MIDI Week Singles: "Witches Lair" - Banjo Kazooie (N64)

"Witches Lair" from Banjo-Kazooie on the Nintendo 64 (1998) & Xbox 360 (2008)
Composer: Grant Kirkhope
Album: Banjo-Kazooie The Soundtrack
Label: Rare
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer Rare

Now, I briefly played Banjo-Kazooie when it was originally on the N64, and by briefly, I mean I rented it once and then returned it the next day (Placer TV/Video was only a one-day rental store).  It apparently did not make that big of an impression on me but I do enjoy me some Grant Kirkhope music so I gave this soundtrack a listen.

What initially stuck out to me was Gruntilda's music leading up to and around her lair, and flashbacks to elementary school.  At my school, every February (or thereabouts) our school would have a Teddy Bear Day (because one of the teachers had an affinity for teddy bears and not in a creepy way) and like something out of Little House on the Prarie meets Full House, everyone would gather in the multipurpose room with our own teddy bears that we brought from home and sing "Teddy Bear's Picnic" as well as some other bear themed activities.

So when I heard that motif in "Witches Lair" that is, more-or-less, taken straight out of "Teddy Bear's Picnic," this once slightly cheerful children's song took on a whole new meaning, or at least a much darker tone.

That is really all I have about this song, besides how the theme moves its way through different instruments as I really have no other context for what is happening in the game when this song is playing, presumably while you are in Grunty's lair.

And that laugh at the end before the loop is pure Kefka and I love it.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
The Melodies of Your Temptation

#IndieSelect: Valentina (NS)

Disclaimer:  I received a free copy of Valentina from publisher QUByte Interactive through #IndieSelect.  The game was given and received without expectation or promise of a positive review, only that the game be played and that experience be shared through social media channels.  All words and screenshots of the gameplay unless otherwise noted are my own from my own experience.

Valentina is a pixel art-style platformer from indie game developer Luamar Games and published on the Nintendo Switch by QUByte Interactive.  The game was originally developed as a mobile game (Valentina: The Princess Archer) and was released on the Google Play store earlier in the year.  Had I known this before I started playing, I might have gone in with a little more of a forgiving mind and lessened my expectations, and while I seemed to find something that bothered me about the game in terms of game mechanics, behind-the-scene mechanics, translation and localization, and a whole host of other issues, I did finish the game.  Kind of, but I will get to that at the end as I do not want to spoil anything, just yet anyway.

I mean, you can understand what is going on, but there are
just a number of grammatical errors.

Let us start with the translation, presumably from the developer's native Portuguese (from Brazil), not to say that nothing could be understood as I was able to follow along quite well, but it does not look like the dialogue script was run by anyone who reads/writes English.  What it looks like is someone took the original Portuguese script and put it through Google Translate then used that translation.  Sometimes.  I noticed that on some occasions, there was still an "e" in place for an "and" or that the Portuguese had not been translated at all.  This is not to harp on the developer that everything should be in English because 'MURICA!, only that in a game with as much dialogue as this one has, being able to convey the story and the purpose of the character and their motivations is very important.  I did reach out to QUByte Interactive to try to put me in contact with Luamar Games to rewrite the English translation (not that I speak Portuguese, but it was to take the existing English translation and revamp it), but I did not hear back as of this publishing.

The story in the game is more-or-less fine, nothing inspiring.  Like a lot of JRPGs, Valentina is hiding out in a village to keep her royal heritage a secret, and the kingdom is taken over and her parents imprisoned by the Empire of Darkness.  She goes on a quest to rescue her brother João who has attempted to reclaim the throne and save them all by fighting against four generals in four themed worlds.  Each world is made up of about 10 individual areas, which at first sounds exciting, but in reality is about 7 areas per world too many as the platforming becomes very repetitive, especially by the fourth world: jump across floating platforms that sink into water, jump up platforms in a stair-like manner, make blind jumps down into a short S-shaped cave then ride a platform back out to the open-air then, maybe, repeat.  And by that point in the game, I had stopped carrying about enemies and was literally running through them with reckless abandon.  There are towns at the beginning of each new area, and sometimes interspersed in the middle, but there is nothing to do in the towns aside from receiving exposition and not being populated with enemies.  Which brings me to my next criticism.

