Suikoden’s opening hour is more goofy than I remembered

I’m going to be replaying both Suikoden and Suikoden II…for reasons. You don’t need to know the reasons right now, and truth be told, I’d happily replay both of these games just because I can since I still own them as physical copies, but also to keep me in check, because I do like to tout them as some of my favorite games, if not my absolute favorite RPGs. That said, I’ve not touched them since my high school days, and I’m beginning to worry that maybe I’m relying a bit too much on nostalgia.

And with that, after completing another comic about Dan Ryckert’s food stories over at Giant Bomb, I popped in the disc for Suikoden, turned on my, as of late, dormant PlayStation 2, and sifted through my memory cards to find one with space for a save slot. I also discovered at this point that I’m missing Suikoden‘s instruction manual, ugh. Not sure where–and when–that thing vanished. Anyways, after checking all my PS1 memory cards to make sure I didn’t already have a game in progress, I selected “New Game”, rightfully named Tir McDohl to Pauly, and began old-school JRPGing.

Real quick: I’m going to be talking pretty specifically about mostly everything that unfolds in Suikoden‘s first hour, which is actually a lot of different events, so if you’ve not yet gotten to experience it and don’t want to be spoiled, I suggest y’all close this browser right now and move on to something else. All right, let’s go. Let’s show my nostalgia just where it is all truly at.

So, the main thing that surprised me about playing Suikoden again for the first time in over ten years is that…it’s actually quite goofy. Like, if the technology to include a studio audience laugh-track existed at the time for the PlayStation 1, Konami totally would’ve done it. Sure, sure, most people think about the heavy politics and twisted betrayals for both this game and later ones in the series, and they are right to do so. Besides the recruiting of 108 Stars of Destiny and upgrading your castle, the extremely adult tone and direction of the plot is where Suikoden stands miles above its competitors. However, almost right from the get-go, things are goofy and light-hearted and a bit juvenile, and maybe that is really only for now, before the shitstorm truly hits Teo McDohl’s son and friends.

Anyways, check this out. After returning home from meeting the Emperor and getting assigned to work with Commander Kraze Miles (just look at that name), Gremio announces that he’ll be serving dinner soon. You now get the freedom to explore the house and talk to everyone. If you go into the kitchen and try to talk to Gremio, you are given the selectable option to either A) scare him or B) tickle him, both of which result in a lot of stuttering. You can also scare Pahn, who is busy napping. Again, you can probably chalk this up to kids being kids, but I honestly didn’t remember any of this.

Your first mission sends you off to Lady Leknaat’s castle, to acquire some astral projections or something. To get there, you must meet with a spunky young Dragon Knight called Futch and get flown over on his dragon Black, which, I kid you not, sounds like an elephant. Oh, and speaking of sound, when you are in the menus and click on something you can’t interact with, it sounds a bit like a duck. Yeah, maybe Konami was limited for audio samples, but it’s pretty bizarre nonetheless.

On your way up to the castle, you’ll get a small taste of the combat system. It’s pretty standard turn-based action, with some characters able to unite for a joint attack or use magic spells/attacks via attached runes. The combat goes pretty fast, actually, and I like when multiple things happen at once. Strangely, there’s no fanfare when you level; you simply watch numbers increase. We’ve been spoiled over the years with games–both RPGs and not–making you glow, playing a tune, doing something special when you increase in level. I’ve also gone from level 1 to 7, gaining experience fast and not even coming close to falling in battle, save for the boss fight with the Ant Queen, where it’s mandatory, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

After speaking with Lady Leknaat, the next mission has you going to Rockland and then up a mountain path to beat up some bandits that are causing trouble for Rockland, a small town of impoverished and suffering smallfolk unable to pay the Emperor’s taxes. I spoke with one of the kids there and he flat out said that the guards hit him. Heavy stuff, not a lick of goofiness, so long as you ignore the cup minigame. Anyways, during an unbeatable battle with the Ant Queen, Pauly McDohl’s good friend Ted reveals he has some crazy dark magic up his sleeve to save the day. When you get back to Rockland, the mayor pays you, but then your helpless escort Kanaan takes the money, seeing as it belongs to Kraze; that small wah-wah-waaah jingle plays. Um. At least it wasn’t a dragonphant trumpeting.

Upon returning to Gregminster, Ted is requested to go to the castle while everyone else returns home to rest. A little later, just as it begins to storm, Ted shows up at the front door, beaten and nearly unconscious. Cleo suspects it might be “thugs,” a term I did not remember her saying or ever expected to come out of her mouth, but there it is. Turns out, the Emperor wants Ted’s magic rune and he risked everything to get away, so that he could pass the rune–one of the 27 True Runes, mind you–over to his good friend Pauly. We’re now hiding out in the local inn, looking for some way to sneak out of Gregminster without alerting the guards.

