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Tomb Raider: completed!

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The final levels, which I understand are set in Atlantis but in fact are set in some creepy pyramid on an island which appears to be constructed from living flesh, were a step up in difficulty from the previous ones. The biggest change came from the enemies, who were more aggressive, more in number, and required more bullets to dispatch. I moved away from using my standard pistols, to a combination of the Uzis and the Magnums – the shotgun seemed a bit useless, with long reload time and poor aiming – in order to prevent enemies getting too close. The tactics I’d used before (of finding a ledge to stand on) no longer worked, with enemies who could throw fireballs and shoot, and others who flew around the room. They were horrible things too, seemingly with no skin, just flesh and muscle.

Of the levels set in Atlantis, the first was relatively normal. At the end of the Egyptian levels Lara was captured and escaped by diving off a cliff, and it turns out that she’s lost all her guns (but for some reasons still had some ammunition). To find her weapons you had to explore some mines, finding three fuses which were needed to lower a suspended building containing pistols. With pistols equipped, the mines led (via lava rivers, concrete mazes, and underwater tunnels) to three human enemies: a cowboy, a skateboarder, and a bouncer, each using some of Lara’s guns. The skateboard fight was very tricky to start with, until I found a passage I could take to come out on a ledge above the level, where I could wait for him to skate past and get shot multiple times.

Armoury reclaimed, I set off for Natla, who was using the scion thingy in the pyramid. I caught up with her and she unleashed a big enemy which I initially thought was the game’s end boss, until I killed it first try (somersaulting from side to side put me out of reach, and I could just shoot it many times). I then had to continue through the pyramid, finding a route back to the scion for me to destroy it. The levels became increasingly icky, with pods growing on the walls which burst to release enemies as I approached them. I’m not entirely sure what the cutscenes showed, but eventually I found Natla in a room at the top of the pyramid, and I fought and killed her using my favourite tactic of running away and finding a ledge to shoot from. Being shot to death wasn’t enough; she woke up and I had to do it all over again.

After a while I was desperate to see anything green.

With her dead again, all that was left was for Lara to run away, through a pyramid which was shuddering and collapsing (but not actually collapsing; this wasn’t a timed run). A few nasty jumps nearly had me throwing the controller in frustration, but I got out in the end – Lara swam out to the boat and took off just as the island exploded.

As a game, it’s aged, but only in that other games have taken the same sort of formula and made it more fluid to play. The way that the platforming is almost puzzle-like at times remains very clever, and the game’s pacing is really well thought out. I don’t think I’ll be going back to find all the secret areas, nor find more efficient routes through the levels – but that’s mainly because I’ve got Tomb Raider II waiting for me.

It felt like I used a lot more than 32 medipacks.

Mr Driller 2: completed!

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Is it possible to complete a Mr Driller game? Well, there is a story, and a set of difficulty levels with a narrative connecting them, and once I completed the highest difficulty level I saw an ending scene and credits and a screen that said “The End” on it. So yes, it is possible. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to play it again, though; it probably means that I’ll stick to normal difficulty rather than hard.

I have a Mr Driller 2 cartridge for the GBA (which, I believe, I bought for a pittance in the US once), and I have played it a lot on the Game Boy Micro at various times over the last couple of decades. I’ve never completed the Egypt stage, though, but recently I noticed the game’s release on the Switch Online service and thought I’d give it a go.

Maybe the Game Boy Micro d-pad wasn’t up to the task, since on the fourth attempt on the Switch – using my 8bitdo controller – I got to the bottom of the well. It being a US translation, everything’s measured in feet instead of metres, and the target depth is 10,000ft. I understand in the original Japanese this was 2,000m, meaning that Mr Driller in the US is 52% taller than his Japanese counterpart. There are breaks every 500m, transitioning to new types of level – the number of colours, prevalence of X blocks, appearance of star blocks, formation of X blocks around the air capsules – and quite often I would finish a level with very limited air, hoping the next would be either a two-colour stage (where chain reactions clear half the level, allowing you to grab multiple air cannisters at once) or one with helpful X block obstacles. I was crushed once, and ran out of air twice, but having been awarded an extra life on the way down (for, I guess, score related reasons) I was able to complete the game with 10% air left.

I don’t think I physically breathed for the last 500m.

The resolution betrays this as a handheld game.

I may have completed the main game, but there was one more surprise. On starting again, there’s a new extra hard stage – the North (Pole). Once again it’s 10,000m, but the levels are much harder. The first two have virtually no air available, meaning the third level is a welcome break with capsules here there and everywhere. The pattern repeats a few times, with levels starved of oxygen, meaning that if you don’t start them with a full tank you’re going to die. There are other levels where the air is buried under many patterns of X blocks, necessitating an excavation to release the air. It’s not easy; my best is 9610ft which was agonisingly close, but the last level is one of those with virtually no air and I started it on my last life with 25% in reserve.

Virtual Boy Wario Land (Switch 2): COMPLETED!

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Yes! I was one of those idiots that paid SIXTY SIX POUNDS for a piece of plastic that you put your Switch (or Switch 2) in, so you can sit awkwardly while playing games made for one of the worst consoles ever made! It’s like having two red-tinted Game Boys stuck in front of your eyes that you can only really play at a table (or, as I did, on the sofa with a teetering pile of lap cushions), all so you can get a not especially impressive 3D effect in some poorly realised games. Idiot.