80 Gold Worth of Potions!

When you kill enemies, they will either drop money (gold=1 and green=5 coins), arrows, or potions.  The game never explains what it is that these loot dropz do, but it might be safe to make assumptions.  You shoot arrows that deplete via a counter, and picking up arrows replenishes that counter.  When you pick up gold, your gold counter goes up, but it was not until I saw a Tweet from Monokuma_V3 that I found out that collecting 100 gold gives you five potions up to a maximum of 25.  Potions will refill your life bar by 1.5 bars out of 5.  For the entire game, unless I missed a well-hidden power-up somewhere, potions will always heal you for 1.5.  Initially this 100 gold to 5 potions sounds like a pretty decent trade-off until I tell you that by halfway through the game, I had over 800 gold, meaning that my potions were maxed out at 25 so frequently, that I just kept on collecting that sweet sweet gold.  And there was no exchange in that if I used a series of potions to prevent dying, gold would not be taken out (of my pouch?) to buy more potions, it just stayed there.  Forever?  The entire game I was hoping that you would come across a merchant who you could buy permanent upgrades from, but this again never happened.

The next thing that bothered me was the animations used for Valentina and a lot of the monsters.  For Valentina, her running animation was more-or-less fine, but her jumping looked as if her back foot lifted off the ground a few pixels, and her ponytails lifted up while her arms stick out.  I guess I'm just focusing on the lack of leg movement.  But speaking of her jumping, the actual mechanics of Valentina jumping bothered me too as it just felt too floaty, as in the character would move just a little bit forward even after you stopped moving and the same happned when you were jumping.  This bad control design made jumping onto moving platforms, especially ones that had short routes, very difficult to judge where you were going to land.  Maybe this was an issue that did not exist in the original mobile game, but for me, it made playing some areas agonizing dying time and time again to what should have been simple jumps.

Speaking of bad mechanics and design, let me take a minute to talk about whatever coding was used for the bosses.  First off, the design of the bosses was great, and if they had functioned normally, they could have been terrifying.  Instead, boss battles consisted of staying still for the majority of the battle while you unloaded arrows into broken pixely meat sponges.  Or a stone sponge in the case of the second boss who would crumble in a death-type-animation, thereby essentially stunning it, giving you another opportunity to attack, causing it damage, thereby stunning it again, and so on and so forth.  There also seemed to be a problem with either the hit detection from the bosses or maybe even Valentina's hitboxes.  In the aforementioned battle (against General #2), I stood my ground while the sprites of the boss went through the player and did not take any damage.  Most of the time I did not take damage although I was hit on a few occasions.  This happened multiple times and with every boss.

And then there was the final boss battle.  You see this boss in the trailer too so I was looking forward to this battle, although not as much as I was before I experienced how the bosses were programmed.  In this battle, you approach the area where you fight the Minotaur and have to jump up onto a ledge to be on the same level.  Except I stayed on the lower embankment.  I jumped, fired an arrow, and hit the boss.  Then I did it again, and again.  The Minotaur could not engage with me because I was on a different plane.  So rather spend the next five minutes sponging arrows, I jumped onto the same level, and that is when it charged me and started swinging its massive tree-sized axe.  And I did not take damage.  So I stood there firing arrow after arrow into the thing.  Then I got bored and moved further to the right and found yet another spot on a different level than the Minotaur so I jumped up there and proceeded to take it down to about 2%-ish health.  I jumped down to be on the same playable area just so that it did not die off screen.

Something else I wanted to touch on was how there were a lot of environmental "gotcha" moments in the game, and by that I mean that you were forced to blindly jump down to an area you could not see.  The second world was particularly bad because it at first taught you that spike pits were a certain distance away from the edge of cliffs/platforms, then have the pit extend further out on a jump you could not see.  What made these hidden hazards so much worse was that the spikes were Mega Man levels of dangerous in that one hit and you are dead, which then takes you back to the beginning of the area (thankfully not the world otherwise I would have never finished) with all of the arrows and potions you had when you started that area.  Add on top of that how I previously said that some of the areas start to feel repetitive, trying to remember where the pit you died and need to jump a little bit further can be difficult to recall.

The last negative thing I wanted to bring up, which is a semi spoiler, is that apparently Valentina is a series?  I think?  Maybe?  Because nowhere in the game description, either on the Google Play Store or Nintendo's eShop make mention of this.  Even events in the game do not hint that there is anything more to your quest than what you are already doing.  You defeat the four generals of the Empire of Darkness, then maybe fight the main boss, then rescue your parents.  But nope, that is not what happens.  After you defeat General number four (the Minotaur), you return to one of the villages where you talk with your brother and friends you have met along the way, which is no different than any other in-between stage.  Then you go to the arrow signpost as you have done a great many times before to head out on your final adventure.

