When I first heard of Little Kitty Big City, in a Nintendo Indie showcase, I thought it looked fun – it was obviously inspired by the excellent Untitled Goose Game, but allowed you to play as a cat across a wider and more vertical area. The fact I had only heard of it at this point (in late 2023) rather than back in 2021 when it was first announced, in undoubtedly due to my bias to console games. But anyway.

The game is fine. The cat is well animated, but there’s an odd lag on the controls which makes it a bit finnicky to do anything. This is particularly disappointing given how graceful cats are when moving around – you’d hope that would translate to the game. In the announcement video linked above, you see the cat doing stuff like climbing up ivy and jumping into boxes, which doesn’t seem possible in the hour I’ve played so far. Instead you have the option of holding down the jump button to steer where you land, which glitches all over the place, onto the edge of ledges, and only gives an indication where you’ll end up.

There’s also little consistency on interacting with humans. Sometimes they will react to you jumping at them, dropping their phone or falling over. Sometimes they’ll just ignore you. The shopkeeper get very annoyed with me for knocking a bottle of jam off the top shelf, and picked me up and put me outside the shop – but then I walked back in and she gave me a stroke.

The missions to complete are varied but not overly inventive so far – scoring goals with footballs placed near them; knock flowerpots off walls; pounce on birds to collect feathers – but the difficulties I’m having with the controls overshadows the fun these could be. When getting the pink football around the corner to the pink goal, the ball randomly bounced off a wall into a puddle and then there was no way for me to get it – any contact with water sees the cat freaking out and jumping away. I had to wait until someone came along and kicked the ball out of the puddle, which was a couple of minutes later. While I thought that was annoying, it was nothing compared to when I fell off a wall into a puddle and the cat got wedged between the wall and a pipe, constantly jumping away from the water it was stuck in.

There’s fun to be had, investigating how the world reacts to you, but the glitches and controls are difficult to get past. I might wait and see if there’s an update soon.

I didn’t write about it at the time, but John, Kieron and I did complete Borderlands, back in March 2018. I know it was March 2018 because I started a draft blog post back then, and also that’s when I last updated the spreadsheet.

A spreadsheet? Well, yes. The way that Borderlands is constructed is that there is a main storyline, which is marked clearly on the map, and which automatically updates each time you pass a mission. As well as this, there are many side missions, which are opened by you speaking to the right character or reading a message board or finding something or … basically, it’s quite possible to miss out on doing these missions since you need to find the right person to talk to, and often these are the most fun to do.

So I put together a spreadsheet, downloading a list of where the missions are found, and marked off when we had done them. This also helped to make sure that if anyone missed a session we could redo it with them as host later on. Anyway, this preamble is to introduce the fact that we now have a spreadsheet for Borderlands 2.

We are progressing quite well at times. Some missions have been particularly easy, such as collecting fur from some low-level creatures; others have been a bit frustrating, such as having to find some recording devices that were hidden and we spent twenty minutes wandering around the same area; others have been long and difficult. At least one mission took over an hour for us to fight through the passage to the end and then defeat the enemy; this wouldn’t have been such an issue if we hadn’t started it at 23:30.

We’ve reverted to similar character types to the first game, with Kieron being someone who can go berserk with dual wielding guns, John being able to gather enemies into a black hole, and me having a handy auto-turret. For some reason Kieron’s character is really short, and waddles along at speed, adding to the comedy.

We spent a lot of time on Friday evening in Three Horns, carrying out smaller side missions and then an extended task of relocating an AI core into a variety of machines, each of which then decided to try to murder us. After the first one we were ready for it and polished off the enemies in quick succession. The last machine taken over was a Constructor, which in the game to date have been pains in the backside, creating hoards of robots for us to kill. I inserted the AI, and then very quickly John deployed his black hole, I set up my turret, Kieron fired three rockets; I don’t think the Constructor even had time to think which blueprints to follow.

Looking at the spreadsheet, we are actually over halfway through the story missions, with 11 out of 18 completed. We’re not progressing quite so fast with the side missions, though, with only 42 out of the total of 112 handed in. Our latest mission, for a jolly rotund lady called Ellie, is to start a gang war between two groups she doesn’t like very much. We have taken emblems from each camp and deposited them (alongside some destruction) in the opposing camps, and now we’re being asked to recruit for one of the sides. Or, as Kieron would describe it, let’s blow some stuff up.