Tumgik
everygame · 11 hours
Text
Tumblr media
Turbo Deflex / Abductor / Rox 64 (Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story)
This post, in which I write about 3 games in Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story’s second section is for subscribers only! You can subscribe for just $1 a month at https://ko-fi.com/mathewkumar, but if you don’t fancy that, you can read or re-read my review of the release as a whole. And don’t forget there’s years of articles in our archive.
0 notes
everygame · 1 day
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
The Mysterious Murasame Castle
Developed/Published by: Nintendo R&D4, Human Entertainment / Nintendo Released: 14/04/1986 Completed: 31/01/2024 Completion: Finished it (with quicksaves at the start of levels and before bosses.)
1986 is a huge year for Nintendo. They released the NES in North America at the tail end of 1985 and will launch it in Europe by the end of 1986. After nearly 3 years of spotty releases and arcade ports an avalanche of games are going to start showing up. But most fascinatingly, as they begin to conquer the world, they take a massive right turn in Japan by releasing the Famicom Disk System in February.
I assume that even if you’re not a scholar of video game history, if you’re reading this you already know all about the system, but in précis, Nintendo made a business decision. The Famicom was successful; producing cartridges was expensive. Retailers and consumers wanted cheaper games. Nintendo hadn’t created a licensing scheme for the Famicom (as they would for NES) so they weren’t seeing any sweet, sweet fees either. Seemingly, a floppy disk add-on solved all those problems, while also allowing games to be larger, have more sound channels, and include saving.
You can debate the success of this business decision. They sold 4.4 million of them by 1990, and the hardware pushed their game design forward leaps and bounds. But it seemed to come at the exact wrong time. Within four months of launch cartridge games were being released with larger capacities than the disks offered. Saving becomes available on carts; newer and better mapper chips meant games on the disk system were stuck in the past. It was simply a technological dead end. The first original game to released for it would be The Legend of Zelda, and by the time of its release in North America not quite a year and a half later it would be on cartridge without any major concessions.
Interestingly, though, the second original game to be released would be Nazo No Murasame Jou, aka “The Mysterious Murasame Castle” which would not be released outside of Japan at all. Why this is I have no idea and can find nothing concrete, because when considered contemporaneously, this is a perfectly successful run-and-gun adventure that feels like an early example of what the system would become known for via companies like Capcom: arcade ports that have been expanded into something more suitable for the home console (think Bionic Commando and that.) Here it’s like someone, noticing that Nintendo had The Legend of Zelda engine lying around, decided that they should make a version of Sega Ninja with it–and in fact, I’m not sure that’s not what they did, considering the SG-1000 version of Sega Ninja has flick-screen scrolling too.
Cast as the samurai Takamaru, you have to make your way through five castles by first fighting your way through their castle grounds (taking one or two maps) and then the castle interior (one more map.) You do this by melee combat (which tends to kill everything in one hit) or throwing projectiles (which tends not to.) Movement feels very much like The Legend of Zelda, including very boxy collision detection. The maps, too are like The Legend of Zelda dungeons, but not exactly: you travel about them in a non-linear fashion and have to pick up certain power-ups to advance (sandals, for example, that allow you to travel over water) but you’re not really ever forced to fight any enemies, and most power-ups follow the Xevious system of just being invisible and you have to shoot where they are to get them (thankfully, they’re predictable once you’ve found them).
While I can’t guarantee this was inspired by Sega Ninja, it’s very much like it in one respect. The Mysterious Murasame Castle is relentless. Multi-colored ninjas are throwing themselves on the screen constantly, and if you stop moving or stop attacking you’re dead–it really is that simple. Most of the game is played trying to get off screen as quickly as possible and working out the optimum route through the castle–it’s almost a racing game in that respect. 
It is very hard. Not impossible, but made, er, impossible-adjacent by how strict it is. You can only take three hits, health restoring items are rare (and invisible) and and every time you die you lose everything (but you do start on the screen you just died on–and you can backtrack to try and get some power back, so that’s nice.) While it feels stupidly difficult for 2024, I can imagine how for the right kind of player in 1986 this was the straight razor compared to The Legend of Zelda’s, uh… quill pen. Play a hard action game surviving and mapping out the levels, learning new things, new efficiencies every time rather than doodling about. It feels perfect, actually, for the American audience of the era, which makes its absence all the more puzzling–I suspect that the setting was considered “too Japanese” and reskinning it felt like too much work, the kind of thing that kept Ninja JaJaMaru-kun stuck in Japan too. 
Now, there are some absolutely brutal skill checks in this that I can only see as requiring you reset the system every time you die (most notably the last few bosses) that just make it feel old-school cruel, but I had a fairly decent time trying see how far I could get “for real” once I’d learned the maps (not very far, it turns out.) And I still enjoyed the challenge of this even letting myself do some judicious quick-saving. This isn’t the great leap forward for design that The Legend of Zelda was, but it sort of offers an interesting counterpoint–would games look completely different if Nintendo decided this was the one to get released in the west instead of Zelda?
Probably not actually.
Will I ever play it again? It’s fun, but it’s too hard. Probably not on this one too.
Final Thought: Nintendo really haven’t returned to this one very much. It’s not a complete black sheep, getting a GBA re-issue and (bizarrely) a 3DS release in Europe and Australia, but one of the strangest has to be that in Samurai Warriors 3 for Wii (Nintendo published in the west but otherwise a Koei game through and through) Nintendo EAD made an entire “Murasame castle mode” which is a remake in the Musou style. That’s an even odder decision than not releasing this in the west in the first place.
Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up a digital copy of exp. 2600, a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.
0 notes
everygame · 9 days
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Developed/Published by: Jeff Minter, Digital Eclipse / Digital Eclipse Released: 13/04/2024 Completed: n/a Completion: Played and viewed all of “The Early Years” and part way through "The Hairy Years" and still digging into the rest of it.
I know, I can’t believe it either. Every Game I’ve Finished topical for two weeks and even posting a write up of a game on its day of release (well, for supporters, anyway). It’s like I’m a games journalist again (spit).
I was hugely excited for this after enjoying what I’ve played of Atari 50 (better than those flashback collections!) and The Making of Karateka, and although this is absolutely, 100% not what I would choose to put out if I was attempting to be commercial after The Making of Karateka, I’ve gotta say… fair play to them. Though they’re pretty much nailing their flag in the terrain that says the Gold Master Series is not so much The Criterion Collection of games as it is like… Vinegar Syndrome or something. I mean there’s nothing wrong with that! Someone’s gotta put out deluxe versions of Bruno Mattei films [checks notes] oh hang on, no.
(To be fair, it’s actually a lot more like my buddy Justin’s boutique label Gold Ninja Video, which actually does insane work to put out work by filmmakers who should absolutely be known better.)
Anyway. They say there’s a stonking 42 games on this, but that’s a slight exaggeration because there’s technically on 33 different games with a few offering different versions based on system (Gridrunner, for example, is on VIC-20, C64, Atari 8-bit and as a remastered version) and most of the games are pre-1985 so there’s a lot of stuff here that’s really only going to be of interest if you like diving into some very dusty cupboards. This is something I honestly enjoy very much, so I loved pulling out a VIC-20 game and trying to make sense of it, but for many, I assume, the main draw here is the fact that it’s a proper re-release of his beloved Tempest 2000, a well that Minter has been back to a bunch of times–I loved TxK to pieces. It’s a slight bummer that this doesn’t re-release Minter’s more recent games which have been delisted like the iOS “Minotaur Project” (of which only a couple of games have been re-released as Minotaur Arcade.) However, it seems pretty obvious that would be a ton of fucking work to port, as would, say, getting a Nuon emulator up to spec so people could play Tempest 3000, so that's... fine.
