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Poly Bridge: do you truss me?

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I’m not sure what came first, this or Bridge Constructor, but they are both very similar. I think I prefer Poly Bridge slightly, as it has more of a distinctive visual style as well as having useful section cloning mechanics, but the idea is the same for both games – build a bridge using a variety of materials to carry a car or other vehicle across a gap, with realistic physics determining whether the bridge holds or not.

This means you make lots of trusses.

I’ve completed almost the whole of the first world now, and the game is made more enjoyable by trying to set high scores as I go (in terms of lowest cost of materials). Not against the global leaderboards – those are full of people who’ve fluked a catapult for $5 – but against friends who’ve played the game on Steam. On the first few levels there were quite a few of them to compete against, but in later levels this has tapered off a little.

Although there is a certain challenge to building stable and strong bridges with a minimum of materials (shifting the joint points down a couple of pixels to make the wooden beams very slightly shorter), the biggest challenge for me comes in the sequencing – and particularly the hydraulics.

At the start of each level you’re told the order things happen. There may be a car going first, and then a van going second. There may be a boat coming down the river in the middle. When this happens you can be given access to hydraulic elements that help get the bridge out of the way, but these put their own stress on the bridge (and if you’re not careful can tip the whole bridge over). Alternatively you can try to build around the boat, but this can be much more expensive.

I am fast learning why I’m not a civil engineer.

Farming Simulator 22: not farming

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Nicholas’s current great interest is Farming Simulator 22, after he has seen a fair few videos on YouTube talking about the array of machinery you can drive around. He has been keen to get me involved in a multiplayer game, and after weeks of putting it off, here we are.

It took us 20 minutes to get a game set up, mainly because he’s installed all sorts of mods and DLC onto his Steam game, which aren’t available on the Xbox (or, in some cases, I hadn’t installed them), meaning our games were incompatible. We worked out what we needed to do in the end, and so I entered the farm with some trepidation over exactly which crops I’d be harvesting or sowing or watering or whatnot.

I needn’t have worried. This wasn’t a simulation of farming, it was a simulation of driving around a town in big expensive machines, blocking roads, turning other vehicles over, and generally causing havoc. The farm we inherited had large fields of sunflowers and wheat, which were wrecked as two large tractors had a (slow) race through them. An irrigation machine with large arms was used to block roads. Combine harvesters pushed over quad bikes.

We parked a few vehicles on the train tracks, not expecting a train to come past. For some reason vehicles clip straight through your avatar, but interact directly with other vehicles. We found that there was a large beetroot-picking machine balanced on top of a house.

It’s all a bit silly. I asked Nicholas if we could actually try harvesting the sunflowers, and he tried to buy the right equipment and it still didn’t work. So he concreted over the field instead, so we had more space to park vehicles. As long as I don’t drive more of them into the river.

Aero the Acro-Bat: diagonal attacks

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In the rash of character-based platformers following the rivalry of Sonic and Mario, there must have been many which were unfairly overlooked. Aero is not one of these; it sold well enough to get a sequel, so was not overlooked; and if it had been so it wouldn’t have been unfairly.

Maybe I am being a little harsh; I have only played the first five levels to far, but they are all in the circus and I am longing for some variety in the setting already. My main complaint is with the way that Aero attacks enemies, and controls in general. The control layout indicates that button A is reserved for “fire”, but I have found no way to actually fire anything. Instead, I am forced to use a drill-type attack that goes either diagonally down or diagonally up, and half the time doesn’t hurt the enemy at all (but still hurts me).

A great platform game lives or dies on the accuracy of the jumps and the momentum the character has. Aero is competent enough, but it’s not fun to control – plus there are frequently unavoidable deaths from going too fast or due to trampolines launching you into spikes off-screen. Luckily for present-day me, save states make this a lot more bearable.

Toripon (PC): COMPLETED!

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You have to find and take photos of all the birds in a flat. I found, and took photos of, all the birds in a flat. And some other things, some of which it seems you need to take photos of in order to unlock more birds.

I’m not sure what else there is to say about Toripon. You can get a copy here if you too want to find, and take photos of, all the birds in a flat: https://theladyvictoria.itch.io/toripon

This one had a knife.

The post Toripon (PC): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.

I Love You Colonel Sanders (PC): COMPLETED!

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Yes, absolutely taking the Japanese dating visual novel genre and tying it up with KFC was a sensible idea. Especially when the aim is to romance the big man Sanders himself. Only what’s this? He’s a young man with a fashionable goatee, and doesn’t look like a bad guy from Dukes of Hazzard?

As a game, being a visual novel, it’s pretty limited. There are a few choices you get to make, most of which don’t seem to have much of an effect but some basically cause insta-death without warning. It’s a short game too, about half an hour in length unless you’re a slow reader, so you barely get to know the cast of bizarre and ridiculous characters who make up the staff and students at the cooking academy the game is set in. The teacher is a dog and a classmate is some sort of pressure cooker, for instance.

It’s silly, a bit creepy, and implying KFC is the height of excellent cuisine throughout grates a bit, but for short free nonsense it was worth a play. I think.

The post I Love You Colonel Sanders (PC): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.