PlayStation Plus Catch-Up: Fall 2015.

Aha! See, it WASN'T months before I wrote another blog! Only been a week, actually. I think. Unless I got distracted and this is posted later than I planned, and I forgot to edit this part out, which is totally something that I would do.

As you likely guessed, I'm back to doing PS+ Catch Ups! As is always the case, I've not played every game that's been "free" on PS+. I still don't have a Vita, and I certainly don't want to go through the process of downloading and installing certain games on my PS3, especially when I know I'm not going to play them more than a few minutes just to say something dumb about them.

Actually, speaking of the PS3, with Yakuza 5 actually coming out tomorrow (again assuming I post this when I originally intended), and that (hopefully) being the last "new" PS3 game worth playing, I could see a future where I don't have a PS3 hooked up to my TV any more. But that's also a dark future because the PS3 is still the only way I have to play Burnout Paradise and Pacman Championship Edition DX. We all know the PS4 is never getting the ability to play PS3 games. At least not without streaming through a laggy service or having to pay way too much.

I wasn't going to get into this, but $15 for PS2 games? You go through the trouble to get the emulation working and what you do is charge $10 or $15 for old PS2 games? Like, I get that you want money, and for all I know there's a variety of reasons why it isn't what people want (being able to just put in a PS2 disc and play the game), but this is still kind of a crappy move. Especially when the competition is doing it better.

Sorry, I wasn't intending to actually write about that, but I just wish Sony would do backwards compatibility right because I want to play Burnout Paradise on my PS4! I guess I should just stop hoping and complaining about things that'll never happen, huh?

Oh well. Onto the games, I guess. If I was smart, I'd have figured out some logical order for these games, but instead the order is probably just whatever I thought of first before I actually went and checked to see what PS+ games I've played since the last of these blogs.

Broken Age.

Actually, I decided to start with Broken Age so I could get all the negativity (or most of it) out early. Which is probably a good way to let you know what I thought about the game. Not that that's totally accurate, because I did enjoy a fair amount of the dialog stuff, and ended up getting at least somewhat invested in the story. You know, the parts of Double Fine games that are usually fairly good because those people are good at making charming and endearing games.

I just wish Broken Age was a good video game. I know that some of my complaints stem from my playing this game with a controller when it was built for pointing and clicking with a mouse. I shouldn't be 100% harsh on the controls, because the game is functional, and the ability to move the cursor directly between interactive objects with the right stick is certainly useful. That said, I would have much rather had a button to highlight everything that's interactive, and had direct movement control, instead of having to move the cursor around with the left still and hit X on where I wanted to move to. I dunno, just something that would have felt better to my dummy-console-scrub brain, you know?

But the not having a way to see everything I could interact with brings me to actual criticisms of the game. I guess as it was originally advertised, Broken Age is very much like the point and click adventure games of yore where you have to click on stuff that you might not even realize is clickable in order to progress through the game. You might think that the right stick feature might alleviate that, but even with that, I somehow found myself in several occasions where the way forward involved simply clicking on a thing that I had no idea I could interact with.

The game also has nothing in the way of a built in hint system, which just meant that when I got stuck, I had to resort to looking up what to do online. And, especially in the second half of Broken Age, there was some stuff that I am one hundred percent sure I would never have figured out on my own. Let me give an example, but without spoiling the actual solution (mostly because I don't remember every detail of it).

So, there's this one part where you have to use a musical cue as one character to solve a non-music related puzzle as the other character. As someone with zero musical talent, and almost zero knowledge of how music actually works, this puzzle was literally impossible for me to solve, because it involves listening to something, and then transferring what you heard into a visual representation that is not just the regular musical note chart thing that I don't even remember what it's called. I should note that when I looked up the solution for this online, the guide I found did say that if you have subtitles on, it actually gives you written information about it, I assume because someone realized this puzzle would be impossible for the hearing impaired.

