Category Archives: Platformer

Oh Yeah, I Own One Of Those

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I haven’t done much with the 360 lately, but today I took a bit of time to catch up with some of the newer XBLA games, at least.

Splosion Man: You play a character who, well, explodes. That’s all he does, run around and explode. But the explosions propel you around, let you trigger various things, etc., and you use that to make your way to the exit. There are of course various obstacles, timed puzzles, enemies, tricky jumps and triggered sequences, etc., along the way. For example, you might have to wall-jump, er, wall-explode up a shaft into an area where spiked walls move inwards and you have to explode up to trigger a barrel drop that you blow up to lift you up enough to trigger a door switch and…etc. I’ve done the first 11 levels so far, and things are getting pretty tricky.

Trials HD: I have the PC version of Trials 2, but word-of-mouth was that the 360 version was an improvement, so I picked it up as well. One of the biggest improvements is that you can see how well you’re doing relative to your friends, which can be motivating or depressing… I’ve done the Beginner and Easy levels so far, usually placing near the bottom but there are a couple of levels where I managed to get to the top of my list of friends.

Shadow Complex: It’s a semi-modern-day version of Metroid, basically, with the same kind of side-scrolling exploration and upgrade-finding, but with an analog aiming stick. I’ve barely started this one, though.

Super Mario Thief

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I finally finished up Trine today, doing the last half of the game in one burst. The levels started getting harder again, and a lot longer, but they weren’t too difficult and I picked up enough new abilities that solutions weren’t so hard to find (especially the floating pyramid).

The last level seemed rather unfair, though, since it involved a timed ascent up a tower, with obstacles spawning in the way. I played the rest of the game at a fairly casual, deliberate pace, and it was rather frustrating to suddenly be forced into a fast, frantic event with little margin for error. I eventually beat it with the thief after a good dozen or so tries, but it wasn’t really that fun compared to the rest of the game.

And then to add insult to injury, it didn’t give me the achievement for completing the game…

Vengeance!

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I got briefly distracted by Bethesda’s release of Daggerfall for free on their site. Although I already own it, it’s nice to have a zipped up package of it, and in a fit of nostalgia I set up DOSBox for it and reinstalled it. I never actually got very far in the main quest line in it before, so who knows, maybe I’ll stick with it this time. I made my typical longsword/mage character, and so far I’ve just gotten him to the city of Daggerfall and done a couple of quests for the mage’s guild. It’s the quests that lead to dungeons that I’m still wary of…

I also completed a couple more levels of Trine, and these ones were actually easier than the previous ones. I think I would have even gotten the don’t-die-in-a-level achievement in the first one if not for some experimenting near the end… Nothing really all that notable about them, though.

And I finished off the day by trying out the remake of Defender Of The Crown, which I picked up in some sale ages ago. You have to conquer England by building up armies, conquering territories, etc., but it’s just not very interesting. It’s fairly simplistic, with no real tactical depth to the combat — you select a card, press Attack, and hope you win… I don’t think I’m going to bother putting any more time into it.

Getting Wood

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I finally got back to Trine tonight, though I only had time for two more levels. I picked up a new ability for the wizard, which lets him make wooden planks as well as boxes, so now I can cross more places. The puzzles are definitely getting trickier, sometimes taking a while to think about what I really need to do to proceed, though I haven’t gotten stuck yet. I have died a handful of times though, so I can forget the complete-an-area-without-dying achievement…

Tryin’

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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.

Indiepalooza

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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.

And I Thought I Was Compulsive

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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.

Appropriately Named

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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.

New School Goes Old School

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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…

The Ninja Strikes Again

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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.