There’s nothing zen about Koan’s keys, spikes, and fall damage

In Koan, you play as a rather impatient disciple that only wants to climb higher up the mountain and become stronger. The passive ways of your master are bewildering, especially all that sitting and meditating and thought-inducing speeches about patience and looking within one’s self. And that’s it for the story here, though I think there are hints of other stuff, like that off-handed comment from your master about…uh, killing Buddha if you see him. Yeah, no idea if that is going anywhere, seeing as I got as far as “The Dream of Effectiveness” level before my lunch-break ended.

At first, Koan seems like a simple puzzle platformer, but then you learn the power of meditation. Through it, after collecting little spinning circles of energy, you can create blocks in the level to act as platforms or climbing points. The trick is that they only last for so long, then returning to their energy form to be collected and used again. You use WASD (or the arrow keys) to move around and jump, but pressing S or down has the disciple sit. From here, you can use your mouse cursor to select where you want to place an energy-based platform, depending on the number you have collected so far. And thus, your goal in each stage becomes using these temporary platforms to make your way to the exit, without falling to your death or landing on spikes. Oh, and sometimes you gotta collect a key or not get shot by projectiles.

Initially, I found the controls to be pretty stiff and jittery. Unfortunately, that feeling never let up, with the discipline occasionally moving forward too much too quickly…or not at all, despite buttons being pushed. Thankfully, for the most part, you’re never in a rush, and the mellow atmosphere and soothing pluck of strings in the background encourages you to take the time to take in your surroundings and plan your course accordingly. A couple levels involve grabbing a key before it falls off into nothingness, and those prove the most troublesome. I’m not also convinced I grok the hitboxes for the disciple and things like spikes, as a few times I died though it didn’t appear like I had stepped on something bad just yet.

Visually, Koan is pretty despite occasionally looking a bit too…videogamey. Yeah, I couldn’t think of a better descriptor. I mean, the backgrounds look like pieces of traditional art, depicting city structures and natural scenes…but just that. Art. The watercolor backdrops clash with the rather obvious climbing blocks and shiny golden keys and doors though I do like the minimalist look to the discipline and master.

Maybe I’ll go back later to Koan and see if I can get past “The Dream of Effectiveness” level. Until then, I’ll just meditate on the key-falling-through-shot-glass puzzle’s solution and hope the answer appears before me like a puff of cloud, voiced by Morgan Freeman, guiding me onwards.

There will bee honey in Fright of the Bumblebees

I’ve been badly struggling with the cold weather this winter, and there are a lot of stupidly small and stupid–yes, stupidly stupid–details that I won’t go into, but to make a long story short, I’ve been spending a lot of nights getting into bed early beneath the heated blanket. While this warms me up and keeps me warm, it does take a toll on my gaming schedule, as I’ve had to let Tomb Raider and Spelunky and basically anything sitting on a console’s hard-drive in the frigid downstairs area sit idle until I can stomach the weather long enough to play ’em properly. Heck, even playing my 3DS can be tricky, what with my arms unmoving beneath a burning blanket. I know, I know…woe is me.

And so I thought, “What videogames can I play in bed on my laptop that don’t require a lot of quick reflexes and constant attention?” Certainly not a first-person shooter. Or an RPG with time-driven combat. Ah, yes. Yes. Point-and-click adventure games. Though not all of them. If I remember rightly, the ending puzzles of Telltale’s Back to the Future‘s first episode demanded fast fingers, but not to worry–I’ve got plenty of adventure games in my backlog to devour. Slowly devour, that is. In my Steam library, I have oodles, and I honestly don’t even remember when I got them, but the entire complete episodic series of Tales of Monkey Island, Sam & Max, and Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures are there, installed, just waiting for me to get into bed.

I figured the safest–and less demanding of them all–were whatever Wallace and Gromit were up to, and so I loaded up the first episode “Fright of the Bumblebees” and tilted the laptop balancing on my chest enough that my fingers could creep out from the stashed warmth and click around. Well, Wallace has a new business called “From Bee to You,” which specializes in delivering fresh honey to customers. After some less-than-stellar results with Wallace’s prior inventions, one customer demands that he provide fifty gallons of honey in repayment. Unfortunately, Wallace has used up all the flowers in his garden and is now forced to improvise an enhanced growth formula to turn regular daisy seeds provided by his neighbor into giant bee-feeding flowers. Alas, while the formula is successful at creating giant flowers for the bees, it also turns the them into dog-size monsters able to terrorize everyone.

