Crossy road

My relationship with Crossy Road has been fluctuating between devotion and contempt. I mean, she’s a good looking game, the bright blocky characters and objects are pretty. But, she’s always nagging me to buy stuff for her. Stuff like £2.38 rabbit characters to play as.

Maybe I should look beyond her flaws, she is fun to be with but she is so clingy that I had to turn off her push notifications.

She is caring though, she gives me little gift characters now and then from bizarre gumball machine that doesn’t relate to anything, although she sometimes tries to get me to pay for it and that’s just rude and frankly, weakens our rapport.

Sorry Frogger. It’s not copyright infringement if it’s isometric.

Other people seem disinterested in the high scores I show them. Maybe it’s her horrible taste in videos, she even pays for me to see them but it’s all adverts. Terrible boring adverts.

When it comes down to it, I know that I’m really I’m just using her. She’ll never replace my true love, Frogger.

Crossy road is a game you should try but she’ll never live up to your expectations.

Shovel Knight

Ahhh late! Late again. Sorry, so sorry. I was just so busy playing shovel knight that the Monday deadline became a distant memory. Shovel knight is a modern game that is altogether SNESlike. It sports a rather fetching restricted colour palette, a chip-tune audio track and some bloody good retro gameplay to boot. I found myself rather fond of the game for the most part. It has a lovely sense of humour and genuine character that is rare in the modern shit maelstrom of games on steam.

The game requires you to play through well designed platforming levels, using your shovel and wits to down-attack your way to the evil .. castle. I don’t remember its name. Does it matter? Leave me alone I’m tired!

I found the controls really quite excellent and the different unlockable spells really make you feel like you’re making choices and playing the game your own way. Levels introduce new mechanics frequently enough to prevent the game from becoming stale and boss encounters are enjoyable and unique (if sometimes a little bit clichéd).

The check-pointing in some levels needs work. I found a lot of checkpoints were placed in such a way that I had to do a fair bit of faffing before I could get to the bit of the level I was failing on. It’s something Super Meat Boy got right and I was surprised that I hit shitty checkpoints quite so frequently. I also found that the punishment for death (losing money) is overly severe. You can reclaim your money Dark-Souls-style by picking it up from where you died but dying several times in a row means that it’s lost for-fucking–ever… goddamn I’ve lost so much money in this game. It’s really an odd choice for a death mechanic and one which doesn’t really fit. It’s a modern concept shoe-horned into a retro game. I don’t understand the reasoning for punishing players in this way instead of just… letting the money accumulate endlessly, it’s not like money is a finite resource, you can easily just replay levels and accrue what you need with minimal grinding. The floating bags of money are a distraction and the loss of money is adding insult to injury, particularly in later more tricky levels.

It feels like the game is much too short and more emphasis is placed on increasing player punishment with the hopes of pleasing completionists (and masochists). Personally, I would have preferred a greater RPG focus, and more places to go, things to see and ways to spend the money. Most of the map encounters are merely a one-off duel, and I’m sure they could do more with the inter-level dream sequences.

I feel as though I’m digging into the game to much here, it really is quite fun to play and people who don’t nitpick and tear games apart will easily be able to ignore these gripes and embrace the warm blanket of nostalgia that the game wraps around you.

If you liked platforming in the late 80s and early 90s, I’d definitely dig deep into your pockets and give this game a go.

Dark Souls 2

My Christmas whisky hangover is finally over, let the weekly updates re-commence!

I’ve really only been playing one game recently and that’s Dark Souls 2 on the personal computation machine. It’s infuriating to the point where you’ll take several bites out of your monitor but at the same time, it’s a magnificent game which will teach you how to dance.

There are five significant qualms I have with the game:

• The user interface is ugly and cumbersome.
• You cannot easily compare equipment you are wearing with items you are viewing in a shop.
• The icons for stats are confusingly similar to one another.
• Some stats have ridiculously abstract names (Poise? What the hell is poise?)
• Punishment for death is excessive. Punishments include:
  • All enemies respawn
  • Your maximum HP is lowered
  • If you die once then die again without reaching the point of your original corpse, any currency souls you’ve collected are pissed away forever

Besides the issues above you are never told if you are in the wrong place for your ability level, or if you need to use an item to progress. You just have to figure it out or you have to find out how to progress from an internet guide like a great big idiot baby. If your personal honour code forbids consulting guides, the first few hours of the game can feel like being frequently punched in the face from a giant with wasps for hands.

I usually consider the need to check FAQs and guides to be slothful design but in Dark Souls, the lack of information is intentional. From Software want you to talk to people about the game. Not just internet goblins either (although the online community is vast), you’re meant to ignore the repulsive smell of strangers and cohorts and actively discuss the game. You’re meant to have conversations with your even your most hideous neighbours. Exchanges like this:

“Hey did you blow up that wall on the corner in the forest of giants”

“No! I didn’t know you could do that! How can I find it? Can I touch your hair?”

“It’s where there’s a hollow guard throwing firebombs. Please let go of my hair sir.”

There’s real joy to be had learning about some secrets and missed opportunities from social interaction. Even in the game itself there are messages left by other players which literally litter the floor. They inform you of hidden paths, items, and useful cliffs to commit suicide from. It’s a wonderful mechanic which is surprisingly devoid of deviant-speak as players can only use words from a preset list. If only this were the case for all online conversations.

If you’re too useless to make any progress whatsoever, you also have the option to summon in random plebs to help you which is great but pretty much nullifies the extreme difficulty. However, you can return the favour by joining some other poor sod’s game. Ding so can reward you with the prize of returning to full health, assuming you don’t arse it up and let the poor sod die (or die uselessly yourself).

It really is a belter of a game. Every time I get crushed by a mace the size of a horse, I feel like I’m learning something. Usually, I learn fear. Stamina management and fear. The trick to succeeding is to hang back and slowly nip at enemies until they die from 1000 papercuts. There’s considerably more depth to it than that but the natural learning and adapting is a refreshing change from big neon arrows telling me what to do and glowing paths telling me where to go. I have to think, and try stuff for myself and fuck up to progress. That’s brilliant.

Learning to kill the run of the mill chumps is one thing but ridding the world of bosses is another. Bosses have patterns which you must learn but unlike Zelda games, the punishment for failure is swift brutal death. Which is what makes killing them so damn rewarding (apart from all the actual awards that is). Coincidentally, I killed the first boss on my first go so I felt like Zeus for a good 5 minutes before promptly losing everything to the the next enemy with a large pointed stick. I needed a new controller anyway, it’s fine.

Oh and my favourite aspect of the game is that you can kill everybody. Want to kill the shopkeeper? Fine. Want to kill the lady who lets you level up and make the game impossible for yourself? Go for it. Want to bump someone off to take their sweet sword? Do it. Oh except don’t do it if you don’t mean it, people who you kill don’t come back. Ever.

In many ways, Dark Souls 2 is a metaphor for life. You can basically do what you want and you can achieve great things that seem impossible but you will be given very little help and might well get decapitated a few times before you succeed.