The next major game I want to play is King’s Bounty, partly because it’s supposed to be really good and partly because I’ve already installed it and used up an activation for it, so I should finish it before I wipe the system to put Windows 7 on it later this month…
But before that, I’m going to wind down for a bit with something simpler, so tonight I started Trine, a new platformer game. It’s fairly simple, progress from left to right, solving puzzles and defeating monsters as you go along. The gimmick to it is that you actually control three people, a mage, a thief, and a knight, which you can switch between at any time and each of which has different abilities. At any particular moment, you might want the mage to summon boxes to climb, or the thief to use her grappling hook, or the knight to beat up some skeletons. And as is typical nowadays, the puzzles are often physics-based, depending on putting a weight in the right place, swinging about, etc.
So far I’ve done the first three areas, dying a couple of times thanks to spike traps. It’s a fairly short game, so I should finish it tomorrow.
And as mentioned, I spent a bit of today on some of the other smaller games I have lined up:
And Yet It Moves: It’s a platformer, but the twist here is that everything looks like it’s made out of paper (which doesn’t really affect anything), and that you can rotate the world, affecting the gravity of you and everything around you. Puzzles usually involve having to use that rotation to move things out of the way or into certain spots, chasing enemies away by luring others around, jumping onto ledges you wouldn’t be able to get to directly, etc. I only did the first few levels today.
The Maw: You’re an alien and you lead a blob-like creature around as he eats a whole bunch of stuff. But there are puzzles as well and your creature gains certain abilities from eating some enemies and uses them to get through and so on. And it’s always growing as you eat all these enemies, and he gets rather large. Cute, but fairly short and not all that difficult. I finished it in about 5 hours, DLC levels included, and only had to redo one level to get 100% completion.
Braid: I already beat the 360 version, but I picked it up for PC as well just to have an ‘archival’ copy.
Since I don’t want my free time to be spent entirely in WoW, but the PC is still substituting for my Linux box, I fired up the 360 and figured I’d start something light, like the original Banjo-Kazooie. It came out for XBLA recently, I never played it when it first came out for the N64, and I like platformers, so what the hell.
And it’s your typical platformer, with a lot of jumping around, puzzles to figure out, some enemies to fight, and stuff to collect. And oh boy are there ever a lot of things to collect. Jigsaw puzzle pieces, musical notes, some shaman’s skull tokens, eggs, honeycombs, these little sprite-like guys, 1ups… A lot of them aren’t optional either; you have to collect at least a certain number in order to unlock things you need to progress.
It’s decent enough, though. Comparisons to Mario 64 are obvious, though it seems to take more of a linear approach and each world is fairly large and can be scoured in a single pass, instead of being revisited a bunch of times. I’ve only completed the first world so far (of nine, I think) though, so maybe it opens up later on.
I’m also tempted by the new B-K game, though it’s a fairly different style. I already wrote something about the demo for it before.
I finished off the day by doing a few more N+ episodes from the third level pack, though I probably shouldn’t have, for the sake of my blood pressure. One level in particular, named “the long and winding road that leads to your death” was full of precision wall-jumping and mine dodging and must have taken at least 30 or 40 tries. When you do something that often, you can often get the timing down precise enough that you’re taking the same path and hitting the same enemy patrol pattern each time, though that sometimes leads you to getting yourself killed in the exact same way as you did on a previous run…
N+ is still a good game, but I think I’ve hit the limit of my ability with it, and any further progress just isn’t worth the frustration.
I got a couple mission further in Giants, but it was still really just tutorial stuff about hatching and controlling Kabuto’s minions. Instead, I wound up playing on the PS3 for a while, since I had just remembered that a couple new games were coming out today: Wipeout HD, and Mega Man 9.
Mega Man 9 is actually coming out for nearly every platform under the sun, but the 360′s controller is just terrible for it, and I didn’t want to waste space on the Wii, so the PS3 it was for it. And damn, is it hard. It really is in the spirit of the original Mega Man games, which were also hard as nails. I tried three or four different stages, but couldn’t even beat or get to the mid-boss in any of them. It’ll take some practice, since the difficulty in these games comes from knowing what’s coming up (gotta keep to the side when falling at one point in Splash Woman’s stage or you’ll hit spikes on the next screen), watching enemy behaviours, and getting the timing right.