And that’s more or less the first hour of the game. I think my save slot says an hour and fourteen minutes. Some talk, some battle, some plot development, and a bunch of hard turns when it comes to tone and material. Either way, I’m excited to keep playing Suikoden, to remember what I remember, and to learn about the moments I clearly missed my first few times through it.

Not calling party fowl on Angry Birds Rio

Look, I’m not here to tell anyone that Angry Birds Rio is a great game, but sometimes it’s the greatest game for killing time or farting away on while you watch Giant Bomb be goofballs during your lunch-break. Truly, that’s the only time I’ve played it, generally in spurts of 15 to 20 minutes, which is just long enough for me not to get tired–or frustrated–at the mechanic of tossing birds and stuff and watching everything, hopefully, fall apart. If you’ll recall, I ended up playing a small slice of Angry Birds in 2012 via Google+, but this hot bird-tossing action is now on my Windows 8 phone.

Obviously, Angry Birds Rio is Angry Birds, but this time based around the 2011 Blue Sky Studios computer-animated film. The movie, for those that have not yet seen it like myself, goes like so: a domesticated macaw from small-town Minnesota called Blu meets the fiercely independent Jewel and takes off on an adventure to Rio de Janeiro with the bird of his dreams. Or maybe it’s based on Rio 2, and I’m not going to even bother looking up the plotline for that one. Let’s just assume it is more bombastic bird business.

Well, there’s the movie plotline. Here’s the game’s: Kidnapped, caged, and whisked away by animal smugglers, the Angry Birds escape the clutches of their bungling captors, only to discover a deeper purpose. Rare and endangered birds are being held captive in Rio de Janeiro, and it’s up to the Angry Birds to rescue their feathery friends by busting open their cages and setting them free. Hmm. Pretty much the same thing. Also, I love in a stupid way how they are simply and collectively known as the Angry Birds, as opposed to the Heroic Birds or Friendly Birds. Well, I guess in that first game they were murdering a bunch of pigs…

Anyways, you throw birds at stuff via a slingshot, and sometimes you tap on the screen to create a second effect, depending on the bird type tossed. That formula has remained the same it seems since the very beginning, so what does Angry Birds Rio bring to the table? Um, these things, which I copy/pasted this from the store description, hence the excited writing and hype:

• 6 fantastic episodes with 180 exciting levels, plus 12 bonus levels
• Completely new achievements
• Special hidden fruit trophies to discover
• Spectacular boss fights–the ultimate test of your Angry Birds skills
• Expect plenty more to come: Episodic updates continue throughout 2011

Well, I guess I’m like three years behind on this game, and it probably already has all the episodic updates in it already given just how many levels there are, as well as bonus stuff right from the get-go. Oh, and I just noticed that there’s button on the main home screen that does take you to a separate section of levels specifically for Rio 2. Ahh. So all bird bases got covered.

Right. So, those boss battles. From what I’ve encountered, which I think is just two boss fights so far, it’s all about luck. Whereas you might need a balance of luck and skill in several levels to get by, I was only able to defeat the bosses by blindly tossing birds and hoping for the best. It took many tries. There’s actually a solid learning curve for each world, which means getting three stars is quite challenging, often asking you to free all the birds–or kill all them monkeys–in one or two turns instead of five or six. I’ve hit a roadblock several times, forcing me to constantly try new ways of throwing birds; each level is beatable, for sure, you just need to experiment.

I have two worlds of levels left to beat in the Rio section: Smugglers’ Plane and Market Mayhem. And then maybe those Rio 2 levels, plus a bunch of bonus stuff to try. Spoiler: it probably all involves throwing birds at things. I suspect this will be another week or two of time-killing, and that’s fine. If I really need to keep scratching this itch, I’ll just remind myself that I also have the original Angry Birds on my phone too–it was given out for free one day as a special thing–so I can keep tossing birds and watching others play more fun games than me. Again, Angry Birds Rio is not the greatest game out there, but it’s also not the worst and serves a purpose in my life, at least for now.

Every mission repeatedly in Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions

It all began in Metal Gear Solid, right there on the main menu. Basically, you could take on 10 different tutorial missions all set in a Tron-inspired virtual reality that would teach Solid Snake–or rather you, the player–the ins and outs of being a sneaky, alarm-bypassing soldier. The idea behind this is that players were offered a chance to learn how to be Solid Snake outside of the game while not interrupting the main flow of the narrative-driven gameplay. Ironically, Codec calls from Mei Ling and friends during Metal Gear Solid‘s early hours would still happen, with them casually breaking the fourth wall to tell you how to save or crawl under a table and so on.

