Emulator Hour: Psycho Dream (SFC)

 

Psycho Dream is a game that I noticed had been added to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System - Nintendo Switch Online app back in February, but I apparently forgot about it until sometime in late March when I was pulling up Mario's Super Picross.  In the North American version of the app, it is pretty rare for there to be Super Famicom games included because oftentimes there would be no English translation unless it was officially localized.  So with the name of Psycho Dream in English and not knowing anything about the game, I decided that it would be a decent game to at least jump in and see what it was about.  Well, I beat the game after several play sessions and I still could not tell you anything about it.  Then I read the Wikipedia article (specifically about the plot) and it actually makes a whole lot more sense.  Kind of.

To say that Psycho Dream gave very little context as to what is happening is a bit unfair on my part.  There are a couple of screens during the intro that gives some explanation (I presume) but because the game was never officially localized for English-speaking audiences, that exposition and context are in Japanese.  What you are told (that I only found out through Wikipedia) is that your two playable characters, Ryo and Maria work for a special division of Japan's National Public Safety Commission as Debuggers and are tasked with rescuing people who have become too immersed in virtual reality games/settings called D-Movie.  In Psycho Dream, a girl has lost herself in one setting called "Story of the Ruined Capital" and has fallen comatose in the real world.  Ryo and Maria must rescue Yuki in the VR world before her real-world body dies, so they enter "Story of the Ruined Capital" but have to locate her first.  Now, imagine not knowing any of that information and this is the game you are playing:

Well, I guess you could chalk a lot of this up to playing a character and fighting off some type of alien invasion, which kind of works as far as the settings and enemies go for most of the game.  What was confusing as hell was the character design and the power-ups.

When you start the game as Maria (I also played through the first stage as Ryo and did not like his powered-up abilities as much), you are what appears to be a leather/spandex-clad woman attacking random blob-looking creatures with a whip.  The first power-up I got upgraded me from whip to a laser pistol of some kind, followed by a more spinning-type attack followed by sprouting wings and gaining the ability to hover (think Princess Toadstool in Super Mario Bros. 2) and you now have homing projectiles that fire out in six different directions.  Let me tell you, this powered-up form for Maria felt severely overpowered, more so when you take into account how much I spammed the rewind feature in the SNES app.  Having the ability to just constantly press the attack button and have projectiles fly out and seek out enemies was very cool, especially against bosses.  Case in point, the boss for Stage 2 (Mothra?):

There was practically no strategy besides avoid the enemy by moving away from it and pressing X as fast as possible.  I nearly did not have time to see its own projectile attack before killing it.

The levels themselves were strange enough to be interesting, even knowing now the context of the story, they seem oddly varied especially for a VR story that is supposed to be about a ruined capital.  The building tops, sewers, subways all seemed to make sense, but the jungle setting I guess could have been an overgrown Central Park type-local.  Then there was a cave setting with a minecart, an area full of waterfalls which you might have been contractually obligated to put in all action platformers made between 1985 and 1997.  But then there was a whole flesh-like area with nodule/pustule-filled corridors complete with flaming prominences and floating bloated whatsits, all of which seemed to exist for the sole purpose of drawing out the length of the game because I do not recall there being a related boss battle at the end of this stage; and even preceding it with the minecart level with no location transition seemed odd and jarring.

There was a pretty interesting auto-runner section which would have worked better as the lead up to the final stage.  I ended up not having the wings, for which I kind of regret because I wonder how that would have worked in an auto-runner stage; it also would have made the stage so much easier.  I seem to recall having lost them in the previous stage and figured I would just play through and hopefully earn them again, but then the stage ended, this stage began and I did not get them again until halfway through the minecart stage.  But holy damn did I spam the rewind feature against this boss because even as interesting this stage was compared to the rest of the game, I really did not want to restart from the beginning of the stage again and hope for the Wings power-up.

Something else that confused me (as if the entire game was not confusing enough), was how what power-up you earned was determined.  I recognized that Green Crystal power-ups would give you a protective shield for a short time, the Red Crystals would refill your life, and the Gold Crystals would give you attack power-ups.  But sometimes one of the crystals would change to I think either purple or blue.  The best I can guess is that they were somewhat randomized as I only saw the laser gun in the first stage and did not go through all of the different claw attacks and varying whip attacks before getting the wings power-up.  There were a couple of power-ups that would change color too, although I would typically try to grab them before they disappeared (assuming that they disappear after a few seconds) so I was never really able to properly analyze what was going on with the crystals when they changed color.