(There’s also no Defender 2000, but that’s rights issues, and as far as I remember people don’t think that’s any great shakes.)
Presentation-wise, you know what to expect with this release, the same wrapper as in Atari 50 and The Making of Karateka with some different colours and music. This is fine! I think I’ve settled into this three releases in. You get a ton of interesting images, details, and box art to look at, though I still have issues with the layout of the documentary/museum (I can't remember which terminology Digital Eclipse would prefer.) I have small quibbles: in “The Early Years” if you go through it in order you play a version of Bomber on ZX Spectrum before they introduce the system into the narrative (admittedly the kind of thing you won't spot unless you're brutally anal on these kind of things like myself.) Then the final video you watch recaps everything you’ve just learned in a way that makes you feel like it should either have come first, or been split up into more videos. 
But I’d argue there’s deeper structural issues if you’re really trying to get people excited about video game history, and I again place it at the decision to go pure chronological* (as I did in The Making of Karateka.) If you play each game as you go, you’ll play a series of games so old and so ropey that you have to already be interested in this story to see it out. If you don’t know why you should care about Jeff Minter, I’m sorry, but a video of some talking heads and then immediately playing 3D3D, a baffling and slow first person maze game for ZX81 that has literally no analogue in the entire rest of his career is… not going to help! And I have to again bang on that I feel they just don’t place the games in enough context of the wider games industry at the time.
(*There's a quirk in that it's not exactly chronological, because all the Atari 8-bit ports are later in the documentary, which is a bit weird when you, for example, play two versions of Gridrunner and then the Atari 8-bit version several games later. I'm unclear on the exact reason if it, and if you're going to be even that irreverent, feels like you might want to just wildly reorder the whole thing for the audience anyway.)
I think Digital Eclipse’s counter overall would be that I probably want something more verbose and detailed which wouldn’t be as accessible, which isn't wrong. They might even argue that I'm basing my criticism on a hypothetical consumer who isn't even their intended audience! It's a hard line to ride, but I’d still argue that there’s a sense for storytelling in the curation here that’s missing--and I really don't want them to limit their audience because as critical as I might be, I love this series already and I want it to go on forever.
So yes, this is still the exact kind of thing I want to be released and if it’s opening up people to learning more about Jeff Minter and Llamasoft on their own time then I think it’s brilliant. I just think that anyone who picks this up who isn't already steeped in this era needs to be a bit forgiving and skip past all the ropey old games after looking at them for a couple of minutes tops and just enjoy reading the text and watching the videos until they get to the good stuff, so consider this fair warning before you buy it (because you should buy it.)
I mean if you only want this to play Tempest 2000 (and Llamatron 2112, actually) there’s nowt wrong with that, and that’s already worth the money.
Will I ever play it again? I’m still working through it!
Final Thought: I will, of course, be playing every game on this, and although I won’t be giving every Llamasoft release a full post, I have at least started with a write-up of each of the games in "The Early Years", as an introduction to the kind of things you’d be playing if you pick this up (and which sadly explains why you probably won’t want to play most of them... it gets better by the time you get to The Hairy Years, and significantly). If you want to read it, it's a supporter-only post over at my ko-fi. I suppose saying that makes my usual please subscribe stinger a bit pointless but let's hammer the point home why not. Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up a digital copy of exp. 2600, a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.
1 note · View note
everygame · 15 days
Text
Tumblr media
Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story - "The Early Years"
This post, in which I write about all 8 games in Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story's first section, including write-ups on 3D3D, Deflex V, Andes Attack and more, is for subscribers only! You can subscribe for just $1 a month at https://ko-fi.com/mathewkumar, but if you don’t fancy that, you can just wait for my review of the release as a whole to show up next week. And don’t forget there’s years of articles in our archive.
0 notes
everygame · 17 days
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Balatro
Developed/Published by: LocalThunk / PlayStack Released: 20/02/2024 Completed: 22/02/2024 Completion: Finished it with the blue deck, then with the red deck… then with the yellow deck…
Balatro is the first game in a long time that I’ve picked up on a whim. I saw a screenshot (Wario64 posting a deal on it, actually) and it just… chimed. It looked like a screenshot of an Amiga poker game in a magazine, and on discovering it was a Roguelike-like deckbuilder, I thought, “well, I’m always game for one of those.”
As usual, I fell into this completely, playing it to the exclusion of all else, until I felt like I’d “solved” it in as much as I worked out a strategy that worked well enough for me that I doubted I’d spend time looking for others.
After which I still played it to completion one more time. But I’ve definitely gone cold turkey now!!!
Balatro is very, very good. To explain it: It is a Roguelike-like deckbuilder that unlike Cobalt Core, doesn’t slavishly follow the template of Slay The Spire. It’s more like Luck Be A Landlord, really, in that it takes something that previously existed (in this case, poker) and bends it into something largely unrecognisable.
The idea here is really quite unlike poker, to be honest, outside of the fact that you are trying to make up to five card poker hands. For one, you have your own deck, you draw eight cards at a time, and then have a limited number of hands to make scoring poker hands to beat a set amount of chips, with the twist that cards grant differing numbers of chips based on their rank, with poker hands conferring more chips and a multiplier. You also have a limited number of discards in which you can discard up to five cards at a time. 
So the idea is, basically, play the poker hand that gets you the most chips and multiplier each time, using discards to savvily maximise your chances of that. But more interestingly, you can also have up to 5 jokers on the table, who provide you wildly differing bonuses. As simple as “gain multiplier for playing a pair” but also more esoteric possibilities, like gaining a bonus for keeping kings in your hand, or even allowing straights to use non-consecutive numbers!
And then there’s also the fact that after every win, you get some money (disconnected from chips, sensibly for the design, weird for the metaphor) to visit a shop and buy cards. These can either add cards to your deck, or change the benefits of particular poker hands, or change the cards in your deck. You can turn a 3 of spades into another king of hearts, let’s say. Or make a card give you a multiplier, or even just turn it into a bit of stone that gives you 50 chips every time you play it (but won’t ever be able to help you score higher on flushes or straights… well unless you get that joker that lets you score flushes or straights with four cards instead of five?)
It’s complicated, and it’s going to take a while to get comfortable with, but once you do, it’s utterly captivating. It’s genius because it breaks the first thing you learn playing a Slay The Spire-like: you start with a 52 card deck, so trying to get your deck small and efficient by destroying cards isn’t going to be possible (I’ve never managed to kill more than 10 cards on a run) and not only that removing cards at random can seriously damage your chance of scoring straights! It instead becomes a matter of working out how to make the deck you have efficient by changing cards and shaping your success via joker modifiers.
There’s also a beautiful spot of risk reward in the design in that there’s no dungeon map or anything, so no chance for bonus granting events. Balatro boils those events down to “oh, you’re just skipping a battle for a bonus” and each “ante” (three games with progressively high scores to beat) you can skip one or both of the first two games to get a bonus. Maybe it’s to immediately add some cards to your deck, or to add a special joker to the next store. In some cases, it’s “ah, I’ll skip this, because I need these cards anyway and don’t have money.” In other cases it’s “oh, if I skip this, it’s a gamble, because my deck might not be good enough to beat the next game, but the reward is so high…”
It’s a bit of genius that adds another layer to the player’s decision making without being overwhelming, and it might be my favourite bit of the design to be honest.