Also, the game defaults to the subtitles being off, and never gave me any reason to turn them on because all of the dialog was clear and easy to understand. At no point did the game suggest that I turn them on for help in that puzzle, or just have them on for this one puzzle because some people just don't understand how music works in the first place.

And that, I think, is indicative of my problems with Broken Age. It puts you into situations with either no clues as to what you're supposed to do, or not nearly enough to actually figure out what to do. In the first half of the game, this wasn't a huge issue, because most of the puzzles were easy enough for me to either figure out. Or I could brute force them by trying every random item I was carrying with every thing I could interact with (or every other item I had because they can be combined). The second half, though, features stuff that is simply too obtuse, and in some cases, actually requires enough timing that I messed up because I wasn't fast enough. And in a game where you're pointing and clicking on a controller because that was the version I was playing, it became a hassle. Not a huge one, and certainly not as huge as some of those puzzles.

But really, I think this game's biggest sin is that it doesn't even have an ending. After all the hullabaloo about the game being Kickstarted, taking forever to make, requiring more money (and thus the split into two parts), and the game does not even have an actual resolution to the events of the game. It just gets to an arbitrary point, then fades to black and credits roll. I tried to look up if there was something I missed, like an after credits scene, or a secret ending you have to unlock, but so far as I could tell, there isn't. Not that having a secret unlockable ending would be acceptable in a game like this, mind you.

That lack of an ending is really unfortunate because I had been mostly enjoying the story stuff in the game. I think the writing is decent, I like the voice acting and the characters, and like I said, I ended up fairly invested in the goings on of the game. But, having played it to completion, I just feel disappointed. I wasn't really expecting to love playing the game, but this is just an extra bummer on top of that.

I will say that there is a part with a talking tree who is very disgruntled at a local lumberjack, and I think that was a good bit. But not in a Treebeard, very pensive and wise way, he's just a really angry tree that can talk. I like stuff like that.

King's Quest: A Knight to Remember.

Speaking of stuff like that, this game has a guild of troll bridges that are on strike because the local knights' shoes are too pointy, which hurts their backs. At one point you need to infiltrate their guild meeting where you listen to them discuss what snacks to bring to the next meeting (savory or sweet), and what they should put on their guild jackets (majestic unicorns or trolls eating knights). One of the trolls has a voice that, on the one hand I can't accurately describe, but on the other I can say that it's a mid-western union guy voice, and he has a mustache, and you know exactly what this voice is supposed to be without even hearing it.

Also I should have noted that in this universe, the trolls are about forty feet tall and the bridges grow out of their backs. And, unlike Broken Age, this was an adventure game that I really enjoyed, as you can probably tell from my just going straight into describing a memorable that I quite liked. It's very charming, cute, and sweet in ways that most games aren't. It's pretty funny, both in the writing, and in the slapstick visual gags that the game does. Don't take this the wrong way, but as much as this game is clearly meant to grab the people who played the older games (not me, and presumably these people are a bit older than I am), but this is also a game for kids. I mean that in the sense that while it certainly has serious moments, everything in it is just, pure, and good, and nice. And those are just nonsense words, I know, but lots of things these days, even stuff meant for kids has some winks and nods that are there for the older crowd because there's actually some really dirty stuff going on that kids would not pick up on. Or at least that's how it was when I was a kid when Ren & Stimpy and Rocko's Modern Life were airing.

But, at least so far as I could tell, this game just seems like some good ole fashioned family friendly fun, and I really liked that. Everything is so dark and dreary these days, and it's just refreshing to play something sweet and nice. And like I said, genuinely really funny in spots, especially if you like puns. There's even a pun in the subtitle of the game. I also like that, aside from a couple nods to The Princess Bride from Wallace Shawn's character (he's the IN-CON-CEIVBLE guy), it's not full of referential stuff like so many things are these days (something I'm certainly guilty of too). But when a game features Christopher Lloyd as the narrator and (so far as I remember) resists the urge to make Back to the Future references, I think that's a good amount of restraint. But, since I wrote this and went to proofread it, I did remember that there is a joke in reference to the Telltale Games' "so and so will remember this" stuff, so maybe it's got more references than I thought.

