I’m not great at scrolling shooters, though I enjoy their spectacle and the panic they induce as the number of bullets increases. Radiant Silvergun not only has a great many bullets, it also has a great many weapons, all but one of which I forget to use. This makes things very tricky indeed, especially when you’re supposed to be firing around corners using a homing missile and I’m stuck firing upwards like a lemon.
Lonely Mountains Downhill: feeling stylish
One of the things I really appreciate in a game is if it makes me look good, full of style, skilled in a way that I’m not in real life. Elaborate swordplay leading to combination hits; parkour across a cityscape; flying through buildings and structures with no effort and no fear. Many games make me feel stylish – or maybe the correct word is cool? – but there’s something about Lonely Mountains Downhill which excels in this aspect.
It seems an unlikely match. Mountain biking is hardly the most graceful of sports, with constant bumps and rattles; the game isn’t effortless either, with me constantly feeling just a tiny bit out of control. Nothing illustrates this better than the Free Rider mode of each mountain, which loses all checkpoints and tasks you with getting to the end without crashing; I’m managed to do this on just two courses. By the end of the course I was almost shaking with nerves, so much so that on one attempt, with just a couple of corners to go, I just cycled into a tree.
Not stylish at all, right? But the feeling when you get through a checkpoint, when you successfully land a jump off a cliff onto a sloped stone below, when you barrel down a steep hill and turn sharply at the bottom to meet the longer path – it’s exhilarating, and makes you feel that you can do anything.
Oddly enough I don’t get the same feeling from Lonely Mountains Snow Riders. Maybe it’s because that is a bit easier to control (skis are less unwieldy than a bike) so I don’t feel like I’ve beaten the odds every time I complete a section.
I’ve finished all the beginner challenges from the first two mountains now, and a few of the expert ones. The game is really lovely to look at, with a stylised art design which feels solid and complete. Sometimes scenery gets in the way of the path you’re following, which is an intentional decision but maybe removes you from the game a little. It’s pretty much never getting in the way though.
Which is more than you can say for the trees.
Sonic CD: completed!
Stardust Speedway remains a low point for the game, I think, which is a shame because the ornamentation (of the brass instruments in the present, and overgrown pipework in the past) is evocative of the Starlight Zone, probably my favourite levels of the original Sonic game. The route to find the generator, and get to it in the past, is overly convoluted and seems to require luck as well as skill. I did explore a lot to find the route that worked for me, but maybe I was missing something.
It’s taken a while, but I’ve now completed this, getting the good future in every zone, and even destroying the Metal Sonic holograms hidden throughout. The game is very different to Sonics 1 and 2, rewarding exploration as well as speed, finding the best places and routes to run along, rather than just always moving to the right. Maybe this is why I found it oppressive; it was just too different, while looking the same. Having explored everything, though, and now with a better knowledge of routes, its become much more like classic Sonic, and I feel like it has the same sort of replay value.
In fact, I know it does, because having completed the game on the PS3, I immediately restarted it on the Xbox 360 (well, the 360 version running on the Xbox One), to unlock some long-standing achievements. I played through it all the way to Stardust Speedway Act 2, where I found I couldn’t remember how to find the generator and I had to look it up. Having done that, I proceeded through and completed it again.
It’s not perfect by any stretch. The final boss battle is a bit of an anticlimax, especially when you compare it to the iconic Sonic 2 last stage. Metal Sonic’s race is a bit too much of a difficulty spike. Some of the level design, especially in the present, is a bit confusing, where they have tried to vary the routes in the past, but leaving rings in the same places. The special stages, even though I now know what to do, are rubbish and uncontrollable; I managed to get four time stones at most. And yet, despite all this, it’s a really good solid game, well up with the best platformers I’ve played.
Having completed the main game, I then looked at the time trials, which are more traditional Sonic material with the time travel removed, and the sole aim is to get through the present version of the level as quickly as possible. I hadn’t explored looking for the most efficient route; maybe that’s something to do in the future.
Wreckfest: this isn’t a PC game
So why is it crashing as if is one?
Unfortunately the debug menu option doesn’t work, and instead it just quits the game. I’ve tried deleting and redownloading, and I get the same error, which means it might be an issue with a locally stored save file or update file or something. Pretty frustrating.
APB: twitchy siren
Maybe it’s the conversion to the Xbox pad, but APB is incredibly difficult to control. In order to arrest someone you have to have your cursor over them and press the siren, because obviously criminals are only going to pay attention to a police car which is an exact distance away from them. The thing is that the cursor is not at a set distance from your car, but instead varies with the speed you’re going. In order to have enough of a gap between your car and the cursor to be able to arrest someone, you have to be going quite fast, certainly faster than the criminals you are chasing. For littering this isn’t so much of an issue, since you need to signal to them once. By the time you get to chasing down dopers, it’s much more difficult because you have to signal on them three times, meaning you are almost guaranteed to crash; too many crashes and you’re out.
I’ll have to see if there’s an original cabinet next time I go to somewhere like Arcade Club, because the concept of the game – a semi-open world, different criminals to find, extending time through fuel and doughnuts – is quite attractive. It’s just the controls which frustrate.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- Next Page »