I found the 10 VR missions in Metal Gear Solid to be beyond easy. Even bland. I breezed through all of them without fault and then immediately found myself sad, wanting more challenge. Well, Paul, I say to myself, nodding and grinning and lightly stroking my somewhat out-of-control mountain beard, then I have good news…

Welcome to Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions, an entire game devoted to all things tutorial missions, as well as some of that crazy mindfuckery that we’d eventually really get to know Kojima for with the series follow-up of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. VR Missions is exactly what it says on the tin, adding 300 additional training missions for the stealthy gamers salivating for more. Oh, and if one finishes all 300 missions, “mystery missions” are unlocked, and there’s also three bonus missions where you get to play as the ninja Gray Fox. And some kind of photo-taking event that reportedly takes up your entire memory card. I’ll spoil y’all reading this now that I won’t ever see that stuff, as I don’t expect to cross even the 80% completion rate; as of this writing, I’m around 73% and really feel like I’m done with VR Missions, ready to move on in my Metal Gear sojourn to Sons of Liberty (the PS3 version with Trophies!).

VR Missions is divided up into four sets of missions, but only two of them are accessible from the very start: Sneaking and Weapon. Basically, you have to grind out access to other categories by completing a certain percentage of the ones you already have available. This often means playing the same mission twice, but now on a timed version, which is not very fun or even Metal Gear-like, but I’ll get to that in just a bit. For now, here’s a breakdown of what the game offers mission-wise:

“Sneaking” consists of 15 missions, most of which are lifted whole cloth from the VR training included in the original Metal Gear Solid. I ran through them in record timing thanks to having just played them recently, and then you get to repeat these same missions all over again in “Time Attack” form, “Socom” form, and then the dreaded “Socom Time Attack” form. For those counting along, that right there is already 60 missions of the much touted 300 missions.

“Weapon” tasks you with target shooting missions in 5 levels for each of the game’s main weapons. Yup, even C4. You basically take out both stationary and moving targets with a limited amount of ammo to chew through. Some are more puzzle-based than others. Then you get to do it all over again in “Time Attack” form, totaling 70 missions. If you add these plus all the “Sneaking” ones, you get 130 missions, nearly half the game’s content.

The “Advanced” section of missions is a little trickier, as you now have to use the game’s cache of weapons to kill guards and avoid alarms. Your only goal is to obliterate everyone, however you deem fit, which leads to more creativity than previous missions allowed. Unfortunately, before you can play the levels for the next weapon, you must first complete all five of the current weapon’s levels, which only got difficult for me when the Nikita and grenades were involved. Solid Snake is not meant to throw grenades, and I mean that.

“Special” is where VR Missions stands uniquely above itself, and it’s a shame that to get there you have to grind through all those timed modes and redundant missions. You won’t gain access to it until you’ve completed 50% of the rest of the game (around 150 missions). The first section of “Special” is “Puzzle” mode, where you need to use physics to knock off unreachable guards from platforms. Considering you’re using PS1-era physics, it’s not the easiest of tasks, but silly enough ideas. There’s some other stuff, but you need to be above 80% to see it, and alas, I’m not there. This means I’m missing out on the “Mystery” mode where you apparently solve Genome Soldier murders by examining rooms for clues. Oh, and those ninja missions, a fight against a giant Genome soldier (yes, I’ve seen the screenshot), and some kind of endurance run where you have to do like 10 missions in a row on one single bar of health, which I tried once and did not complete.

I was really excited about the idea of VR Missions and even enjoying everything early on, as seeing Snake leap triumphantly when you finish a set of missions was enough to fuel me forward, but as I quickly saw that I’d have to grind out missions to open up more to play…well, my enthusiasm dwindled. Especially when it came to the “Time Attack” forms of missions, which require Solid Snake to move fast and strike faster. He is a man that crouches, that crawls, that slinks around corners, so having him timed to kill X soldiers in X amount of time really makes you throw all that stealth stuff away and just run up to snap necks or pop silently with the Socom pistol. It’s certainly not at all how I like to play these games, and it certainly isn’t how the game was built; for example, try to crawl up behind an enemy, stand, and grab him, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

VR Missions is not the most visually exciting game, as it is the same virtual reality setup from mission to mission. Sometimes it is gold-colored, sometimes light blue. Might even get green at one time or two. Strangely, you can still see the cold breath of Solid Snake and the enemy guards. The music is fine if limited, and all the voice sample cues come from the original Metal Gear Solid, so don’t expect any new story beats here, unless you find hidden layers in how many times Naomi Hunter can say, “Impressive, Snake.”

Again, I’m disappointed that most of VR Missions is the same mission, but on repeat, and that the really crazy stuff is locked away for a long, long time. I might end up looking some stuff up via YouTube as I’m just not interested in grinding out those “Time Attack” levels. A shame, but oh well–this isn’t a traditional game, more like bonus DLC for those that really love these kinds of challenges. Me? I’m ready to move on to Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, and hopefully I’ve grown stronger as a Solid Snake–but not Raiden–thanks to VR Missions. We’ll see, I guess.