Secondly, and really only having to do with the minecart stage was getting lost in levels, although I did feel this way at various other areas like the sewers and subway.  In most of these stages and in good video game fashion, you would progress through the stages from left to right.  Sometimes you would move vertically through stages too, but that would also include moving from the left side of the screen to the right.  The atrocious minecart stage just seemed to go on forever.  You would enter from the left riding on top of the minecart (not actually in the minecart) and the minecart would plummet when going across broken tracks, but you would fall with it.  So I tried jumping off of the cart and walked through, passed through a tunnel, then entered through another identical-looking cavern riding on a minecart, but I could not tell you if the tracks were broken in the same place (essentially redoing the same room) or one that only looked the same.  I want to say it was in this stage that I learned that if I pressed L/R I could sprint and high jump.  This was a

The last thing (maybe?) that I questioned was how the game would save your progress, if at all.  Thankfully the SNES app has up to four save states per account per game, so I could have saved at various stages to replay while maintaining one that I would use for my primary game, but I never noticed any file select or password option.  So if this game was designed to be played and beaten in a single sitting, then I applaud your buttocks, hips, and thighs, because my entire lower body would have fallen asleep before even getting to the Mothra-lite boss.  Unless you know what you are doing and you could just sail through and beat the game in fewer than 45 minutes.

Psycho Dream was definitely an interesting experience.  On one hand, I am glad that I played it because it was a game that I had never heard of before and I love being able to play unfamiliar games.  On the other hand, I do not know if I would fully recommend the game, especially if it is being played outside of an emulator without save states or a rewind feature.  I can almost promise you that I probably would not have made it past the first level if I played this on a native system.  That is not to say that there is no merit to this game, just that it was interesting from the character design, the level layout, to the mechanics and power-up feature.  Just. . . interesting.  And I feel like that is enough.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental

MIDI Week Singles: "Orc Campaign III" - WarCraft: Orcs & Humans (PC)

 

"Orc Campaign III" from WarCraft: Orcs & Humans on the PC (1994)
Composers: Gregory Alper, Rick Jackson, Chris Palmer, Glenn Stafford
Album: No Official Album Release*
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment

It has been a long many years since I have visited Azeroth in any form.  The first time was playing a demo for WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness back in 1996 then buying the Warcraft I & II Battle Chest Edition at Target.  I really only dabbled a bit in the original WarCraft mainly because there was the shiny and new WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness that ran so much better and had so many more options.  But I did play both Orcs and Humans and listened to the music on the CD ROM a lot.

At first, this track is pretty unremarkable.  There is ambient drones playing in the background and war drums chugging along.  But then at 0:39, you have what sounds like to me the horn section that screams WARCRAFT!!  Something about those MIDI horns is what brings me around, then coupled with that ambient drone and war drums and you have music fit to raid and pillage the puny human settlements who were foolish enough to build so near to the Swamps of Sorrow.  Then around 2:12 the song really picks up (or at least I think it does) with the bass repeating their melody and then when the strings and then the bells come in. . .AH!  I love it.

I mean, I guess the song does kind of show its age for being a track in an RTS game, but this was the mid 1990s and WarCraft was not an especially fast running game, but it suits it just fine.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Nothing's Gonna Stop Us

P.S.  I say that there was no official soundtrack because you could just as easily listen to the music from the game by using the CD ROM as a music CD either on your computer or in a regular CD player (after skipping Track 1 which was the Data Track).  I was definitely spoiled by this and never understood why all CD ROM games did not have this ability?  It also helped that the game CD worked on both Mac and PC, because I first played the game on my sister's Mac and then used it on my on PC laptop after graduating from high school.

#IndieSelect: Savage Halloween (NS)

 Disclaimer:  I received a copy of Savage Halloween by 2ndBoss from the publisher QUByte Interactive for 420MacMan's #IndieSelect.  The game was given and received without expectation or promise of a positive review, only that the game be played by the requesting party and that the experience is shared through social media channels.  All words and pictures unless otherwise noted are my own from my own playthrough of the game.

Savage Garden is a retro-styled shoot'em up game developed by 2ndBoss and published by QUByte Games Studios where you run and shoot things.  Run and Gun if you will.  Like all good games in this genre, there is a healthy mix of running, gunning, jumping, surfing, gunning, flying, gunning, driving. . . you get the idea.

Like any good NES/SNES era game, you need to have a basic story for why you are running through various environments and biomes shooting everything in sight.  The story here is that Dracula has decided that all of the evil things that would normally have the night off on Halloween but decided that they deserve more days off, so he closes the portal that would take them back into their realm so that they can (checks notes) wreak havoc the rest of the year.  I think that is correct.  The point is, Dracula is allowing evil creatures to remain and it is your job to kill them all and force Dracula back through the portal.  

