens before they vanish. Incredible.
As for how my play went, well, it didn’t go as planned. You see, I intended to just be a right bastard, murder everyone, steal everything, blow up Megaton – the lot. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Aside from the stealing. I did that a lot. I’m not sure it was the morality of killing everyone that made me stop, much as I’d like to claim that, it was more my concern that taking that route would close off quests, make the game harder, and require more ammo than I really wanted to waste. I’m practical, if not moral.
Unlike on the 360, I didn’t complete every single mission, and the only DLC I completed was the post-main-story Brotherhood of Steel one (Broken Steel?), mainly because I have other games to play and I’d already applied about 50 of my precious hours to this as it was, and I’d done it all before. However, I did find some stuff I’d not found previously! For example (spoilers, sorry), at the end of the main game you have to choose to either send the Brotherhood woman into the reactor to flip switches and die from radiation, or bravely sacrifice yourself in the same way. What I didn’t realise, was that if you have Fawkes, the intelligent Super Mutant you saved earlier, as you companion, you can send him in instead, and – being a mutant – he’s immune to the radiation so nobody has to die. Hurrah!
I know many people say that New Vegas is far superior to Fallout 3, and I’d agree to a point, but Fallout 3 is still amazing. The world, the humour and the combat are all amazing even after all this time. But, I can check for myself because Amazon just gave Fallout New Vegas away for free so guess what I’ve just installed on my Deck?
Oh, and I forget to mention! Toilets! So! Many! Toilets!
Back when this came out on Xbox Live Arcade (remember that?), I played through it over and over. I completed, and in fact, 100%ed, every single difficulty setting and then maxed out my level. I loved it, not least because it’s a Metroidvania, but back then the term wasn’t so widely known or used.
I have no idea what is actually “remastered” here. It seems identical to the original, so unless my memory is playing tricks the only real difference is the platform I’m playing it on. Actually, I’ve installed Heroic on my Steam Deck to let me play Epic Store games, and Shadow Complex was free on there years ago, hence why I have it. It’s great on the Steam Deck too, with the fact that (even in remastered form) it’s pretty old now meaning I can knock all the quality sliders up full and it still not even wheeze.
This is all waffle though, as I have said nothing about the game. Well, you’re a guy who ends up in a terrorist base “by accident” (spoilers: it wasn’t an accident) and while trying to rescue his captured girlfriend from the baddies gets caught up trying to stop them from beginning an attack on the US, finding upgrades and – eventually – a super suit along the way.
Like all good Metroidvania games (and school Geography lessons) there’s plenty of map colouring-in, giant bosses, tricky platforming, hidden areas, places you can’t get to until you’ve unlocked skills and items, and it’s really, really good. The acting in it suffers a bit from overly macho nonsense and hasn’t aged well, but the traversal and shootybangbang stuff is still incredible.
Yes, it’s the same damn game as Zoo Keeper World and Simon’s Cat and Puppy Blast and 50% of the games on the App Store, but it’s polished and cute and as it’s on Apple Arcade has no IAPs or wait times or other nonsense that gets in the way of, you know, just matching three things and clearing the board of whatever it is that needs clearing.
And sometimes, that’s all you want. Simple, pretty, puzzle fun.
