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Pokémon Blue: wild ZUBAT appeared!

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The start of Pokémon Blue1 is pretty slow. After the first couple of set-pieces, where you choose a starter and fetch the pokédex, you are left to go forth into the world, with only the route numbers to guide you. The paths are winding and specifically designed to make you walk through long grass, meaning that you will encounter many wild pokémon along the way. Unfortunately for the first hour or so they are all of one of three or four types, and it gets a little dull when the fifteenth caterpie is dispatched with a single hit from Charmander. Trainers along the way offer some variety but they all have similar pokémon, again, and give very little reward. By the time you get to Pewter City, you’re desperate for just a bit of challenge.

Having chosen Charmander at the start, I got it. Brock’s gym is of ground and rock types, and Charmander’s attacks did little. Luckily I had already caught Spearow and Nidoran♀ so I had some variety, but my first attempt at Brock’s underling saw all my team of six (which also included Pidgey, Metapod and another Caterpie) being defeated. Before trying again, I went to the South of the city and wandered around in a patch of grass for around 150 hours, battling hundreds of level 3 and 4 pidgeys, caterpies, and rattatas. The time was not spent in vain, however, as Metapod evolved into Butterfree, with the confusion move, and Spearow and Charmander all jumped up several levels. Of course, this being a Generation 1 pokémon game, there was no EXP Share, so all this levelling had to be done by having Metapod in the first slot of my team and manually changing away from it as the first move.

I also caught a Pikachu, who quickly replaced Caterpie in the party, and I spent some time with him levelling up as well. Pikachu is nowhere near as cute in this first game as he later came to be; he is a little chubby.

I’m playing using the black and white option rather than grey and green, because sometimes authenticity can go too far.

With a team of level 15 pokémon, I went to Brock and beat him with health to spare; Butterfree performed admirably. And then I departed Pewter City to travel along Route 3, and on to Mt Moon. In the caves on the way to Cerulean City, I encountered approximately 32,649 zubats, with them appearing every few steps along the way. Each and every one was defeated with Pikachu’s thundershock move, as demonstrated in the header image of this post; occasionally they would get an attack in first which drained a point or two of Pikachu’s health. By the time I made it through the mountain, picking up a fossil and defeating Team Rocket on the way, Pikachu was at level 18 and other members of the party were trailing behind.

I may need to do some more grinding before I go to meet Misty.

  1. Before the 3DS store closed I bought a number of games, which I am only just getting around to playing. I have both Blue and Silver lined up, to hopefully complete for the first time. I played Yellow back when that was first released (or close to then) and I believe I got as far as the Elite Four before giving up. ↩︎

Afterburner Complete: the downside of digital controls

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It’s not just horizontal side-scrolling shooters that I’m hopeless at. Afterburner Complete is an excellent conversion of the arcade game, and one of the games that I’ve played many times on my actual 32X. It’s colourful, it’s fast and smooth, it has great music. I am rubbish at it.

Part of this is down to the digital controls, I’m sure. There’s no nuance on how you move, you have to throw the plane all over the screen to avoid missiles but this means that it’s really difficult to target any of the enemy planes. On Afterburner Climax the controls are much more precise, with the aiming reticule being more delicately balanced, and I feel so much more in control.

I set the number of lives to the maximum, and I managed to get as far as level 8, but I found the shift in focus to avoiding obstacles – the canyon walls and the radio masts – to be beyond me. No matter how quickly I reacted, even with the plane’s speed set to the minimum, I ended up crashing multiple times. I have no idea why I couldn’t just fly a little bit higher.

Hellfire: colour coding

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The box of Hellfire is etched in my mind, as it sat on the shelf of the Computer Leisure Centre in Orpington for many months, unobtainable due to the expense but tempting due to the artwork. I had played R-Type, of course, and any number of lesser scrolling shooters on the CPC, but this looked fantastic, and the reviews in Sega Power and Mega did nothing to quell my enthusiasm.