Our heroes here are a sentient bipedal pumpkin-man named James, Lulu the puppy who turns into a werewolf, and Dracula's daughter Dominika.  Each of the characters has slightly different stats in terms of health, moving speed, and jumping.  When I first started, I selected James since his stats were all right down the middle, and not knowing if I would favor a slower character (Lulu) or a speedier and slightly weaker one (Dominika), James seemed like the best choice for me.  I also tend not to be the greatest player when it comes to run and gun games (Contra comes to mind), so again, I decided to go with safe.

Before I go on, I should briefly explain the lives and continue system here since this can differ from one game to another and I definitely took this into account before I started a new stage.  In Savage Halloween, you start out with three lives but you can find James' head, often in hidden areas that grant you an extra life.  When you lose your last life, you are given the option to continue or quit back to the main menu.  If you continue, of which you only have three, you will start back at the beginning of the most recent area of the game you died in, or if there was a checkpoint partway through the area.  At the end of your continues, it is Game Over and you are taken back to the main menu.  Now, if you pass a stage with one character, that will carry over to any of the characters, so you could beat Stage 1 with James, then attempt Stage 2 with Dominika if you find that James just no longer cuts it.  This is a little game mechanic that I very much appreciate as it tells the player, at least to me, that this game is meant to be fun, not punishing and that if you decide you want to try other characters, go for it.

With James, I made it to almost the end of Stage 1: Awakening and decided that I needed more life to get me through this section.  The flying (Gradius, Life Force) section did a number of eight of my lives and two of my continues.  The mechanic here was a little different though from your regular flying shmups in that here, when you pressed Left on the left joystick, you would aim backward while flying backward.  Maybe because I did not take full advantage of this mechanic, but I found it somewhat disorienting so I just held the ZL button to lock my aiming forward.  So after many failed attempts, I felt that my only recourse was to choose Lulu whose Life rating was an A instead of James' B or Dominika's C.  A somewhat slow tanky character in a run and gun for the sake of staying alive just a little bit longer seemed like a fair tradeoff.  So I returned to the main menu, restarted the game with Lulu, and began my journey to send Dracula and his minions back.

For me, Lulu was it!  The slower movement speed never felt like I was playing a slug, and the shorter than average jumping ability never seemed to hinder me from accessing any part of the game that I was trying to get to; having a double jump ability from the start was a nice touch too, so it just meant that I was double jumping most of the time; sidebar, you cannot fall and then use your double jump mid-fall if you did not jump, to begin with.  So thanks to Lulu either having more life than James or just taking less damage, I made it up to the flying section [although for Lulu instead of flying on a witches broom, Lulu is flying on a ghost (and for good measure, I made it to this section with Dominika and she flies with her own wings)], past it and got through to the first boss.  It would be Lulu for me for the rest of the game.

As you can see in the last two screenshots above, you have the character's health meter, the number of lives under their avatar picture, followed by a series of icons showing different types of ammunition and how many rounds of that type of ammunition you have.  The first bullet type (the grey box with orange/yellow bullet) is the default bullet type and is the same for each character (despite each character having their own type of gun, they all fire the same bullet at the same rate, ie a machine gun).  By default, you have the machine gun which I ended up favoring over most of the others, partly because it is just a good gun and you have infinite ammunition so you do not have to worry about running out.  Then there is the classic shotgun spread, which I really only used for trying to reach hard to hit enemies or enemies that would shoot back at you if you got in their line of sight.  Next is the ghost bullets, which I only found out by accident that they can pass through walls and will move back-and-forth in an area until they hit an enemy; I rarely used this ammunition.  There were frog bullets which were just you shooting a giant frog out of your gun that would ricochet off of walls until it hit something, which was great for hitting enemies on platforms lower than you, often around corners.  Then there was the chicken bullet that would stick into walls and other enemies then explode.  Lastly was a character-specific special attack which I honestly would often forget about.  What I quickly discovered about these different types of ammunition was that I would hoard them like they were Elixers in a JRPG often thinking that they might prove useful against the end-stage boss.  Then I would end up unloading my machine gun on them and just carry over the unused ammunition into the next stage.

But not always.

As previously mentioned, you only have three continues each playthrough, so if you used up one or two (or three?) during one stage, that would mean that you have fewer attempts at taking out the stage boss.  What I ended up doing most of the time was after defeating the stage boss, I would quit back to the main menu, then select the next stage and begin again.  This meant that I would start a new stage fresh with three lives and three continues.  The two downsides to this approach to playing is that your score is reset each time you start up from the main menu, but what the High Score does beyond bragging rights, at least on the Switch version I am unsure.  The second thing that happens is that any special bullets and special attacks you had accumulated in the previous stage are gone.  So all 678 rounds of that shotgun ammunition go back to zero.  I took this as an acceptable trade-off.