What the Deuce!?

Yup.  You get a "To Be Continued" screen, fade to black, and back to the main menu.  This was a huge letdown to a game I had wanted to like and even though the last level felt like a trudge (as I just stopped caring and found that I could just run through enemies without taking damage, but only if I did not stop in their same space) and I just wanted to see the end.  Now, if there ever is a sequel, I do not know if I will feel compelled to play.  Probably not, but I do not want to rule out that possibility entirely.  Maybe the developer has learned from some / a lot of the rough edges here. 

But not everything about Valentina is bad.  The pixel art for the worlds, the landscapes, the characters, some of the monsters, and especially the bosses are spot on.  They often look just detailed enough to not feel out of place with the rest of the game (think the mobile re-ports of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy VI).  The art is appropriately pixely, blocky where it needs to be, and never looking too crisp for its own good.  The numbers that appear on-screen when you do damage are smooth compared to the rest of the world, but that ended up being something that I did notice, but never bothered me.  The only negative thing I have to say regarding the graphics is that Valentina's bowstring, is just a single line that does not fit in with the rest of the pixel sizes, and considering that firing arrows are her only way to attack, I did notice this anachronism quite often, but that could also just me being picky.

Another thing that I did actually enjoy about Valentina was the music, which I sadly cannot showcase because I could not find any information on the composer, which makes me think that it might have been music that was pre-written and purchased for use in the game.  Since there are no credits to the game, there was no way I could find out (aside from reaching out to the developer and finding them for that matter) if the music was written specifically for the game, or if a music pack was purchased and plugged into the game, and no shame if this was the route because I found the music very suiting for when it was used.

Looking at the reviews that Valentina: The Princess Archer received on the Google Play Store, really makes me wonder who is playing the game, and if the game just works better as a mobile game.  Maybe the bosses are not as wonky in their animations and maybe there is a real challenge.  Maybe that is not the point though.  I feel like there is some potential here, that Valentina on the Switch almost feels like a rough draft after figuring out the outline, but it needs a fair amount of work.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian

A Maelstrom of Silvery Light

MIDI Week Singles: "Formation Screen" - Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions (PSP)

"Formation Screen" from Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions on the PlayStation Portable and the PlayStation (2007 & 1997)

Composer: Hitoshi Sakimoto

Album: Final Fantasy Tactics Orignal Sound Track

Label: DigiCube

Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

Developer: Squaresoft

I do not want to sound all gatekeepy, but if you have played either version of Final Fantasy Tactics (on the PSX or PSP) then you may have heard this song more often than the rest of the songs on the soundtrack if you play the game at all like I tend to do.  As the name of the song states, "Formation Screen" is the music that plays while you are looking at the members of your party.  While on this screen, you could just be surveying who you have in your party, mourning the loss of one of your recently deceased, or, like me, agonizing over how you are going to spend your JP points (yes I know, Job Point points) on which abilities while looking at an offline skill tree to determine which ability unlocks other abilities and which jobs you need additional levels in so you can unlock the Mime job.  Do you spring for Thundaga or save up more for Death?  Do you blow all your JP on Archer's Bane or instead learn Aim +3 and Jump +1?  What about having the Monk learn Revive or Critical: Recover HP?

Listening to this song while agonizing over abilities is probably about 1/3 of the game for me, and that's fine, because that's part of why I love this game, following these characters, both story-centric and random mercenaries that you hire, and watching them grow from Level 1 Archers and Black Mages to characters you end up embuing with personality through their actions on the battlefield, and how you spend time customizing them off the battlefield.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
How Could I Leave This Behind?

Why Another Point-And-Click Adventure Game!?

What is it about point-and-click adventure video games that draw me in?  I feel like it isn't even a conscious decision either.  While putzing on my computer early last week, I decided to install Phantasmagoria from GOG, not thinking that I wanted to play a point-and-click game, just that I have had Phantasmagoria in my queue for I don't know how long, and thought it might be a nice game to pull up while Conklederp is playing Animal Crossing.

[Really quickly, and just to get the definition of point-and-click out of the way (because we don't want to assume that everyone knows everything about every genre because I know I sure as hell don't) refers to a storytelling based game where you would typically point a mouse cursor at an object on the screen, and click on it to interact with that object in order to solve puzzles and progress into additional areas and progress the story.  Or you can just read the definition over on Wikipedia.]