And Wipeout HD so far is…disappointing me. Not because of the game itself though, but just because the graphics really drive home that I need to upgrade my TV, as things are tiny and blurry and I know it would look so much better on a proper 1080p set. It’s also one that’s going to take a lot of practice; in the first couple events, I only placed 5th in the first and only got bronze in the second’s time trial. You really have to know the tracks well enough to know where the boost pads are and be in the right place to hit every one. This is the first time I’ve played this series too, so it’ll take some time to get used to the style, though I did play F-Zero GX a bit. Albeit poorly…
Not much time to play tonight, so I just did a few episodes in the new N+ level pack that was released this week. I didn’t die too much or require too many restarts, but it’s definitely starting off harder than the first level pack did. This might be the one where I finally hit the difficulty wall again.
Bionic Commando: Rearmed was released today. The original was one of my favourite NES games, so of course I had to pick this one up.
It’s a remake, but extremely close to the spirit of the original, with the same basic abilities, same overhead map, same level layouts, same mid-transit truck battles… There are various differences though, such as being able to switch weapons on the fly rather than picking one at the start of the level, the minibosses are completely different (they were rather lame in the original), some different obstacle types, you can grab barrels and enemies with the arm and toss them, and new enemy types (I think).
It was a rough start though, since it feels more difficult than the NES version, even on Medium. It seems to be easier to get hit while swinging around, enemies are alerted more easily and move around more, take more hits to kill, and their firing patterns are less predictable. I failed the first area and had to redo the whole thing three times before finally beating the first miniboss, but I think I’m more familiar with the controls and have gone through a few more areas now.
As expected, I finished off both Braid and Paper Mario: TTYD today. Some of the later puzzles in Braid are fairly devious, but I wasn’t stuck for too long on most of them. There was one though, in world 5-4, that I had to get a hint for from a forum. I would never have solved it myself, since I wouldn’t have even thought of the trick necessary. The final world was fairly clever, with one long ‘chase’ sequence that winds up being the game’s big emotional reveal.
And the ending is…rather difficult to interpret. You can read in all sorts of metaphors about loss and guilt and experience, depending on your own perspective, but I’m not really enough of a smarty-man to fully evaluate it.
Paper Mario: TTYD took a bit longer than expected, and I almost failed to finish it since I wasn’t really well-prepared enough. Grinding levels turned out to be extremely slow, so I just barged ahead with the final chapter. It was full of the requisite puzzles that require you to exercise all of the skills and use all of party members you picked up along the way, of course, but at the end was a sequence of boss fights that depleted a few too many of my healing items. The final fight was fairly long and had two stages to it, and I wasn’t very confident of success at the midway point since I was almost completely out of items, but I just barely finished the boss off, with stats low enough that I probably would have only survived one or two more rounds. I had a similar problem with the GBA Mario & Luigi game, where I have a save right before the final boss but still haven’t beat him in the few attempts I tried.
But it’s over, at least, even if it’s a fairly traditional everything’s-back-to-normal Mario ending.
Not much gaming tonight as I got caught up in watching the Olympics, so I just popped into Braid long enough to pick up another five or so puzzle pieces. World 5 is tricky in that reversing time causes a shadow copy of you to appear and go through the same actions you just rewound, so you have to help yourself by performing the second part of what you want to do, rewind, and then go perform the first part and try to sync up with your clone.
The goal this weekend will be to finish Braid (shouldn’t take much longer), finish Paper Mario: TTYD (on the last chapter), and…okay I’m not quite close enough to finish The Witcher, but I should at least get back to it.
Edit: This entry seems to be attracting Google searches about defeating the World 5 level Lair, in which case I suggest: make the shadow do all the work.
I finished off worlds 3 and 4 in Braid tonight, after a few more “aha!” moments. Platforms and enemies that seemed to be completely pointless at first glace often turn out to be the key to the puzzle in hindsight. I wish I could say more, but it’s a game that really should be played without any spoilers. Completing a world also lets you piece together a simple jigsaw puzzle for that level, creating scenes that will probably turn out to be meaningful once more of the story is revealed.
I also tried out the demo for Pixeljunk Eden on the PS3. It’s an…interesting game, even if I barely had any idea what I was doing. Too interesting for me, probably, as I never do well with games with weird control schemes like the tethered swinging around in this one.
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