GAMES I REGRET PARTING WITH: Impact Racing

For all my gaming history, I’ve never really given a lick about straightforward racing games. You know, the kind where you pick a realistic car, drive around on a realistic track, and make realistic turns, doing all of this for a set number of laps and aiming for first place. I think the closest I came to owning something of this ilk was Midnight Club: Street Racing. Though a fuzzy part of my brain also remembers a Need for Speed title in the stack next to my consoles, but don’t make me figure out which one. Other than that, I pretty much stuck to car combat-style racers, like Vigilante 8, or free-roaming hijinks in Smuggler’s Run. Before those though, there was Impact Racing.

I absolutely know why I bought Impact Racing, way back in the summer of 1996–its cover. I mean, just look at the thing. It has explosions and speed and frickin’ laser beams coming right at you. It certainly stood out against other car-laden covers at the time, and yes, yes, yes, I know. One should never judge anything by its cover alone, but I was a doe-eyed teenager with illusions of grandeur, and so this just screamed stellar at me from the shelf. Alas, I don’t remember it being extremely amazing, suffering from trying to be two very different styles of games compacted into one offering. Still, I should’ve never traded it in.

Developed by Funcom Dublin, who also worked on the colorfully cartoonish Speed Punks, Impact Racing gave players more objectives than simply coming in first place. Each race boiled down to doing the following two tasks: complete laps before the allotted time expires and destroy a specific number of enemy cars. This made each go nerve-wrecking, and if you ended up focusing more on one goal than the other, chances are you’d fail by either a few seconds or exploded vehicles.

Since there are no pit stops or excursions off the course, the best plan of action is to floor the gas, obliterate every and any car drifting into your path, and make it back to the finish line before time runs out. Power-ups can be picked up for bonuses, like extra time, energy, or new weapons, though there’s also a nasty, almost Mario Kart-like pick-up called “flipview,” which, to no one’s surprise, turns your entire screen upside-down, as well as reverses the controls for steering. Avoid at all cost if you’re out to win. Either way, with this power-ups and the two somewhat contradictory goals, driving in Impact Racing is high-tension, all the time.

There are a total of twelve racing variations in Impact Racing via three different main tracks (city, mountain, and frickin’ laser beam-inspired space), and then mixed up through various modes, like mirror, night, or the dreaded night-mirror. At the time of its release, I have to believe this looked amazing. I have to. Unfortunately, now that I spent some time looking up screenshots and gameplay videos for this post, it just looks like a muddy mess, with strange, garbled textures and a less-than-pleasing user interface. Plus, we’ve all seen better sky-boxes. I’m sure as a teenager I looked past that and only saw launching missiles at cars, but it can’t be ignored nowadays. That said, considering you were driving armored cars at upwards of 200 mph, the sense of speed was nicely delivered, and a robotic man-voice gives you updates as you go. If there was a soundtrack, I recall nothing.

Has there ever been a game like Impact Racing in the eighteen years since it came out of the auto shop? Sure, there’s been plenty of racing games and a couple car combat games not called Twisted Metal, but I can’t seem to find many examples where someone tried to fuse both elements together again. Maybe it’s for the best. I guess the best I can do for now is to load up some Crash Team Racing, create a custom battle round, and blow up as many karts with missiles and mines while timing myself on the side. So it goes.

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GAMES I REGRET PARTING WITH is a regular feature here at Grinding Down where I reminisce about videogames I either sold or traded in when I was young and dumb. To read up on other games I parted with, follow the tag.

Don’t let Insidia’s dark creatures consume you

I really need to start spending more time perusing Adult Swim’s gaming subsite. I mean, previously, they blew me away with Winnose, a surreal puzzle thing blistering with catchy tunes and tricky riddles, and sort of impressed me at the start of Westerado, that Western tale of revenge murder and retro graphics. Plus, if I remember correctly, they are also behind Jazzpunk, a zany adventure game that I do have in my Steam library and hope to play both before the year is over and I have it spoiled for me on the Giant Bomb GOTY podcasts. Either way, they put out strange, unique experiences–“Too Many Cooks”, anyone?–and Insidia, while actually rather plain and straightforward, is still a solid half hour of fun.

