Yeah so I played stuff in September. It was an okay month as far as quantity… despite the quality overall being… questionable. Not really too much to say for an intro, so I guess let’s just get to it.

So this month the new games I played are: Visions of Mana, Gimmick 2!, the new Famicom Detective Club, Gori, Rugrats, The Plucky Squire, UFO 50, FF16 and Echoes of Wisdom… Oh and the Playstation State of Play happened so a quick moment to talk about how bad that was.

Let’s go!

Visions of Mana

New Mana game! It’s been a long time since a proper new game in the series. I was pretty excited for this. And… it’s okay… ish… sorta…

Honestly I have very little to say about this one. I finished it. The story was extremely predictable and not particularly interesting. The combat was very simplistic. It was really easy. A lot of the bosses are just 3D versions of bosses from Secret of Mana. It has no coop (which is kinda understandable considering the gameplay style but fans of the series are a bit disappointed). I didn’t mind the class system but wish it had a bit more depth… Overall it’s a very forgettable game I can’t recommend. It’s just a very generic action RPG with nothing unique to it.

I really wish I had more to say about it because it’s a game I was hyped for, but in the end it’s so unremarkable. If you find it for 10$ it’s an okay way to spend a weekend.

Gimmick! 2

Speaking of really late sequels… Gimmick is definitely one of the best NES games. On a technical level it’s amazing with what it does graphically and it had a physics system which was very cool.

Gimmick 2 is very similar to the original as far as gameplay. You still have that star projectile that bounces around that you can ride on. The physics system for the star attack is still there, you have really interesting platforming puzzles, it’s pretty hard, there’s multiple endings that require finding all the items in the game to unlock a new boss fight (same idea as the first game)… It’s a pretty cool game as far as pure functionality.

Where my issue starts is with the length of the levels. I’d rather have more smaller levels than what they did here with only a few levels that are extremely long. My problem with these long levels is that replaying them to find the secrets feels like a bit of  a chore, because those hidden things could be literally anywhere sometimes. At least, after the first “big” checkpoint every level, you can teleport to the other “big” checkpoints if you beat the level previously. I didn’t have the patience to find all the hidden objects, so I only got the bad ending.

That said, this is a good game. I liked it. The first one is better, play it first, it’s on Steam.

Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club

Speaking of really late sequels… Again… Man this game is way too expensive. But I got it anyways because I want to support the series.

You play as the same guy from the first 2 games, a detective from a small agency investigating a murder. A kid was found dead with a brown bag on his head that had a smile drawn on it. It seems similar to the urban legend of The Smiling Man, so you are tasked with not only investigating people of interest, but also the origin of that urban legend (which were, in part, similar murders that happened a few decades earlier). The gameplay itself is very similar to the first 2, you basically just navigate menus to do different actions in the immediate area, and sometimes you can also travel to different areas (again through a menu). At any point in the game, there is one specific thing you need to do to progress through the story. Talking to someone, examining something, thinking (that’s an option in the menu)… Figure out what the action is that you need to do (or just do everything until something works) and you can progress. The story is mostly interesting as you find what characters may or may not be involved and start piecing things together. I did figure out most of it around the halfway point.

On the negative side, it’s way easier than the first 2 games. Most actions required to progress are way easier to figure out, especially because there’s a lot less travelling. The plot has some issues too IMO. One of the big ones (no spoilers) is the history and state of one of the characters in the game and people who know him (it’s a bit plot hole-ish in some ways)… Some of the characters, even after the epilogue which goes into that character’s history, get no closure… which is wild after a pretty emotional scene with them closer to the end. And then the ending itself comes out of nowhere. It’s like… you’re looking for evidence and suddenly you’re in the final segment when there’s a bit of it that wasn’t fully cleared up yet (it does get fully clear right after, of course).

In the end the story does mostly make sense and most questions are answered… but I’ll just say I’m not fully satisfied with some elements of the solution of the mystery and the events that led to it.

I’d recommend this series if Nintendo finally decide to sell these games for a price that make sense. Until then I’d say don’t buy it. Don’t be like me.

Gori: Cuddly Carnage

This is a game. Imagine a combination between Devil May Cry and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, but not as good as either of them.

