ugvm

the site of uk.games.video.misc

Cat Quest (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

Posted on Written by

My daughter picked this up on the Switch some time ago and loved it (and the sequel) so much she actually preordered Cat Quest III the day it was announced. She had never preordered a game before! I’ve always liked the look of it – 2D sprites on a map in a way that sort of feels a bit like Paper Mario but the game is more like Zelda and the camera angle is like those 2D-HD remakes of old 8-bit RPGs.

Anyway, after getting it for free on about twelftynine different platforms via PS+++ and Epic giveaways and stuff I finally got round to playing it on my Steam Deck (Lord bless the Steam Deck and its infinite supply of free games) and you know what – it’s really good. She was right.

It’s much more simple than Zelda, but it’s cute and mostly laid back. You, as a cat, travel the world and sword up baddies and enter dungeons and find better weapons and armour and level up your various magics like fire and ice and healing, and there’s nothing especially new or difficult here, but it’s all done in a polished way with great humour and silly events and characters. And I love the art style.

Street Fighter Alpha (Switch): COMPLETED!

Posted on Written by

Anyone would think I’d recently bought both the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection pack and the Capcom Fighting Collection pack on the Switch eShop for super cheap recently or something. And if they thunk that, they’d be thunking right because I have.

Now, I’ve said before that Street Fighter Alpha 2 is my favourite Street Fighter game (and, probably, my favourite one-on-one fighting game of all time), but that doesn’t mean I don’t like Street Fighter Alpha, er, One. It doesn’t have as many characters, it doesn’t have as many moves, and it doesn’t have quite as much flash and sparkle, but it still has Sir Kenneth “Ken” Masters and he’s still the best of all the animals.

Naturally, I whipped through the game pretty quick. Not that I’m really good at it or anything despite how much I love the Alpha games, but probably because the default difficulty is pretty low? I don’t actually know as I didn’t check, but it seemed a fair bit easier than I remember from last time I played it.

Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo (Switch): COMPLETED!

Posted on Written by

Yes, it isn’t the best two player competitive blocks-in-wells based puzzle game (that would be Puyo Puyo), but you can’t not like Super Puzzle Fighter with it’s super-deformed Capcom fighters and just the sheer absurdity of it.

The aim I much like other similar games – match up blocks and send them over to the other player’s well to fill it up a bit and bugger up their plans. Each character has a special pattern of blocks that, when you form them, unleashes hell on the opponent. In my playthrough, I found creating these patterns were literally impossible and also, completely unnecessary. But it doesn’t matter, it was all fun anyway, although a lot easier than I remember.

And yes, I played as Ken. Obviously.

Vampire Savior (Switch): COMPLETED!

Posted on Written by

No, not the horde-based twin stick only one stick sort of shooter. That’s Vampire Survivors, even though I keep getting the two names mixed up. No, this is the Capcom 1-on-1 fighting game from the late 90s heyday of Capcom 1-on-1 fighting games. There was a cheap bundle of bundles (a bundle^2, if you like) on the eShop recently where you could get Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection and Capcom Fighting Collection together for less money than either collection had ever been on sale for individually. Ah, gwan then.

Vampire Savior (the lack of a U is making me queasy), or Darkstalkers 3, depending on region, is a CPS2 based game, much like Street Fighter Alpha and X-Men: Children of the Atom, so it has big ol’ sprites and loads of animation. The fighters are generally based on monsters like a mummy, a vampire, and a Definitely Not Frankenstein’s Monster.

I played as newcomer-to-the-series Baby Bonnie Hood, who absolutely isn’t supposed to be Little Red Riding Hood, and has a machine gun and a dog. It was silly fun.

Aero the Acro-Bat: completed!

Posted on Written by

The museum turned out to be the last level, and it was indeed significantly more difficult than the rest of the game. Much of this difficulty came in the narrowing of platforms, which would ordinarily be easy to land on but required the awful diagonal jumps to get high enough. It reminded me of the Dizzy games, where you had to work out which pixel to jump off in order to land in the right place, except more frantic and (often) with death awaiting if you fell.

Despite the setting and the increased difficulty, there were few innovations which set apart the last levels. There was an annoying obstacle which saw a laser shooting around a frame which you had to avoid, and flames shooting out of gargoyles at seemingly random intervals, and circular saws embedded in many platforms. Some of the enemies were immune to my diagonal attacks, or rather were sometimes immune (but at other times they popped, for no discernible reason). It was getting a bit frustrating and boring.

I quickly realised that it was pointless spending hours waiting for appropriate windows in obstacle attacks, since there were normally multiple life pickups – the As in the bottom-right corner – following any difficult section. As a result I often just barrelled straight through and dealt with healing afterwards. This wasn’t always the case, but due to the beauty of regular save states I had sixty-odd lives available anyway.

And then I got to the final level. The boss came in three stages, and before each battle there was a frantic vertical platforming section, with an ever-rising laser beam ready to cut the climb short. This took a fair while to do, even with saving, because of the awkward placement of platforms and the inaccuracy of Aero’s jumping. In the third section there were countless spikes and other enemies to avoid while also trying to land on minute platforms. Whenever I caught up with the boss, there was fight where he put out floating clowns to get in the way, and also streams of water coming from his giant clown face flying vehicle; while I tried to know his jaw off.

At the end of the second fight, the lower jaw came off, but that didn’t stop him from spawning clowns and generally being a pain the posterior. Instead of the jaw I had to hit his red nose, and after doing that 32,977,421 times he admitted defeat.

This wasn’t a great game. It was tolerable, and there was a nice fluidity to it – but there was perhaps just a bit too much inertia to allow for accurate jumping and platforming. Whoever designed the diagonal attacks should never have worked in the industry again. The jankiness with the controls may well have been an emulator problem, but I did see at least one review mention it.

Will I replay it, or play the sequel? I’ve got quite a lot of other stuff to do first.