Not to give the impression that I loved everything about Savage Halloween, there were a couple of things that I had critiques on, which really just seem minor at this point.  The first is that some of the stages felt a little long.  While each stage would often have a section that was an homage to a classic game, I found myself excited to make my way through the running and gunning areas to find out what this stages special section would be (like the flying area in Stage 1, or the surfing section in Stage 2 being a reference to the Turbo Tunnel stage in Battletoads).  There were also a number of stretches especially in the earlier stages near the end of an area where there was just running, no gunning.  These areas really felt empty and pretty uninteresting.  I am a little conflicted here because while it was nice to have a bit of a reprieve, it did kind of feel like the game (or the area) ran out of enemies and just wanted me to get on with it.  I guess you could also say that this meant that enemies were not frequently respawning making times when you had to backtrack all the more hazardous.

Because it is the Switch (and I do not have the Child Monitoring function enabled to see my playtimes) I cannot say for certain how long it took me to beat Savage Halloween, but at seven stages, all but one I was able to beat on my first attempt, felt like the perfect length of time.  There were a number of times, looking at you Peanut, where I felt anxious that I was going to go through all of my lives and continues and I would have to start a stage over from the beginning, but that thankfully never happened.  For me, this tells me that the game was nearly perfectly balanced in terms of difficulty.  Putting the player on their toes, thinking that there is a very real chance that you will end up dying and being overpowered by the enemies and/or the stage boss.  I applaud the developers for being able to achieve this fine line of maintaining the challenge without feeling that game is too easy; although I would be surprised to not find people who have complained that the game is too easy, even on the Hardcore setting.  I did briefly try the Hardcore difficulty setting if only to say that I did, and while I had thought that I would be faced with more enemies on screen, the effect was actually a lot simpler.  In Hardcore, one hit from anything kills you.  Any enemy and environmental hazard are lethal.  I did not make it through the first area in the first stage.  This might actually be a case of playing as the most handicapped character (Lulu) when playing as Dominika would offer the greatest advantages if Life is not taken into account.

There is a lot more that I feel I could go on about with Savage Halloween, from the gorgeous sprites for the characters, enemies, and bosses by Abdel de Oliveira to the perfectly suited music by Zé Roberto Chapolin.  The environments are interesting and varied for each stage ranging from inside trees to circus trains, to large interstate freeways.  The modes of play too are a massive love letter to shmups throughout the golden age of NES/SNES gaming using past games as elements in stages and not based entirely off of those elements so as to not feel completely derivative.  You can tell there was a love for these games that wasn't intended as a nostalgia cash-grab.  QUByte Game Studio did well to help publish Savage Halloween and hopefully developer 2nd Boss will see even more support from them going forward, as they will see support from me (just bought Biolab Wars on the Switch before writing this article).

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Ancient Malignance Awakes

P.S.  The only aspect of the game that I did not try out was the local two-player co-op, which I am sure would be a blast.  Conklederp is not really a fan of shmups/run and gun, but I can almost guarantee you that if Dr. Potts or Vorlynx were in town, I could see us starting and finishing the game in a single evening.  Ahhh, the Before Times.

P.P.S.  Because I could not find a great place to put gameplay videos in the body of the article and have the formatting still look good, here are a couple below:

A brief scene from that infamous first flying section in Stage 1.

An underwater stage reminiscent of The Dam stage in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (but you know, with guns this time).  This was a tough stage.

Lastly, a section in (I think) the second-to-last area in Stage 5: Circus Show where you took control of a calliope car with a rocket launcher and from what I can tell, you are completely invincible.  This section seems to have been created just for the player to have fun in and rack up points before you have to fight Peanut (see above), being one of the more difficult boss fights in the game.

MIDI Week Signles: "Boss 2" - Psycho Dream (SFC)

 

"Boss 2" from Psycho Dream on the Super Famicom (1992)
Composer: Michiko Naruke
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Riot
Developer: Riot

I just finished Psycho Dream on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System™ - Nintendo Switch Online app which has a copy of this strange game that was originally only released on the Super Famicom in Japan back in 1992.  I knew nothing about the game but the title looked intriguing so I started it about a month ago.  The music. . . is strange, but that seemed to fit in well with the rest of the visuals for the game not knowing about anything that was going on.  The music during what turned out to be the final boss though piqued my ears a bit early on, and it was then that I realized that composer Michiko Naruke had used the melody from "Ave Maria" as the basis for this semi-climactic track.

I say semi-climactic for a number of reasons.  First, the battle against the end-game boss looked pretty bad-ass.  A large robot figure with a woman floating in its abdomen while it swipes at you with massive hands and shooting projectiles all over the place.  The dramatic music which seemed to be a much slower tempo (albeit at a semi-techno-house-remix tempo) than the rest of the music in the game probably would have had an even greater impact had I known that I was actually battling a virtual AI for the life/soul of a young woman who is on the verge of dying while plugged into a virtual world from a fictional film.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

What Could Be Plainer Than This?

