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Life Is Strange: Before the Storm Bonus Episode: Farewell (PS4): COMPLETED!

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Well this was a surprise! Sure, I knew it was coming, but to appear today with no warning… that I’d seen anyway.

Farewell is set a few days before Max left for Seattle. Her and Chloe seem to be 13 or so, and much of the episode is about them reminiscing over when they were younger. Indeed, the “aim” is to uncover a treasure they hid when playing as pirates five years previously.

It’s much shorter than other episodes (less than an hour long, in fact), and aside from the spoiler (which shouldn’t be a spoiler if you’ve played the rest of the game), not much actually happens. There’s happy chat between Max and Chloe, a bit of house exploring, and Max finally manages to tell Chloe she’s leaving soon. And that’s it.

Farewell doesn’t really tie up any loose ends, nor does it tell you much you didn’t already know. What it does do, however, is cement how close the two girls were and explicitly show just how hard it was for Chloe when Max left. Making the choice at the end of the original game harder still if you’ve yet to play that.

If you want to watch my playthrough, it’s here. Spoilers and stuff, of course:

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SNK Gals’ Fighters (NGPC): COMPLETED!

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No, I don’t know why I decided to play this either. I mean, I’d just set my Raspberry Pi back up with a fresh install of Retropie, and yeah, I’d added this as one of the games, but still. Why this and not something else, I can’t say.

But these Neo Geo Pocket fighting games are just so good, aren’t they? So slick and responsive and fun. It wasn’t that long ago I played KOFR2 and it was great as well. In fact, there’s a lot of great NGP games. Best console. For a while, anyway.

Anyway.

I’m not sure what else to say about the game. It has a nonsense story about “Miss X” holding a Queen of Fighters contest (do you see what they did there?), but of course Miss X is – spoilers – Iori. And not a “gal” at all. Hilarious and we all fell about in stitches, didn’t we? Then there’s the cut scenes like this one:

Which are great. Just the right about of wonky translation mixed with a limited text area to perfectly ruin any depth to the conversation. Nobody cares about that though, because what is important is how good the punching and kicking is and in that regard, it’s lovely and fluid.

If you’re taking notes, I played through as Yuri. And if you don’t know how she plays, she’s basically Ken from Street Fighter. Which is why she is Best.

Oh yeah, and there’s a sequel of sorts to this coming out on the Switch soon! Yesss.

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Super Bomberman R (Switch): COMPLETED!

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A lot of people derided this at launch, but I know Konami have changed a lot since then. In fact, the multiplayer mode is – baffling graphics choices aside – a decent enough Bomberman game. Today, I discovered that you could change the viewing angle of the single player game with the L and R buttons and you know what? Single player is just fine now too.

Sure, the camera angle, even when fixed, is a bit odd and sometimes it’s hard to see what “level” you’re on as a result, but mostly it’s not an issue. I’d have liked it to be a touch more overhead (perhaps I missed another button combo) but it hardly caused an issue.

In fact, I completed it. And it was fun, and it wasn’t too long and you know what? It’s the only Bomberman game with a single player mode I’ve completed since the SNES/PC Engine/Mega Drive versions. Which says more than any description I could stick here would.

Obviously it isn’t perfect, but all the necessary power-ups are there, each world has gimmicks that work, the levels are pretty varied (some have “survive for” time limits, some require you to kill everything, some have you saving people), and the bosses are decent too.

Of course with a Bomberman game, the actual game is in the multiplayer modes. But Super Bomberman R’s (haha! R’s!) is a solid 3/5 on it’s own. How much has changed in the last year I don’t know, but that’s where I’d stick it now. And yes, I played the “bonus” world after completing the game too, in case you were wondering.

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Grand Theft Auto V (PS4): COMPLETED!

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I started it about a year ago, but after around 15 hours play GTAV was put away because I bought a Nintendo Switch. And Zelda happened. And then I thought actually getting back into GTA would be hard and I’d have no idea what I was doing any more. A few weeks ago, however, I gave it a go and was sucked back in.

My aim was to just concentrate on the story. A lot of fun is to be had in GTA games just messing around, doing the side missions, or (my favourite) Taking A Bike Where A Bike Shouldn’t Go, but my priority was to get the main missions done to clear the game off my backlog. And that’s what I did, although often it was difficult to tell what was a main mission and what was a side mission. Sometimes the mission “trail” went cold, and I’d have to do some other tasks before I was back on the path.

There’s not a lot to say about the game that hasn’t be said elsewhere, not least because it’s pretty old now. What I found, however, was that it was really rather good, but it’s too big. There’s too much in here. You can’t mark it down for that, but for me, so much of it was wasted. Case in point: in the end credits I saw a golf course. Did I see a golf course in the game? No. Can you play on it? It seems yes. Wasted.

Oh ho. Did you see what I did there.

Mechanically, the game is fine. I pressed the wrong buttons hundreds of times because there are so many and they change function depending what you’re doing, but that’s mostly my fault. I never managed to find a camera position when driving that I was completely happy with, but I coped.

Importantly, the story is pretty good. I’m not convinced that in any real world, Michael, Trevor and Frankin would ever even give each other the time of day let alone cooperate on a massively dangerous bank heist, but it sort of works in the game. Where the story isn’t perfect, the characters are. They’re excellent.

I suppose to summarise, it’s not perfect, there’s a lot more I could do (but probably won’t), it was fun, funny, varied and I enjoyed it. It’s no Vice City, but then nothing is.

Anyway. Here are some videos:

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The Lego Ninjago Movie Video Game (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I have to say, I’m a little bit disappointed with this. The Lego Ninjago Movie Video Game (yeah, that’s the name) isn’t bad at all, but there are a number of niggles that actually cause gameplay issues. Sure, there are the “usual” Lego game problems – crashes and bugs, mainly – but two things in particular are really game breaking.

The first is the strange darkness of the game. In the open, sunlit levels (like the beach) it’s fine, but as soon as it’s a bit dark or even just shadows, it’s impossible to see. A gamma slider would sort it, but there isn’t one. And when you play as Garmadon or Cole, who are both wearing black, it’s even worse.

The other problem relates to Lloyd’s “green build power”. Like the “master builder” power from the Lego Movie game, you have to stand in a certain spot, hold down a button, then move the cursor over three glowing items. The thing is, when you’re playing in split screen two player mode, sometimes you can’t physically “tag” all three items – the screen just won’t scroll to reach them. We had to have one of the two players drop out so the remaining player had use of the full screen. A bizarre bug that would absolutely come up if two player mode was actually tested – which it clearly wasn’t!

That said, these are pretty minor things and it’s generally business as usual for Lego games. There are a few changes to the formula, notably no red bricks and no “True Hero/Adventurer/Whatever”, but surprisingly these don’t change the game as much as I expected. The plot follows the film, although expands it somewhat with a load of extra sequences. For some reason all the characters get their elemental powers well before they do in the film – making the whole purpose of their journey a bit pointless – but that doesn’t really affect the game.

My daughter and I played the whole game in co-op (bar the above mentioned necessary drop-out), but as usual we’re only actually about 40% done. No doubt we’ll do some more.

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