What’s Insidia all about? Well, it’s about a traveler, who may or may not be a female automaton, who has to make an emergency landing on a dark, strange planet in order to fix her broken spaceship. Ten repair kits will do the trick. To find them, you’ll need to explore and collect several power-ups, like double jumping and moving faster, which allow you to access new parts of the map. There are also ten hidden areas containing switches to flip, and if you want the best ending, you’ll need to discover them all. Otherwise, the darkness will consume you, which is probably the same fate that fell on those skeleton in cages you are trying not to notice in the background as you move about.

Speaking of moving about, you can use WASD or the arrow keys to move, X to jump, M to bring up your map, and T to safely teleport the traveler back to the spaceship at any time. That last point is great, considering the spaceship is near the middle of the map, making it handy for cutting down on backtracking. I found both moving and jumping with the arrow keeps to be less reliable and switched to a letter key for jumping and had little problems after that. There are save points everywhere, but you don’t actually lose any progress if you die, so they act more like respawn points. You can totally collect a repair kit, jump into some spinning spikes, and restart four screens over with the repair kit still collected. I persevered, and after about twenty minutes or so collected all ten repair kits, as well as flipping the ten hidden switches, which allowed the little orange robot to lift off the planet free from harm.

Insidia obviously looks like a handful of other small, indie platformers of late. Thankfully, I’m a fan of this simplistic, old-school style, but it does try to be its own thing, with a sort of sketchiness to it. Seeing it and the monster designs in motion shows that there is great personality here, and a single haunting song makes up the whole soundtrack, shadowing your jumps with clinks and clanks and techno-esque bloops. It helps build ambiance. If there’s one nitpick–and naturally this is one I’m always going to gripe on when it comes to games–it’s that the text for both the intro/end cutscenes could use some serious editing, as well as the tutorial messages. Saw a number of spelling mistakes, as well as just strange wording, which is a shame as the cutscene art is quite cool.

Anyways, you can play Insidia right over here, so stop reading and make with the clicky clicky.

At least the cynical swipes in DLC Quest are totally free

DLC Quest is a bit like a song or movie that directly references something from the same time period it was created in, and it could be anything, such as an actress or a movie or a made-up-word-that-is-now-totally-a-word like YOLO; the more time goes on and things change, the stranger it appears. It becomes a firm, unmovable companion to the mentioned item. DLC Quest is obviously about DLC, but it references a very specific time in DLC’s early, burgeoning years, and so it’s strange coming to it after things have, more or less, calmed down. At least it’s a decent little platformer, if a bit simplistic.

The plot in DLC Quest boils down to a single sentence: defeat the villain, save the day. However, that’s not very easy to do at the start of the game, when your hero is stripped of even his most basic abilities, like jumping or moving left/right. To gain more moves, you need to purchase in-game DLC from a shopkeeper dude by collecting gold coins. Heck, there’s not even a soundtrack until you unlock it. This is the main hook, as well as the game’s satirical punchline, which you’ll absorb on loop. Each DLC pack is priced differently and has a short, amusing description, and the DLC, once purchased, immediately affects the game around you. Like the pet pack or sexy outfits pack.

The call to collect all the coins and buy every DLC pack, whether it sounds useful or not, is still strong. I did hit a lull towards the middle stretch, but then bought the Double Jump pack and was able to find my second wind, now having new places to reach and explore. The movement and jumping is not fantastic, but it works well enough; thankfully, the platforming isn’t too challenging. Alas, there’s a lot of backtracking to the shopkeeper, which is not fun nor made funny when non-playable characters comment on it to the hero. If this was a lengthier title, it would be unacceptable, but since this is a pretty short, bite-sized experience, I let the less-than-stellar bouncing and returning to the same dude slide and enjoyed my time exploring around.

