2016 Game Review Haiku, #75 – A Wolf Among Us, Episode 3 “A Crooked Mile”

On the trail, others
After Bigby, must protect
Who is Crooked Man?

–

Here we go again. Another year of me attempting to produce quality Japanese poetry about the videogames I complete in three syllable-based phases of 5, 7, and 5. I hope you never tire of this because, as far as I can see into the murky darkness–and leap year–that is 2016, I’ll never tire of it either. Perhaps this’ll be the year I finally cross the one hundred mark. Buckle up–it’s sure to be a bumpy ride. Yoi ryokō o.

2016 Game Review Haiku, #73 – A Wolf Among Us, Episode 2 “Smoke and Mirrors”

Follow Snow to Snow
Glamour goes, shows, time to know
Poor Little Mermaid

–

Here we go again. Another year of me attempting to produce quality Japanese poetry about the videogames I complete in three syllable-based phases of 5, 7, and 5. I hope you never tire of this because, as far as I can see into the murky darkness–and leap year–that is 2016, I’ll never tire of it either. Perhaps this’ll be the year I finally cross the one hundred mark. Buckle up–it’s sure to be a bumpy ride. Yoi ryokō o.

2016 Game Review Haiku, #72 – A Wolf Among Us, Episode 1 “Faith”

A murdered Fable
Big bad Bigby, on the case
Make those decisions

–

Here we go again. Another year of me attempting to produce quality Japanese poetry about the videogames I complete in three syllable-based phases of 5, 7, and 5. I hope you never tire of this because, as far as I can see into the murky darkness–and leap year–that is 2016, I’ll never tire of it either. Perhaps this’ll be the year I finally cross the one hundred mark. Buckle up–it’s sure to be a bumpy ride. Yoi ryokō o.

Costume Quest 2, sweet like candy to my soul

I enjoyed that first Costume Quest game. It was cute, charming, bite-sized, rewarding, and perfect for warping you back to your childhood to remember those consequence-free times of running through your neighborhood, ringing doorbells, and asking strangers for candy. Surprise, surprise, being that the games are nearly identical to each other in terms of mechanics, pacing, and exploration from the eyes of children with larger-than-life imaginations, I also enjoyed Costume Quest 2. Probably more than the first adventure.

Here’s the four-one-one. Costume Quest 2 from Double Fine and Midnight City takes place once again on Halloween night. The fraternal twin siblings Wren and Reynold from the original game are back, as well as a bunch of their friends,  to save All Hallows’ Evening from the evil Dr. Orel White. This ultra-nefarious dentist has teamed up with a powerful time wizard, as one often does, releasing the Grubbins into the human world in hopes of ridding the candy-filled holiday entirely from history. Wren and Reynold’s friends open a mystical time portal from the future to explain that, where they are from, Halloween has been permanently outlawed, with Dr. Orel White ruling the world. Wren and Reynold go back to the future with their friends to stop this disillusioned dental surgeon for good.

If you’ve played the first Costume Quest, you’ll know how this game works because it is nearly identical. You move around an enclosed area full of things to punch for candy and on-screen enemies, like a suburban neighborhood or dental compound, talking to NPCs and solving simple navigation-blocking puzzles. Often, to get where you want to go, you need to use the right costume. For instance, the pterodactyl can use its wings to blow away big piles of leaves or garbage, and the wizard can illuminate dark areas the kids are too scared to explore without a light. There are main quests to follow, as well as small side ones that will earn you extra XP, upgrade your candy bag, and provide rarer Creepy Treat cards.

The main aspect gating progress in Costume Quest 2 is combat. It’s turn-based, focusing heavily on timed button presses, just like Paper Mario: Sticker Star. You select attack and then must time the button press with the indicator on-screen to hit maximum damage. You can also do this for blocking, to take less damage, as well as learning the ability to counter attacks later on. Each of the costumes the kids wear have different basic and special attacks, and I ended up relying on the Superhero, Clown, Wizard, and Jefferson costumes the most. I’ll talk about the Candy Corn costume in just a bit. All of the costumes have different strengths and weaknesses against specific enemy types, but I really never found myself worrying about that. You can run away from any fight, and even if you die, you respawn by the fountain of health to try again. This is not the Dark Souls of lite RPGs.