There’s just no turning back in And Yet It Moves

And Yet It Moves has been in my Steam library and untouched for a pretty long time. Specifically, since July 2011, which is when I got it and a bunch of other not-known-at-the-time indie games as part of the Humble Indie Bundle 3. Man, I can’t even make an estimated guess as to what bundle we’re coming up to now, seeing as that whole process has evolved from just the occasional bundle to weekly happenings and themed promotions and a store and bundles about books and music and whatever else you can think of. Anyways, And Yet It Moves is not the first name at the top of my list of Steam games, but it’s pretty close, which means I see it all the time when logging in to the client, so I’m glad I finally sat down and played through it.

Besides being a famous quote said by Galileo, And Yet It Moves is a puzzle platformer, one where you turn more than you actually jump. Let me explain. The game’s main nifty shtick focuses on moving the player character, represented as a colorful man made of paper with wavy hair, through an environment full of hazardous obstacles. At any time, one can freely rotate the entire game world with the left and right arrow keys, transforming walls into floors and moving things like boulders and broken branches out of the way. Your goal is to basically navigate the environment and make it to the end safely, and you’ll have to be careful how you turn the world as our little paper hero can’t fall from very high and ends up maintaining momentum even as everything around him shifts.

There’s no real story to follow or even a thin set-up in And Yet It Moves. You’re just this paper man, stuck in a rotatable world. That’s okay, honestly, but it probably wouldn’t have been too difficult to come up with some kind of conflict. Maybe the paper man wants to find out who made him, how he is alive, where this rotating power came from. I actually thought we were getting somewhere along those lines during the last few levels, where everything begins getting LSD trippy and unpredictable. Anyways, the game features paper collage-inspired visuals designed by Jan Hackl, which are a treat to behold and watch move behind and in front of other visual planes, and a beatboxing soundtrack performed by Christoph Binder that really becomes its own when the vanishing platforms appear, your jumps nearly timed to the drums.

I only ended up getting seriously stuck in one spot, where there is fire involved. Little ol’ me didn’t notice that the flames change direction as you tilt the world, so you need to position them just right to set other things blocking your path ablaze. Other than that, trial and error and persistence are the key tactics here. There are other game modes to try like time attack levels, but this never felt like the sort of experience one should rush, especially given how slow the main character moves.

Oh, and we can add And Yet It Moves to that list of games with fantastic, interactive end credits. It can stand proudly next to Vanquish, even if it doesn’t last terribly long due to the small staff behind it.

Let’s see, let’s see. So, from the Humble Indie Bundle 3, I’ve now gotten through two entire games–And Yet It Moves and VVVVVV–played Cogs for a wee bit, and have never even launched Crayon Physics Deluxe or Hammerfight. Maybe I’ll try to see what those last two are like sooner than later or maybe they’ll just have to be even more patient and wait a couple more years. I know, I’m so cruel.

Something continues to lurk in Deeper Sleep’s darkness

I’m not going to deny it–I still think about Deep Sleep. It’s a really short, browser-ready atmospheric point-and-click adventure game I played last year that, by all means, should’ve just been a thing that ate up a few minutes of my day and then disappeared into a void, not worthy to take up space in my actual sliver of brain memory devoted to gaming. Trust me, over the years, I’ve dabbled in a number of instantly forgettable yet fun, small games, just things that you experience for a moment and then move on. In fact, Deep Sleep inspired me to try some of that very popular “talk and play games” video stuff, though I’ve not really done much else with that medium since.

Anyways, Deeper Sleep is the direct sequel to Deep Sleep, where you basically find yourself stuck in a waking nightmare. The original game had a wonderful sense of atmosphere, a murky, pixelated look, sounds that could shake you still, and some highly tense action moments where timing your clicks was vital to staying alive. I really loved it, but never moved on to the readily available sequel…that is, until now. Also, this is my fiftieth game beaten in 2014, and we’re only halfway through the year, so we’ll see if I can break one hundred or not by the time that big ball in New York City drops.

In Deeper Sleep, you go to the library to investigate more about lucid dreaming, seeing as you are now obsessed with the subject. Unfortunately for you, the world dissolves, and you find yourself back in the nightmarish stomping grounds from Deep Sleep. This time, however, you get to learn a bit more of the world(s) and its inhabitants through a prisoner and his various dialogue options though, when I think about it, that’s all this prisoner is there for, so could be totally skipped or missed by some players. Regardless, it is much of the same pointing and clicking and scouring of dark rooms for clues or items that can help you progress. I believe the inventory system remains the same, too, so it should be familiar territory for many.