While DLC Quest‘s main mission is obviously to lambast the idea of downloadable content, it also pokes fun at Achievements with an in-game system of their own called Awardments. Most of them pop with natural progression, but a few are tied to tasks like discovering a specific hidden hole in the wall or killing every person/sheep you encounter. I went after some of these, but not all.

So, here’s the funny thing: there’s another version of the game called DLC Quest: Live Freemium or Die! I don’t have it, but I could totally upgrade by…purchasing DLC for DLC Quest. With actual money. The very concept they are making light of. It’s not a big deal, really, just something I find amusing. Sounds like it is more of the same, with a new villain to take down and more DLC packs to purchase to help the cause. I think the Day One Patch pack is the funniest from the list I quickly scanned, but I doubt I’ll ever come back to DLC Quest.

It’s not a game I’d recommend everyone dropping their life to play right now, but it’s an enjoyable, wholly unique experience nonetheless. I can only imagine how bizarre it might seem in like ten years. Or 2087, when DLC has taken over Earth and is our new robotic overlords and they grind us up into data code to make new DLC for government policies.

The Young Master and Dunan Unification Army leader join forces

When you start Suikoden II for the first time, the game checks to see if you’ve previously played Suikoden. If you’re a good l’il gamer and still got save data on your PlayStation 1 memory card, you’re in luck. Well, maybe. Not that Konami tells you why, but there are plenty of bonuses to reap from already playing the previous game, the greatest being that you can actually get Tir McDohl’s son to join your side and fight along Hodor, Nanami, and friends. It’s a little tricky and troublesome, but totally worth the effort, as well as the short stroll down memory lane.

First off, here’s a really good breakdown about what changes can happen for characters from the first game that do appear in Suikoden II. It all depends on how far you leveled them up during your time fighting Barbarossa, but only if they were level 60 or above. There are other perks for starting equipment, runes, and weapons, too. Hmm. Given that I ran through Suikoden in twenty-ish hours and focused on only a small, select bunch of fighters, I really don’t think anyone got that high up. Sure, I could check, but that would mean removing Suikoden II‘s disc from my PlayStation 2, something I’m not yet ready to do.

Those stat bonuses aside, the real reason to let Konami know you played Suikoden is for the chance to “recruit” Tir McDohl’s son, aka the Young Master, aka Pauly (as I named him). And I say “recruit” in quotation marks because he does not actually count as a Star of Destiny, nor does he take up residence in your castle headquarters, but more on that shortly.

So, the soonest you can find McDohl is right after the big, multi-tiered battle with Luca Blight. In Banner Village, you can speak to a young kid called Ko who is dressed to the nines like some doe-eyed Hodor cosplayer, and this kid will inform the gang that someone named “McDohl” is staying at the inn, spending most of the day fishing. Well, except, in my case, McDohl is called PcDohl due to Konami’s extremely poor translation job. Basically, for each capital letter you have in your original McDohl’s name, those capital letters will be transferred into McDohl’s name in Suikoden II, replacing the original letters one by one. Much like I did with Suikoden‘s bad grammar, I’ve been taking a lot of pictures of wonky writing and translation problems for a big post after I’ve beaten Suikoden II. Stay tuned, grammar gurus.

Anyways, since I recruited all 107 Stars of Destiny before Suikoden‘s final battle and got Gremio revived (spoilerz!!!1!1!), both Pauly McDohl and Gremio appear in Banner Village. You then go on a short side quest to save Ko who got kidnapped by bandits, eventually ending back up in Gregminster and Tir McDohl’s household for supper. Now, I’ve written about what Gregminster means to me before, so returning to it was such a delight, as well as a swirl of emotions and desires. You’ll find Gregminster has changed, though not too much, and many familiar characters pop up, though it saddened me that former stars like Cleo and Pahn did not get new portrait artwork–or any portrait artwork, for that matter. The birds remain as skittish as ever.