Why I even bring this up, is that I was looking at the last couple of games I have played on the Switch, along with one of the games that I am currently playing (Goetia) and thought, "Wow, I sure do play a lot of point-and-click adventure games."  Not that that is a bad thing.  I do frequently love the stories that are told in these games, even if the puzzles often trip me up or I tend to overthink solutions to rather simple puzzles.  And this is where my own mental strain comes in.

I love solving puzzles.  Along with some of our friends, Conklederp and I love doing escape rooms, which essentially are point-and-click puzzle games set in the real world.  Finding an item in one location, deducing what it could be used for, and discovering that it is used to solve a puzzle on the other side of the room is a pretty cool rush.  My favorite puzzle had something to do with finding an object that would "speak" to you giving you information, realizing that there were multiples of this type of object and that there was a picture of these objects on the other side of a room in a particular order next to a telephone and when you dialed the phone number based on the order of the objects in the picture using the number you had already received from the objects in the picture, you got another clue.  That, to Conklederp and our friend group, is fun.  And when we have to wait for our favorite escape room company to develop and playtest new escape rooms, we would frequently (in the Before Times) play Mansions of Madness which has escape room elements.  Which is what we did last weekend, but virtually, because we are not dumb asses who think we can or should skirt social distancing guidelines (idiots).

The thing about this genre of video game is that I find them mentally exhausting and easily overwhelmed.  Once multiple areas start opening up, items start clogging inventory space and there is more than one puzzle to solve, my brain begins to kick into overdrive.  I try to keep track of each location, how it relates to the previous and subsequent location, all of the interactables in those locations if there are any puzzles in those rooms, all of the items in my inventory, and then wondering if I am clever enough to realize that this item in Room A goes with the puzzle in Room D.  For instance, in Phantasmagoria, I am 90% sure that in order to explore the dark basement, I need to find either a lantern or a candle because I found a book of matches earlier and that makes sense to me, but I have searched a lot of the house, the grounds outside, and am in the process of exploring the nearby village of Nipawomsett, still thinking that I need a lantern or candle.  Maybe the matches are not even used in this puzzle, and instead are supposed to direct me to the bar that the book cover is advertising?  Maybe you use just the matches and risk burning your fingers only to have the match go out right as a shadowy figure crawls out on all fours from underneath the stairs, bones cracking as it rises to its full height, towering over your soft mortal frame of flesh and bone.

I like to keep my video game genres varied.  If I am playing a survival horror game, I might combine that with something less intense like INK or The Legend of Zelda.  And when I finish a game in one genre, I will typically try to pivot to a different genre, and while this has been predominantly true, four of the last six games I have played and written about have been point-and-click adventure games [The Office Quest, Old Man's Journey, Apocalipsis: Wormwood Edition (Harry at the End of the World, & One Night in the Woods)], although I did play INK, and Mother Russia Bleeds between some of those so they are the opposite of point-and-click.  

Just something that I was musing about while trying to figure out how to determine what it is in my inventory that is small and thin enough to scrape away the mortar between bricks so that I can access the bricked up church located behind the fireplace.  You know.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian

How Do We See These New Principles Come to the Fore?

MIDI Week Singles: "Celes" - Final Fantasy VI / III (SFAM / SNES)

"Celes" from Final Fantasy VI / Final Fantasy III on the Super Famicom and Super Nintendo Entertainment System (1994)

Composer: Nobuo Uematsu

Album: Final Fantasy VI Original Sound Version / Kefka's Domain: The Complete Final Fantasy III Video Game

Label: NTT Publishing / Squaresoft

Publisher: Square

Developer: Square

I feel like any attempt at explaining this song in all of its context will either be nigh on impossible, or I will earn myself a master's degree in the process and the posting date will have to be pushed back until Fall 2024.  That is the problem with pulling music from Final Fantasy VI / III is that there is so much background information and emotion with nearly every song on this soundtrack that it is difficult to be able to write it all down.

But just everything about this song.  Everything that it not only has to do with the character of Celes, but how the song came to be in-game, Celes' story, and how other characters relate to her.  

So here is a song that I love from a game that I love.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian

Then I Fell on My Knees and I Cried and Cried

#IndieSelect: HARDCORE Maze Cube (NS)

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of HARDCORE Maze Cube developed by YAW Studios and published by QUByte Interactive from Mac as part of #IndieSelect.  The game was given and received without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and that experience be shared through social media channels.  All of the words in this article unless otherwise noted are my own and all of the pictures and video(s) are from my own playthrough.