Game EXP: Snowboarding The Next Phase (NS)

Now that we are firmly in Spring and snowsports are not really part of the public conversation, let us talk about a snowboarding video game.  I picked up Snowboarding The Next Phase for Nintendo Switch over the sale that happened back at the end of November (back in 2019 mind you) on the recommendation over on /r/NintendoSwitch in that it was generally a fun snowboarding game coupled with the fact that it was only $0.99.  If it was a bad game, then I would have given Session Games and RedBullMediaHouse $0.99 of my hard-earned money.  I think if I had gone into the game expecting the next iteration of 1080° Snowboarding I would have been severely disappointed, but after about five hours, I can tell you that the joystick on the Joy-Con is a lot happier than the joystick on multiple N64 controllers ever were in 2001.

Snowboarding The Next Phase is broken up into a number of game modes although to date, I have only played Carrier Mode because I mostly play single-player games and I don't think anyone I know with a Switch is also playing.  But there is a fair amount of content in carrier mode to take up five hours and I am maybe halfway through, all depending on how complete I want to be.  By the looks of things, there are 11 different locations to select with between three to nine different runs per mountain and three objectives to complete on each run in the form of Bronze/Silver/Gold medals that progressively become harder as you complete each challenge.  The challenges based around acquiring a specific score or higher, are often impossible until you earn a higher score multiplier, which requires you to play additional mountains and runs and then come back later to attempt the higher score challenges.

Score multipliers are determined by the gear that you are wearing (kind of) and what vehicles you have earned throughout your career (kind of).  One thing that annoys me about the gear mechanic is that the game will automatically select what gear you are wearing based on the most recent gear you have earned in-game.  This seemingly also changes the facial look of your rider so it almost seems like you are really just a manager for a bunch of snowboarders rather than one snowboarder.  To note, you are also only able to play as a male with no option to switch genders, which is really too bad because there does not seem to be a reason behind not including a female character to play since the snow gear is not tight enough to show off Dead or Alive levels of bouncing breasts or the degree of butt curvature.  There are plenty of snowboarders of all genders out there so only including men is something that I feel either Session Games or RedBullMediaHouse could have improved upon if only to be just a bit more inclusive.

That being said, there have been some outfits that I like the look of, but if I want to keep that look, I have to constantly go back to the main menu, select Customize and change my look any time I earn a new outfit or snowboard.  What makes this particularly confusing is that you frequently earn outfits and boards as you raise levels where one outfit will give you a 0.9 to your score multiplier and then the next one will only give you a 0.3, but the game keeps the higher score multiplier, from what I can tell, while changing your outfit to the one with a 0.3.  To me, it does not make a lot of sense.  And there are vehicles too, from what I can tell, are merely cosmetic items that hang out in the background of the menu screen that only adds to your score multiplier and nothing else.  I guess it is common for Red Bull sponsored snowboarders to have a snowmobile, helicopter, and a snow groomer as part of their entourage?  Maybe if upgrading your helicopter, snowboard, and/or groomer allowed you access to additional slopes, a variation on the same slope, or a different starting location, but that might be asking too much of this game.

Now that that is mostly out of the way, let's get into actually playing the game.

The biggest issue I have with the game is that the controls feel very loose.  The physics can act a bit wonky at times too.  On some runs, you will have a ramp that lets you jump maybe 10 feet in the air although it does propel you 30+ yards down the slope, while on the same run, you can jump off a small incline and launch you 20 feet vertically into the air, or even bounce you from one side of the slope to the other while performing a two-foot verticle 180.  And since the sole purpose of jumping into the air is to give yourself as much time as possible to pull off some sick tricks, and tricks are one of the other loose aspects of the game.  Unlike 1080°, you do not have to rotate the joystick every time you want your character in STNP, instead, you just hold the direction you want to rotate and you do that.  

If you want to be able to land a 1080° or even an 1800° spin, then all you have to do is jump high enough and hold the joystick in one direction for the length of the jump/fall.  If you want to do a front flip followed inexplicably by a backflip, then you can do that, often while throwing in a couple of rotations in for good measure.  Now I am not a physicist but I am pretty sure the Laws of Motion would have something to say about that.  However, this is not a physics-reliant game with a robust physics engine, it is a game designed to pull off massive tricks, score points, and have fun.  And maybe slam back a Red Bull or five in the process.  Red Bull drinking game?

One mechanic that was nice to come across was that there is no life bar or meter, or timer you were fighting against.  If you wipe out too often, you can keep boarding and you will not risk dying or failing your run because you wasted too much time trying to traverse over to that Black Geotags to score more points.  You may end up not be scoring as high preventing you from progressing in Career Mode, but it is nice to have the emphasis on snowboarding, and not on whether or not running into another tree means that your run will end wasting the last five minutes you spent on the current stage.  And since the runs only last a couple of minutes, having to repeat a run is not as much of a time investment as other games might make it out to be.  Kind of like in Tecmo Bowl on the NES, there are no penalties or injuries, just an elaborate game of tag designed to be fun.