The issue with Balatro, is, ultimately like the issue with most of these kinds of games. After you play it for a while, you find the way to play it that, as far as you can tell, is the optimum way to play it. When I think of Slay The Spire or Cobalt Core, it’s “defense!” with Balatro, for me at least, it seems to be “Flushes!” 
(In a 52 card deck, you only have 4 of any one card, but you also only have 4 suits. So it’s far easier to try and reduce the number of cards of a different suit you draw by changing cards suits/destroying “wrong” suit cards than to try and make more aces or anything.)
In addition, while the game does have different classes of decks, they don’t change the deck pool at all, and the more you play the more jokers and card you unlock, which may open up new combos, but it also makes combo you know seem harder to manufacture, and there’s a sense that you could end up with the same issue that I found with Luck Be A Landlord–that it becomes hard to hit a combo early and get to that point where you have an engine whirring away often enough that you’re having fun.
These issues, however, don’t really diminish what a triumph Balatro was for the time I spent playing it. It looks great (although the constantly moving pixels did make my eyes sort of hurt? I wish you could turn that off) and it does do something unique in a space that’s arguably got a bit samey, so it comes highly recommended.
Will I ever play it again? God I really want to actually. But I won’t. Probably.
Final Thought: Something I haven’t mentioned though is that even without unlocking all the jokers, the RNG in Balatro can be absolutely brutal. There’s another unique touch here that every ante’s “boss” gives a unique modifier to the game, and some are a nightmare–for example the one that makes every single card draw face down! (There’s a trick in that the game still presents hands in suit or rank order, though…) And this means that sometimes you’re just going to hit something that is unwinnable unless you made very different decisions significantly earlier (oh you built a deck full of clubs? Too bad, this boss debuffs your entire deck. And don’t get me started on the one that permanently levels your hands down, basically that fucking poison swamp from Shiren…) With huge decks, there’s a bit more frustration here I’d say when you feel like you didn’t manage to get anywhere (or did, and just got screwed) and I suspect it only gets worse on higher difficulties. So like the rest of these kinds of things I’d say: play it as long as you enjoy it, and not a second more.
Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up a digital copy of exp. 2600, a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.
1 note · View note
everygame · 23 days
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Cobalt Core  Developed/Published by: Rocket Rat Games / Brace Yourself Games Released: 08/11/2023 Completed: 17/01/2024 Completion: I’ve beaten it six times including once without using the starting three characters.
Slay The Spire is great, isn’t it? I mean you could basically play it forever. Except… I stopped because I felt like–at least for me–I had to play it focusing on defense, and after beating it a few times it just started to feel samey. With well over a year since I last touched it I’m wondering if I was being a bit unfair on it–I mean I played it for so long it’s like those Steam review that are like “140 hours, I got bored, 1 star”. But let’s imagine there was a roguelike-like deckbuilder where you could dodge instead of just putting it all into block.
Hang on!!! We don’t have to imagine! Because here’s Cobalt Core!
Cobalt Core takes Slay The Spire’s metagame–by which I mean the entire thing where you do three branching levels experiencing events, fighting normal enemies and bosses and collecting or removing cards from your deck and getting passive powers via artifacts and that–exactly and throws it onto an actually rather more complex card game set up. Instead of selecting one character, you now select three (each with their own selection of cards) and a space ship (which provides its own playstyle quirks) and then in each battle you’ve got more to think about than just playing your cards. You also have to think about your ship’s positioning, because you can move it to either avoid damage or make sure that you’re hitting your opponent. Actually I suppose you still do that by playing cards.
This is a really fun change, and it also makes things even more complex than they already were. Not only do you now need to think about how much damage you’re putting out on a turn and how much defense (in this case, shields), you now need to think about how much movement your are gaining, or spending, and where that means your ship will be or needs to be. And in turn you do this with a deck that’s made up of cards from three characters whose abilities can be wildly different making adding new cards to your deck a minefield of potential combos and non-bos.
To start with, it’s totally overwhelming, with every screen packed with information. Then it suddenly clicks (probably quicker, much quicker, if you’re an old hand with Slay The Spire) and it becomes super fun. You feel powerful, in control and it starts to feel a bit… easy?
Then you pick a new character and it’s frustrating and confusing again. Then it’s fun! And… a bit easy?
Basically, you’ll continue this loop as long as you like, and something nice about the game is that it’s not particularly bothered about you playing it on progressively harder difficulties or anything (unless you really want an achievement or whatever) so you actually can choose a level where it’s not as easy, or you can just not bother.
Where it falls down a bit for me is that it’s got a really cute narrative with excellently written characters, and I liked it a lot, but to unlock the “true” ending you have to beat the game 18 times. It’s simply… too many times! Being able to do it on the easiest difficulty helps, I guess, but then that just ends up being a grind, and if you’re like me and played the game multiple times over with one character failing every time till you got a handle on them/got the right drops, that means a lot of time spent playing this. And the more I played it the more I felt like I hit the same issue I had with Slay The Spire. The game makes healing so rare that even though you can move to avoid getting hit, it’s still so hard to avoid getting hit you still need to put a lot of focus on defense. To the point that the character with defense is probably the best one in the game (and the one with movement is a close second.) So I guess the change here wasn’t enough, and just like Slay The Spire I started to find this too samey.
But just like Slay The Spire you’ll play this for so long until you find it samey that it positively feels churlish to say so. If you can get through the initial complexity you’ll have a great time. Just don’t feel you need to see the true ending, I guess.
Will I ever play it again? Well, after I wrote most of this I actually decided I fancied seeing if I could beat this on the hardest difficulty, and after a couple of runs I did and I had fun as well! So there’s something still oddly moreish about this, even though I’m intent to put it down for good.
Final Thought: Something I must say is that it may simply be in the nature of these kinds of roguelike-likes that you will always have to concentrate on defense somewhat because a single death is, well, the end of the game. It’s like how if you chose to play Doom or whatever with a single life suddenly the way you play it changes completely. In basically everything else I love to play glass cannons–games where you die and reload–and it may simply be a case of horses for courses. Every time I have to choose a boring-ass card with shields on it rather than the one that’s like “do loads of damage” I slightly die inside, but maybe that’s not you. Maybe you’re boring!!! I mean… maybe my complaint doesn’t hold water with you because you accept that bit of the design. Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up a digital copy of exp. 2600, a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.
2 notes · View notes
everygame · 30 days
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Devil World (Famicom)
Developed/Published by: Nintendo R&D1, Intelligent Systems / Nintendo Released: 05/10/1984 Completed: 18/01/2024 Completion: Saw all the levels (there’s only three.)
I’m not sure I can think of a company as venerated as Nintendo. A company that’s ultimately considered peerless–a promise of reliability, of quality, but with a mystique that somehow makes it all impossible to duplicate. While it’s made mistakes, they’ve always been mistakes that only Nintendo could have made. We might buy Apple products, or use Google, but even if we liked what they did at one point, we’re by now tired of the greed, the privacy violations, the churn of samey products, the enshittification. It’s hard to tell anyone apart. But not Nintendo. They stand alone.
Which I suppose is why it’s nice to go back and play these old games and see that just like everyone else Nintendo basically has no idea what they’re fucking doing. I mean, this. Devil World. Made with the gay abandon that only Asian developers can have about western religious iconography, it takes Pac-Man (sort of, more on that in a minute) and throws in random auto-scrolling and the need to collect crosses and bibles to survive while the devil dances at the top of the screen like he's in Haxan. It’s textbook weird and I’m sure it’s been in all sorts of Angry Video Game Nerd or Seanbaby-type videos but I’m not looking them up and neither should you.