Overall, I found Deeper Sleep to lack a clear goal, which, let me tell you, is basically descend down the well in the woods and see the “to be continued” screen. And don’t get killed by the creepy girl in the attack. However, in the original game, you didn’t want to be asleep, and so your goal was to find a way out, a means to wake up. Here, you are probably not surprised to find yourself back in this maddening dream-world, and all you want to do is find out more about it…but where and how is never explicit. Once you are able to unlock the door to the outside woods, the game sort of becomes convoluted, having you wander this way and that, and there are two paths that are extremely difficult to notice, which made puzzle-solving impossible until I looked up a walkthrough to see what I was missing.

The use of items always makes logical sense, such as putting batteries in a flashlight and combining thread and the sewing needle, and then using them on key parts of the screen is easy enough to figure out. I just worry that a few of the locations are purposely hidden and shrouded in gloom to force the player to initially miss them, elongating their plight. This proved extremely frustrating, as I felt like I was on a good track for most of the game until I hit the outdoors and that empty flour bag puzzle and had no idea how to fix the bag without thread; nope, going back to the room with the sewing machine resulted in nothing. Turns out, I had just missed a path four or five times in a row.

There’s a collectible this time around in the form of scraps of paper, which ultimately make up one complete note. These are depicted as tiny balled-up wads of paper, often in plain sight, but also easy to gloss over. I got 14 out of 15 by the end of the game, so yeah…no idea where the last one is hidden. Either way, it’s a decent thing to collect that also tells us a bit more about these lucid dreams, but also a bit of a cliché in the survival horror genre, as I think you pick up notes in both Slender Man and Daylight, as well as a number of others.

While Deeper Sleep doesn’t pack the same punch as the original game, both in terms of scares and exploration enjoyment, it’s still a worthy, entertaining adventure to see through to the end, and I’m very much looking forward to the release of The Deepest Sleep, the last in the trilogy, in just a few days.

The Temple of Elemental Evil is full of deadly crayfish

Seems like Divinity: Original Sin from Larian Studios is the latest talk of the town this past week, especially over at Giant Bomb, my go-to for influence on trying out games I’ve never even heard of. It’s the newest and latest CRPG, which stands for computer role-playing game if you didn’t know, a genre that is not as common these days or, if it is, not as talked about. Evidently, the game’s developers used Kickstarter to help raise additional funds, acquiring over $1 million, a pretty hefty sum of cash that makes me think about just how much money Double Fine got for Broken Age, an old-school point-and-click game, another genre you don’t see in the spotlights these last few years. All it takes is support from fans, so let’s now get that Suikoden VI ball a-rollin’.

It’s been described as “hardcore overhead Skyrim,” which more or less means adding Dragon Age: Origins and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim together–you get tactics, you get openness, and you get a lot of content to devour. Alas, I’m not in the mood to buy a brand new game, even if it is only retailing for $40 on Steam, and besides, I have a massive backlog–hey now!–so surely I have something similar enough to Divinity: Original Sin in there that could quench my curiosity-limned thirst for the time being. And yes, I was right. Hello, there The Temple of Elemental Evil.

If you’ll recall, I played Icewind Dale II some seasons back, covering the first sixty minutes of gameplay for The First Hour. In the end, I liked the dialogue trees, but hated mostly everything else. I got it from Good Old Games during a  “buy one Dungeons & Dragons game, get The Temple of Elemental Evil for free” campaign. My first dip into old-school RPGing didn’t prove a great time, but since then I’ve played a few more really fun D&D sessions with friends and am more aware of some of the rules and restrictions. Plus, I promised to try The Temple of Elemental Evil at some point, so here we go.

The Temple of Elemental Evil begins, as all games did in in the early 2000s, with an epic CGI intro. It’s basically a big war scene, with wizards and soldiers and goblins and two-head trolls and even darker things amassing on the battlefield and fighting to the death, and it ends with some horrifying demon dude getting locked–and magically sealed–in a temple. If I was to refer to the game’s Wikipedia, it would say this, “An evil demoness founded a cult dedicated to exploring evil in its most elemental forms. This cult was based in a temple just outside the village of Hommlet in a vile shire known as Nulb. Soon, this cult rose to rule the region with tyranny and grim times of chaos and violence ensued. Hard-fought battles were waged and the war was eventually won by the good armies of nearby lands. The temple was razed, the villains were imprisoned, and order was restored. The temple itself faded into distant memory. Until now…”

Yeah, I never really picked up on any of that. Evidently, this is based on a famous Greyhawk adventure, using the D&D 3.5 ruleset.

But before the crystal clear story could start unfolding, I did the Tutorial section, a separate menu option. Here, the game taught me many of the basics, like how to walk, how to open doors and chests, how to loot, how to attack enemy rats, how to make friends and chat, and so on. Alas, I never comprehended how to cast Magic Missile, and so I died fast in a room full of zombies, unable to complete the Tutorial. On well, I’m sure not knowing how to properly cast magic spells won’t bite me in the ass later on. Forward, to the main meat!