HARDCORE Maze Cube is an interesting game in that it combines several different elements to create a whole experience.  First and foremost, HARDCORE Maze Cube (HMC) is a game where you need to find your way through a maze to an endpoint that is not outside of the maze, but a semi-hidden location within the maze.  I have found that navigating through the mazes, the ones that I have made it through anyway, are not overly complicated and remind me of the ones I created on graph paper in elementary school.  Now, because I have only made it to the fifth maze, perhaps they become more demanding in terms of multiple paths, or Overlook-level of complexity, but the game did introduce a new lighting mechanic that I wasn't fully able to utilize before dying and was forced to start over.

The threat with this trap is that the moving walls are not visible until
your path is blocked off.  Plus you can see the dart-cannons on either
side of this chamber, but they don't always fire when you'

Now, if this were a simple find-the-end maze game, there would not be a need for the HARDCORE in the title, although the game does have the feature that you can go through the maze for the sole purpose of reaching the end.  However, you have to have had already completed that level to play in the Relaxing Mode which removes all hazards and operates solely as a maze game. But what gives the game the appropriately titled HARCORE is that there is a constant attempt to prevent you from reaching the end by way of all manner of traps.  From firey-bolt darts that shoot when you are nearby to collapsing bridges, rolling Indiana Jones-style boulders, and almost everything in between.  The majority of these traps had some type of tell that they existed and would kill you in an instant, such as the dart cannon-things being visible, or the boards of a bridge already being cracked that will give way once you move over them.  However, there were a few traps that you only learned by being killed be it dart cannons that sprung up out of wall, or mechanical rat-skull-things that dart out of debris (while in the previous level, harmless scurrying rats were have conditioned the player that these background animations cannot kill you.  These types of traps I felt were cheap considering how the structure of the game operated, directing you towards dead ends or having hazards just off-screen but still aware of your presence..

As you progress through each maze, you can pick up cubes that dot the maze making the levels like something out of Pac-Man's nightmares.  For every 30 cubes you picked up you were awarded a free life, and lives are a hot commodity in this game.  The dangerous part about picking up additional cubes, even when you manage to find the exit, is that they will inevitably lead you into more traps and potentially more chances to die.  In a way to aid the player, the game makes mention of checkpoints and save points starting in the second maze, but five mazes in, I never came across either a save point or a checkpoint or if did, it was never made clear now to interact with them.  This became a problem because once you lose all of your hard-earned squishy lives, you are forced to start over from the beginning.

I nearly died here because I didn't understand that the scrolls filled in
the answer for you. 

When you reach the endpoint of the maze, you are taken before what I can only assume is the antagonist based on the narration at the beginning of the game, and are given the option of starting the maze you just completed over to look for another way out, or to answer a riddle.  Now, this is where the game did something I did not at all expect.  Having a genuine riddle at the end of the stage was a pretty great mechanic because it does not really fit in with the rest of the game, at least in theory.  While you are running through the maze gathering cubes, in some levels you also pick up pieces of scrolls (you are told these are from previous people/cubes who attempted the maze and died).  When you reach the end of the stage and choose to be given a riddle, the answer is given to you based on the number of scrolls you picked up.  If you gathered two of the possible four, you will be given a couple of letters and the rest will be obscured.  If you collect all four scrolls, you do not solve the riddle so much as just fill in the answer with the available letters.  In levels that do not have scrolls, you are instead given what seems like it should be a logic puzzle, but it seems, at least to me, based more on how much the player was paying attention to the symbols they come across in the maze.  And just like anything else in the game, if you are not correct in your answer, you die and start the maze over.

The only other mode I could access was "Time for Life" which essentially is a speedrun mode, giving you more points for the faster you complete the maze.  This mode also keeps intact the choice of the riddle at the end of each maze, and I am not sure if the game continues to time you while you give your answer.  I should also mention that the devs were smart, at least with the Switch port, in that if you press the Home button back to the Home Switch menu, the timer continues.  Yeah, I did try and cheat the system during one of the logic puzzles and when I came back I immediately died.  It was worth a shot though.  There was a "Hardcore" mode, but that required you to have beaten the game first, so I moved on.

Literally, the furthest I got in the game.