There’s two things that are crazy about this. One, it’s that it’s apparently the first Famicom game that Shigeru Miyamoto directed. It’s a pretty early original title for the system (outside of sports titles) and it strikes me to what extent that even after Donkey Kong Miyamoto was still finding his feet as a designer. In fact, as I subscribe to the theory that Super Mario Bros. is more heavily based on Pac-Land than Miyamoto might admit (“sky colour” my arse) I wonder how much Donkey Kong was inspired by Space Panic, the proto-platformer, and Miyamoto simply “hit” on the tweaks that would make it eternal as he would do with Pac-Land. Here… he is not successful. In fact, the concept just feels sort of… unfinished. Half-arsed.
To put it in more detail: On the first stage of Devil World, you are navigating a fairly small wrap-around maze (a la Flicky) but one that moves in a random* cardinal direction for a random* amount of time, meaning you can get squished between walls and the edge of the screen. There are monsters that move around the maze (but who don’t seem especially bothered about chasing you, at least to begin with) who kill you on touch, but you can kill those by collecting a cross and firing a fireball at them. The cross, also, is the only way to collect the dots around the maze. It runs out after a set amount of time and then you have to collect another (though there’s a bunch around the level, and they don’t run out.)
*There may be some system to this, but I never worked it out.
On the second stage, you’re still avoiding the monsters and trying not to get squished, but you’re collecting four bibles and taking them back to the central “seal” (think the central ghost box from Pac-Man) to get to the next level. 
The third stage is a bonus level with no enemies where you’re trying to collect six bonus boxes before time is up. The level is still scrolling randomly, but there’s some arrows in the level that… allow you to move the direction? Maybe? 
Ultimately… none of this works. The random level movement and wall squishes feel, well, random. Having to collect the cross to pick up dots feels arbitrary, and the bible collection is sort of… pointlessly easy? And it’s all rather slow and unresponsive. 
It’s possible that these were Miyamoto’s attempts to “level-up” the maze chase game the way adding jumping created the platformer and then when it didn’t work, well… the game had to come out. But maybe it’s also the fault of the second crazy thing about Devil World. Rather absurdly the game’s other designer, Takashi Tezuka, had never heard of Pac-Man. Doesn’t seem like the best foot to get off on when you’re, you know… cloning Pac-Man, to be honest.
Devil World is one of those examples of a game where some people tried something to make something already good better, and everything they did made it significantly worse. Wait… they enshittified Pac-Man… Nintendo aren’t different at all!!!!
Will I ever play it again? It simply isn’t worth the time.
Final Thought: I was honestly very surprised to discover that this was actually released in Europe in mid-1987 despite being not released in the US due to the ol’ religious iconography. Rough for the weans who got a copy of this that late in the game.
Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up a digital copy of exp. 2600, a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.
2 notes · View notes
everygame · 1 month
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Punch Club
Developed/Published by: Lazy Bear Games Released: 01/08/2016 Completed: 22/12/2023 Completion: Beat the main story (but I didn’t finish the Dark Fist bonus storyline.)
I’ve been meaning to play Punch Club for ages, but I’ve always been put off by the fact that every review you read complains bitterly about the fact that the game–a life/combat management simulator–features extremely aggressive stat decay that makes the game quickly an unpleasant grind just to keep your head above water. Well, guess what! This review is going to be no different. I should have listened!
I’ll start with some positives. Punch Club has a great 2D pixel-art look with a decent filter. The game systems make sense basically immediately and are as streamlined as can be. You’ve only got three stats to care about (strength, agility and stamina) and your upgrade trees neatly correspond to one. Working out or working to raise money makes you hungry and tired; you sleep and eat to fix that, but sleep costs you time and eating costs you money. The balancing act makes perfect sense.
The thing is… that stat decay. Now, one of the issues with any of these kinds of simulations is that you are always incentivised to min-max your opening as much as possible, and this game featuring stat decay seems to put that into overdrive. You quickly realise that you have to work out the absolute most efficient way to raise your stats while keeping your character rested and fed because any leeway you might have had is destroyed by every lost day costing your stat growth, allowing you to spiral into what feels like a need to restart as you hit up against opponents you can’t defeat (especially bad if you’re foolish enough to take on an opponent in the illegal fights where you can end up with injuries that make growing stats even harder.)
It’s worth noting that there’s really not a true game over in Punch Club, though. If you screw up completely, you can grind and it’ll just take you longer to beat the game–most opponents give you currency for your upgrade tree, meaning if you go through a long losing period, you should, as long as you can right the ship with stat growth to an even keel with your opponents, eventually out-skill them and defeat them. It’s just not very pleasant.
The game has an interesting take on combat, actually. There are some passive skills, but you select up to five skills that affect if your character is going to punch, kick, guard–or even what kind of punch or kick it is. The problem is that as much as you imagine changing these up between rounds to deal with opponents, because of the way skill trees are set up, and that stat decay means you want to avoid flexibility, you almost alway just have the highest attacks or powers in the skill tree equipped and run the combat at 8x speed because tactics basically don’t matter. You either out-skill and out-power your opponent, or you… don’t.
Punch Club tries to mix this up with the narrative and quests–because otherwise this would be unbelievably repetitive–but those are a mixed bag as well. This is a 80s/90s parody written by a Lithuanian studio with Russian founders, and it has the slight lost-in-translation air you’d expect as a result. The story makes absolutely no sense, and the references are direct to the point of not even really feeling like jokes. But when it comes down to it, that’s probably better than going for some sort of “radical” take on the era. Think how annoying something like Kung Fury is. This is nowhere near that bad, but the game is so relentless that every time it does something like make you travel somewhere just for a cut-scene you think “oh great, now I have to waste 2 ticks of the clock or pay $4 to get the bus back to the gym, thanks for nothing” rather than being that interested in seeing what happens. Things are even worse with the Dark Fist DLC, which does that constantly and culminates with a series of battles you have to do where you have only a chance of winning what you need to progress. I 100% said fuck that.
I didn’t hate Punch Club. Once you get into a rhythm with it, it’s… fine. Sort of pointlessly stressful and ultimately unrewarding though. I couldn’t recommend it.
Will I ever play it again? There are two routes through the game and 3 different fighting styles, and there’s even a no stat decay mode if I just wanted to see the other route. But even with that there’s just so much watching your character fight at 8x speed, or doing a training animation that I can’t imagine it.
Final Thought: For the sequel stat decay has been re-worked into a system where certain skills use “tonus”, a form of MP that is replenished by training, which might be… fine? Very funny to see people complain about the stat decay being removed because it was “realistic” in a game where your character doesn’t have to sleep (always annoys me in a game with a clock when they skip the night phase) and literally eats 5 frozen pizzas in a row to heal after a fight. 
Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up a digital copy of exp. 2600, a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.
1 note · View note
everygame · 1 month
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Luck Be A Landlord
Developed/Published by: TrampolineTales Released: 06/01/2023 Completed: 18/12/2023 Completion: Finished one floor.
Luck Be A Landlord is, at its simplest, a pretty bare-bones “roguelike-like” deck-building take on the slot machine. If you’ve played Slay The Spire or a tabletop originator like Dominion you know what you’re doing here. You start with a slot machine with five symbols on it (and 20 spaces that you will “score” on every time you spin–imagine you’re playing one of those ridiculous modern ones and max betting) and after every spin you add a symbol to fill in another space from a random choice of three–with the idea that you’re trying to construct a collection of symbols (a deck, basically) that are complementary, creating an efficient economic engine.
