Game EXP: Biolab Wars (NS)

 

I purchased Biolab Wars on the Nintendo Switch just as I was finishing Savage Halloween, the first game I played from Brazilian developer 2nd Boss Game Studio which I received for an #IndieSelect event.  Again, I purchased Biolab Wars because of how much fun Savage Halloween was and I felt no obligation to purchase this game, I just wanted to.  I should also warn you that I am going to be making countless comparisons to Savage Halloween because the games are so similar-style shmups but I also try to keep in mind that Biolab Wars was released first, so the comparisons are a little unfair; like talking about A New Hope for the first time and comparing it to The Empire Strikes Back.  So now that that is out of the way, let us get down to Biolab Wars!

In terms of release dates, Biolab Wars preceded Savage Halloween so there was a fair amount of this game that felt very familiar.  Both are run and gun, shmups where you play a character gunning their way through various areas of a stage culminating in a final boss fight.  Each game has an anthropomorphic dog a pumpkin-headed character, and a female character, while Biolab Wars has a fourth semi-generic 80s action movie male hero to play as well.  Here, all of the characters have the same stats so the only reason to choose different characters is if you like the color scheme of one over the other or if you genuinely do not like the color orange.  For me, I tended to be somewhat superstitious so I would play one character and if I hit a rough patch and died multiple times, I would switch to another character.  Because I played as wolf Lulu in Savage Halloween, I decided to play as Teddy, but again, there were no stat differences between any of the characters.  After reaching stage two (later) I switched to Becca and played as her for most of the game, only switching to Jack and Finn while going up against the final boss, but ended up going back to Becca.

The plot of the game is about as simplistic as you can get.  There is an explosion in 1985 New York.  A military general tells his subordinate to call in a group of mercenaries and to enact the Biolab Protocol.  Cut to the title screen.  You then select your character to single-handedly be airdropped in via helicopter and that is where the mayhem begins.  There is no additional dialogue between stages.  There is no soliloquy from any of the bosses before, during, or after their fight.  There is no additional input from either the General, the Soldier, or any other representative of the military.  You just go from one stage to the next shooting hordes of enemies while trying not to die (too often) yourself.  You know, a shmup.

Like any good 80s era shooter, there are additional types of guns you can pick up, but unlike Savage Halloween, here you can only pick up one type of ammunition and you use that until you run out of ammunition or pick up a new type of ammo, and then you revert back to your default machine gun when you have run out of the special ammunition.  There was also an item drop that gave you more ammunition for whichever type you currently had equipped which is all well and good unless you had the default gun which already has unlimited ammunition so that became essentially useless.  The ammo drops appeared to be all planned out, so often times the new type of ammunition would be beneficial against the upcoming enemies.  Or I would just ignore it because I did not want to switch to the shotgun spread-type ammo.  And while there might have been a difference in the amount of damage different types of ammo caused, I honestly did not notice if the giant ball ammo (pictured above) was more effective than the default ammo, but at least it felt like it was.

Another tactic that I carried over (carried back?) from Savage Halloween was exiting back to the main menu after clearing a stage.  The premise here is that there would be a good chance that I died at least once during the stage, especially on my first attempt.  So If I were to start a new stage after completing one, I would only have as many lives as I had at the end of the last stage.  But your score would carry over.  By exiting back to the main menu and essentially restarting a stage, you would go back to having three lives, but your score would reset to zero.  There is a Restart option when you pause the game, but that only restarts you from the beginning of the stage and it does not reset the placement of 1-Ups if you had already collected them.  So unless I was missing something by having my score reset and not raking up the sweet-sweet points, I had no qualms about exiting out so that I could start a stage with three new lives.

The level design here was a pretty straightforward Contra / Mega Man type approach.  Moving left to right, shooting enemies, and collecting ammunition upgrades with an arbitrary score that runs throughout your playthrough (refer to above).  And there is one stage that deviates from this formula, somewhat but it comes in Stage 2.  This is the stage that put fear into my heart.  The entirety of Stage 2 is your character on a motorcycle with enemies coming at you from behind and the front.  Like the second section in Stage 1 of Savage Halloween, you can shoot behind you as well as in front, but you are unable to lock your gun in any direction.  After three attempts with Teddy, I began to feel that my run in this game was coming to an end, but I switched to Becca and remembered that I had grenades.  Have I not mentioned grenades yet?  Well, I would often forget about grenades because I would force myself to save them up for the end-of-stage bosses, but if I never made it to the end boss, there would be no point in saving them up.  So once I realized that using grenades was integral to taking out the multiple armored cars, I finally made it through to Stage 3.

