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.

Christmas slowdown

Whinges are on the way, just… slower than usual. I may be whingeing a tad less over the Christmas period but whingeing will return to standard frequency in January. I tried to write one for today but I’m too knackered and contemptuous to squeeze out a whole one so here’s a brief summary of the games I reluctantly had a go at:

• Crazy Zombies: Boring zombie premised strategy game. Well, calling it a strategy game is a stretch, it’s hardly Napoleonic warfare. You have to choose which idiots go where tap on a special ability button every few seconds. It’s World of Warcraft where the characters don’t move and you get 2 abilities. Oh and it’s interspersed with dialogue that so bad it makes me want to superglue my eyelids closed.

The only thing that lets this game down is every aspect of it,

 

• Godus: Gag-inducing slime from the perpetually flapping gums of Saint Peter Molyneux. An irritating “god” game where your godly powers are laregly limited to stretching and shrinking platforms to please or frustrate a noisy crowd of hateful minions. Shit on a stick with no ice.

If only real deities were forced to deal with this level of annoying mico-management and… existed I guess.

 

• Five Nights at Freddy’s 2: A nauseating series of jpegs. A slideshow where sometimes when you flick back and forth between the slides and a creepy anthropomorphic animal with dead eyes stares back at you. Genuinely creepy at times, executed with the grace of a donkey.

This game is probably actually terrifying but I played it on the bus at rush hour and the smell induced more fear than this game ever could.

 

• Stick Hero: A non-game created by graphic designers. Very simple, tap and hold to create a bridge, if the bridge is too long, the hero walks to his death and you have to start again. About as deep and engaging as guessing the outcome of a coin toss. I play a lot of these types of the games on the store actually. Games with one concept and then an arcade style game over when you mess up. It’s not good design, it’s lazy and it’s wank.

A simple idea using simple graphics and a simple control scheme for simpletons.

 

• Turbo Dismount: This is like one of those golf games where you tap and hold to control the shot’s power, only instead of hitting a ball, you control a milk van’s speed and it crashes into stuff, tamely, causing a little ragdoll man to get a bit squashed. It reminded me of the crash test dummies and how an actual real game was made based around them instead of a poxy little, minimally interactive half-game.

Pictured: A game with simpler controls and less entertainment value than a plug socket.

 

Both Godus and Crazy Zombies required an internet connection to play too so they both get double shittiness points.

Modern phone games are about as much fun as inhaling glitter and coughing upwards into your own eyes. Merry Whingemas.

Contract killer: Sniper

CKS is a bold new sniping game which breaks sniping tradition by having you do as little actual sniping as possible. You’ll be required to take on a number of targets and, as often as not,  you’ll clumsily gun them down with an assault rifle or other gaudy tool of death, just like real snipers don’t.

“Dad came back from the war a vegetable, I swore I’d never turn out the same way.”

The protagonist is a potato headed berk named Gruffles Testosterone. Apparently he’s too tired of the military’s red tape and protocols and just wants to murder a few chumps. Luckily some private military core bint has hired Grizzle McMurderclogs to take pot shots at thugs in the street. I’m pretty sure there is an actual plot underneath all the stupid pretence of taking down gangs but my brain was too advanced to really comprehend it, I might as well have tried to understand a baby’s sense of humour or what dogs dream about.

I have to say that I purposefully failed to snipe people at most points. I preferred to shoot at people and miss, or get them in the foot. Somewhat roleplaying a bumbling buffoon of a sniper who keeps dropping bullets everywhere. I wanted the PMC to reconsider their hiring policy and maybe screen people for neurological defects before employing them, there’s a game idea in there somewhere.

Speaking of neurological defects, I find shooting dudes in the dick endlessly entertaining.

It’s the small things in life that count. *Raise eyebrows for double entendre*

About 3 missions in I was required to plant a bomb, I did so and then decided to just stand around and wait. The enemy guards riddled me with bullets for a minute and a half. The bullets might as well have been feathers because they did sod all damage and I continued to stand defiantly. They should have been terrified. One day I will play a game where enemies freak out if you just soak up bullets like the fucking terminator.

After absorbing thousands of pounds worth of bullets, the timer hit 00:00 and the bomb hilariously failed to explode. The men kept shooting at me with their airzookas, slowly nipping away my health. At 10% health, I realised that I was actually invulnerable and ended their meaningless lives with a sigh. It really cheapened the already worthless game for me. It’s not a game if you can’t sodding lose. Even my toaster can fail if I press the buttons incorrectly. Oh and then the bomb exploded.

5 human beings died to allow for this beach ball sized explosion to partially scorch a bin and some bollards.
I could literally do more damage than this in real life by myself, without a gun.

Oh and it’s barely worth mentioning at this point but as the sun shines and the grass grows, the leaves fall and the rivers flow, tonnes of trivial bullshit exists to be bought for this game with real money. Nutters and 7 year olds of the gaming world rejoice.

Don’t play this stupid non-game. Chuck on a load of washing, it’ll take more effort but it will be more rewarding that this casserole of bollocks.