In fact, the hardest thing about Costume Quest 2 turned out to not even be terribly difficult, just a little more time-consuming. I’m talking about the “Hardcorn” Achievement, which requires you to keep a kid in the Candy Corn costume for the entire game. Basically, the Candy Corn costume does not attack enemies. You can still take less damage to it with a proper button timing when blocking, but otherwise it doesn’t do much other than make silly quips at the start of its turn, which, alas, I can confirm do repeat. Later, when Corvus teaches the kids how to perform counters, Candy Corn can at least occasionally deal some damage back, since everyone like to target it the most. This did make the boss battles go on a little longer than normal, but otherwise, I was able to do it, and I even shared this journey with all of you via Extra Life this past weekend. You can watch the videos on my YouTube channel (not all are up yet). Also, thanks to Microsoft’s latest dashboard update, I can now tell you that, on the Xbox One at least, this is a pretty rare accomplishment. Like 2% rare…

Go me. Anyways, Costume Quest 2 is real cute. Super duper cute. The kind of cute fun that makes you feel safe again in a world that is undoubtedly growing more dangerous every day. For sure, I’ll play Costume Quest 3, if Double Fine decides to make more, but I’d love to see this evolve more mechanically. Granted, I think it was a surprise to everyone that this sequel alone got made. That said, I’m getting a copy of Costume Quest 2 this month on PlayStation 3 from PlayStation Plus and, for once, I will not even bother downloading it. I’ve done everything there is to do in this cartoonish Halloween-land. Until the next thwart on withholding candy from children, I guess.

Extra Life 2016

Hi, everyone! I’m doing Extra Life this weekend. A whole 24 hours of playing them fun-as-fun-gets video games. My goal is to hit $800 for the Children’s Specialized Hospital in Mountainside, NJ. If you donate $25 or more, I’ll draw a cartoon portrait of you.

More details can be found at my participant page.

And you can follow along and watch me stream a bunch of random things over at Twitch!

Learning about gross insects with Aniscience’s help

As a young boy in a public school on the East Coast in southern New Jersey, I had my standard fill of edutainment games, such as The Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?. These were interactive experiences designed both to educate and entertain. Like, now I know that dysentery is a terrible thing for anyone to get, extremely detrimental to one’s colon and health, and that it will severely impact your chance of seeing the end of your covered wagon’s journey to Oregon’s Willamette Valley. But enough about the highs and lows of 19th century pioneer life because I’m here to talk about bugs. Flowers, too. But mostly those creepy-crawlies that, from my point of view, exist solely to freak me out and slither into my open mouth as I sleep.

Aniscience is a fine piece of edutainment, performing both actions of entertaining and informing well enough, though I do wish there was a little more interaction from the player. Well, easier interaction, to be honest. To start, it’s still in development. You can basically play a demo of the first level, and there are promises of more areas to come. Ultimately, Aniscience is a cutesy, mouse-driven journey about discovering nature, its laws, and the principal species of plants and animals. Or, in the case of the demo level, all things that live in the dirt. Y’know, insects galore.

Here’s how one plays Aniscience. You control the tiny brown mouse, either with the arrows keys or, I assume, if on some kind of touch-based device, with your figure. This cinnamon-brown mouse by the way reminds artistically of the characters from Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and I’m perfectly okay with. Anyways, by lightly dragging a magnifying glass over a selected object (animal or plant), you can get a page of facts on the screen. These are real, honest-to-science facts, too. I mean, look at all these common shrew details:

Other than that, you can click (or tap) on the specific animal/plant in question to watch it animate slightly. That’s basically the experience, backed by a soft, friendly soundtrack of happy keyboard notes, as well as birds chirping. It’s inviting, simplistic, and visually pleasing. I still wish there was more interaction, like maybe comparing different bugs and flowers to one another or somehow modifying the scene, like adding in food or a predator and seeing how things change. Also, having to drag a magnifying glass over each and every thing you want to examine is tiresome. I get that the developers probably wanted a very straightforward control system, but I’d have preferred having the examine on one mouse click and the animation on another. It’s not a deal breaker.