The big takeaway from STNP is that yes, it is a fun game if I am looking for something to play for 10-15 minutes.  Progression has been fairly steady with some runs needing multiple attempts in order to complete all of the objectives, which is fine because the runs are pretty short, often taking no more than one minute to go from the top of the mountain to the bottom.  To date, there is one objective that eludes me, which is to pull off an Off-Axis Flip, which seems like it should be as easy as pushing the joystick up and to the left or right and you rotate while flipping.  For whatever reason, it is not as easy and the technique still eludes me, which probably means that I am just overthinking things again.  You know, the usual.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Meiringin 2021

MIDI Week Singles: "Walking the Earth" - Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light (NDS)

 

"Walking the Earth" from Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light on the Nintendo DS (2009)
Composer: Naoshi Mizuta
Album: Hikari no 4 Senshi -Final Fantasy Gaiden- Original Soundtrack
Label: Square Enix Co., Ltd.
Publisher: Square Enix
Developer: Matrix Software

It has been, a long time since I last played Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light, released on the Nintendo DS back in 2009, although I do occasionally think about going back to restarting it and not grinding an additional (and useless) 30 levels above the recommended level before attempting the final boss.  "Walking the Earth," from what I remember is the default theme that plays regardless of what biome you are walking in, so you end up hearing this theme a lot, although maybe not in its entirety due to the semi-frequent-ness of random battles.  Interestingly in this game, there is a day/night cycle and with it a change in the overworld theme that plays (and I may just feature the nighttime music next week?).

"Walking the Earth" is just a good all-around overworld theme for a JRPG where you are going to be spending a lot of time walking around and listening to this particular track.  The instrumentation, which is very much an element of its time and the system it was released on, is well-suited for the storybook aesthetic.  It even reminds me a bit of music that would have been composed on the NES, although there is more depth here, again, the instrumentation hints that an 8-bit version of the song could exist.  And now we are dipping our entire bodies into nostalgia.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Should We Take The Day...

Emulator Hour: Kirby's Dream Land 3 (SNES/NS)

 

Oof.

I kinda do not want to talk too harshly about Kirby's Dream Land 3 as played on the SNES Online Switch App on the Nintendo Switch because it was a game that Conklederp wanted me to play as a way of us destressing before falling asleep at night (Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity was understandably too high energy), but she also witnessed enough of my frustration and annoyance while playing the game that I think it is safe here to do so.

I have some history with the Kirby franchise in the form of playing a little of Kirby's Dream Land on the Game Boy, 3D Classics: Kirby's Adventure, and I played the demos for Kirby's Epic Yarn (20 minutes at PAX2010) and Kirby's Star Allies last year on the Switch; after playing Kirby's Dream Land 3, I did play Kirby's Super Star so I have that in the back of my brain too while writing this article, but chronologically, I had not played this title yet before KDL3.  So please keep that all in mind as I attempt to be coherent in my wordings from here on out.

I did not really enjoy Kirby's Dream Land 3.  Outside of the intro cinematic showing the black-blob-force crash-landing in Dream Land (sorry, I just learned it is called Planet Popstar, so now I'm the idiot) and taking over the various characters that inhabit this land/realm, I found the game to be significantly lacking in any description of what you were supposed to be doing besides moving from the left side of the screen to the right.  Sure it follows the standard Kirby format of swallowing and absorbing the power of certain enemies (while others you just swallow with no effect), but the visual depiction and definition of what the effects are after swallowing an applicable enemy leave a lot to be desired.  BUT!, this does make a bit of sense because, in KDL3, you are able to have an optional companion that modifies the abilities, but I will get to that down below because I have more to go on about.

The game is broken up into (technically) six worlds, although the final world can only be accessed if you managed to collect all of the Heart Stars from each of the six levels and a boss fight in all five of the worlds.  What are Heart Stars you ask?  I have almost no idea aside from them being a collectible.  I know that if you do something in each stage, you will meet an NPC who you help (maybe?) and they reward Kirby with a Heart Star at the end of the stage.  How do you get a Heart Star?  Again, no clue, because how you acquire them changes with each level you are in, and I only know this because I am also currently looking at a walkthrough on GameFAQS.  