From this point forward, you can add McDohl to your team for turn-based battling purposes. But only him; sorry Gremio, you drew the short straw once again. And you should add him. His unite attack with Suikoden II‘s main hero is impressively deadly, able to hit all enemies in one go, not causing either to become unbalanced either. It’s essential for survival in some of the tougher parts where monsters roam. But here’s the rub–if McDohl is removed from your party, you have to travel all the way back to Gregminster to ask him to rejoin you. It’s not a simple fast travel hop with the Blinking Mirror; first you travel to Banner Village, then have to go through the forest, then get to Gregminster, then back to through the forest, Banner Village, take a boat to Radat, and lastly fast travel back to HQ. It’s lengthy and annoying, and the game automatically removes party members at various points during the plot, so you can’t rely on McDohl being there all the time, when you need him most.

Still, it’s a special slice of the game, one to pursue when not waging war and very rewarding for those that put in the time and effort to get the best results in the original Suikoden. Since Suikoden III is on the PlayStation 2, and memory cards only work for their respective consoles, I don’t think any data or secrets from Suikoden II will carry over, but we’ll see. Imagine if they eventually make Suikoden VI (unlikely, I know) and you can have a six-character team made up entirely of the series’ heroes? Imagine that!

Ridding a lambent tree of every evil, parasitic creature

Originally, despite having owned a copy of Botanicula for a good while now, I was planning to experience it firsthand raw, in the flesh, during my Extra Life stream in this past October. However, when I went to load it up, something turned wonky with my streaming program and was not able to capture footage despite being able to capture other windowed games prior. Instead of sitting there and pounding my head against a metaphoric wall, I moved on to another title to keep the action hot, but always planned to get back to Amanita Design’s bug-based point-and-click adventure game.

So, what’s the narrative all about? Botanicula centers around a rag-tag group of tree-dwelling creatures searching for the last seed of their home, a giant tree unfortunately infested by evil parasites. Sure, this excursion sounds ultra serious and something the U.S. EPA could get behind, but there’s a great deal of humor to eat up thanks to the game’s zany five heroes and creative critter designs. For the first half of the adventure, the game’s environments and clickable bugs are bright and amusing (for example, the tambourine bug above), though things get pretty dark by the end, both figuratively and literally. Either way, it’s a straightforward story with a lot of personality, but few surprises–and that’s okay. It’s good versus evil, life versus nature, cute bugs versus villainous spiders.

Gameplay-wise, Botanicula is a puzzle game, one that often asks the player to think outside the box. That said, many puzzles simply devolve down to clicking/tapping on the most obvious of things on the screen (the bugs themselves, large plants, strange items) and watching what happens; generally, something happens. There is no in-game hint system or even text-on-screen guide to point players in the right direction, but the puzzles never got to the place where progress felt unmovable. Every screen has a number of tiny secrets to discover, too. My favorite section was about midway through the journey, when the gang arrives in a large village of problematic onion houses, asked to gather a number of birds to help run a machine. The puzzles here were sometimes isolated to a single house, while others gave you items to use elsewhere. Still, this is more a point-and-click exploration romp than an adventure game.

Let’s pause and talk about Botanicula‘s soundtrack. Which is astounding. The constantly unpredictable and tinkling audio is supplied by the Czech band DVA and is peppered throughout the game in numerous ways. Some scenes are interactive, with you making the music by bouncing on mushrooms or clicking bugs in a certain order, while other tunes are rewards for solving a puzzle or making some insect happy. It’s all very pleasing, except when it is scary, and then it is terrifying.

Last year, I finally got around to playing–and completing–Machinarium, which is truthfully no easy task. Some of those puzzles were absolutely maddening, and yet I couldn’t not solve them. Amanita Design’s games brim with color and character, not to mention colorful characters, and the switch from robots to bugs in Botanicula does little to change that hard-earned fact. I think I ended up looking up a single puzzle solution this time around, and it turned out I was on the right track to solving it myself, but just didn’t take it all the way there. Your inventory never becomes bloated, and it is usually pretty clear where you need to go or what you need to collect to move forward.