It’s a very cute story so far, and Gromit makes some of the best faces at the camera since Jim from The Office. I’m not too familiar with the stop motion animation movies and previous videogames–though I did lightly dip my big toe into Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit–but it is a lot of puns and kid-friendly antics and consequences, with goofy-looking characters and colorful, charming locales. Oh–and cheese. And incompetent coppers. Anyways, the graphics are nothing to write home about, and either are the puzzles, but they are fun and logical enough to solve nonetheless, and the story moves along at a good clip, not wasting your time with too many pointless objects and unnecessary observations.

A couple complaints. While not as bad as in other Telltale products like Poker Night at the Inventory and The Walking Dead, the engine hitches for a second or two when transitioning from section to section. I also had the entire game freeze when I attempted to use the fast-travel map as Wallace. Also, while not terribly game-ruining, I wish you could have Wallace or Gromit walk to wherever you click, instead of relying on WASD or the arrow keys to get them investigating a room fully. Lastly, when you use an object on another object, if it doesn’t complete a puzzle, the item disappears from your mouse cursor, meaning you have to select it all over again if you want to use it on the thing right next to the thing you just checked. That might sound like I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, but it can be really tedious to have to keep selecting an item over and over just to see if it works or not.

So far, I’ve looked up a single puzzle solution–it had to do with cheese, so shame on me–and from the size of the walkthrough, it seems like these episodes are actually rather lengthy. Which is fine by me. I’ll keep nibbling away at Fright of the Bumblebees until I can come out from under the covers though I worry that the story is maybe too light and inconsequential to keep its stingers hooked in me for the other three episodes. Unless they are standalone-ish and all something else entirely. Only time–and the weather gods–will tell.

GAMES I REGRET PARTING WITH: Beyond the Beyond

Let me say this right up front: Beyond the Beyond is a terrible game, and an even worse RPG. I know this, you know this, and the world knows this. And yet, I still wish I hadn’t traded in my copy all those years ago, as it was one of the first–and maybe the first–RPGs I got on my original PlayStation, and since there was not a lot out there at that time, beggars couldn’t be choosers, and so I played Beyond the Beyond because I rented it and and paid money for the end product, not because it was fun.

Here’s how bad the story in Beyond the Beyond is: I had to look it up. All of it. Had to look up every single detail about the story out there because I couldn’t remember a lick of it. And normally, I can at least unsurface a detail or two, a plot twist, a character’s name, etc.–but nope, not for this one. I mean, that makes sense when you have plot summaries like this: The forces of darkness have broken an ancient treaty, and those who uphold justice and goodness must stop them from bringing chaos and destruction. Oh wow. That sure tells me a lot. Not like I’ve ever played a good character fighting evil before in a videogame. Well, we can get more specific: Beyond the Beyond is about a young apprentice knight called Finn who gets caught up in an ancient war between the Beings of Light and the Warlocks of the Underworld. With the help of a number of other adventurers, he is tasked with protecting the fate of the kingdom of Marion. As generic as it gets, unfortunately.

Prior to Beyond the Beyond, I had dabbled in some RPGs on the SNES, like Mystic Quest and Breath of Fire, and NES, but not enough to really know what to expect from another anime-style RPG from Japan that had been translated for U.S. shores. Yes, I wouldn’t run across a copy of Lunar until much later in life. But upon first looking at Beyond the Beyond, it’s clear that the leap from earlier consoles to the quote unquote power of the PlayStation 1 was more like a tiny bunny hop. Featuring discolored and uninspiring 16-bit graphics, the game was not a piece of art to gaze at. Remember how in games like Suikoden and Suikoden II when the action would zoom in during combo attacks and get extremely pixelated to the point of impressionistic? That’s what all the battles look like from the get-go, as evident from this blog post’s header image.