The pressure here is that you’re doing it to pay your landlord, who, gleefully free of rent controls (thanks Doug Ford) gets to raise your rent every month, requiring your engine to be ever more efficient. As a result, each month you tend to get passive bonuses, some “re-rolls” (allowing you to dump a selection of 3 symbols that you don’t want) and some destroys, allowing you to kill off symbols that have become unprofitable or to simply think your deck so it’s more efficient (as you basically want every symbol you have to come up every time, so you don’t actually want more than 20*).
*Generally. There may be some cases in which you do or there may be some “big deck” builds, but I can’t see them.
Luck Be a Landlord is… fun! In the way a deck builder is, anyway. But interestingly, once I’d managed to complete it once, I was just… done with it. There’s a few reasons for this.
Firstly, there’s really no surprise to the game once you’ve got it. I don’t exactly need a deep narrative, but the game just relies on some text boxes telling you to pay your landlord, and I kind of wanted something more than the grind, and there’s none of that here–the game just ends too, there’s no climax or sense of a win (not even any sense of a sly “the house/capitalism always wins” wink, either.)
Secondly, like a lot of roguelike-like deckbuilders, there’s a huge dose of randomness to your ability to make a successful build, and there is such a huge number of symbols (152) that you can find yourself stuck trying for a build that you actually can’t make because no support ever comes up–or you just didn’t switch tracks fast enough. While a game here is quick enough, it feels easy to be a “dead man walking” for too many rounds as unlike something like Slay The Spire there aren’t any “gear checks”--just a progressive raising of rent. It really feels like something where the game would be enriched a bit by having character classes so it would be less daunting to specialise.
Those two issues are largely enough to make this a one and done for me, even though I did like it!
Will I ever play it again? I feel like I’m damning this with faint praise, but I’d play a more fully featured sequel absolutely. There’s just not enough here to get my teeth into (a second time, anyway.)
Final Thought: And never mind that the slot machine doesn’t even really make sense. You get money for every symbol on every spin and don’t put money in!!!
Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up a digital copy of exp. 2600, a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.
0 notes
everygame · 2 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Switch Flash Round: Suika Game This post is for subscribers only! You can subscribe for just $1 a month at https://ko-fi.com/mathewkumar, but if you don’t fancy that, don’t forget there’s years of articles in our archive.
1 note · View note
everygame · 2 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Hi-Fi Rush
Developed/Published by: Tango Gameworks / Bethesda Released: 25/01/2023 Completed: 09/12/2023 Completion: Finished it!
I loved this.
I’m not quite sure why, but saying so feels very exposing. Maybe it’s because before playing Hi-Fi Rush I had no idea what it actually was, and the game’s bright anime-adjacent stylings somewhat had me discounting it out of hand, so I assume the extremely cool people who read this would be doing the same.
Maybe it’s also just that Hi-Fi Rush is… pretty straightforward? It’s not particularly trying to move the medium forward (although I think it does some clever stuff) it’s just trying to be very, very good at what it’s doing. And what it’s doing, actually, isn’t so much “anime” as “full on Sega blue skies” while being an incredible competent 3D action platformer/brawler with a likable (dare I say loveable) cast of heroic misfits telling a simple but effectively structured narrative with some very savvy music choices.
The thing is that… succeeding at something that hits that many beats isn’t actually… easy? Something I’m most struck by is actually those characters. By now we’ve all seen the nadir of Marvel-inspired quip-a-thons thanks to the likes of that Forsaken trailer, but even looking at something like, say, Guardians of the Galaxy, where they have something that (at least previously) had worked, it’s remarkable how flat it falls. Here, you have a goofy, act-first-think-later hero, Chai, the cleverer-than-him female leader, Peppermint, the funny robot, CNMN, etc. in a very simple “baddies are doing bad things, let’s get the different things we need to defeat them” story, but it completely pops because there’s been care to keep the story rolling naturally so you flow through it and grow into caring about them. I’m so insanely curmugeonly that I can’t believed to ride that line for me. But they did!
Now you could say, “ah, but the secret weapon here is that the game uses actual songs that you actually like! That always works!” But it doesn’t work if all the pieces don’t fit together. There’s no better example than one of the game’s latter levels that uses The Prodigy’s Invaders Must Die. It plays at a moment where narratively all hell is breaking loose. It feels like you’re in a climax of an action movie, not just because the music is playing, but because the story has taken you there. That the level design is clever enough to cool down, let the music pull back a little, and then kick it back in for a climax? Absolute chef kiss.
(It only really gets better from there, too. Ending strong is rarely something I think video games aspire to, but Hi Fi Rush is sensibly around the 10 hour mark and the last three levels or so rip. Did the appearance of The Joy Formidable on the soundtrack literally make me emotional? Yes. Yes it did.)
Now interestingly, I haven’t actually played any other Tango Gameworks titles so I don’t really know if I should have expected rock-solid play, but either way I was surprised by how well it does. What makes Hi Fi Rush genius, I think, is that it takes a type of game I am incapable of not button-mashing through and adds a rhythm action component that doesn’t expect but rather, uh… politely asks you to hit your combos on rhythm. And it works!
I can criticise it, somewhat, however They quickly add quite a lot of subtleties to the combat and don’t tutoralise them heavily enough–I didn’t understand how to use Chai’s “partner combos” until well over half-way through the game, and I don’t know if I ever got comfortable with parries because standing around waiting for enemies to attack seemed the antithesis of everything else I was doing. There end up being a lot of buttons and you have to internalise the order of your partners and switching between them rapidly in situations where there are like 3 different kinds of enemies at once meaning at times combat is just a total stramash. But even then, there’s always the beat to follow. It’s very clever.
Anyway. I loved this. It’s one of my favourite things I’ve played in years. Your mileage may vary!
Will I ever play it again? When it finished I wanted to play it more. That literally never happens. I sort of hope there’s a sequel, but the story of this is so pleasantly complete that I’m not sure if there should be one.
Final Thought: I may also be a bit of a sucker for this game because you’re always accompanied by a black cat. Inspired by the game director’s!
Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up a digital copy of exp. 2600, a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.
11 notes · View notes
everygame · 2 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
It Takes Two (PlayStation 4) Developed/Published by: Hazelight Studios / Electronic Arts Released: 26/03/2021 Completed: 28/11/2023 Completion: Finished it!
After quite enjoying A Way Out, it only made sense to play through It Takes Two considering I had a willing partner and it has, generally, received massive critical acclaim and awards and that.
Now. Hazelight’s company director, Josef Fares, is kind of famous in game circles for appearing on The Game Awards and acting like an lunatic in a way that is, to any rational human being (i.e. not anyone who would identify as a “gamer”) as being absolutely themonuclear cringe. And you think… god that’s so forced. On a show that is so pandering, how can he act so embarrassingly?
Then you play It Takes Two and you go… ah, no, the guy’s just off his rocker.
It’s kind of hard to really write sensibly about It Takes Two, to be honest. I’ve played some games with absurd, misguided concepts and writing, but I don’t think I’ve ever played one that’s this misguided but also this confident in it. The game is a near-endless parade of different game mechanics that have been polished to within an inch of their lives that has then been absolutely slathered in a grab-bag of insanely dissonant emotional beats.
There’s so much wildly different content in this, that all I could think about was the poor staff working on this. How hard did they have to work on a game where no mechanic is allowed more than about a half-hour, because, in Fares’ own words, it would become “less special”???