This is a game where you play as a cat who rides a hoverboard, going around bloodily killing bipedal zombie unicorns. His weapon is the board itself changing forms for different kinds of attacks. The visuals and style of this game are decent. The gameplay is pretty okay with combat that has actually pretty decent variety. The levels I played are pretty fun. The attacks and combos are fun. The bosses I fought were pretty okay.

Overall though, I found this to be very average. Fun, cool, but ultimately I kinda felt I got enough from the few levels I played (I played 4 levels). It’s cool, if it gets a 30% off sale on Steam I’d say it’s a fun one to check out.

Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland

I was gonna buy this game, until they announced it was gonna be free on release on Epic Game Store. No idea why they did that, but holy shit am I happy I did. This is why everyone should have an Epic Game Store account, there’s free games every week, might as well just clock in every thursday (and during special events where they have daily free games) and grab the free game.

This is an NES game, like actually on NES which you can’t buy because Limited Run Games is an awful company that needs to die (you can buy physical versions of the other ports, but not the NES version). The PC/console version has HD graphics but a toggle to play with the NES graphics. You should play with the NES graphics, they’re actually better. The HD graphics are more zoomed in so you see the environment less and the graphics are busier so it’s harder to notice things.

The gameplay itself is pretty decent. It’s an NES-style platformer where you can switch between the 4 main babies and they each have slightly different stats. They have a ground pound, they can grab some things to throw at enemies/place as platforms for very minor puzzle-solving (enemies can also be grabbed if you normally jump on them instead of stomping, which stuns them), and there’s boss battles that aren’t too bad. The core gameplay is actually decent. There are some minor issues with it, with a few areas where enemy placements are completely bullshit. There’s one specific part where you’re meant to crawl under something but it’s unclear graphically that you can do that because there’s a solid-looking thing there. But overall it’s largely fine.

The big problem to me is that the game is very short (less than an hour to finish it your first time through) and it has no replayability because you need to 100% it to access the final level anyways. I have no desire or intent to play it again. Not because it’s bad, but because I got everything I could from it in one play. Even the speedrun isn’t interesting.

Overall… I hope you picked it up for free on the Epic Game Store. It’s too expensive IMO. If it drops to under 10$, I’d put it on the recommended list.

The Plucky Squire

I was so hyped for this game. It looked like such a cool concept with so much potential. Starting in a children’s story book, going into the real world to explore and find stuff to go back into the book and puzzle solving and stuff… It sounded amazing. Imagine my shock when it wasn’t.

This game is linear, which is fine generally, but it’s to its detriment in this case because the linearity means it can’t utilize its fun concept for anything interesting. You start in the book where you play in 2D (and sometimes do really bad minigames), go into the real world where you play in 3D to find things… But there’s no big world to explore or anything. There’s a specific linear path to follow, basically no challenge at all, no exploration at all… It’s really disappointing. It goes in chapters, so going out of the book each chapter doesn’t lead to more exploration. Instead the area on the desk around the book is just a different setup of linear shit to do (who did that setup? Why does it change without you seeing it change? Who knows! The one likely explanation is the kid who owns the book but that’s never shown or explained). It has some okay moments as far as story and visuals, but it’s plagued by gameplay design that is kinda boring.

If any of the individual mechanics were really good this could be redeemable, but no. The game doesn’t even allow you to puzzle solve, it just tells you the solution to everything (moreso if you talk to the mini-Moonbeard statues that also give you the solutions in case you missed the game telling you normally). The lack of exploration in either the book or the 3D world makes this whole thing kinda boring. There’s really shitty minigames instead of boss fights, those sucked! You get this bow which makes you think you’ll, you know, have a bow you can use… nope, it’s just to do a really bad minigame twice and then you lose the bow. Even the game acknowledges that they’re awful because you can literally just skip them. Even the final boss is a Star Fox-like minigame where you literally can’t lose as long as you’re holding the shoot button (because the boss shoots rocks that spawn health items when you shoot them, so as long as you’re moving and shooting, you’ll be fine).

Oh and there’s glitches, sometimes it would just lock up the game because I’d be moving before dialogue appeared and me being in the wrong spot for the dialogue meant I couldn’t advance it or something and I had to reset the game… or at least I think that’s why it happened.