Combat. Alas, that’s the one area where Beyond the Beyond tries to stand out…and doesn’t. Things slip into 3D, with a “rotating camera,” and some light strategy involves maneuvering your characters around, trying to outflank the enemy or move somewhere safe. In truth, the combat is standard hack and slash, but turn-based. There was a system called Active Playing System (APS), which had characters performing secret moves at certain moments. Such as right before a character attacks or defends. Rapidly pressing a combination of buttons increases the chance of more attack/defense power though it was never a guarantee and did little to make the fights more exciting.

I don’t remember much about Beyond the Beyond‘s soundtrack…except that it didn’t sound astounding. Not for its arrangement, but rather the way it was recorded. Evidently, the game relied on MIDI format songs rather than pre-recorded red book audio, which made everything sound tinny and less than great. The soundtrack was composed by Motoi Sakuraba, with five tracks later being released by Antinos Records in May 1996, and it seems like those are much more appreciated than the original tracks.

All that said, and I’ve touched upon this in other iterations of GAMES I REGRET  PARTING WITH, I kind of want to play it again, today, in my current mindframe, with so much more knowledge about what games a good RPG and what makes a bad, bland one. I certainly hold no nostalgia for Beyond the Beyond, but I fear that I was perhaps too quick to judge it and write it off as unarguably terrible back then. I suspect it’s still absolute garbage now in 2014, but that’s only a suspicion, and I would like to actually confirm it for myself.

One aspect that I do appreciate about a sub-par videogame called Beyond the Beyond is that it opens up a thousand doors for clever wordplay, like “below the below standards of what a good RPG should be like.” If anything, we got that.

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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.

The hostile inhabitants of Yamatai have nothing on this Tomb Raider

As you all know, I have a sickness, and that somewhat imaginary disease is downloading videogames–both free and paid for–and then not doing anything with them for a very long time. Actually, this also applies occasionally to retail products, seeing as I got both Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection and Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story back in October 2013 and have yet to even crack their cases. Sure, I’ll install a game on Steam and check to make sure it runs, but that’s as deep as I go sometimes. I mean, really…there are moments where I feel catastrophically overwhelmed with content to consume, considering I get a free game a week on PlayStation 3 thanks to PlayStation Plus, two games a month for being an Xbox 360 Gold member, and countless titles on the PC from bundles or cases of freeware.

Well, I’m happy to announce that I fought back this week and immediately began playing Tomb Raider after it finished downloading–and installing further after that–and boy howdy, I’m pleased with the results. It’s one of March’s free games, along with Thomas Was Alone and Lone Survivor: Director’s Cut, and it’s actually only the second “traditional” tomb raiding game starring Lara Croft that I’ve played. Yup, I’ve played the original 1996 release–and beat it multiple times–as well dabbled with the co-op-focused Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, and now this 2013 reboot of the series. That’s it. A couple of the games in-between 1996 and 2013 did pique my interest, but many also seemed too unnecessary and too far from form, like when Lara was running around the Natural History Museum in London.

Strangely, while this new Tomb Raider is most definitely a reboot, it’s both close to form and far from it, as the focus is much more on QTE-lead action sequences and firefights than exploration, though some of that stuff is in there via optional tombs. The fact that the best aspect of an Indiana Jones-like videogame series is now partioned off to something secondary and missable is extremely depressing. But otherwise, I’m really enjoying it. My save slot says that I’m a wee bit past the halfway mark, and I’m focusing mostly on just moving from story beat to story beat, saving many of the collectibles for later after I’ve earned all the vital Metroidvania-inspired weapons which will give me access to hidden areas and such.

Well, here’s how a reworked Tomb Raider story takes shape in the current day and age: Lara Croft, an ambitious archaeology graduate with theories on where the location of the lost kingdom of Yamatai is, has convinced the Nishimura family—descendants from the Yamatai—to fund an expedition in search of the kingdom. The expedition eventually ventures into the Dragon’s Triangle, east of Japan, but the ship is suddenly struck by a violent storm and shipwrecked, leaving the survivors stranded all across an isolated island. Well, maybe not as isolated as initially expected, as Lara begins searching for her friends and stumbles across other inhabitants and a trend for nasty shipwrecks and plane crashes. No longer is Lara simply a rich archaeologist out for personal gain; she is young, naive, fragile, acting out of instinct rather than planned aggression, and it works…for the most part. That is, until it becomes a videogame again.