In total, Botanicula took about three to four hours to get through, and I ate it up in a single sitting over the Thanksgiving break while enjoying some quiet time down at my father’s place in South Jersey. As you go along and encounter all the various friendly/non-friendly insects, you collect animated cards of them; if I had been playing a Steam version, I think those are all related to Achievements. Anyways, I didn’t collect them all by the time the credits rolled, but I got enough to open up two bonus menu items after completing the game. I might YouTube what you get for collecting all the cards. Either way, I’m so glad I finally got around to ridding this tree of evil bugs; it was an odd little trip, but without a doubt memorable.

Aimless and without answers, that’s Amihailu in Dreamland

I…don’t really know what to make of Amihailu in Dreamland. That’s not just me being stumped criticually and creatively, but also intellectually. I put about fifty minutes into this exploration-based puzzle game, and I still have no idea what I was ultimately doing other than walking around, interacting with everything I could, and then backtracking to see if I missed something along the way. The game refuses to tell you what to do, where to go, what’s missing, and in this age of Dark Souls and Paper Mario: Sticker Star I applaud that; however, it has gotten to the point that, unless I want to watch a video of someone else playing, I can’t continue on into the darkness.

Here’s how Noyemi K, the game’s creator, describes it:

Amihailu is a recent graduate of the Bromnian Military Academy. She recently came home from vacation with her friends and decides to take a rest because her parents are out. What follows is the strangest, most vivid dream she’s ever had! Amihailu and all her friends find themselves embarking on a strange and twisted adventure in a world where things aren’t at all what they seem and nothing makes any sense!

Yup, nothing makes any sense! That much I grokked. But when it comes to dreamlands, everything is meant to be interpretive and obtuse, so that comes with the territory. Do I really need to understand why touching a painting teleports Amihailu to another part of the map? Or why she keeps running into friends of hers that want nothing to do with her? I learned to not question much in Remember Me or Link’s Awakening, and so I have to do the same here, though without a dash of reality to reference it can be hard to separate the zany from the sane.

The main meat of Amihailu in Dreamland is puzzles and solving them yourself, whether through logic or the use of a specific item, but there’s also an RPG-esque stat screen for Amihailu with details for HP and strength, which initially gave me hope that there would be some turn-based combat. Alas, doesn’t look like it–unless it pops off later on–and I guess it is just part of the program used to create the game, that it has to be there. I keep expecting random battles in these retro-looking exploration tours, and they keep not happening. Good thing I’m still eating up Suikoden II at the moment.

There’s not much out there in terms of walkthroughs, but I tried to follow along with this “spoiler-free” guide, but couldn’t figure out step seven of the first section of the game where you have to find a tension wench from, and I quote, “the purple area.” And so, I wake up, back to the land of the living, to write about Amihailu in Dreamland here at Grinding Down and never to learn what that wood block (cedar) in my key items list was meant for. Oh well. Twas only a dream.

Five blue shards are at the heart of The Stoneville Mystery

It’s easy to compare the opening of The Stoneville Mystery to A Link to the Past‘s start, given that both occur on a dark, stormy night, with our leading lad waking up to investigate a disappearance. For Link, it was following after his uncle and listening to Princess Zelda’s telepathic call. In The Stoneville Mystery, young Johnny wakes up to find his father’s bed empty. Out he goes, into the rain, into the land of blue filters and loud crashes of thunder, to do some fetch quests, read a few books, and bring peace back to nature. All without a single sword swipe, too.

You control Johnny from a three-quarters overhead perspective with the [WASD] keys, using [Z] to interactive with anything he can press against. Most of the descriptions are fairly simplistic, but a few are humorous, and a couple of spots need to be interacted with to get a specific item to help you progress, so I then ended up examining everything to ensure I missed nothing. It’s a gamer’s problem, y’know. You do have an inventory (that is too large considering you never acquire more than two rows’ worth of items), as well as the power to save anytime, anywhere. As you explore the town and the western forest area, you’ll meet a handful of characters, all who seem to serve a purpose save for one pirate and the girl fishing in the middle of a thunderstorm. I liked the inclusion of the creepy witch, who went about her potion-brewing in very gray territory, but all good fairytales are brimming with darkness. Did you know that in the original version of Snow White, the Queen is forced to don hot iron shoes at the end and dance until she drops dead? Yeah, Disney altered that a smidge.