Initially, I was annoyed that you could not just restart from the beginning of the last maze, but this appears to be a core mechanic in the game.  Because the player is expected to become proficient in each maze, memorizing the location of each cube, and each trap, that flying through the levels will be second nature.  Think of it as the Dark Souls of 2D mazes, except this maze is full of gotcha-one-hit-kill-traps and does not always play fair.  The surprise traps, constantly having to restart from the beginning, and feeling that progress was not happening as quickly as I would have liked, I ultimately decided to put the game down after a couple of hours playing.

I do not think that HARDCORE Maze Cube is a bad game entirely.  I like the combination of working your way through a maze, collecting objects to earn one-ups and give hints to the end-of-maze riddle, that the maze has traps, and especially the inclusion of riddles, but the execution I am not a fan of.  I wish there was a little more explanation as to the checkpoints and save points, how the scoring system works, and maybe have a bit of randomization in the maps (but I realize this last one takes away the learning aspect).  I am sure that there are people who enjoy this level of difficulty in this type of game, but I just happen to not be that person.  But I am sure that they are out there and HARDCORE Maze Cube will not be hardcore enough for them and the rest of us will just need to git gud.



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
To Die In The Same Place


P.S.
And for making it all the way to the end of this article, here is a semi-super cut of me dying a lot.  This idea came about, sadly enough, during my second-to-last attempt in the game and realized that I made it only eight seconds into the maze before I was killed by a swinging pendulum that I had forgotten was there.  If I knew life was going to be so fickle, I would have recorded every single one of my deaths and had a feature-length movie by the end of the three days I spent.

I haven't decided if this is something that I will continue doing for games that allow video capture.

P.P.S.
Lastly, for those of you keeping score, here was the state of the online Leaderboard as of Saturday, September 12th at 9:09:16.

2nd on Time for Life Baby! (And it's probably gone at this point).

Game EXP: Mother Russia Bleeds (NS)

I picked up Mother Russia Bleeds a while back, sometime around late March and early April when a lot of indie games were going on sale around the beginning of the pandemic; it is, as of this writing on sale at 75% off.  Mother Russia Bleeds (MRB) is a beat'em up brawler from Le Cartel Studios and published by Devolver Digital.

Side-scrolling arcade-style beat'em ups are not typically my thing, or at least I think they aren't, but I do enjoy games like Golden Axe, Castle Crashers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game, The Simpsons Arcade Game, so I am not completely new to the genre.  What got me interested in MRB was the early 1980s alternate history aesthetic (coming off of Wolfenstein: The New Order), I enjoyed the trailer from the eShop although I knew that the cartoon art for the trailer was not representative of what the game looked like, and again, with it being on sale, I thought a beat'em up would be a good change of pace.

And it was.  Kind of.

The Cast of layers.

I started the game on Normal difficulty playing as Boris for a couple of reasons.  First Natasha, and Ivan all looked pretty standard fare for this type of game with Ivan being the strong slow type and Natasha being the fast weak type. Boris, I liked his lanky, crouched, half-crazed Romani Mark Bonanno type appearance.  His stats I preferred too since he was not on either extreme and I would prefer to be slightly slower and stronger than weaker with less range.  I chose Normal because it is what I try to start every game given the option.  Granted my combo and group fighting skills are not very good so I knew that even on Normal difficulty, there was going to be some challenge, but that was why I picked up MRB in the first place.

The body count in this game is stupidly high. And that's what makes it fun.

In the tutorial and first two chapters (because the game refers to stages/levels as chapters), I handled myself well.  I never tried to beat the stages for time and just focused on surviving, but since I am not the best beat'em up player, I did die a number of times, and this is where my first criticism comes in.  MRB is styled after arcade games of the same genre, where you would put in a quarter and buy three-four lives.  Once you go through those lives (because there is no way you are getting through unscathed), another quarter goes in until you run out of quarters or patience.  In MRB, when you die at the end of your first life, the screen goes grey, and you are taken back to a loading screen which prompts you to "Press -/+ to Continue."  Obviously, I want to continue, or I just would have paused and exited the game.  This just feels like an unneeded extra step that slows down the action, in a game that is all about action.  I do not mind the checkpoints in the game, especially since you have unlimited lives and I can understand having you restart from a checkpoint rather than respawning, or at least I got used to the concept of restarting rather than respawning.

Don't Worry, that Dude's With Me.