Anyway, let’s explain what the game is, I always feel like I forget to do that. It’s a 3D platformer, basically, that uses the split-screen technique from A Way Out so you can play the entire game with another person (and you have to, unless you’re an octopus.) At its simplest, the game is asking you to do things like “one of you stands on a button, so the other can go through a door, and they stand on a button in that area so the other can go through that door” but it doesn’t stay that simple for long.
Setting-wise, it’s immediately more complex, as the set-up is that you’re a divorcing couple who have just revealed they’re splitting up to their daughter, who then, uh…. hexes them? They become a couple of wee dolls and then have to work out how to get back into their bodies while having lots of “Honey I Shrunk The Kids”-style adventures, although it can be extremely tenuous that this is supposed to be someone’s house.
I’m gonna say it: a divorce is a weird setting for a 3D platformer.
It is not helped by decision to make the couple the most annoying pair of bickering arseholes you’ve ever heard, and then to saddle them with Dr. Hakim, a talking book that Fares at least must have thought was the funniest thing ever (he personally did the motion capture???) but is like… is it racist? What race is this book anyway? It feels… racist against… someone???
But seriously folks, every time this fucking book appears you’re going to be like “arrghhh we have to listen to this now!!!”
And it just seems to go on forever. The problem with coming up with all these different mechanics is that you have to use them, and for a game where you basically have to  make time as a couple to do it quite quickly becomes a chore. As polished and as genuinely good feeling many mechanics are, there’s something so utterly tedious about how much of the game the fucking book appearing and saying “Hey! In this zone you have to collect THREE things! Go collect them!” when the game isn’t either long sections where you are literally on rails, or chunks where you have to do what is probably my least favourite thing in the world, which is run around and avoid shadows that are slamming down on the ground while the ground you can run on gets smaller. Legitimately it feels like they do that about… nine times.
Which brings me onto another point. Not only does it feel just much, much too long, there is absolutely zero understanding that you might be playing with someone who isn’t as skilled at video games as you, with no way I could find to ease difficulty for one player. This is at its absolute nadir with the bosses, which from the very first are… really hard? Even for me, a Mr. Good At Video Games Man???
The game simply forces too much quarterbacking, an issue that most co-op games can’t surmount.
But really the worst thing is… the narrative. I mentioned that the characters you play are awful; but they’re also insanely selfish and stupid and in some ways drag the player down with them. There is a section where you are forced to murder your child’s most beloved toy while it cries and begs for its life. Now, I’m a Untitled Goose Game hater, and there’s a similar smell to this; I’m sure Fares thought this was really funny but I hated it. It’s cruel, and yes, there is a difference between this and shooting up lots of lovely enemies in Doom or something. I’m reminded of Michael Madsen almost not being able to do his famous scene in Reservoir Dogs because he felt it might be crossing a line:
“You have to be…playing a bad guy’s one thing, but turning it too far in the wrong direction doesn’t make me happy.”
Yes I’m comparing the sequence to Reservoir Dogs. Josef Fares would probably love that actually. Fuck!
Will I ever play it again? No, it’s too fucking long and not actually that fun!
Final Thought: Oh I suppose I didn’t really finish my point. The narrative doesn’t… go anywhere! If characters are going to not get divorced, you better hope that the game does some incredible character work to show how they’ve grown and learned how to be together, but they basically bicker until about the last level and a half and as far as I know solve none of their problems. It’s so unrewarding!!! If Fares had spent more time on writing a story rather than coming up with “funny” things for the book to say and I assume hitting his staff with a big whip and screaming “MORE MECHANICS! NO ONE GETS ANY GRUEL UNTIL I SEE EIGHT MORE NEW MECHANICS!” maybe we’d be getting somewhere with this. I mean it’s so polished! It’s just… too weird to recommend.
Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up a digital copy of exp. 2600, a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.
0 notes
everygame · 2 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Alter Ego (Apple Macintosh)
Developed/Published by: Peter J. Favaro / Activision Released: 27/04/1986 Completed: 21/11/2023 Completion: Died of old age in my bed, single, but a millionaire. Little Richard’s “Thinkin’ About My Mother” was playing on the radio as I played. “I swear I'm gonna love her… Yes, until the day I die.”
Alter Ego is a dated, sexist mess that basically doesn’t work at all.
I am so fond of it.
One of those games I found in my earliest forays on the internet, digging around for “abandonware” Alter Ego was immediately interesting to my teenage self–a game that let you live an entire life! Sure, it did it in a text-only, choose-your-own-adventure style, but I was already fiddling around with Infocom games and it wasn’t that many years out from owning an Amstrad CPC; the limitations had no effect upon the promise I imagined.
The interesting thing about when I played it then is that I remember playing it into Young Adulthood and never further. Until now I couldn’t remember why. Did I get bored? Was I overwhelmed with options?
Well, here’s a hint. Alter Ego was designed in 1986 by Peter J. Favaro, a psychologist who at the time was just 28 years old (which I am forced to admit is younger than I am now.) It becomes very quickly clear that past a certain point he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.
But let’s take a step back here and discuss how Alter Ego actually works. Really it’s one of the earliest examples of a hypertext game (it actually predates Hypercard, if you can believe it.) You progress through seven stages of life from infancy to old age, and in each, you progress through a kind of… card map? choosing cards which each contain a vignette where you have to make a few decisions–if you’re a toddler, do you share your toys? If you’re a teenager, do you act sulky to your parents when they won’t let you do what you want? And then have that effect your stats and have time pass as a result.
As the game progresses, it adds several cards that you can flip over whenever you feel like it. A card that lets you try and meet people, or have experiences with your current partner, for example. A card that lets you make big purchases that you might have to pay off with a loan. 
The goal in Alter Ego is, simply, to… see what happens, and it’s here that the game’s highest pleasures and greatest mistakes are found. I decided to play this via a classic Mac emulator (as I believe that Favaro created this on a Mac) and although I originally played this on PC, the convergence of playing this via a system that I haven’t touched since I was at high school made the early sequences of this game a brush with nostalgia I haven’t felt before. The game is at its highest when you get to in some ways relive, but not quite, the past.
Like most people who play this (at least the first time) I chose to play it making the kind of decision I would make, as best I could, at the time I’d make them, and each experience was a moment of–oh, remember when something like this happened? 
It’s not perfect. Designed in 1986 by a young, white American, there’s this strange sense of re-living your life by way of “Leave It To Beaver” even if, like me, you only know the reference second or third hand. Personally I looked at it as asking: what if I’d gone to an American high school and lived my John Hughes dreams? The game was developed in the same era, I watched The Breakfast Club as a teenager around the same time I was messing around with abandonware and using classic Macs at school... it all intertwines.
And really, if the game had stayed there, I think it could have worked. A kind of… growing up simulator. Add lots of different vignettes, not all which play every time, and then the player plays until they leave college and the game goes “congratulations! You became a CORN FARMER. You married ONE wife and had SIX children. Your dog is called JEFF.”
Sadly, it does not do that, and it becomes pretty clear that Favaro didn’t really have a clear plan or concept for how adulthood was going to work. Childhood and Adolescence, after all, are fairly clear cut. You have to go to school, your parents take care of most other responsibilities. From a western, middle-class perspective, you’ll mostly have the same kind of experiences. As an adult however, all kinds of things can happen at all stages of life. 
It goes wrong immediately. You can go to college, but there’s no clear pay-off, you never seem to graduate! Jobs are just… something you have. Purchases and money quickly turn out to be totally meaningless (there may be a fail-state if you run out of money with huge debts, but I didn’t see it.)