The Wolf Among Us

To my complete surprise, a game I’ve been interested in for ages suddenly appeared in the play store, for free. I howled with delight when I saw The Wolf Among Us available for zero dollars. I immediately thought “What’s the catch?” and after googling, discovered the catch to be that all the subsequent episodes are not free. Well, that’s a whole god-damned game for free! Now for the adverts…

It’s really weird playing an android game for an hour and not seeing a single advert. It feels abnormal, like recycling or talking to strangers. Can a game truly be an android game if it’s free and has no adverts, paywalls, or  micro transactions? Perhaps it’s some kind of trick, an interactive wallpaper or hallucination. The developers at TellTale must be shitting their pants, it must be some mistake. Or, perhaps they published a game that wasn’t a total piss refinery and knew that people would be willing to pay for its equally good sequels. Nobody got hurt, nobody had to vomit out their eyeballs because they were asked to spend 79p on gems. They just made a game that was good.

Pay 79p to punch advertisers in the face. Bargain.

Gameplay is, well, it’s more of an interactive story with a few quick time events. I’ve ripped into android games for less and the controls are not the game’s selling point. Having played for about an hour, I can say that the story is interesting enough to warrant further sessions. The game is set in a section of New York where characters from mythology called “Fables” potter about trying to disguise themselves as humans using magic. There’s a gratuitous amount of swearing and violence which I suspect is to quickly dismiss any notion that this is a game for children (despite the character’s origins). It’s perhaps over eager in this regard but these help keep the narrative interesting and the dialogue is so well written that I’m genuinely interested to see what happens to many of the characters as they develop. I also think a bit of ultra violence is in short supply in the mobile games market. In fact, I’ve never seen a full decapitation or axe to the head in any games I’ve played. Such a pity. Come on Rovio, let’s see Angry Birds: Tarantino. There’s a market for it, I assure you.

Some negatives then. The game is buggy. I experienced a pretty severe crash that affected my Nexus 5’s OS and I’ve never seen any such issues from any other game. The autosave was well placed enough to prevent lost progress being an issue but I get nervous when I think about how badly my phone was chugging until I forcibly killed the power. On top of this, minor graphical issues are plentiful and the game caused my device to superheat to a temperature that defies the laws of thermodynamics so god knows what it would do to a lesser model.

I suspect the series will share some faults with the similarly engine’d The Walking Dead, with conveniently converging plot lines, completely illusory dialogue choices and too many unnecessary action scenes but these gripes don’t prevent it from being a largely enjoyable experience with engaging characters and meaningful stories that fans and newcomers to the series should enjoy.

Don’t not download this. It’s a paradise island among the sea of shit.

 

Spider-man

Wooo it’s nearly Halloween, and in that vein I’ve decided to play a spooky game about spiders. Well okay, no. It’s just Spider-man but it is horrifically bad so it still counts!

Gameplay is identical to Subway surfers because original ideas terrify marketing executives. To save on money, Spiderman runs jumps and slides across rooftops in 3 neat little lines. Players must swipe left or right, up or down in order to maintain Marvel’s bottom line. Players are encouraged to buy the usual slurry of free game tripe in order to prevent Stan Lee’s collection of golden helicopters from getting dirty.

 

12 Litres of glowing yellow fluid? Maybe these will cure my sudden urge to run only in straight lines.

It’s not all running and jumping over boxes that appear out if nowhere though. You also have to collect vials of yellow fluid. Strangely, the game doesn’t inform you why this is until after you’ve completed a level so you’re treated to a little introductory section where you can only assume that Spiderman has taken to collecting vials of piss in some kind of deranged urine obsession.

It’s really a shame that Spiderman has become unashamedly shit in this iteration. It isn’t the first crappy Spiderman game and it won’t be the last but there’s so much potential for Spiderman games to be good that it’s a pity to see the opportunity squandered.

Playing this game is like meeting an old friend in a pub who tries to hard to impress you with tales of becoming a writer and then you find out that he works for the daily mail and is looking for people to join his full body massage class. You just want to get as far away from him as possible so you can get back to ignoring him until he has a crisis and threatens to commit suicide by overdosing on Calpol.

When I purposefully killed Spiderman I was given the option to “Continue free” which implies that it isn’t always free which is a horrible thing to know and fills me with pure contempt. I know it’s the standard for free games but it shouldn’t be because it’s shit and Marvel should fucking know better.

That was too cheesy, where did you get your writer’s from- The talentless hack dimension? Woah… meta.

On top of all of the awful game mechanics, the game’s writing is hilariously abysmal. I’ll post a few examples.

Who would have guessed that a person who wears skintight lycra and covers their face with a mask would have body-image issues?

That doesn’t look like “acne” and you know it Spiderman.

If your eyes, nose and mouth are bleeding right now, don’t blame Ebola. Blame Spider-man.

Halloween special

Start putting up your Christmas tree, it’s the beginning of October! It’s nearly time to burn an effigy of a man lived 400 years ago but before that we have to celebrate an old Celtic or possibly Christian tradition which has been fashioned into a western version of Dia de los muertos.