The Stoneville Mystery is a straightforward fairytale about angry woodland spirits. It eventually boils down to Johnny collecting five blue shards which can then be created into a hearthstone and returned to its proper place in the temple. Once you do that, the game ends abruptly, though it has a cute bit of credits to go through afterwards. I found the puzzles to be varied enough, but nothing too challenging. You have to avoid monsters, activate statues in a specific order, give people the item they most need, and acquire enough gold to buy that silver key from the lingering town merchant. You can’t get stuck or screw yourself out of moving forward. The game takes place over a couple of large areas, as well as indoors, and I really like hearing the thunderstorm muffled while inside the warm, well-lit inn. Just felt really good.

I enjoyed The Stoneville Mystery at a laidback pace, interacting with everything I could while drinking my evening fill of two cups of coffee. I saved three times total and saw the “game over” screen twice, once from a flame spirit and the second from an angry skeleton I was not prepared for. If you have around thirty minutes to kill and a fondness for sprite-based exploring, I recommend it. You can download a free copy of the game here.

Dakota Winchester’s Adventures are everything save adventurous

Over the years, I’ve occasionally dabbled in a few “mouse only” point-and-click adventure games from the people at Carmel Games, namely Habla Kadabla and a few others that I never got around to writing about. They all share a very similar style, both in terms of art, humor, and puzzles, and while none so far have been anything to drop one’s jaw at, they can periodically be enjoyable and an okay way to kill thirty minutes. Not amazingly great, not terribly offensive–just these strange, small adventure titles that ask you only to click and exist in what I imagine as some kind of shared universe, where everyone stands stiffly forward, eyes wide open, voiced by one singular, ultimate power.

So, why’d I pick the subject of today’s blog post to experience? It had to be that Dakota Winchester is clearly trying to ape Indiana Jones, and any time that happens I just have to see how it goes. I mean, Indiana Jones, at least for me, made archeology exhilarating and cool, rife with danger and discovery. And before you weigh in on the current state of Doctor Jones, no, I’ve not seen (and probably won’t ever see) Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, though I did play the LEGO videogame based on the film, which wasn’t terrible. Mostly due to LEGO figs.

Anyways, in the first leg of this episodic journey, intrepid Dakota Winchester travels to some island via Gustavo Cruises in hope of solving the mystery behind Hilda’s box, which is rumored to contain the secret of eternal life. However, in order to open it, he first has to find three unique rubies scattered across the globe. To do this, you speak with people, collect items, and use items on other items/people to make things happen. The main goal here is that Winchester needs to find two rings to open up a temple door, and it’s all straightforward stuff until the final puzzle, where I wasted at least five minutes not realizing there were additional layers on the rotating ring that could be moved. The “To Be Continued…” screen popped up after 21 minutes.

The second episode has a much fuller title of Dakota Winchester’s Adventures Part 2: Cactus City. That means the first episode should probably have been called something like Part 1: Gustavo Cruises or Part 1: Temple of Ring Doom. I don’t know. I’m a stickler for consistency. Anyways, this one only took me 12 minutes to find the second of three plot-vital rubies, and the gameplay structure remains the same. However, there’s one part where you need to find a pickaxe through a bunch of steps to hit a rock in a mine, but if you look in the background art for that very same mine…you’ll see a pickaxe inside a cart. Naturally, you can’t simply click on that one; a strange shortcoming.

According to the credits, James Kaylor handled the voiceover work. All of it. Yes, even the female characters, which you can hear instantly as a man trying to pitch his voice higher to speak like one of those newfangled women in their super screechy tinny talk. I can understand the difficulties in finding additional actors to help record lines, but maybe the better idea is to have it be text-only, which could use a fair shake of copyediting. Sure, you can turn the audio off, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore the fact that it sounds extremely amateurish and is there from the start. Some of the music from the first two episodes comes from Kevin MacCleod–remember that awesome soundtrack from 400 Years?–so that’s at least pleasant to absorb. The background art is pretty good, too.

