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Spider-Man 2 (PS5): COMPLETED!

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It’s not often I play a big all-the-graphics modern games these days. In fact, even Spider-Man 2 is now a few years old. It does look amazing but the important thing is how it plays.

Very few games are this much fun to just get from A to B. Batman: Arkham Knight was, and the first Sony Spider-Man was, but most other games don’t give you the freedom and the tools and the verticality that just make it a joy to get around. This adds gliding and air-streams to the original, making long distance travel even faster – which is just as well as the map now covers more of New York. Or you can just be boring and fast travel, which actually looks all fancy because there’s no loading thanks to The Power of the PS5 SSD. Which, as I said before, is only fast in-game, not when doing file management. Tch.

So actually being the Spider-Man, or Spider-Men, or Spider-Mans (it is debated in the game as to the correct term) is a lot of fun, but the story needs to be good in order to take you through. And it is, if not quite as good as the previous instalments. You’ve got Pete still dealing with the death of Aunt May, and trying to mentor Miles while getting fired from a teaching job and generally not having any time or money, and you’ve got Miles who has college applications to sort and his dead dad to get over and him feeling increasingly concerned about Pete when, well, spoiler if you’ve not already heard about it, Venom makes an appearance. Plus all the Spider-Stuff they’ve both got going on, Harry Osborn on the brink of death for most of the game, and a number of Spiderfoes all being broken out of jail so that Kraven The Hunter can take them down meaning, weirdly, the Spider-Men have to save them.

It’s a lot.

And that’s before you get all the random side quests and street crimes and Sandman B-plot and photos you have to take and everything. I think this might be partly why the story just doesn’t hit like it did in the previous games – there’s too much distraction. That said, Kraven really isn’t a top tier Spider-Man villain like Doctor Octopus was, so it’s not the only reason. Sure, there’s Venom, but, I was expecting the Green Goblin. Maybe in Spider-Man 3? If they ever make it.

In conclusion (written like an AI, I know), it’s an excellent game, with lots to do and some amazing combat and traversal mechanics. Please don’t make me buy a PS6 for the next one.

Puzzle Bobble (Evercade): COMPLETED!

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New Evercade cartridges arrived last night! one of them is the Taito Arcade 3 compilation, the highlight (for me) on it being Puzzle Bobble. The original one! In the arcade!

As I already knew, it’s great. Only, because it’s the arcade version, it only has 30 levels so I was done within an hour. 30 levels! I’m sure later home versions had many hundreds of them or randomly generated endlessly, but no.

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.