Nevermind all that though. Halloween is really all about encouraging childhood obesity and putting pumpkins on EVERYTHING.

Obviously, small developers have tried to make a quick buck out of the celebration by littering the play store with a plethora of poxy little pustules and I’ve cobbled together a few of the most pestilent.

HALLOWEEN MYSTERY

This game is about as mysterious as a 3×3 tile shifting game can be. Which unsurprisingly, is not even a tiny bit mysterious at all. It’s about as much fun as skating through sick.

Maybe I will, I certainly couldn’t be less lucky right now.

HALLOWEEN ADVENTURE

Picture an adventure in your head. Imagine a treasure, a backdrop, an epic tale of overcoming danger concluding in  a thrilling conclusive apex. Did you picture 3 minutes of identical pumpkin jpegs cascading towards you? Was your backdrop a tiled wallpaper of skulls? Did the music from your vision continue forever? If so, congratulations! You’ve could make Halloween adventure games for a living and/or may have irreparable brain damage!

“Game design is for twats” – The developer

HALLOWEEN SPA

What says Halloween more than a spa where you can dress a woman up in vaguely Halloween based clothing? A spa where you can dress up a woman in Halloween based clothing and draw cocks on their face with makeup.

I’m such a child. Also, can’t believe they used cucumbers instead of pumpkins… amateurs.

YUMM HALLOWEEN

This game has you put your fingers in the mouth of a creepy little 3D demon for as long as you can. Leave your fingers in there too long and his mouth snaps shut and you lose. It’s actually somewhat disconcerting and might give you a psychological jolt for about 4 second but that’s 4 second more than  the other games in this list.

“See? No gag reflex!”

LITTLE COMMANDER HALLOWEEN

As this game loads, the logo for “Intel software” appears so I was briefly expecting a treat but was instead greeted with a trick! This game is the original little commander only with pumpkins lazily slapped into the heads of the enemies. It’s also got some pretty horrendous graphics. Come on intel, you’re supposed to be a giant in the tech industry. Anyone would thing this game was made by a solitary cheese coated recluse.

The luftwaffe’s attempt at fear mongering was weak at best.

FOOLZ: FEAR OF HALLOWEEN

This is probably even more half-arsed than HALLOWEEN MYSTERY. The goal is to save some poorly animated plebs from death by performing a multitude of interactions similar to “Dumb ways to die”. It would probably be the best game in the list if it didn’t force you to sit and watch your points add up after each level. It takes about a second to get through 10 points so if you’ve just scored 200 points, you’ve got a 20 second wait until you can play the next minigame. Shit. Actually horrifically shit.

“Only commies use fewer than 4 fonts per screen.” – The developer

That’s enough horrors for me, I need to go out and buy mini toothbrushes to disappoint this years’ trick or treaters.

I sincerely doubt there’s even such a thing as a good Halloween based android game. If you know of one that isn’t total garbage, let me know about it and if I agree, I’ll review it proper before the month is out!

 

 

The Battle Cats

A game about cats! Purrfect! Let’s see how many cat based puns I can litter this review with! My whiskers tingle with fear when I have to play as a cat in a game. This is largely because I worked briefly in a kennel and cattery while I was a nipper. In the dog kennel there were cranky little terriers, mischievous rottweiler pups and a great dane the size of Denmark itself. Feeding and walking the dogs was an absolute joy. Even the dogs which were initially nervous around me became friendly once they learned that I was the bringer of delicious jellied pig entrails. Conversely, the cats in the cattery considered themselves prison inmates and used every opportunity they had to shank me with their razor claws.

Meow on to the game. There’s certainly nothing immediately abhorrent about it. Levels are brief and fun. Upgrades are amusingly titled, varied enough to provide a unique experience and best of all, don’t cost real money. The game starts off at a decent pace, purring and rubbing itself against your brain legs. It doesn’t dig its micro-transaction claws into your shins right away, although they are there and I’ve got a feeling that the difficulty might unfairly spike at some point* at which point players will be given an unexpected financial scratch unless they the game in a burlap sack and throw it into the river of uninstallation.

*(Tiny Dice Dungeon knows what I’m talking about)

Poor Japan. They don’t even stand a chance.

I’ve played through 10 levels so far without an enemy getting within range of my cat cannon, so I’d say that even if the difficulty does spike to unplayable levels like other games, you do get a decent amount of uninterrupted gameplay furrst. I do like the art stye of the game and the cat cannon is particularly purr-ty. I guess I have to catnip this positivity in the bud and do some complaining! The music and sound effects get monotonous fast if you’re an irritable bastard like me and the learning curve is slow to ramp up, it’s too easy for too long.

“I look forward to disemboweling your entire family.”

 

I would have liked an alternative where I’d get to play as the dogs. That might have been ruff on the developers though. Haha! get it? that was a dog one! I’m so sorry.

If you’re feline like playing a decent android game. The Battle Cats is a tail which is well worth digging your fangs into. Paws for effect.