In the second level, the mechanic of Nekro is introduced, which is indicated by the needle next to the player's name/health in the upper left.  Nekro is a shiny green Re-Animator colored drug that is core to the story and can have varying effects on the player.  The first is that you can use it to heal yourself as there are no pot roasts or whole turkeys hanging out in trashcans or behind brick walls in this game.  The secondary effect depends on which type of Nekro you have decided to use, which you select at the same time as your character, and the type of Nekro available are only unlockable if you play the mob-rush arena mode, but more on that later.  The point is, when you start out, this drug that you can pull from spasming corpses (as long as you do not completely destroy their head by punching it into oblivion like the picture above) to refill your syringe with up to three doses, and use it to either heal, or give yourself temporary increased speed, strength, and instakill one or two enemies.  It is a pretty neat mechanic that I definitely took advantage of although I would typically save the Nekro for heals.

About 0.47 Seconds Before Disaster (But Not For Me. Finally).

Eventually, in Chapter 3 I did have to turn down the difficulty to Easy from Normal and thus began my run through the rest of the game on Easy because I stopped caring that I was trying to impress either myself or anyone else.  It really was the boss fight that did me in as I felt that I was doing fine for the most part, until additional mechanics and conditions for winning were thrown into the meat-grinding-mix.  During the boss fight, you had the left side of the screen like some kind of meat-grinding combine harvester in the bottom of an Olympic sized swimming pool.  If you hit the harvester, you lost a significant chunk of life.  On the other side, you had the stereotypical big-burly 50% muscle, 50% fat boss-dude who you could hit 1-2 times before he knocked you to the ground.  Oh, and along with the boss were types of enemies that you had encountered earlier in the chapter.  I also found that it was difficult to draw Nekro out of enemies due to the threat of the harvester and the boss.  It was after my fourth attempt that I apparently reached the end of the pool, the boss knocked me down, then jumped up on an escape ladder leaving me to die by the harvester.  This was when I turned the game down to Easy.  And in doing so I had to start the entire chapter all over again.  Which was a bit annoying, but it only took about 15 minutes to get back to the boss.  It was not until my 10th attempt that I finally managed to kill the boss by hitting him (enough times) with a baseball bat into the harvester, gumming up the machine and stopping the driver from killing me after I killed his boss.

These Older Attendants are Rather Spry for their Old Age.

My second "Well god damn this bullshit" moment happened in Chapter Four.  This section had you on a train, and around the third checkpoint, you needed to hold a walkie-talkie and keep it away from (I think) any enemy or they would radio the conductor and stop the train, preventing you from getting to your destination.  If an enemy grabbed the radio, you would usually have a couple of seconds to get to them and knock the radio out of their hands by any means necessary.  Now, you could punch enemies while holding the walkie-talkie, but this seemed to do significantly less damage, and you could not throw your enemies because this made you drop the walkie-talkie too.  I found that my only attack options were to either kick, or do a jump-kick, both of which knocked back the enemies, but did not seem to do as much damage as punching (but it did do more damage than hitting with the radio).  This section really felt like it was designed to be played with multiple people as you could have radio-person running around avoiding enemies (and kicking when they could) and have the other person wailing away on everyone else.  That was how it felt to me, and it felt very annoying.

Все копы – ублюдки!

And that was pretty much it for what annoyed me in the game.  Almost.  Chapters five, six, and seven were all well-paced, the locations were interesting with nothing so gimmicky as needing to fend off wave after wave of enemies while a computer technician spent for god-damn-ever hacking into a computer terminal.  Once AK-47s were introduced it made me feel damn near invincible, which after chapters three and four was a great change of pace.  Plus having a couple of NPCs fighting next to you (the Gimp in Chapter Five and the revolutionaries in Chapter Six) is always welcome support.

Chapter Eight, the final chapter in the game though, that was when things once again took a turn for the worse.  Maybe because I was kind of over MRB at this point, having fun part of the time, but still feeling that because I was playing solo that I was missing out on aspects that the developers had worked on, or that the game was not designed with this particular play-style in mind.  There was even one of the pop-up tips on loading screens that said you could have computer-controlled characters fight alongside you, but I never saw that option in the character selection screen, or in the options menu.  The final chapter consisted of a lot of areas, ultimately taking me nearly 20 minutes (and a couple of deaths/checkpoint restarts) to reach the final boss, or the first of two boss fights, broken up into four different fights, but only one checkpoint.