I genuinely feel that this mechanic of Heart Stars only exists to draw out the length of the game, because if you do not know how to earn a Heart Star, or if you do not accidentally come across something to do in a level that is not immediately moving to the right, then you will most likely have to replay a level again and again until you discover that to get the Heart Star in Level 1 of World 1: Grass Land, you have to not step on any of the flowers in the third room.  Or if you have never played any of the Metroid games, you may not know that you need the Ice Beam (or any ice-based weapon in KDL3) to defeat the Metroids who make a cameo appearance along with Samus; This one, in particular, upset me because it requires outside knowledge that you do not have from this game in order to collect the Heart Star; sure you might already be favoring an ice weapon since the stage is all fire-based.  For me, I decided that I was just going to play each level, make it through, and if I found a Heart Star, then good on me and move on.  If I did not find one, then oh well, and move on.

My last complaint about KDL3 is that I felt that the gameplay felt very sludge-like.  Kirby and his companion if I was using any, would move almost painfully slow.  There were some stages where there were no enemies on screen and I was just walking/running to the right, over hill and under hill with the speed of a fat and overfed Hobbit.  Yes, I could instead have them run (double-tapping forward), but even that felt like it should have been the default speed.  This never felt like a problem with the game itself running slowly on the Switch, only that the characters themselves would move slowly, that they were designed to move at this speed.  I present to you Exhibit A below, from World 1: Grass Land - Level 5:

Not so much a complaint as it is a critique of the way that I played KDL3, was that by the end of World 1: Grass Land, I was not even trying to act like I never used the Rewind feature that is part of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System - Nintendo Switch Online app.  I fully admit that I spammed the hell out of it on most occasions, so purists can claim that I only pseudo-played KDL3 but I did not play it as intended by the developers.  Which is fine.  This is also probably why I had upwards of 29 lives by the end of the game and really did not care about collecting the star pieces (needing 30 for an extra life).  Most of the time though, I would just power through if I took damage, but the times when I was down to one HP left (or the equivalent against whatever enemy I was trying to get past), I would rewind the game so that I could figure out how to not die in the process.  Sometimes this was just from me playing the game too quickly and being careless, other times it genuinely felt that it was a GOTCHA moment designed to eat up Kirby's life.  But for those moments, this was how I would (frequently) play, I offer Exhibit B, from somewhere in World Five: Iceberg:

Now, KDL3 does look very good for an SNES game released in 1997, I have no qualm there.  The multiple layers of background scrolling in some stages is pretty impressive, especially when compared to Super Mario World being a launch title.  The music too, oftentimes, is spot-on as catchy as you would expect to find in a Kirby game.  But for me, there were just not enough saving graces for me to want to go back and collect all of the Star Hearts so that I could fight the final boss and achieve the best ending.  There were moments of fun, like figuring out how the abilities Kirby absorbed would be used by each of his companions, but other times I would be perfectly happy with Pitch and fly, avoiding as many enemies as possible; or just use Kirby's flying ability to, again, avoid as many enemies as possible and in turn, as much of the platforming as possible as well.  Sure Coo is a better flyer than both Kirby and Pitch, but I tended to not like Coo's special attacks as much as Pitch, but that is just me.

I think what a lot of Kirby's Dream Land 3 came down to was that it felt like this was the third game in a series that Nintendo and HAL Laboratory had felt that the player was coming into with a tank full of knowledge about the Kirby franchise and game mechanics.  There did not seem to be a lot in the way of handholding to get the player used to any mechanics and the lack of any description, from what I could tell, about the Star Hearts just seemed to me like an insult to the player and possibly even cheap on the part of the developers.  Sadly, a fun soundtrack and a great-looking game were not enough for me to have many more positive things to say about Kirby's third foray into Dream Land, sorry, Planet Popstar.  But, Kirby's Dream Land 3 will hardly keep me from trying other games in the Kirby franchise in the future.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental

Game EXP: Little Nightmares: Complete Edition [Six's Story] (NS)

Just to warn you all before you start in on this article.  This will not be a traditional Game EXP article (whatever that means).  I will only somewhat be talking about my experience playing the first half of Little Nightmares by Tarsier Studio, but I will be talking about my thoughts about the game, the story, the lore, and then a bit of how I played.

Now, it has been a little while since I finished Six's story in Little Nightmares: Complete Edition on the Nintendo Switch.  I should preface first though that when you start Little Nightmares: Complete Edition, you have the option to play as either Six or The Kid, with The Kid's story being the DLC to Little Nightmares.  Because I did not look too much into what was included in the game when I bought it, I did not know this, but I did decide to play as Six, the little character in a hooded yellow rain slicker because that character seemed slightly more prominent in the trailers that I watched but was also the character depicted in the logo for the game, so that was who I went with.  I genuinely thought that the game was going to be the same, just the look of the playable character was going to be different, but The Kid's story is a complete DLC game that I will cover after I find a way to get away from the Janitor in his workshop.