Just like in Icewind Dale II, picking your party members is both the first thing you do and the most intimidating part of the adventure. I went with all lawful good people, three men and two women. I think they were all different classes, but two might have both been warriors or whatever you call those decked out in shiny armor. This is one problem I have with these large party-based RPG adventures–it can be hard to keep everyone separate, and it’s more like a mass of names and faces rather than actual personalities and such.

The very first mission has your band of merry men and women fighting off some bandits raiding a traveling caravan, and I did this with ease by simply clicking on them until they died. Next, the group traveled to the village of Hommlet, which is a quite sizable place. Here, we explored a bit, spoke to some people and got clues about other places to go, though our main mission is finding the rest of those bandits, as they kidnapped some women and children. I then mistakenly decided to look at the map and click on the Emridy Meadows, a place mentioned to me by someone in a tavern. Suddenly, my group began moving across the map, getting halfway there and stopped by a pop-up menu that said, “2X Crayfish.” I clicked okay and unfortunately found everyone in a one-sided fight against two giant crayfish. My team was able to take one down with extreme losses, and the second crayfish killed everybody left standing. Again, here is where it might have been handy to know how to properly cast magic.

Well, no problem, I thought, I’d just reload my save and not travel to the Emridy Meadows just yet, certainly not until my party has leveled up and gotten some better armor/weapons. Alas, no. Ha ha nope. Clearly I forgot I was playing a ten-year-old videogame and I never made a manual save during my gaming time, and the only auto-save in the list is right at the start of the fight with the crayfish. Thanks, The Temple of Elemental Evil. Though maybe I’ll try again. I think I just need to really play slower and pay attention more to every move I make. Again, I love all the dialogue, and there’s some pretty good voice acting here. I think I even ran into a Scottish bard in one of Hommlet’s homes, which is enough to get me to revisit this down the line.

That said, maybe I’m not ready for Divinity: Original Sin just yet. Or I should at least wait until the game drops in price or goes on sale. I don’t know how similar they are to Icewind Dale II and The Temple of Elemental Evil, but I also have a trio of Ultima games downloaded and uninstalled at the moment. Hmm. Maybe I’ll try one of them soonish if I get that itch again for some old-school RPGing.

Doki-Doki Universe may be irreverent, but at least it’s imaginative

There exist many great RPGs, like Suikoden II and Chrono Cross, and in these also exist little slivers of additional content lovingly called side quests. They get this name mostly because they are smaller tasks on the side put upon the hero, heroine, or group while they also handle much larger tasks like killing that evil dragon and saving the world. More often than not, a great side quest can outshine the main path; for instance, take a look at the “The Power of the Atom” quest from Fallout 3, which stands out to me more some six years later than all that water-purifying monkey business with your runaway father. Of late, I really loved London Life, a kinda large mini-game bundled with Professor Layton and the Last Specter that is all about fetch side quests and ate up many hours of my life.

Well, good news–Doki-Doki Universe is a game made up almost entirely of side quests. It’s basically them, plus a handful of personality quizzes which are not as mundane as they sound and can be quite enjoyable so long as one spaces them out between helping random planet inhabitants and riding coffee mugs with wings up into space. Y’know, be sensible about your tasks like that. It’s a lot of to- and fro-ing, but I always seem to need these rather straightforward tasks in times of brokenness, so I’m really having my fill. The game is a freebie this month for PlayStation Plus users, and I initially thought it was only for the Vita, but evidently it is a cross-play title. That’s awesome, and something we need to see more with other consoles.

There’s a story here and, just like Le Petit Prince, it is both sweet and sad. Maybe not as crude as that French children’s story though. You’re robot Model QT377665, but let’s go with QT3 for short. Turns out, your human family sucks and abandoned you and your balloon buddy on an asteroid. Flashforward 11,432 days, and Alien Jeff shows up to give you some bad news. Evidently, your model is getting recalled and scrapped because the company that made you apparently doesn’t believe it has enough “humanity.” Alien Jeff is assigned the task of discovering just how much humanity QT3 is capable of before reporting back to head-honchos.

And so off you go to different, humorously named planets to solve the myriad of problems people have–and animals and talking vegetables and sentient snowmen–to learn more about humanity and gain some perspective. Space is an open map of planets, and you can visit them in any order; in fact, you’ll often need to visit other planets for additional presents to help people with some of the trickier requests early on. Most often, QT3 just needs to summon a specific summonable to finish the quest; for example, someone on Yuckers desires a smelly item, and so QT3 just needs to make a pile of poo magically appear next to them. Quest complete. Others have you either performing a greeting with the right analog stick (waving, bowing, blowing a kiss) or throwing someone like a slingshot to a specific part of the endlessly scrolling level, which is actually a bit tricky.