While billed as open-world gameplay, Tomb Raider is surprisingly linear, with sections of the map broken up by hidden loading sequences of Lara crawling under something or through a stretch of cave. Once in a section, there is some room to explore and find XP-giving collectibles, salvage, and crates of ammo, but the story path is always straightforward, from one place to another, and there’s usually no chance to tackle a scenario in a different manner. Much like in Mass Effect, you’ll arrive in areas where you’ll instantly know a shootout is about to go down, given the number of cover pieces and layout. Despite being all sad about killing a deer and reluctant to fire a weapon anymore, Lara Croft is a killing machine. An absolute sociopath when it comes to QTE kills and arrows to the head. Sadly, a lot of the gunfire moments force you to constantly keep Lara behind some kind of cover, so a lot of the melee moves and shotgun blasts are not utilized. But the bow is pretty awesome, especially once you can start lighting your arrows aflame.

I do have more to say about the distinct disconnect between Tomb Raider‘s story and its gameplay, but might save that for another post. I mean, you can’t watch Lara grimace at gutting a deer for food when she goes on in the next scene to choking a man out with her bow string, especially when you later realize that “food” is not a game concept and literally do not have to kill any other non-aggressive animals for the entire game. Ugh. Like I said, I got thoughts.

Oh, and there’s online multiplayer. Which I’ve not touched, and most likely won’t touch once I’m done with the story and finding the remainder of the trinkets, journal entries, and weapon-upgrading items left on the map. Looks uninteresting. No biggie, kids. That’s not what Tomb Raider is about, unless there’s a mode where you are each trying to grab a single item first before others get to it. No, no, not Capture the Flag. More like…Capture the Priceless Ancient Totem and Deliver it to the Museum for Zero Dollars but Some Career-pushing Recognition. Yeah, I’ll play that.

Showing off my cultural superiority in Civilization Revolution

Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution is one of the two free games Gold members get this month on the Xbox 360. It’s not particularly shiny or new, releasing back in June 2008 for all the expected systems from that time period, meaning the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo DS, and iThings. It’s a simplified turn-based strategy game that mixes historical figures and cartoonish graphics in a fairly addicting manner, seeing that I only played a single round so far, and that entire fight saw Rome dominating all the other cities after just under two hours of back-and-forthing it.

The truth of the matter is that I’ve never actually played a Civilization game before this. Hey–please don’t throw rocks. Oh, sure, I bought Civilization V back during Thanksgiving or Christmas last year when a crazy Steam sale was running, but I’ve still not loaded it up once. Okay, okay…maybe throw a rock for that, but please, not the face. Back in the day, however, I did enjoy a lot of time with Age of Empires on the PC, watching brainless grunts evolve from the early Stone Age all the way to the late Iron Age. I’ve previously talked about my dislike for many RTS videogames, but those are usually military-based and tower defense-focused, and I do enjoy ones more about…well, teaching a group of people how to read or build a stone wheel or harvest crops from nearby fields. Yes, in Civilization Revolution there’s still combat and a need to protect your city while also possibly attacking another, but you can also just grow in culture, money, and fame, and that’s pretty dang cool.

Now, there are four roads to victory in Civilization Revolution:

• Domination: Capture and hold each of the other four civilizations’ capital cities.
• Technology: Be the first to launch a spaceship and discover the planet Alpha Centauri.
• Cultural: Acquire 20 Great Persons, Wonders, and/or captured cities and build the United Nations wonder.
• Economic: Amass 20,000 gold and build the World Bank wonder.