Just lookit though. LOOKIT.

Although I’ve never owned a Virtual Boy, I have played on a few and can say that this Switch peripheral manages to recreate the ridiculous of the original flop console admirably. With my Nintendo Online subscription I also get access to 7 games (about a third of those ever released – most of the rest are on the way), and having tried them all only Virtual Boy Wario Land really works.

And, against all the odds, it’s great.

It’s a pretty straightforward platformer, with about 20 levels and some power ups that let you smash blocks or shoot fireballs, but the 3D comes in as there are “front” and “back” layers to the playfield. Much like Mutant Mudds, I suppose, which I know came much later. There are special blocks that “throw” you in and out of the screen, as well as pipes and doorways that sometimes do the same. Some of the levels are almost 3D mazes as you try to find a key to open the lift to the next level. Every few levels you get a boss, which also tends to swap plane in some way or another.

The 3D effect is subtle, but it’s nice. I don’t think the game would have suffered by being a straight Game Boy or SNES title, though. It’s hard to see from the screenshots how well it works because it seems so damn dark and the dual-screen thing (one for each eye) means you lose the 3D completely. But anyway, nice game shame about the delivery mechanism, I suppose.

Super Mario World: completed!

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I didn’t get lost again, but that was largely because the game’s designers had finished messing around with the world map and everything was fairly linear from that point. I did find a couple of extra exits on Chocolate Island, but maintaining my aim of ignoring the red blinking markers and just pushing through to the end, I finished off Wendy and progressed through the shipwreck down to Bowser’s hidden valley, previously submerged beneath the suspicious big empty sea in the middle of the map.

I was expecting the Valley of Bowser to be more difficult, in fact, but actually the levels themselves didn’t present much of a challenge. There was one annoying level where the big moles kept getting in the way and I couldn’t find the way out the level, meaning I died a couple of time running out of time, but one I realised that I could go out and get a Yoshi, and then eat the moles, things became easier.

What was tricky was the final boss battle, and I felt I was fighting against the controls much more than in the rest of the game. To defeat Bowser you had to attack him from above, and the only way you could do that was to jump on one of the clockwork bomb things he was throwing down to stun it, grab it, and then throw it up so that it would land on Bowser’s head as he swung his ship back around. Obviously, this had to be done while avoiding the other clockwork bomb things and his ship.

Peach really needs a better tailor.

Still, it only took me a couple of goes, and then I saw the credits, meaning that the game is completed. Sure, it’s not completed completed, since there are a lot of secret exits I’ve not found, and I believe there’s a star world somewhere to be discovered. I’ll park it here, much as I did with Galaxy and 64 and Odyssey, and plan to come back to it one day soon.

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time (Switch 2): COMPLETED!

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Almost exactly 11 years ago, I played and completed (and then played some more) the original Fantasy Life game on the 3DS. I really enjoyed it, and after all this time I was excited to play the sequel.

Only, it isn’t really a sequel. There’s nothing, plot wise at least, that links this game to the previous one. Sure, the mechanics and graphical style are nearly the same, but there’s no story continuation or even, as far as I can tell, any shared characters or history. Actually, “history” is one of the main plot points in “i” (no, it’s never explained what the “i” is for), since the game takes place in two different eras, 1000 years apart. Gameplay-wise, it isn’t too different from before – choose a Life, level up by doing Life related things, complete quests for people, and so on. So it’s similar.

One big difference, is that you’re pretty much forced to change Life (a Life being a trade or character class) as you progress. In the first game, I completed the story without ever swapping from my Paladin Life, but in “i” you can’t do certain story-based things without changing to be a miner or an alchemist or whatever. Swapping between Lives is a big thing, and as each one levels up separately, there’s a lot of grinding. Certainly more than I remember from the original, and my play time – over 50 hours by the end of the game (with some Lives still untouched) compared with less than that to 100% the original – showing it in cold hard stats. Some of that extra time is that there’s more to do, but a lot is grinding.

Thankfully, a lot of the grinding is done by exploring a separate, and huge, game area called Ginormosia. Here you can level up by chopping trees and swording bees and whatever else, unlocking new companions when you complete shrines you find, and making areas of this continent level up too. It’s fun to just wander and complete challenges like fighting or farming while you grind. I also found a way to quickly level up a new Life. Get one of your miner companions to mine ore while you hang around as an artist or carpenter, and when they are done you get a all the XP. With a miner on level 50 and some level 40-50 ore, you can get your “new” Life from level 1 to level 40-odd in minutes.

In terms of plot, there’s stuff about you and your archaeologist mate flying a dragon to an island, then getting separated as you end up in the past, and then lots of back-and-forth between eras while you build a new village in the present (in a definitely not Animal Crossing type way) whilst finding items and advancing your Lives in the past. There’s loads to do, millions of items, weapons, foods and furniture to craft, people to meet, side quests to complete, and that’s before you even hop over into Ginormosia or do the dungeon tree thing or the dream world stuff. What are they? Well, Google exists.

So, I completed the game as (mainly) a Mercenary, swapping to most of the other Lives along the way. I’ve already made a start on trying to get them all up to at least Expert rank, and have started the other Lives too. Still lots to do, and still having a lot of fun. Is it as good as the original Fantasy Life, though? Well, there’s certainly more, but I’d say overall, it loses a bit of focus as a result. Still excellent, but not quite as excellent.