Post — Page 88

Assassin’s Creed Unity (PS4)

Posted on 28/02/2016 Written by deKay

After what seemed like a very long period of time just scrambling over rooftops looking for chests and collectables, I finally decided to pursue the main questline again. Well, after a mission or two for the theatre, anyway.

The next mission was the one where you have to infiltrate Notre Dame and assassinate Sivert. Of course, I messed it up a few times mainly by being spotted or not planning my escape. Eventually, I got my act together and did it properly, or at least an approximation of properly, by taking down Sivert’s associate first, nabbing his keys, and then waiting in the confessional ready to do this:

After that, there was some bizarreness involving portals and timeshifting and jumping between servers or something. Frankly, it didn’t make a lot of sense, and required me to avoid trains, climb the Statue of Liberty, not be hit by flying debris and outrun and avoid data corruption. Or something.

Finally, I returned to wandering around doing good deeds, collecting those rosette things, and generally running into people and knocking them over. As you do.

Click to view slideshow.

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Street Fighter Alpha (GBC): COMPLETED!

Posted on 27/02/2016 Written by deKay

There’s no way that Street Fighter Alpha, Capcom’s CPS II based arcade fighting game, would be any good on the Game Boy Colour: A system not just lacking in buttons, but also roughly one ten-millionth as powerful. It’d be like expecting Elite Dangerous to run on a Speak and Spell. And yet, here it is, surprisingly well turned out.

It doesn’t have all the moves, characters or backgrounds. The animation isn’t as fluid (but for a Game Boy title it’s pretty damn good) and the sound effects are limited at best – not least in there’s no speech – but it feels and plays like a Street Fighter game. Most importantly, Ken is Ken, with all his special moves intact and he is best. Ken is always best.

Since Ken is best, it’s him I used to complete the game and in doing so found one major difference between this version of Street Fighter Alpha and the Saturn one I used to play so much: the Game Boy Colour port is incredibly easy. I only lost one round in the whole game (versus Birdie, if that matters) and even that was close. Final “boss” Ryu was a complete walkover.

Crawfish have worked miracles with the GBC hardware to pull this game off. They did it again with the Game Boy Advance port of Street Fighter Alpha 3 too (which I also played, briefly, a few days ago) but somehow that endeavour seems more feasible. At least the GBA is a 32bit sprite-pumping powerhouse to begin with, whereas the GBC is a calculator. Incredible.

Click to view slideshow.

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Sonic the Hedgehog (MS): COMPLETED!

Posted on 27/02/2016 Written by deKay

Sonic the Hedgehog on the Master System was, at the time, quite an achievement. It may not have been as technically polished as the Mega Drive original, but it was a good approximation given the more limited hardware, and it steered away from simply being very, very fast by focussing more on the platforming. I quite enjoyed it at the time.

It has been quite a long time (read: over a decade, I expect) since I last played 8bit Sonic the Hedgehog, and several things surprised me: It was just as easy as I recall. It stands up better today than I expected. Mostly, I was amazed at how I still remembered where all of the hidden Chaos Emeralds were. Except for the one in Scrap Brain Zone which I stumbled across, luckily.

It’s a fun platformer with some excellent music (Jungle Zone was always my favourite, and still is) and one of the best games of its type on the Master System. When you compare it, technically, to earlier games like Psycho Fox and Alex Kidd (both still excellent) this does things unheard of on the console at the time.

And that’s it completed, with all the Chaos Emeralds in tow. Excellent.

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Assassin’s Creed Unity (PS4)

Posted on 20/02/2016 Written by deKay

It’s more Assassin’s Creed! Yay! My favourite series of neck-stabbing games. I’d heard a lot of bad things about this entry, and so waited until it was cheap enough to risk. £10 in this case, and so far, it’s been just fine. The story isn’t that good however, and Arno seems to have fake conviction to carry out his tasks. He doesn’t seem too bothered about the death of his father so the only reason he joins the Brotherhood is because he has nowhere else to go. And his girlfriend is a Templar! Good grief.

At least Paris is excellent to run around and explore and climb and stuff. That’s the best bit of Assassin’s Creed games anyway. Stopping crimes in the street, finding hidden stuff, and opening chests – all this is good stuff. The fighting is improved over previous games, and it looks astounding, especially when you synchronise from a vantage point. The climbing requires less precision too, making getting around a bit more fluid, and being able to quickly climb down stuff as well as up stuff is a massive improvement.

Click to view slideshow.

As far as progress goes, I’m a few hours in and have “grown up”, joined the Brotherhood, and started renovating a theatre. Arno is a bit angry we weren’t allowed to kill the guy who killed his girlfriend’s dad (who was Grand Master of the Templar Order in Paris, so killing his killer seems an odd move for an Assassin), but he’s been given another chance to do so now, which I’m about to begin. Once I’ve done this theatre stuff. And climbed around some more.

The story so far:

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Disney Infinity 3.0 (PS4)

Posted on 19/02/2016 Written by deKay

I have no interest in Disney, and no interest in Star Wars, so obviously I was going to buy the Disney Infinity 3.0 Star Wars Starter Kit when I say it cheap. It’s terrible.

Let me qualify that a little. It isn’t exactly really terrible, but it is a confusing mess. There’s a hub, right, which is called a Toy Box, but then there are other toy boxes, then rooms in the toy box that are almost completely empty. There’s very little to do in the toy box itself, and the other toy boxes that I downloaded are jerky and slow and despite being listed as made by Disney seem to be made by five year olds. Every time we play, my daughter is told she has to sign into PSN (she can’t – she’s not old enough to legitimately have a PSN account), then the game complains she isn’t signed in. Every so often when the game loads a new area or toy box or something, it complains again.

The supplied toy box (I presume that is what it is, anyway) is a very short level from The Clone Wars (again, I presume) where you infiltrate a droid factory and defeat General Grievous, in a way which is much less fun than when you did it in Lego Star Wars III. Once the “story” is complete, you wander round the level doing inane tasks for characters who have magically populated the place. Find my pet. Find my toy. Find the spies. Find me. Yawn.

Click to view slideshow.

The graphics are decidedly last gen. The actual construction stuff is too complicated. It’s possible to get stuck in areas with no way of resetting your position or restarting the level. When you record a video it sticks a big DISNEY INFINITY logo in the top left of the screen.

It’s terrible.

BUT. But. There’s a saving grace. A game changing victory. A killer USP. What is this feature? You can pick up Ewoks, and dropkick them off a cliff. YES. In fact, you can pick up pretty much any character and dropkick them anywhere. Over and over again. With no penalty! Best game ever.

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