As I mentioned before, my one game so far took about two hours, and that’s seemingly just how things go. You begin by building units and buildings and Wonders, and each of those things take X number of turns to be completed. While that’s happening, other cities are growing too. Some may befriend you, and others will grow jealous or angry or scared and declare war. You can stave off some fighting by giving other city rulers money or technologies you’ve learned, but it’s never a guarantee for eternal peace. So it’s a lot of small planning and waiting, and I eventually began working on a Cultural victory, building the United Nations wonder to cinch the deal. However, strangely, I didn’t get the Achievement associated to fulfilling this quest, instead earning the one for a Dominance victory. Not sure what that’s about…

A couple quick side notes: I find it hilarious that the Xbox 360 shortens the name of this game to Civilization Revolut’n on all of its dashboard menus. Certainly they could have fit the whole name on there, right? There have to be games with longer titles than this. Or maybe this was just Microsoft not knowing what to do with longish titles back then, seeing as they also ditched Sid Meier’s name too. Also, while this might not matter to many, a few of the Achievements in this game are worth odd amounts, like 3 or 9 Gamerscore; initially, I was freaked out by this, but eventually earned all of them odd ones to balance my Gamerscore back out to a nice even number. That’s just how wild and loose those early days were with the Xbox 360.

I definitely see myself doing a couple more rounds with Civilization Revolution, at least to try out some of the other cultures, as well as attempting some different win victories. Unfortunately, none of this will happen until the weather gets warmer and the living room isn’t painful to sit in for longer than half an hour. Until then.

2014 Game Completed Comics, #19 – Ben There, Dan That!

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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.

2014 Game Completed Comics, #18 – Scaling the Sky

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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.

Not defending the use of drones in Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy

I’d worry that throwaway on-rails action sequences at the beginning of the latest mysterious story are becoming a trend in the new Professor Layton games on the 3DS, but it sounds like Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy is to be his final adventure, and so that nips that theory in the butt. I kind of don’t believe this is the end for our top hat-wearing detective, but then again, Nintendo loves to ignore beloved characters from time to time. Regardless, these over-the-top sequences are jarring and contradictory to the series’ quirky charm–i.e., everything else–but shooting drones was at least more enjoyable and involving than guiding a horse down Monte d’Or’s winding streets.

But before I get to talking about shooting down drones in a child-friendly, cute and colorful Professor Layton videogame, let me first give y’all the setup. Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy is the sixth–and possibly last–adventure. The game opens with our constant prequel trilogy cast of Layton, apprentice Luke, and assistant Emmy Altava heading to the exotic locale of Froenburg, summoned there by Professor Sycamore to assist him in reviving a long-dead civilization. At this point, I’ve played an hour or so, and now know exactly what this Sycamore character wants Layton to help him with, but anything further story details are unknown to me. Unfortunately, some nefarious fellow–who I won’t name–and his goons are also hot on Sycamore’s tail, ready to cause trouble and steal things that aren’t rightfully theirs.

Which leads us to the chase sequence. This time, instead of riding a horse and avoiding barrels, you are piloting the airship Bostonius, in quick pursuit of he-who-will-not-be-named. To slow you down, you-know-who throws out drones to attack your ship, and you must shoot them down. Now, because this is a handheld puzzle game, you’re not pulling left trigger then right trigger to take them out. Instead, you have to figure out which correct drone to shoot through a puzzle, and you shoot them by dragging the cursor over the selected one and tapping on the touchscreen. Some sections ask you to select the one unlike the others, and another might have you tapping them in a specific order. I failed a few parts, too, but the action kept going, so this seems like just fodder, something to do during an action scene instead of simply watching a beautifully animated cutscene. In truth, I’d prefer the latter.

But really now, there’s just something so charming and comforting about these games to me that I can deal with a silly throwaway tapping sequence. The music is bouncy and less like Chrono Cross this time around, and I’ve gotten so used to the 3D models now and Layton and Luke blinking that I don’t even remember how it used to be. I also love the menus and everything in Layton’s trunk and each puzzle, which I never rush through, even if I can guess the answer right away. I guess I’m trying to savor each second.

And just like with Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask, along with all the puzzles found in the main game, you can also connect to the Nintendo Network in order to download additional puzzles. For a whole year. These puzzles are made available weekly for a year following release, with seven puzzles made available each week; there’s some new categories to learn, as well as a few repeats from the previous edition. I am not excited to the see “bounce the ghost light off the mirrors” puzzles back for another swing.

So yeah, I’m excited to see more of the story unfold, so long as there are no more pointless action sequences wedged between intelligent sleuthing and being thorough on every scene for hidden hint coins and special items. I suspect I’ll even be sad to see it all end.