What about the actual game? It's fine. You walk around, talk to people, pick up items, give items to people, or use items on things. There was one part where I got stuck for a bit because I didn't realize I could interact with stuff around a piece of meat dangling above a trap pit, or the pit itself. Aside from that (which was mostly my fault), I think it's pretty straightforward, and enjoyable. But I still think the real enjoyment to be had with this game is in the story, and the humor.

If you want a fun little game to play and make you laugh, this is definitely worth your time. But it's also made the cynical part of me wonder if the sales of this game were perhaps a little weak so Activision made it free to gain interest in people paying money for the other episodes once those are out. But they also didn't want to make it permanently free like Telltale has done in the past (they did recently with the first episode of Tales from the Borderlands). On the one hand, it totally worked, but on the other, other hand, I think the season pass for King's Quest is $30, which is maybe a little rich for my blood. We'll see once all the other episodes are out. If they're all as good, and lengthy as this one, I'd say that's probably worth it. But who knows??

Grow Home.

Grow Home is an interesting little game. I think, much like King's Quest, it's very charming and nice in a way that, at least when I played it (right after MGSV), was definitely something that I needed after as dark and grim as MGSV gets, especially toward the end. But it's also a game that I don't really have a ton to say about, because there isn't really a ton going on in it. You run around, climb on things using your little robot's ability to grab onto any side of any surface, use long flower stems to pierce into floating energy rocks to make the big plant grow taller, and so on. At least until you get back to your ship in orbit, at which point some collectibles appear throughout for you to get, and then the game didn't give me the Trophy for finding all of those, and I'm still upset about that.

I used my Uplay points to make my robot pink, so that was cute. But if you haven't played Grow Home, I think it's a fun time. The controls and movement definitely take a lot getting used to, because everything is physics based, and feels like sluggish at first. Well, it felt kinda sluggish the whole way through, but not enough to ruin the game. I still had some fun with it.

Chariot.

I feel kinda bad in this case, because I got about halfway through the game and stopped because I got stuck. I feel bad because I was actually enjoying playing the game, and also because one of my internet friends worked on the game and she's probably reading this and EEK why didn't I cut this out??

Anyway, in Chariot you have to drag this chariot with a dead king in it (complete with his ghost berating you most of the way) through various caverns and caverns and caves as you platform your way to trying to find a suitable resting place for the king. He's very picky. And greedy. And I do literally mean dragging, because you literally attach a rope to it and pull it along.

But it's a lot more fun than that sounds, trust me. The levels are pretty well designed, with all sorts of nooks and crannies filled with shiny gems that you don't need to get, but I needed to get them because they were shiny and I wanted them. It's the sort of game where most of it is figuring out how to get through to the exit, but the process of doing so is tricky in a good way, and pretty fun. There's also enemies, but they don't actually kill you, instead they just steal your gems. And while I certainly appreciate that they can't actually kill you (only bottomless pits and magma can do that), I still feel like they were a bit too prevalent for my tastes. But maybe I was being too loud with the chariot, because being sneaky and quiet can get you through areas without alerting them.

The game also has neat little gadgets to make getting through easier, but I didn't really find that many of them when I was playing. I think I actually only ever found the first one, which lets you tether one rope between the chariot and a spot in the environment. When you're not playing in co-op (I have no local friends to play with), something like that is pretty essential for getting the hidden goodies throughout the levels. And there's other gadgets, but I don't remember what they are because I only know about them from watching other people play the game online! I think one of them involved a bird bomb or something?