Attempt #2 of 10,247.69

When you first fight the final boss, you have to prevent him from escaping via a helicopter rope ladder while being mobbed by mobs of the mobsters' men.  This section took three attempts.  The next was more of a fight inside Boris's mind against a physical manifestation of the Nekro drug that you take throughout the game.  That battle had three (three-and-a-half?) different sections, none of which spawned additional Nekro [for healing or whatever the secondary effect was (more on that later)], so the life and Nekro you enter the fight with is what you have until the end, so it does kind of behoove the player to die immediately when the fight starts if you are continuing so that you can start the fight over with full health and Nekro.  The three fights of the Nekro Boss were alright as themselves, but they did take a while to figure out what to do, plus when you died, you had to start all over.  I cannot specifically remember how many attempts I made against Nekro Boss, but I know it took three or four to figure out I had to throw the syringes against the pulsating walls, figuring out the Pummeling Fists of Flesh was easy enough, fighting the actual boss was a handful of times, and I beat the final form (when it splits into two entities and speeds up) on my third attempt.

I am Hoping that Out of Context, There Won't Be Spoilers Here.

I did end up earning the Bad Ending, which was pointed out to me because I used Nekro during the Nekro Boss fight, which makes sense that if you use the drug during your fight with the physical manifestation of that drug, it could be that you are giving it power?  Or something?  But once I beat the game and it rolled to credits, I was not about to jump back in, spend another 20 minutes getting to the Nekro Boss fight, just to see what would happen if I managed to make it without using Nekro.  I enjoy a challenge, but only if I am already enjoying the game.  Now, someone could say that that fight up to the Nekro Boss would be easier with X-Type of Nekro, but you are only able to gain additional types of Nekro outside of the main storyline.

Squeal for Me Pig Boy!

Earlier I hand mentioned that you are able to select the type of Nekro you use, but only under certain circumstances.  You start out with Nekro that heals or gives a strength/speed boost by default.  To get additional types of Nekro, you have to play the Arena enemy rush mode that you unlock as you complete each chapter and make it to at least the 10th Wave.  Each Arena area uses a section of the chapter, along with enemies that you find, all dealing with a slightly different mechanic, gimmick, or environmental hazard.  In the starting area, you just fight in a standard pit in a street.  In the sewers area (Chapter 2), there are rats that run through the area making you slightly slower and (I think) cause a little damage when they latch on, and in the BDSM club area (Chapter Six) where you have enemies throwing bottles at you (that always knock you over) but there are weapons that frequently fall from the sky.  Now, there is no difficulty setting for the Arena mode and I was only able to make it past the sixth wave on two occasions, the first being in the first Arena which I got to Wave 10 and earned the [name] Nekro which was vague in its description of "[description]."  After a couple of attempts, I gave up because dying was not any fun when you are seven waves short.  So I settled for the standard Nekro for the rest of the game, which was fine because as long as it healed when I needed it to, then it worked well enough for me.

So I believe this is where I part ways with Mother Russia Bleeds.  I would say that I had fun for about 65% of the time, but there were times when the game was beyond frustrating (game mechanics, level design, single-player vs. co-op) but when it clicked, it performed very well (weight of attacks, story, humor) which is why I still felt compelled to play the game to the end, even if it was on Easy.  I could see a second run in my future, but only if I were playing with someone better than I at beat'em up brawlers and playing local co-op.  I might even be tempted to play as someone else besides Boris too.  Maybe.



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian

MIDI Week Singles: "World Map" - Ring Fit Adventure (NS)

"World Map" from Ring Fit Adventure on the Nintendo Switch (2019)

Composer(s):  Shinji Ushiroda, Maasa Miyoshi, Shiho Fujii, Asuka Hayazaki

Album: No Official Release

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: Nintendo EPD

You know, for overworld music in an exercise game, the theme probably could have been a lot worse.  It could have been really over the top high energy to get that pulse pumping.  It could have bland elevator muzak to get you onto the next exercise.  Nintendo could have even reused a song from an existing franchise (Super Mario World, Super Mario Bros. 3) and that would have been okay.  But just, okay.

What they did instead was have an entirely new soundtrack and with it, a song dedicated to the overworld map while you debate if you want to redo the previous map to figure out where that branching path leads to, or because you accidentally jumped over the line of three bad guys for the second time in-a-row.  It is a catchy little melody full of xylophones or glockenspiels and is, at the moment, my favorite song from the game and it feels good to come back to this tune after taking 12 minutes to do a 5 minutes exercise.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian

Instrumental