See you next year at Festivale, Pavé

Everyone plays Animal Crossing: New Leaf differently, and that’s a scientific fact, proven by science. Or me just assuming. One of those two. Some people make a bee-line for each and every bell, in hopes of paying off their entire house before focusing on anything else. Others tackle one Public Works project after the other, sprucing up the look and originality of their town, and then there are those that put all their energy into getting every fish, bug, and fossil they come across. I’m all of those people at varying times, but last night I did something I’ve never done before in an Animal Crossing adventure–I grinded.

First, let me talk a bit about snowflakes and Snowmam. During the winter, you can build four different types of snowpeople by rolling specific-sized snowballs into each other. There’s a Snowman, Snowmam, Snowboy, and Snowtyke. Each gives you special pieces of furniture and wallpaper in their own distinct way. I went through the entire winter season never getting anything from a Snowboy or Snowtyke, but the Snowman plays BINGO with you, giving you something once you hit five numbers in a row. As for the Snowmam, she asks you to collect falling snowflakes and in return gives you a piece of Ice furniture. I did this for a while, but only got a few pieces before I lost interest in the tediously simple process and stuck with playing BINGO, which, while annoying at times, at least kept things unexpected.

Well, whatever. Winter is over, but only in Animal Crossing: New Leaf. There’s still plenty of snow and cold temperatures outside in Pennsylvania to argue otherwise. Bring on Festivale, which is a spring event that happens in February or March, depending on the year. It mirrors Mardi Gras and Carnival, a holiday celebrated worldwide. Pavé the peacock hosts the event in front of the Town Tree. As it is an all-day festival of color, costumes, and craziness, there is no snow or rain during the entire day. Confetti constantly falls from the sky, and if you look close enough, you can see colored feathers in the mix. Bring enough of a specific color to Pavé, usually three, and he’ll reward you with an item from the Pavé series of furniture. If you find a rare rainbow-colored feather, all you have to do is bring him one of those to get an item. Also, you can interact with your villagers to trade feathers or win them in mini-games, such as charades and rock, paper, scissors.

Now, I totally missed out on both the Harvest Festival and Toy Day due to the fact that both of those fall on the respective U.S. holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas, and that time is spent traveling and drinking wine and being full of food. By the time I had turned on my 3DS, the events were all over–which is a shame. And not. But it is heart-twisting to miss out on these special moments and the chance to earn some rare pieces of furniture. And so I decided to make the most out of Festivale as I could, running up and down and all around Arni in search of the specific feathers, trading when I can, and dumping not needed items on the ground to save inventory space. It’s actually harder than it sounds, as the feather drop rate–slowly falling rate?–is low, and you can never predict who has what color of feathers and are willing to trade. Seemed like any time I had three of one color, Pavé wanted three of a completely different shade. I’d say I put a total of three hours of devotion into this grinding task and came away with about half of the Pavé items for it.

Here’s a list of what I ultimately earned:

• Pavé Bed
• Pavé Bookshelf
• Pavé Bureau
• Pavé Chair
• Pavé Chest
• Pavé Closet
• Pavé End Table
• Pavé Floor
• Pavé Lamp
• Pavé Sofa
• Pavé Table
• Pavé Wall
• Pavé Clock

Grr. Waah. I think I have duplicates of the Pavé chair and table if anyone wants to trade. Otherwise, I gotta wait a whole year now to try again, and that stinks as I also happen to really love the look of this series. It has a sort of retro kitchen cabin-like look to it, with the blue and white. I’d save the multitude of feathers I still have in my pockets, but my storage space is actually quite limited as is, so I think I’ll save a green feather to wear and sell the rest. Oh well. Until next time, you beautiful picture of a peacock!

The Half-hour Hitbox: February 2014

Ahh, February–the shortest month of the year. As well as the snowiest, at least for 2014, that is. Last year we barely saw any snow, and this year we’re quadrupling down on that cause, and I have to be honest. I’m done. Truly and terribly. No quibbles about it. I’m tired of my car getting stuck in the snow, I’m tired of shoveling snow, I’m tired of walking like a penguin so as to not fall in the snow, and I’m tired of hearing nearly every day on the radio about the potential coming of even more snow. I really don’t mind cold weather, as I’m all about layering and being warm, but there’s a difference between cold weather and stress-inducing snow. Bring on March and green grass and the chance to not wear socks in the house. My body is ready.