Then, I recall, Colin got it, and I played it at his house, and it was fantastic. But since I could possibly borrow it, I no longer needed to buy it. I borrowed it a couple of times, and never got very far. See, I’m rubbish at shooters.

That’s present tense too. I’m still hopeless. Hellfire’s gimmick is that your ship can fire four ways – forwards, backwards, up and down, or to the four diagonals. You cycle between these on the B button while A fires; your ship changes colour depending on the gun direction. To get through the stages, particularly when you get to the bosses, you need to have the right weapon selected. I find this tricky.

The stages are colourful but the backgrounds never intrude

I’m playing on easy, and have got to Round 1 Stage 4 before meeting a section I just can’t get past. It really is a great game, it’s just that I’m pants at it.

Paper Mario: an endless prologue

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Playing Paper Mario now, the similarities to the Mario & Luigi games are obvious. Not just in terms of the mechanics – attack an enemy in the overworld to get the first hit in battle; turn-based combat with timing enhancements; use items to enable special moves – but also in terms of the humour and interaction with other characters. In this game, Mario’s sidekick is one of a selection of bad-guys-turned-good, subverting the usual assumption that goombas and koopas are only there to be bounced on, and lending specialist skills to open new paths and collect more badges. That’s not to say that all enemies are converted, and the game hasn’t quite yet reconciled the fact that Goombario, for example, has so far seen a hundred of his peers being brutally slaughtered.

The game starts off quite slowly, with a lot of story to cover. Bowser has obtained a star rod, which makes him look like a fairy but more importantly allows him to have any wish granted. He has taken this opportunity, not to make Peach fall in love with him or to have Mario disappeared from existence, but rather to just kidnap Peach and her castle wholesale. Back to a standard plot, then. Mario has to find seven star people sprite things, which are all over the kingdom, and to do that he has to collect new abilities and get stronger to face stronger enemies.

So far I have found one.

The first part of the game took ages to play through due to there being so much conversation, which of course you can’t just skip over because there is the odd line that is important at telling you where to go. I started playing this back on 6 November, and because I have very little time to play and also because of the slow pace, I didn’t reach Chapter 1 until 12 November.

I explored the village and pathways first, finding a number of badges and coins and star pieces, before venturing into the Koopa Brothers’ fortress. The puzzles inside weren’t at the level of Ocarina of Time’s water temple, but it was refreshing to see a bit of clever design which required little backtracking. Halfway through I rescued Bombette, who coincidentally was able to blow up cracked walls, of which I had noticed a couple throughout the dungeon.

Bombette is relatively handy in battle as well, though her special move of Bomb uses a fair amount of FP (flower points?) which means I am more likely to be found with Blue Koopa accompanying me; his special move allows you to attack all the enemies on the ground at once.

I battled up to the Koopa Brothers, and then the fight against them was the most difficult so far; I had to use some items to regain health since I couldn’t work out the timing to mitigate against their attacks. It didn’t help that Goombario’s Tattle skill – which gives information about an enemy and then unlocks a health bar beneath that type forever more – only worked on one of the four brothers at a time. Nevertheless, they eventually fell, and I rescued big moustache star man thing.

Starfox: the stars are colourful

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You press a button, and wait for a couple of minutes for the view to change. You hear something shooting at you, but there are no instruments telling you from which direction. You flail around panning up, down, left and right, until you finally see some weird distorted polygon on one of your screens. If it’s in your front screen, you hit the lasers and fail to do anything since it’s already disappeared. If it’s in your back or side screens, you can see it merrily firing at you while you try (and fail) to turn around to face it. You then accidentally press the T button and see your ship rocketing off into space, with no idea where you’re going.

I’m sure I’m missing something. There must be a way of seeing where you are supposed to fly to, and then to see where things are when you get there. I was told I was near a planet, and near a fuel ship, but didn’t see either of them. I was told I was near a convoy – and saw a single ship each time.

I think I’ll stick to Elite.