This game is bad. It’s a game that LOOKS good and has a great concept, but they do absolutely nothing interesting with the concept. I was hyping this up for years, but man am I disappointed. I thought this would be a GotY candidate… Man. WTF.

UFO 50

Remember Action 52? Well this is a new take on that concept. For those not in the know, Action 52 was an unlicensed cartridge in the early 90s for NES and Genesis (I had the Genesis version, and I did actually play the NES version at a friend’s house once). Each version had 52 action-packed game for the price of one (a bit more expensive than a normal game but it was worth it for 52 games… right?). Well, the problem with both of these is that both of them… really sucked. But we’ve learned from the mistakes of our past and  this can be a good concept now, right?

Well, actually yeah. This is quite good. I don’t want to spoil anything specific because I think it’s cool to go into this game blind to find out what the games are yourself. The “story” is basically that you’re dusting off your old collection of games from the 80s, all made by one company, UFOsoft. These are all new games. They’re short-ish games (some are a bit longer than others), but they’re still full games with a start and an end. They’re all takes on regular genres, but they all have interesting twists and concepts that are actually pretty unique. I was pretty surprised about some of the ideas here. These are really well made. Some are multiplayer, but even the multiplayer ones have a way to play them solo (something Action 52 didn’t, funny enough).

There’s a metroidvania-ish one, many platformers, beat ’em ups, a race betting game, there’s a full-on JRPG, there’s some resource-management games, several shooters of different styles, a fighting game, some zelda-likes, there’s a first-person point-and-click adventure game (think Shadowgate or Deja Vu), 2 golf games that are not typical golf games… There’s lots of variety here. Even if a game ends up kinda bad, it’s always at least interesting in some kind of way and is still fun to play.

My favorites would be: Velgress, Grimstone, Valbrace, Mortol, Bushido Ball, Warptank, Rock On! Island, Overbold, Elfazar’s Hat, Caramel Caramel and Bug Hunter. There’s several others I liked but I’d say these are my top ones… I have not beaten any of these yet!

There’s a few meh ones here and there though. Combatants, Campanella 3, Mooncat, Onion Delivery, Block Koala are probably the worst in here IMO.

But yeah I recommend this one. It’s a cool concept, it has 50 games, most of which are fun, and it’s not even full-price so it’s a pretty good deal… Check it out!

Final Fantasy 16

Oh hey there Final Fantasy 16. Took you a bit to pop up on PC despite PC being the original dev platform for the game! Literally the announcement trailer for this game was running on the PC version with settings brought down to emulate what it would look like on PS5. Kinda strange.

I am not done with this game. I don’t know if I will complete it, we’ll see.

Remember when FF games were RPGs that were good? Seems Squeenix doesn’t want that to be the case anymore. This one is an action game… but not a very good one. There are RPG elements, you do get EXP and skill points and equipment, but it’s pretty minimal. You have different actions you learn as you go, like a fire teleport dash, a DMC-style “grab enemies from far away to drag them to you” move and remote mine lightning bombs. You can dodge attacks… Yeah. It’s not TERRIBLE, but it’s very simplistic. Like… a step up from Visions of Mana. Every battle ends up being very much the same thing over and over, regardless of what the enemy is. And unless I just missed something, there’s no really good reason to explore anything (the map screen will tell you if an area has side-quests or hunt targets, so you’re fine there), and it’s all very linear.

So far the story’s kinda okay, I don’t mind the main characters and the overall plot is decently engaging, but it feels like it’s a constant depression simulator. There’s so many main and side quests where the conclusion is just “everyone died, there’s nothing you could do about it, they would’ve died even if you weren’t there, fuck off… anyways here’s some EXP and victory music!”… It’s just very… bleak. Looking at a walkthrough list, it seems like I’m at or close to the halfway point, so maybe it gets less weird in the latter half.

I also found the localization to just be weird… but for once I don’t know if it’s localizers being incompetent douchebags as usual. It might be because of the weird order of operations in the game’s development. It’s originally a japanese script, translated and (apparently) partly rewritten to english which became the “core” of the game (especially for dialogue writing, mocap and voice recording) and then (apparently) re-translated again to japanese from the english version. I am playing with japanese voice acting and english subs (which I have verified are identical to the english VA script), but literally every sentence is completely different in japanese compared to the english, which is really fucking confusing. Like I don’t know which language I’m exactly meant to be taking as correct, so I’m constantly distracted by the words not matching in both languages.