Shortly after I started Six's story, I realized that there was a lot of information in the trailer that is not conveyed in the game, mainly because there is zero spoken dialogue, no notes to find, and no signs to read in the game.  I was kind of expecting some type of narration with phrasing similar to a children's book that has gone off the rails.  Names like "The Maw," "The Lady," "The Residents," and "The Janitor" are spoken in the trailer as if you already know about these locations and characters, but at the very least that you will find out about them when you play the game.  The furthest you get to find out any of this information is that you do meet The Lady and the Janitor, you are in The Maw, and you do pass through the Residence.  But again, there is nothing in-game to give you any of these proper names either by being spoken to the player or from any in-game text because there is no reading involved.  The reason why I sound ever so slightly bitter about this is that again, based on the trailer, I was fully ready to find out all of the information about this location, who these obese characters were, who this yellow rain jacketed character was, and why they were there, and why this Janitor figure has such touchy-feely arms.  Now, there is a good chance I missed some of the more subtleties (as I have done with Dark Souls), but I like to think of myself as a semi-attentive person, but everything ended up feeling more interpretive by the player.

And I am somewhat okay with there being no recorded dialogue or reading notes, signs, or other communication beyond utterances, grunts and exclamations from an inclusive perspective because this means that there is no localization required and anyone who speaks any language could play Little Nightmares and have the same experience, although their own background and experiences they bring to the game are what could make it unique to themselves.  On the other side of things, I am a little disappointed because I want to know more about The Maw.  Why is it there?  Why are people so much larger than Six and is it only because Six is a child and that is how children perceive adults?  What is up with the Janitor?  Did Six have a vendetta against The Lady and why was she having nightmares about her at the start of the game?  I guess the fact that the game had given me a lot of questions to think about is not a bad thing that may or may not be covered in Little Nightmares 2.  

On the surface, Six progresses from a suitcase she wakes up on, wanders through areas of a place, is captured by a long-armed villain who wraps up other children and sends them to two chefs who grind them up into sausages and other meats for a ship full of obese people who are observed by a Geisha-looking villainess who Six ends up killing.  Oh, and during that time, our protagonist Six has their own evolution of accepting help from other caged children, to eating trapped rats, to eating live creatures (referred to as Nomes) who are trying to help her, to consuming the life-essence of The Lady and murdering nearly all everybody who comes in contact with her on her way out.  Why?  There are a number of sites/articles that have analysed the story in Little Nightmares so I am not about to try to start that now this far into the article, just know that I have talked a bit about it with Conklederp who has a better interpretation than my, "I ran around and did stuff while trying not to get killed."

One of the things that really kept me going through the game was how good everything looked, even on the Switch in hand held mode, there was just this aesthetic that reminded me of little puppets moving about in a diorama.  My biggest complaint though was that the load times were noticeably long.  From starting up the game to have to reload after every death (which happened semi-frequently with The Janitor and every now-and-then with the Chefs and the Residents), the load time averaged between 25 - 30 seconds.  I have not tangentially heard anything about load times associated with Little Nightmares on any system so maybe it is a handheld Switch issue?  But the load times have persisted with the DLC chapter which I have recently started.  The Runaway Kid's story in the DLC portion of Little Nightmares: Complete edition and two of presumably five chapters in, I have gathered very little additional information outside of a single picture from the Concept Art Extras portion of the main menu that I will not share here and probably will talk about in one of the two articles for Little Nightmares: Complete Edition [The Kid's Story]."

So until then, I look forward to continuing The Kid's story, and hopefully, my interest will continue through to eventually picking up Little Nightmares II, see how it connects if at all to the story and events in Little Nightmares: Complete Edition, and find out if the load times have been improved at all.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental

MIDI Week Singles: "Title Theme" - The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (N64)

 

"Title Theme" from The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask on the Nintendo 64 & Game Cube (2000 & 2003)
Composer: Koji Kondo
Album: The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask Game Music Soundtrack CD Set
Label: Nintendo of America
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo EAD

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is a game that I have mentioned a number of times in the past but strangely enough, has not been a game that we have featured before on MIDI Week Singles.  I was originally deciding between which of the four Clock Town Themes to use as Days 1 - 3 are all variations on the "Title Theme" which itself is the theme for Clock Town (thanks Xzibit) while "Last Day," being the final six or so hours before the moon smashes into Clock Town (and the world?) was a little too esoteric to just pull out of the blue.  So "Title Theme" being the theme for Clock Town and in typical J.J. Abrams and Michael Giacchino style, all is happy and good in the main theme until the final seconds when you realize that something is very much wrong and then it fades to black (thanks LOST).

I guess I just like and lean towards songs that have this overall tone and what better song to use from one of my favorite games in this franchise than the one that plays over the opening titles?

Happy Wednesday.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
I Can Make You Cry