That said, here’s a handful of games I played a little bit of this month.

Lyle in Cube Sector

This little indie thing from 2006 is self-described as a block-throwing action adventure game, and that’s exactly what it is. Lyle’s kitty cat has been stolen by some robed witch, and he’s off to rescue his furry feline. Unlike other Metroidvania games, Lyle doesn’t have a weapon–no whip, no gun, nothing. All he can really do is pick up blocks and throw them. Sometimes this is done to damage enemies, and other times it is to create a path from point A to point B. I had trouble balancing the timing of avoiding incoming enemies and picking up blocks, meaning I didn’t get very far, but it seems like an overall good package. You can grab Lyle in Cube Sector for free over here.

Under the Garden

Right. In this open-ended indie survival game, you are out in the middle of the wild nowhere, tasked with staying alive. You’ll need to eat, create shelter, find fire and essential tools, and so on. A bit like Minecraft, but the controls are kind of iffy. I ended up surviving for around 15 days or so, but gave up playing when I reached a part where you have to cross a body of water on floating crates, and the physics of everything coupled with the janky jumping proved too much. Without exploring, you just end up spending a lot of time standing around, waiting for something to happen. Most often, nothing does.

Pale Machine

More like an interactive music video, Pale Machine is kooky and crazy and completely worth the five or so minutes to go through it. You’ll do ordinary things, like brush your teeth, but also rock potted plants back and forth and stick your tongue out very far to cause some cereal-based chaos. The song is peppy and bounces around from mini scene to mini scene, which means you’re not doing any one specific action for too long. In fact, I played through Pale Machine a second time while writing this little blurb up, and it’s still a bunch of uninhibited fun.

Maverick Bird

Terry Cavanagh strikes again! Maverick Bird is a fan game for the much-talked about Flappy Bird, and though I can’t say much about the game that this draws inspiration from–remember, I have a Windows 8 phone–the concept is simple, but so very addicting. In Maverick Bird, you are…well, a diamond-shaped being, and you can fly up using the up arrow and dive down with the down arrow. You never stop moving, and so the goal is to see how far you get without hitting any walls or traps. It’s tough, but I like it, though I turned the music off right away. Despite the screenshot above, my highest score so far has actually been…17. Take that!

Monaco – What’s Yours is Mine

Yup, I bought the newest Humble Bundle, and got a handful of new indie games to play. So far, while I’ve installed all of them, I’ve only loaded up one, and that’s Monaco – What’s Yours is Mine, a strange title for a stealthy game about…well, cooperative stealth? I really don’t know. There’s some light story setup in the beginning about breaking a fella called The Mole out of prison, but that’s all I recall at this point. I like the aesthetics very much in this and the retro-ish graphics, though it’ll take me some time to get used to the lack of vision and fog of war. Lockpicking feels good, having you press against a door or computer for a short period of time to pick it. Rubbing ain’t picking.

Galaga Legions DX

I was drinking a hot toddy and getting buzzed and thought this would be funny–not fun–to experience a little on the tipsy side. Turns out, I was right. Maybe. Hmm, maybe not. I had no idea what I experienced. I was a spaceship, and I shot bullets, and a blizzard of colorful lights and objects filled the screen, and there was some crazy music bumping in the background, and I did this for a little bit until I cleared the first section of levels. Most likely never going back.

Payday 2

Hmm…this game is described as so:  an action-packed, four-player co-op shooter that has players donning the masks of the original PayDay crew–Dallas, Hoxton, Wolf, and Chains–as they descend on Washington D.C. for an epic crime spree. That may all be very true, but I still can’t get past the first mission, and if one can’t successfully pull off a jewelry heist, well…maybe a life of crime is not the right path to walk. My problem is someone in the store notices what’s going on too quickly, and I don’t yet know how to corral everyone away from the bank-opening action without alerting them or the cops.

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The Half-hour Hitbox is a new monthly feature for Grinding Down, covering a handful of videogames that I’ve only gotten to play for less than an hour so far. My hopes in doing this is to remind myself that I played a wee bit of these games at one time or another, and I should hop back into them, if I liked that first bite.