And the PC optimization is occasionally ass. Like for the most part I get  1440p at ~80fps (sometimes even up to 120fps), but I’ve had it drop in certain sections to ~50fps. It overall feels a bit stuttery and weird.

But yeah, anyways, this game is kinda ass so far but I’ve been slowly keeping at it in-between other games. I would not recommend it.

Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

And a new Zelda! This one is where, for the “first” time (I swear the CDi isn’t real), you can play as Zelda! It’s pretty okay!

Instead of being a regular Zelda game where you swing a sword and use a variety of items, Zelda is equipped with a magic rod that makes copies of objects that she can spawn as she wants (with a limited number of “points” to spend as far as having items out at the same time, and some items having more cost). I will note it’s pretty awkward to select what objects you want to use once you’re far enough in the game (they use menus similar to the pop-up menus from TOTK but with way more stuff).

Zelda can not only make a shitload of beds to do platforming (you will make beds for absolutely everything… or flying tiles are also a good alternative), but also objects she can grab and throw at enemies… or enemies themselves which will fight for you. You have traditional Zelda dungeons, and a variety of smaller ones where you have to find specific things in them to close rifts in the world, and a lot of side-scrolling sections for some reason (probably makes sense because this probably uses a lot of the Link’s Awakening remake at its core. And finally she can use her yellow spirit friend to telepathically move things which has a few okay puzzles built around it.

Zelda also gets the power to transform into Link for a very limited time to deal more direct sword damage and use a bow and throw bombs (I don’t think there’s any point where using the Link Bombs is useful at all, you have an alternate thing you can use instead of bombs already by the time you unlock bombs), which is good for boss battles and not a whole lot more.

There’s also some amount of stuff to find in the overworld for minor upgrades like money, heart pieces and accessories. There’s various sidequests as well which give pretty minor rewards for the most part. It’s all well done stuff.

Overall this game is quite good. I wouldn’t put it anywhere near the top of my Zelda game list, but I’d say it’s worth playing. I’m putting it on the recommended list.

September 24 2024 Playstation State of Play!

Oh yeah that was a thing, right? Sony’s State of Play presentations are always very shit, which I guess makes sense considering they’re a shitty company.

The standard for what makes a good announcement in a presentation like this is very simple (and I like to repeat this from time to time): it must be a new game announcement, with a trailer that shows gameplay, and said gameplay must look good. Bonus points if there’s a release date right away. If it’s a previously-announced game, it’s only interesting if it’s there to announce the release date. If it’s a new announcement but it’s just a remaster/port of something that was on another platform before, that’s generally not very interesting unless it’s something unexpected and actually harder to find in playable form in modern days. So if a game is something that was announced before and they’re not showing a release date for it… they can fuck right off.

Not that some things here weren’t interesting in this state of play… but this was like the fourth time Monster Hunter Wilds was in a presentation this year and that’s a third-party multiplat so it being in a Sony presentation makes no sense (though they did announce the release date for it so that’s cool). Most of the announcements were pretty lackluster. DLC, Remaster, Remaster, Remaster, Remaster, Port, Port, VR, VR, VR, DLC for multiplat game, DLC, a few games that I don’t know if they were new announcements that just weren’t interesting… It was TREMENDOUSLY boring.

The only really interesting things here at all were 2 of the remasters (Lunar and Legacy of Kain), the MH Wilds release date, and Ghost of Yotei… though I will say I’m someone who was negative about the gameplay in Ghost of Tsushima (the game is really pretty and the story/setting was really well done, but the gameplay design was kinda weak), so the only reason the sequel was interesting is because it was an actual new announcement for a game that, if I decide to get it, I’ll get when it’s ported to PC. Which points back to the PS5’s big issue of… not having games. It’s really just Astro Bot and there’s a non-zero chance it will go to PC like all the other “good” PS5 games. Sony has yet to make the PS5 worth buying, let along the 960$ (canadian) PS5 Pro that has no disc drive. Fuck off Sony.

So yeah this presentation was bad, solid 2/10.