I have to assume there will be a third episode down the line to unearth the third ruby and see what’s ultimately inside Hilda’s box. I don’t suggest anyone play to see what happens, but I’m now at least curious enough to want to know. Maybe sooner than later I should actually play the Indiana Jones point-and-click adventure game in my collection. Y’know, the one called Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Hmm. We’ll see.

Careful cooking is love and a minigame in Suikoden II

They say that the loveliest thing you can do for someone is cook them a meal. Alas, I’ve never been a great chef. My culinary skills sit somewhere between a good bowl of ramen noodles and a tasty tofu stir-fry with diced up vegetables. Over the summer, I learned how to make a fantastic cucumber salad. But here’s a shocker; I’ve never baked anything in my thirty-one years of life–not a cookie, not a cupcake, not a pie. There’s too much exact science involved in baking, and that terrifies me. Plus, I’m always worried that because I have such low standards for food that what I might think is amazing someone else might view as disgusting, and then I’d hate for them to consume it. In short, this has resulted in an adult life where I do very little cooking for others.

Anyways, how does all this relate to Suikoden II? Well, if you explore your castle headquarters enough you’ll eventually stumble across a man named Hai Yo, who is looking to open up his very own restaurant. Naturally, Hodor thought Dah Castle would be the best place for this because we obviously see so much foot traffic. With Hai Yo now an official member of the Dornish Army, the restaurant is magically put together instantly. Oh, and all those recipes you’ve been collecting so far and throwing in the warehouse for storage can finally be put to good use. As you visit him, you’ll kickoff a lengthy minigame-heavy side quest about Hai Yo and other touring chefs that want to compete against him. Don’t worry; Hodor is deeply involved as his sous chef.

Each cooking competition in the still-very-serious Suikoden II starts out the same way, with you visiting the restaurant to find Hai Yo in the midst of a confrontation. Almost resembles a playground fight, with a circle of people gawking. Hai Yo’s opponent will challenge him to a cooking contest. You then have the option to jump to it or delay while you search for more recipes/ingredients. At this point, I’ve only done one cook-off, but I was so excited to get to this moment and re-experience the wonder and weirdness of it all that I just can’t stop the words leaking from my fingertips.

Hai Yo’s first rival chef is the unfortunately named Yu Kum. There’s a little introductory scene wherein the chefs are announced in a boxing match manner, though Dah Castle’s cook gets some wicked strobe lights, and then the panel of judges is revealed. There are four of them, and they are randomly selected from your group of thus-far collected 108 Stars of Destiny. They are not simply pretty faces though, as each judge does have a food preference, which correlates to how they ultimately score everything. For the Hai Yo/Yu Kum fight, I think my judges were Gengen, Nina, Gilbert, and Ellie. This random element keeps each competition up in the air, so to speak, as you never know who will judge and what they prefer to eat.

After the judges are revealed, Hodor must select an appetizer, a main course, and a dessert from your growing collection of recipes. You can add spices to each recipe to turn them into something else. For example, a salad with salt turns into pickled cabbage. The true secret to winning is as so: first, pick dishes that have a high “deliciousness” rating, and second, remember that Suikoden II was written with the Japanese palate in mind. While a simple bowl of ice cream as a closer might make sense in an American mind-frame, it might not in Japanese culture.

Once you are done making your choices, sit back and watch Hai Yo and Hodor go to work. You can also watch the rival chefs too, but I prefer the former. There’s some really solid animation work here, much of which is particular to the dishes you selected. There are a few meters on the side of the screen showing you how long something is taking to cook, but you can’t interact at all. Then the judges taste the courses and score accordingly, with a final tally tossed up at the end of dessert. I beat Yu Kum by about eight points, earning me his trusted tomato soup recipe.