So, if I was enjoying it, why did I stop? Well, for better or worse, the levels aren't exactly linear, and it seems like in each world, you get to a point where you actually have to go back to a previous level (through an alternate entrance, so far as I could tell) to find an item to let you proceed onward to the next world. These are separate from the gadgets, and are things like a light for the chariot to see in the dark, or snow tires to get through, well, snow. And, on paper, that's a very Metroid-y sounding thing and I totally get why they would include that in the game. But in practice? It just kinda left me not knowing where to go, and then I got distracted and haven't gone back to the game. I might, though, because it's a good game.

I'm not sure if it would be better or worse in co-op, because while the game is clearly "meant" to be played with two people, I feel like if you can't actually work well with the person you're playing with, that just might be a disaster. But if you could, the game definitely could be much easier with two people.

Anyway, it's fun. Definitely worth a shot. There's a talking skeleton and I like it when games have talking skeletons.

Super Meat Boy.

Much like Limbo earlier in the year, I seem to have been the only person to manage to not play this game until 2015. Well, that's not entirely accurate, because I did play a few levels of it on my friend's computer back around the time it came out. But that was five years ago, so I might as well have not actually played any of it. So, what did I think when I played this game that people always seem to invoke whenever discussing other modern platformers?

It's good. I liked it. Feels good, and for the most part, I think the levels are really well made. I love the speed at which this game moves, and restarts. But because of that, I think the bonus stages kind of miss the entire point of the game by removing the instant restarts and giving you a limited number of lives before you have to restart them (from the map screen). And that statement makes more sense with the context that the bonus stages are three part affairs, and like I said, running out of lives means starting the whole thing over. From the map screen, which means loading in and out. Not that those loads are super long, but when the entire rest of the game is built around hard levels that you (or at least I) have to replay a lot of times to memorize what to do, it's aggravating.

In a similar vein, there are levels later on in the game that feature enemies that don't just move in an exact pattern every single time. Instead, they change what they do and where they move based on what you do. For example, there's these big bloated flies that chase after you if you get too close to them. But as I was saying, introducing a random element, or at the very least an element that changes based on my inconsistent actions makes memorizing exactly what to do much harder, and frankly, I just got frustrated with those levels.

Thankfully, the vast majority of the game isn't like that, so I really enjoyed the vast majority of what I played. Even if I didn't do most of the dark world levels, or bonus stages, or the world that opens up after "finishing" the game. I might get back to some of that stuff someday, but I expect that much like Bloodborne, once you get rusty at this game, it becomes pretty hard to jump into late game content.

I don't really have much else to say about it. Not unless you want to see me complain about Dr. Fetus and how making the villain of the game a joke about a fetus in a jar is one of the stupidest things I've ever seen in a game and it almost made me want to stop playing. But you don't, right? Not after in the past when I wrote about how I stopped playing The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth because of the "aesthetics" of the game, and not because I wasn't enjoying the game play of it. And that just reminds me how much I dislike the "aesthetics" of the games these people make (I forget their names!) because the game parts are good!

I really enjoyed the music in the game. I also went back and listened to a little bit of the music from the original version, just so I could make some rude comment about how people overreacted to the music being changed because the original music wasn't good enough to throw a fit over. But then I realized that would be rude, so I decided not to do that because musical taste is mostly subjective and it's generally accepted that I have poor taste in most things.

So, that's Super Meat Boy. Had a lot of fun. Wish the replay feature didn't break if you died too many times in a level, because those are the times when I most wanted to watch replays of hundreds of Meat Boys dying, but alas. 'Twas not to be. Also wish the overall death counter was accurate, but it was definitely lower than it should have been.

Super Time Force Ultra.

You know, I was actually just about to post this blog when I remembered that I had forgotten to write about this game. And, that would have been unfortunate because, at least mechanically, of the games I wrote about here, this one is probably my favorite. Not that I instantly "got" the game and enjoyed every second of it that I played. I was actually pretty down on it at first. Not because the early parts of the game are bad, or anything like that. It was, to be honest, because I was playing the game "wrong."