Aniscience is a pretty fun way to learn about nature, even if some of the bugs are super gross. You are rewarded with exploring by learning about a new critter or flower, and while that might not sound immediately satisfying…it is. I wish you could collect these fact cards in some kind of journal, that way you could both have a goal of finding them all in one area and can easily pull them up later to view without having to go back to the specific thing in question and re-magnifying glass them. Again, not deal-breakers. I’m viewing this more from the “Is it fun as a game?” perspective, where I’m sure others coming to it just for education purposes aren’t even thinking about stuff like this. I mean, again, that mouse is pretty dang adorable.

2016 Game Review Haiku, #71 – Gears of War 4

Swarm creatures kidnap
Must fight back, bring back Daddy
Good fun, familiar

–

Here we go again. Another year of me attempting to produce quality Japanese poetry about the videogames I complete in three syllable-based phases of 5, 7, and 5. I hope you never tire of this because, as far as I can see into the murky darkness–and leap year–that is 2016, I’ll never tire of it either. Perhaps this’ll be the year I finally cross the one hundred mark. Buckle up–it’s sure to be a bumpy ride. Yoi ryokō o.

Spyro 2’s guidebook is stuffed full of gems, talismans, and orbs

Earlier this year, I put the original Spyro the Dragon to bed. This was a game that I had started playing in 2014 and really liked, but moved away from over the years, only returning to it in 2016 with the drive to see its credits roll. Shortly after, I started playing Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage! and vowed to not take the same length of time to beat it. And look, I remained true to my words, even if I maybe never said them out loud here, but whatever. That’s two purple dragon romps down for the count, with a third still waiting in the wings. Soon, Spyro: Year of the Dragon. Very soon.

Let’s see. After saving the world and many elderly dragons from Gnasty Gnorc in his last adventure, Spyro and his friend Sparx decide to take a vacation to the lovely, picturesque Dragon Shores. Unfortunately, while there, they are sucked into a magical vortex that takes them to a realm called Avalar. All three of Avalar’s worlds are in danger of falling under the power of a Napoleon-like dictator named Ripto. In order to save these worlds from destruction and tyranny, Spyro must travel to and fro, helping out who he can while also collecting a number of things: gems, talismans, and orbs. I emphasized the last one on purpose, with more to say later in this post.

For good and for bad, not a lot has changed since Spyro’s last outing. Which, in terms of narrative, wasn’t that long ago. When it comes to development, there was only about a year between the release of the first game and the second. Anyways, you’re still charging enemies, breathing fire, jumping, gliding, and collecting butterflies to power up Sparx and stay alive. A couple new moves have been added to the little dragon’s arsenal, such as being able to swim underwater, using ladders to climb higher up, and an overhead smash stomp that I think I only used once or twice for a story reason and never again. There are hub worlds, which contain gems and orbs to find, and then within these hubs are warp gates to individual levels that will hand out talismans as a reward for finishing its main through-line. Story progression is gated by a specific number of these things, so it is in your best interest to get as many as you can…as soon as you can.

Alas, I really hit a wall between the third world of Winter Tundra and the final boss fight against Ripto. I needed 40 orbs to move on and was only somewhere around 25 at the time. This meant I had to go back, multiple times, to levels I had already completed and find the extra challenges to do to earn an orb. Generally, these challenges are towards the end of each level, which means a lot of replaying, something I already do excessively in them numerous LEGO videogames. I found that some of the orb challenges rated five stars were easy peasy and others rated two or three stars to be impossible. Some of that has to do with controlling the camera or Spyro, as moving him with both speed and skill is not easily doable; I preferred the slower challenges, like herding cows into a fenced off area, instead of chasing after thieves or playing a lackluster minigame of hockey.

I hope I’m not seeing a pattern when it comes to these final boss fights. The one against Gnasty Gnorc was long, frustrating, and had the nasty sting of having you redo the entire thing if you messed up once. Yeah, yeah…gaming in this generation is spoiled by lots of checkpoints and saves and magical power-ups to get us through the tough parts, but it really felt like the main chunk of the game sat at a difficulty level of 3 and then the last fight was cranked up to 11…just because. Well, it’s all that again with the final stand against Ripto, which is broken into three sections. Two are on the ground, easy enough if you keep dodging and picking up sheep for health, and the last has Spyro flying above a pit of lava, dodging incoming homing missiles while also trying to dish out his own damage. It definitely took me more than five tries to put Ripto in his place.