The problem is that Favaro is forced to flatten everything into the most generic experiences once he reaches adulthood as the biggest decisions we make in our lives–who to partner with, our careers–cannot really interact with the canned vignettes of the main path. The box art is like “become a baseball player or a nun!” but even if you could the actual experience is “what if you were a white collar worker in the 1980s” as your nun deals with getting chewed out by their boss and refused a promotion or whatever.
In many ways it’s simply a fault of coming so early. A modern game in even just Twine can far more easily modify its text based on the information you’ve given it, and more easily offer events that either relate to your stats and relationships. In many other ways, it’s the fault of the culture that Favaro lived in and which, sadly, he could not see beyond. I played the “Male” version, and attitudes to women are beyond poor; many later vignettes are basically Penthouse letters (actually, another American reference I only know second hand, I swear) and one vignette featuring your discovery that a friend is gay is… er… not good.
It’s made even weirder by how… judgemental the game’s “narrator” (read: Favaro) is when it comments on your decisions. He definitely has an idea how you should be living your life, and hell mend you for not following it.
All that said, however, there’s still some amusement and possibly revealing moments to be had in the later stages of the game. I for one was surprised by my complete inability to maintain a steady relationship and how borderline panicked I got as I aged about it! It seems like it might be fairly random, which makes how unforgiving it is almost hilarious: I had been living with a woman for years, we’d invested in a company and became millionaires, at least according to one vignette I got on amazing with her son from another marriage… I popped the question and she said no because I was “untrustworthy.” Relationship over.
I probably should have indulged less in those Penthouse letters vignettes… It was… research. For this article. Yeah. Not just because playing this made me feel like a teenager again and the teenager I was would have made all those decisions.
Anyway. As much as Alter Ego doesn’t work, what stands out about it is what stands out about, say, an Infocom game. The text-based nature of it draws you in as deeply as a book, and it simply engages the imagination to make the game something more than it is. I can see Floyd in Planetfall, and I can see my weird picket-fences middle-America alternate life here. For weaving that sort of magic, it does deserve some respect. Just don’t take it too seriously.
Will I ever play it again? As I expressed above, I’ve only ever played the Male version, and the Female version is supposed to have a series of bug-fixes and less instant-death situations, but far, far more sexism. I might take a look at it, but even if I don’t I can imagine noodling on this again, at least as a mirror into memory.
Final Thought: Worth noting that you don’t have to take my word on this game, it can easily be played in-browser, which is probably fine if you don’t have a dense, multi-layered nostalgia attached to it. Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up a digital copy of exp. 2600, a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.
2 notes · View notes
everygame · 2 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Dig Dug II (NES)
Developed/Published by: Namco Released: 18/04/1986 Completed: 22/11/2023 Completion: Finished all 72 levels. Version Played: Namco Museum Archives Vol. 2 Trophies / Achievements: n/a 
I don’t like Dig Dug. I don’t like Dig Dug so much that I have written about it twice and not bothered to really give it more than a sentence either time.
Dig Dug 2, however… is interesting.
It’s not good, let’s get that out of the way first of all. But let’s dig into what it is (pun genuinely not intended). 
Originally released in arcades in 1985, I had access to the later NES/Famicom version, which may have some differences that I haven’t bothered to research. It probably speaks to the incredible success of the Famicom that this was ported, because by all accounts the arcade release was a failure, so they really were shoving anything out as quickly as they could (see: Pac-Land, unfortunately.) 
Dig Dug II is… roughly a twist on the play of the original, where if you don’t remember, you dig around underground in a 2D side-on fashion, trying to horrifically murder underground monsters by pumping them full of air (seriously, what a fucked up way to kill anyone) or, if they’re lucky, drop a rock on their head (much quicker.) In Dig Dug II, you instead view things on an island from a 2D overhead fashion, and try to murder the monsters by, well, still pumping them full of air. But the twist is now rather than digging your way around you can also drill at pre-determined points that create little fault-lines in the direction you’re facing that serve two purposes: they stop the enemies from crossing them, and secondly, if you connect fault-lines so they cut off a part of the island you’re on, it falls into the sea.
This is not a horrible design! You can sort of see how it’s related to Dig Dug, but rather than that game’s free-form digging, it adds an almost Qix-esque ability to saw off large parts of the island to defeat enemies, but only within the designated level designs, an excellent constraint.
Unfortunately… the level designs fumble this completely? This should be essentially a puzzle game game about looking at a level and working out how to efficiently sink it, but it’s not that at all. Maybe there are speed-runners and geniuses that can do it more often than not, but many if not most levels are not designed for you to corral enemies and sink them and end up, instead, frantic attempts to survive as you’re chased around by the enemies, which is honestly a bit too much like the original Dig Dug for my tastes (yes, I know this is Dig Dug II. You don’t have to remind me.)
Most levels I ended up abusing the enemies’ rather poor AI. As they can’t cross fault-lines and can get confused on how to navigate to you (at least on the Famicom) beelining to the nearest drill-point, drawing a cross of fault-lines and just dancing around from one side of the cross to the other while pumping enemies to death was generally the best tactic; indeed, even if you could maybe cause a bit of island to drop off, it was usually quicker and safer to ignore that option and quickly kill enemies (though if you’re going for a high score, it’s not optimal.)
This is a real “close but no cigar” video game, where everyone involved almost created a really cool video game but were stymied by either not knowing how to create levels to better suit what the design was informing what they should do or simply too trapped in the old mindset to push forward. Ah well.
Will I ever play it again? I’ve rinsed this. I was disappointed by how repetitive the Dig Dug Theater animations were for 72 levels!
Final Thought: It is unbelievably weird that they made an online MMORPG version of this in 2008. Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up a digital copy of exp. 2600, a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.
0 notes
everygame · 3 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Wonder Boy (Arcade)
Developed/Published by: Escape / Sega Released: 12/04/1986 Completed: 15/11/2023 Completion: Finished it without collecting all of the dolls, so missing the bonus world (which doesn’t change the ending or anything.) Allowed myself to quicksave at each checkpoint. Version Played: Astro City Mini
It’s April 1986, and interesting to consider that this is the first platformer that I’ve played in the days after the release of Super Mario Bros. that you could say follows its playbook, but it’s more emblematic of the complicated lines of influence in this era. You could call it a Super Mario Bros. clone, but it could easily have been made if only Pac-Land had existed before it. And really, it takes just as much from Ghosts n’ Goblins. And then you think “actually, the fire flower in Super Mario Bros. is a bit Ghosts n’ Goblinsy, isn’t it?”
Anyway. Wonder Boy is the first title in the once cult-legend but probably now just legend-legend Wonder Boy series, and if you’re absolutely not familiar to TL;DR it Westone (then Escape) made Wonder Boy for Sega, and then made loads of sequels which while generally still platformers were totally different for Sega because Sega owned the IP. Meanwhile, Hudson Soft ported Wonder Boy to NES, but they had to change it into Adventure Island, and then that became an IP in its own right, but weirdly they kept to the original Wonder Boy design for all the sequels, so we’ve ended up with one faithful series of sequels that’s not Wonder Boy and one divergent series that, er, is.
Phew! But Wonder Boy’s influence goes further than that, because you only have to play it for a couple of minutes to realise that it’s pretty much the template for any auto-runner game you’ve ever played. You run right, generally at top speed, and jump to avoid obstacles that will either trip you or kill you, and if you’ve got Wonder Boy’s Flintstone-ass axe power-up, you can kill anything that moves with enough hits. You can even get a skateboard power-up that almost completely works like an auto-runner; you can slow your speed, but never actually stop yourself from moving.