In spite of it really just being a bunch of menu selections and astute attention to detail, the cooking mini-game is not very interactive. Still, it is a ton of fun to go through, and I’m looking forward to the next competition, as well as gathering some more ingredients and recipes. You can even have Hai Yo make you dishes to use in battle, some with strong effects. I just don’t anticipate having to do that fishing mini-game again, but I know, at some point, I have to. Ugh. Animal Crossing: New Leaf and Disney Magical World have spoiled me on simple, satisfying fishing gameplay, and everything else is too archaic to grok. But how else will I make that delectable salmon dish glazed with soy sauce and brown sugar?

Rogue Legacy’s castle of chance keeps on giving

I don’t completely understand how this happened, but this is the first post I’ve dedicated to writing about Rogue Legacy, despite playing it off and on for the last few months. I mean, generally, save for some exceptions, I write about every game I’m playing–at least once. And yet, Rogue Legacy never really got in the spotlight despite accidentally eating up a few hours of my Extra Life stream; hey, it’s rather addicting. It’s also completely different than Rogue Galaxy, an awesome Level-5 JRPG for the PlayStation 2, but with both names being oh-so-similar I think I mixed them up a bunch when speaking. My bad. This post will now only be about the indie platform game with rogue-like elements, not the one starring a young, rebellious Jaster Rogue.

Rogue Legacy from Cellar Door Games is an indie platform game heavy on giving you one chance to win. Its biggest hook is that you are constantly playing as the child of the character you last played as, often gaining some of the previous parent’s traits while showcasing new ones. These greatly affect how you explore the randomly generated castles, as some traits, like blurry vision, only let you see so far ahead, while others, like two left hands, change the direction you normally cast spells in. There are also many other traits that have little to no impact on gameplay, just there for decoration. My personal favorites are dwarfism and ADHD, meaning you are both small and fast. Couple that with a good spellcaster, and enemies drop like flies as you zip on through.

While the early deep-dives into Rogue Legacy feel a bit aimless, there is an overarching goal to achieve: defeat four bosses, which unlocks that large door at the start of the castle, wherein you’ll find the final boss. However, beating those four bosses is no easy task. At this point, I’ve taken down one, namely Khidr, the Gatekeeper, in the opening section of the randomly construed castle, and that was only after something like 50+ deaths and enough money to level up my heir to fighting status. Khidr is difficult because it has a projectile attack that spirals around its eyeball body, and there are spikes on the floor to avoid. I did encounter Ponce de Leon, the Sentinel, in the Maya zone, but got my assassin butt handed to me swiftly.

The truth of the matter is that every run is actually more about getting as much gold as possible rather than taking on bosses before you are ready for ’em. All upgrades cost gold, and usually it is a hefty amount–think 500 and higher, at least. Plus, as far as I can tell, the prices continue to increase as you grow in skill. Whatever gold you don’t spend on upgrading the castle can be spent before heading inside. There’s an armorer for weapons/gear and an enchantress for runes, as well as a dude that will lock the previous castle’s layout for you for a price, though it does repopulate with enemies. You have to give up the remainder of your gold before venturing into the castle, though there is an upgrade path to go down that lets you keep a small percentage of it. Regardless, get that gold and upgrade each and every time you die.

Not everything in Rogue Legacy is fascinating. The “story” is told through sporadic journal entries you randomly stumble across, and even then, they aren’t the most exciting or illuminating to read. You’ll occasionally come across a statue in the castle, which you can pray to for assistance, often giving you a bonus ability for that single run; however, unless you know what each power-up is already, there’s no way to know what you got. It’s kind of The Binding of Isaac in that respect. There are also Fairy Chest and special rooms that are purposely difficult or obtuse to solve. Still, even in light of that, it is an internal struggle to not keep playing, to not make one more attempt at that boss or get enough gold for that vampire-themed cape that restores HP with every enemy kill.

Strangely, Rogue Legacy is a game I can play for hours, but I actually load it up rather infrequently. Part of that might be my brain warning me not to lose an entire night to castle raiding, I don’t know. I’m sure I’ll get back to it soon enough, and each run is progress, whether it is getting a new weapon to buy or a permanent upgrade to your MP or actually killing a mini-boss. I’ll get through this in due time. Heck, that’s what genealogy is all about.