Spoiler alert: there are no plans to collect the remainder of orbs (15 left) to open up whatever is hidden behind that sealed door at Dragon Shores. There will never be a plan. If anything, I hope to start Spyro: Year of the Dragon soon, though that may be a more likely candidate for 2017 under the assumption that there are even more things to collect in that one. Mmm. I’ll also freely admit that I’m now much more curious about how things went for Spyro on the PlayStation 2 when Insomniac Games handed the reigns over to another developer and moved on to the Ratchet & Clank series.

Lastly, I’ll leave you with my favorite code for Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage!, which is my favorite hidden code from every game ever, no matter what the genre – Big Head Mode! Pause the game, and then enter Up, Up, Up, Up, R1, R1, R1, R1, Circle. You are very welcome.

2016 Game Review Haiku, #70 – Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage!

Vacation ruined
Dictator Ripto, must stop
Collect all them orbs

–

Here we go again. Another year of me attempting to produce quality Japanese poetry about the videogames I complete in three syllable-based phases of 5, 7, and 5. I hope you never tire of this because, as far as I can see into the murky darkness–and leap year–that is 2016, I’ll never tire of it either. Perhaps this’ll be the year I finally cross the one hundred mark. Buckle up–it’s sure to be a bumpy ride. Yoi ryokō o.

Buy low, sell high, and make bank with Market Crashers

Remember when I beat Crimson Shroud some time back and opened up a ton of free space on my Nintendo 3DS? No? Well, click here to read more about that and then come back so, sequentially, you are following along with this story. It might help. Right. Well, with all that free space prime for the filling, I went and downloaded a bunch of other things, such as updates to Pokémon Shuffle and that freemium Pokémon Picross thing, which I’ve kind of only touched twice since and not for very long. Aside from those, I also grabbed a free new StreetPass mini-game from Nintendo as part of their promotion of a whole bunch of new StreetPass mini-games, deciding between Slot Car Rivals, a racing game, and Market Crashers, a business simulation game. You can figure out which one I picked.

Ultimately, Market Crashers is a fast-paced decision-making game. You know how in those Telltale games like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones you only have so long to reply to someone before the scene moves forward? It’s all that. Except money is at stake instead of someone’s friendship or, as it often happens, their life. Anyways, you are a new day trader to the market scene, and so you’ll need the help of analysts to ensure you are making the best estimations of the market. This is where the StreetPassing comes in, as each person you connect with will help show a stronger forecast of how the market will play out. That way you know when to buy low and sell high or hold back. Or, if you are like me, buy one share and then immediately freeze up from a panic attack over not wanting to mess up, ironically messing up nonetheless.

You can buy up to ten shares at a time from fictitious companies like Piece-By-Piece Deliveries and Kingfinder Studios. Purchasing a share is as easy as hitting a button; in fact, that’s what you do–the A button buys shares and the Y button sells. As time trudges forward, an analyst might say that there is big news, and this could either be a big drop or rise. The short goal for Market Crashers is to do well and earn money, using those StreetPassed Miis to the best of their ability, and the longer goal is to earn a massive amount of money, with the first flag being $10 million. Hmm. In the two sessions I played, I earned money, and then I lost money, so that longer goal might forever be a longer goal for me.

Stocks are definitely not my thing, both in real life and, now I can confirm, in videogame form. Watching line graphs grow and change isn’t all that exciting, and knowing that an investment is behind those ups and downs is more than enough to stress me out greatly. Then there’s also the requirement of making rapid-fire decisions to get things done. Um, no. I’m not good at that. I’m a thinker, a muller (not to be confused with a mullet), a man of wonder, and I’m always one hundred percent too afraid to instantly commit to something in the matter of a few seconds. Chances are, that never works out great for me. I’d rather assess the scenario, really study it, and then dive in. In the end, I’d make a better analyst than day trader.

I don’t know. Maybe I should have gone with that little car racing game. It’s too late now to go back, and I don’t expect to hit many more areas with lots of people carrying their Nintendo 3DS around–thanks, MICE 2016!–so I’ll just stick with collecting puzzle pieces and earning new hats via multiple playthroughs of Find Mii 2.