Something interesting to consider, though, is that the auto-runner never became a “thing" until the advent of everyone having a widescreen. Why? Well, the dreaded “Rick Dangerous syndrome.”
It’s probably a bit weird to accuse a game from 1986 as having a problem named for a game that didn’t come out till 1989, but it’s what I think of it as anyway. Rick Dangerous was a flick-screen platformer with a simple twist: you get no warning whatsoever for traps that will kill you. Run up to a wall? Well, some spikes flew out and killed you. Landed on a platform that looks like all the other ones? Oh, it fell and you died.
Wonder Boy is this, with that classic added bonus that you basically have to run full pelt forward as Wonder Boy’s inertia requires it. Which means that not only will a platform you’ve landed on often drop and kill you with no chance for recovery, if you don’t have perfect advance knowledge you’re going to run into enemies or obstacles that you couldn’t see pretty much every time.
It’s perfect for the arcade… operators as it has a continue system, but Wonder Boy ups the ante even more by making Wonder Boy’s weapon a power-up that you can only get occasionally, and it seems like there’s some long stretches of levels where you might just be totally fucked because you died unless you can master perfect platforming on a level of a tool-assisted speed run, so I wonder how many people put in credit after credit in a no-win situation. 
It’s funny, really, that Ghosts n’ Goblins has such a famously brutal reputation and this is, I would say, nearly as bad. I never had to give up and start seriously abusing quick saves here, but there are a few moments which are just ridiculous, like a platform that drops you through the floor (which had never happened to that point) and a jump almost at the very end of the game that requires you notice that two moving clouds are slightly closer together and you can jump vertically between them with perfect timing.
I found playing this… miserable. Getting to the end of a hard section just to kill yourself on an obstacle you couldn’t see is just pain, and as the game doesn’t trigger a lot of things until you cross a certain points you can sometimes find yourself wobbling around trying to trigger things while a timer ticks down (I forgot to mention that you have to constantly be grabbing fruit power ups to stop a timer running down and killing you. And the game even sets up several sections so you’re stuck picking up a death power-up that runs this timer down even faster!!!)
But I did finish it, and as honestly as I could manage, so that’s something I guess. There were points I believed I wouldn’t be able to.
Will I ever play it again? I’m interested to see how the Adventure Island franchise takes this skeleton and builds upon it for as many years as it did, and intrigued that a Korean developer put out a modernised remake, Wonder Boy Returns, recently(ish.) But I’m not playing it.
Final Thought: If you were unbelievably mean, you could mention that I didn’t fully finish this, because this is another Druaga/Xevious inspired game where you get an extra world for collecting all the dolls that are in levels, but fairly quickly you have to do contradictory things like run into particular enemies or obstacles to make them appear. To do that just to get four more levels of miserably cruel platforming? No thanks!
Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up a digital copy of exp. 2600, a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.
1 note · View note
everygame · 3 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Santa Claus (Commodore 64) Developed/Published by: Accelerated Software Inc. / Laing Marketing Ltd. Released: 1984 Completed: 12/12/2023 Completion: Got a high score of 3000, I guess!
Well, this has to be one of the most obscure things I’ve ever played. I'm not sure there's an image of the box art anywhere--although I’ll admit the fact that it’s called “Santa Claus” does make it a bit hard to google. It’s also barely a video game. But it’s worth mentioning, I’d say, because it’s another Canadian link for Christmas-themed video games after A Christmas Adventure. My interest was piqued by seeing low-resolution simulacrum of the Canadian flag in screenshots of this, and I have at least managed to work out that Laing Marketing Ltd. was a Brampton, Ontario company. According to old faithful Mobygames they put out 16 games between 1982-1986. I suspect with local developers, but there seems to be even less information to be found about the likes of Accelerated Software Inc. unfortunately, so they could be from anywhere really, and been forced to put Canadian flags in this game at gunpoint for all I know.
Of course, maybe these people don’t want to be found, because it this is as dire a cash-in as Santa for ZX Spectrum, implying that if you can’t be bothered to think up something unique to call your game how good is the game going to be. Here, you fly right, dropping candy canes on houses in an un-named Canadian city (but it’s probably Toronto, famous for having loads of single family homes because of racism) while avoiding the busiest skies of all time, full of jets and hot air balloons and shit. Seems like it might be fun enough, but it’s a game set on a timer like an old 2600 game, and colliding with enemies or scenery just… runs the timer down faster and makes the screen red. So you can just sort of do whatever. Plays a jaunty version of Santa Claus is Coming to Town though?
Will I ever play it again? Oh my no.
Final Thought: Thus concludes this year’s Christmas coverage, and I didn’t even get through all of 1984. Thanks for following this year, and hope you have a merry Christmas, or just a really great Monday if you don’t observe or care for it! Have a nice, er, January 3rd. *cough* If you were a supporter you'd have got to read this when it was seasonal... *cough*
Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up a digital copy of exp. 2600, a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.
1 note · View note
everygame · 3 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Merry Christmas From Melbourne House (Commodore 64) Developed/Published by: Melbourne House Released: 1984 Completed: 11/12/2023 Completion: Beat it with a score of 100 out of 100.
It’s 1984 and the Christmas cash-in market is finally mature, with five whole games released for home computers (at the very least.) Alphabetically first in my list (because Icon Software chose to go with “Xmas” on their merry release) Merry Christmas From Melbourne House is a slight cheat because it’s really just a tiny tech demo/bit of marketing, but it was sold, costing 95p (the price of tape duplication and postage?) for readers of Commodore User (it was actually in the December issue and the deadline was December 17th to get your money to them, which makes me wonder how many people played this long after things stopped being festive.)
It is though, honestly, what I was kind of expecting from A Christmas Adventure. It’s a short, very easy little adventure game that… passes about half an hour and actually manages to feel Christmassy. 
Like A Christmas Adventure, you’re tasked with making sure Santa can get away from the north pole to deliver presents, but in a shocking twist… YOU are Santa. The game’s blurb claims he’s “attempting to stop an industrial dispute” that “is threatening the delivery of toys to children of the world” and it sounds like jolly old saint nick is a fat cat like the rest of ‘em, and out of solidarity with the elves and workers everywhere I spent quite a bit of time typing things like “GIVE ELVES RAISE” and “PROVIDE TIME OFF” but the parser never understood it, so I almost didn’t finish this.
The plot is a bit oversold anyway, considering the solution is pretty much “Get off your fat arse and pack your sack of toys yourself, Santa.”
As you’re not doing all that much, the parser is adequate, and the graphics are… genuinely quite evocative. They are important too–the toys you have to pack are all on one screen. I don’t generally like this design in graphic text adventures–where you don’t get told everything in text (I’m a VERBOSE man in Infocom games)–and having to work out directions here was not my favourite, But it worked well enough, and I was even charmed by the full screen advert for Melbourne House games.
Anyway, lemme see how much 95p is in today’s money. £3.77. I can’t really say people got their money’s worth here, but they could do a lot worse.
Will I ever play it again? I’m good.
Final Thought: Joe Pranevich over at The Adventurer’s Guild played through this as well if you’d like to read something more in-depth about it, with the bonus that one of the developers, Dave Johnston, shows up in the comments, revealing that it was developed “in a matter on weeks using an in-house text engine and a tweaked sprite engine based on Way of the Exploding Fist code” and that he didn’t even have a copy. They paid people at Melbourne House so poorly that they couldn’t raise 95p???
Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up a digital copy of exp. 2600, a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.
2 notes · View notes