Super Time Force is built around manipulating time. In each level, you start with only 60 seconds on the clock, and 30 rewinds that you can use to go back anywhere between a fraction of a second (not really useful) and the very beginning of the level. And along the way there are pick-ups that can give you more rewinds or add more time to the clock. What I didn't really "get" at first is that the game is built around using those rewinds pretty liberally. Instead of that, I played it like I do with most games that have some sort of finite, seemingly limited resource. I only used it when I absolutely had to (when I died, basically).

But, once I realized that 30 rewinds was more than enough for most missions, and started using them a whole lot, suddenly the game clicked for me and I really enjoyed it. The encounters in the game are a lot more enjoyable when viewed as little time travel puzzles instead of just as a side scrolling action game. Part of that is because it's not actually that great of a side scrolling action game, but also because there's some really cool stuff that can be done with the time traveling.

For example, if you die, then come back and manage to stop the thing that killed you, you can absorb the essence of that dead character. That gives you an extra health point (up from one to two), and gives you that other character's charge attack. Which reminds me that I forgot to mention my favorite part of the game, which is that there are a bunch of characters, all of which play differently, and many of which have pretty fantastic names that are plays on actors or fictional characters. Such as Melanie Gibson (my favorite character to play, because of her spread-shot), Jean Rambois, and my favorite one in terms of the name alone: Dolphin Lundgren. Who is a literal dolphin. With a large machine gun.

Goofy names aside, mixing and matching the various charge attacks can really make you into a walking death machine, and that's cool. It's also kind of necessary for the boss fights, which like the rest of the levels, have a 60 second time limit. But, they all take way too much damage to actually kill in those 60 seconds, so you really need to use the time manipulation to get that damage done.

It's a pretty straightforward game overall. Most of the characters are unlocked by finding them in levels, and doing something to save them before they get tragically killed. There's a few Sony themed characters in the Ultra version of the game, including Shu Yoshida, the being from Journey, and some The Order Man. That might actually be all of them. It's been a while since I played. I do remember thinking that The Order Man might be over powered. About the only other thing I think I have to mention is that while I think a lot of the character names are fantastic, and the game has some great time puns, overall I think the game's attempts at humor are pretty bad. But, it's a game about the game play, and that part is fun, so I'm willing to overlook some not great internet humor.

Anything else?

There certainly were more PS+ games released, and more than I played. But I don't think any of them were really worth writing about. Unless you want me to complain about how I was excited that Dragon Fin Soup was a rogue-ass rogue like, only to get to a shop and see the only "armor" being sold was panties, and then disgustedly exit out of the game. And then delete it. Like, joke or not, that was just dumb, so I stopped. I also played Magicka 2, and I feel like the Magicka brand is a huge missed opportunity given what you can do with the magic, and the divide between what that game could be (a cool puzzle solving thing) and what it actually is (just killing waves of boring enemies).

Anything else else?

Still playing Assassin's Creed Syndicate. I'm very close to the end of the game, like, two or three story missions left, close. I'll write about that game next week, hopefully. And probably Fallout 4 as well, even if I haven't finished the main story. I'm not going to go and spoil the end of the game anyway, and I've certainly played more than enough to write about it. But, not for this blog! And after those games I still have Mad Max to play.

Will I play Yakuza 5 this year? I don't know! Honestly, given that it's a PS3 game, and probably quite large in file size for a PS3 game, I might not play it at all. I was looking through the games I have access to through PS+, and saw Yakuza 4 in there (I played the physical version when I played it back in the day), and that game is around 20 gigs in size. If my recollection of how the PS3 works is right, that means I actually need to have 40~ gigs of free space to install it, and I can only assume Yakuza 5 will be as big, if not bigger. I don't know if I want to be deleting that much stuff off my PS3 at this point, you know? Well, we'll see.

See you next time, and as always, thank you for reading. Hope you have a swell day.