Besides handling simple side quest after side quest, which despite how it sounds really does scratch a specific itch, there’s personality quizzes to take and email to read. Mmm I do love a game with email, and I’ve been tinkering away slowly at a Grinding Down post about why this is so; maybe it’ll make an appearance down the road. Anyways, the personality quizzes are cute multiple choice questions, with a quick summary of you as a person at the end. They don’t always nail my personality, but are surprisingly accurate the majority of the time. These quizzes are perfect to do before you land on a new planet, too. As you grow as a robot, Alien Jeff and friends you’ve made along the way will send you adorable little emails that are animated and colorful and keep those stories going a bit longer after they technically ended.

Not all is green and dandy in Doki-Doki Universe, as I have stumbled across some very annoying hard crashes and lock-ups. These always happened when QT3 would begin to pull up the multitude of bubbles that makes up his inventory. There’s also no great way to sort through all your consumables, a problem the closer you get to collecting 300, as you can really only view a handful at a time on screen, and so if you’re trying to hunt down one specific item, best keep hitting randomize or trying your luck with the similar button. The game will occasionally log me out of PSN, too, though I know not why and how. I might have also run into a glitch where you are supposed to return to the Home planet and speak with the red balloon; alas, for some reason, the balloon is high in the sky, and QT3 can’t reach it to begin a dialogue. Hmm.

Based on how many consumables I have and how many decorations I’ve acquired for QT3’s Home planet, I must be pretty close to the end, to seeing if this little robot that likes dressing like a lumberjack has enough humanity instead to save his steely skin from being turned into scrap. It’s not a long game, but long enough for me, and I’m looking forward to finishing it up and adding it to my never-ending list of games completed in 2014. At least this one should be relatively easy to draw a comic about, since the art is more or less on my level.

Gnoming the Minnesota countryside for more answers in Puzzle Agent 2

Look, I think Telltale Games really messed up in how they presented Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent and Puzzle Agent 2 to adventure and puzzle fans worldwide. They are not two separate games, but rather one cohesive story broken right down the middle, with some faux resolution to make one feel like they finished something when in reality, all they did was open the floodgates for further answers. Answers that would have to wait for a second go-around. If we could travel back in time and I could get a job at Telltale and confidently speak up during one of those early brainstorming meetings, I’d rename them as so: Puzzle Agent, Act 1 “Acer Eraser Chaser” and Puzzle Agent, Act 2 “Gnome Man’s Land”. You’re welcome, everyone.

But really, that’s just me being picky over the fact that these are clearly meant to be played together. One, then the other. I mean, I have no idea how anyone could play Puzzle Agent 2 and not have experienced the story from the first game and still understand what is happening in this dark, disturbing tale of disillusionment and dementia. Everything is connected, and nothing is hamfistedly explained for the player a second time round. You either know who Isaac Davner is or you don’t. It’d be like if the first act of Broken Age had been released with the full implication that it was, for lack of a better way to put it, a complete and finished product. People would have gone bananas-infused crazy if that had been the case, but granted, from what I can tell, the two Puzzle Agent games are small fish in the big adventure games pond. And what a shame that is.

Puzzle Agent 2 is more or less the very same game as Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent, with one pretty key difference between the two: difficulty. In the original game, I found many of the logic puzzles to be absolutely mind-hurting and found myself looking up answers online even after I used all three possible pieces of hint gum. It’s no fun getting stuck on a puzzle in these kind of games because it basically means you can’t see any more, and I felt like the majority of the puzzles were just too obtuse or unfair, though maybe the later Professor Layton games really softened me up. That said, I looked up maybe two to three puzzle solutions at most in Puzzle Agent 2, finding many of them almost ridiculously easy and simple. Guess you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

The strange story of a shutdown erasers factory and the Hidden People whispering in the woods continues on and on in Puzzle Agent 2, with Nelson Tethers returning to Scoggins, Minnesota to finish what he started. Alas, he has to use up all his vacation days to do so as the FBI believes everything is cleared up. Immediately upon arriving, Nelson feels unwelcome and receives a mysterious note that highlights the fact that many others have gone missing, not just Davner. Your first step is figuring out who, in what order, and why. Naturally, you’ll do this by talking to locals, running down dialogue options, and solving puzzles. It’s quite perfunctory and by the numbers, but it’s also really great and entrancing thanks to the tone, delivery of the voice acting, and Graham Annable’s unsettling art style. Seriously, there’s some fantastic dialogue here, especially between Nelson and newcomer (and potential love interest) Korka, and even more fun-to-watch cutscenes thanks to a bump in the animation department.

However, there was one puzzle that really disappointed me. It’s one of the final puzzles in the game, where Nelson is running from some people and trying to find a thingy. I believe the instructions were telling me to draw lines from certain floating items in a specific order to help keep Nelson focused on the task, but I failed every time, and this is one of the rare puzzles where you are being timed and have to act fast. I felt very confused from the word go, and I blame the instructions, as they weren’t very clear. I had completed all the other puzzles up to that point, so it was frustrating to see one slip by, especially that close to the credits.

This time, thankfully, when Puzzle Agent 2 ends, it ends. Though there is a postcard-size hint that maybe a third adventure, one not set in Scoggins, could happen down the line, but given that Telltale Games is now working on four episodic adventure games series concurrently…I doubt anyone is really pushing for more Nelson Tethers action. I mean besides me. Let me know if I’m not alone in this. Heck, if a potato salad can see rise to a great Kickstarter, why not Puzzle Agent 3: The Bermuda Bummers? Let’s do this.

The geometric world of Hexic definitely needed my help

Are you a cats or dogs kind of person? If you must know, I’m a big fan of cats. For proof, here’s my two furry critters: Pixie and Timmy. And I’m not just throwing this question out here for any ol’ reason, but I think you could potentially use that common question and apply it to videogames as well, such as so: are you a Call of Duty or Battlefield kind of fan? Crash Team Racing or LittleBigPlanet Karting? Or, to get right down to it, are you a Bejeweled or Hexic kind of puzzler?

For me, I never really played much Bejeweled save for a round or two on Facebook when I had a few minutes to kill and wanted to see who else on my friends list was doing the same. I’m a Hexic man through and through, and I’m fine with that. Heck, the game was designed by Alexey Pajitnov of, y’know, Tetris fame, so it’s got some serious cred behind its creation. Anyways, Hexic HD came pre-installed on my original Xbox 360–which is still operating since mid-2009–and I played it a lot. Almost like a friendless fiend. No, really. I would come home from work on my lunch-break to eat and instead shove food into my mouth as fast as possible while I dangled a controller on my lap and stared at a screen of tiles, analyzing the scenario and seeing which ones to turn next. Eventually, I moved away from Hexic HD as the remaining Achievements seemed nigh impossible to unlock, and they still do some five years later, but it remains a fun memory.

But Microsoft knows I’m still their unconditional, unwavering Hexic man, releasing a version for both Windows 8 and the Windows 8 phone for me to eat up. Naturally, I played the latter, and while it is far from perfect, it’s been a great little game to eat up ten to fifteen minutes every day as I progressed through all of its 100 levels. For those that don’t know how it plays, you are trying to rotate hexagonal tiles to create certain patterns and clear spaces on the board or create special tiles that have various effects. This time around, the mobile version sets different goals for each level, like hit X amount of points or destroy all of the dark tiles in X number of moves. It’s more goal-driven, which works in its favor for gaming on the go.

There’s also a bit of story, with a blue-faced tile encouraging you forward. It’s light and thin stuff, but it is nice to read some cutesy–if throwaway–dialogue between rounds and learn about how certain power-ups work.

Now for the negatives. Hoo boy.

Hexic is a free-to-play game that asks you, pretty frequently, to spend real money. Either on special boosters or extra lives. See, you get five lives–also know as five chances not to fail a level–and they refresh themselves over time. I think it’s maybe around 20 to 25 minutes for one new life to be gained. If you run out of lives, but want to keep playing and can’t wait around, well…the game has a store button for you. I’m not one to ever get involved in microtransactions, and let it be known that you can complete every level in the game without spending a real U.S. dollar; granted, I probably would’ve been finished with the game a month or so ago if I had, but there is nothing wrong with making something last. Patience is a plus.

The game also ends up crashing a lot, seemingly for no real reason. The first few times I chalked it up to how I was holding the phone and maybe I accidentally bumped the back arrow or something. Nope, not it. You’ll be doing well, making combos and gaining a high score, and suddenly you are kicked from the game back to your phone’s main screen. A straight dump. What’s even more frustrating is that when you log back in to play, the life you were just on is gone, and so not only did you mess up a good run, but you’re down one life. Knowing this also helped fuel my desire to never spend a single dime on extra BS because I had to now live and play in constant fear of crashes.

I haven’t uninstalled Hexic from my phone just yet, but I really think I might be done with my tile-turning time. For now. There’s maybe one or two more Achievements I could possibly go after, but the remainder seem to require some hard-earn money to get close to, and while I love Hexic, I don’t love it that much.

2014 Game Completed Comics, #30 – Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures, Episode 2 – “The Last Resort”

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Every videogame that I complete in 2014 will now get its very own wee comic here on Grinding Down. It’s about time I fused my art with my unprofessional games journalism. I can’t guarantee that these comics will be funny or even attempt to be funny. Or look the same from one to another. Some might even aim for thoughtfulness. Comics are a versatile form, so expect the unexpected.