Sadly, Stage 2 was the only time that the level design diverged at all from the rest of the game, which was a little disappointing.  Stages 1 and 3 - 7 consisted of more platforming and running and gunning.  There was even a stage that incorporated a waterfall which seems obligatory for games that are based around 1980s action movies that inevitably take place in forests/jungles (First Blood, Commando, Predator), but there was nothing that was too either groundbreaking or at least nothing that was completely memorable.  What did make these stages interesting were the boss fights, most of which had different tactics in how to approach them rather than just firing away and dodging enemy fire until they died.  Some of the bosses like Big Boy and Papa Chicken were just a matter of recognizing their respective patterns and hitting them.  From the third stage on, each boss started to have two forms with ever-so-slightly-altered patterns the second time around but it was not until the final stage that the game was finally difficult.

Stage 7 was oddly difficult and part of that was my own fault for trying to be as perfect as personally possible.  Unlike previous stages, this one had two 1-Ups that were easy to acquire so that I could reach the final boss with a whopping five lives so that was one of the metrics I placed upon myself.  Something related to the 1-Up was that it came early on in the stage, so if I lost a life after collecting it, I would respawn back at the beginning and since the 1-Up could only be collected once, I decided to exit out of the game and restart.  In the second area of the stage, there was an elemental mechanic that was a one-hit kill and I would typically only die if I was knocked back by an enemy into the said mechanic, but otherwise, this second area was relatively easy.  Following the second area, there was a mini-boss fight that I never liked, mainly because it felt like it was designed to eat up any special ammunition you had so that you would go into the final boss fight with very little if any special ammunition left.  This felt especially frustrating because this mini-boss was not so much difficult as it was a bullet sponge.

Now, the final boss fight was pretty frustrating and for a while felt like I was not going to actually beat the game.  I cycled through Becca back to Teddy, then to Jack, and finally played the generic male character, Finn.  All of my multiple attempts with each character failed and I decided to give both Teddy and Becca one last attempt (these now being my 9-10th attempts on just the boss alone to say nothing of all of the exit/restarts.  What made this fight so difficult was that you were given one type of special ammunition at the start of the fight, but the trick was that you were not required to pick it up until you wanted to.  Since the first form of the boss was much easier to hit with the default gun, I would wait until the start of the second form to pick up the ammunition.  Then, once the second form started, an ammunition reload drop was given along with another health item; the trick here is that the ammunition reload only works if you have special ammunition already equipped, so if you are using the default ammunition, this drop is effectively pointless.  The boss' first form takes more than the 35ish (I do not recall the exact amount) rounds you receive and since there is no switching between ammunition types, you had to delay picking up the special ammunition as long as possible.

But you know, for all of my griping over the last three paragraphs, Biolab Wars was a lot of fun, partly from a design standpoint, seeing what 2nd Boss Games had come up with and where they would eventually improve upon in Savage Halloween, but also because it genuinely was a fun game.  The music was on point the entire game, the graphics were era-appropriate and despite my own hangups on the final stage, the difficulty never felt so hard that I felt like I needed to replace a controller, and once I recognized patterns and mechanics for the final boss fight, it was just a matter of timing and patience.  Savage Halloween was only released in October 2020, so it might be some time before we see a new game from them, but they are definitely a developer that I will be looking forward to for their next release.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
I Can Feel My Powers Slowly Returning

MIDI Week Singles: "Stage Theme" - Ninja JaJaMaru-kun (FC)

 

"Stage Theme" from Ninja JaJaMaru-kun on the Famicom (1985)
Composer: Unknown
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Jaleco
Developer: Jaleco

Here is another game that is somewhat out of context in that before Nintendo decided to semi-shadow drop this and a handful of other games on their Nintendo Entertainment System™ - Nintendo Switch Online earlier in the week (in all regions from what I can tell), I had never heard of Ninja JaJaMaru-kun, but apparently it sold 1 million copies in Japan after it was released in 1985, so there might be something to it.  I mean, you play as a ninja who is off to rescue a princess and you can ride a giant frog.  That sounds pretty exciting.

Surprisingly, there is very little information that I could find out about Ninja JaJaMaru-kun outside of a possible producer, so I am unsure who wrote this song.  

"Stage Theme," for lack of a better name, only last about 26ish seconds but it loops so well that I had to listen for a few minutes just to make sure that there were not any differences between each time it repeated.  And after that amount of time listening to this song, I actually like it, and I hope that the action-platforming is as engaging as this track; granted it is a track written back in 1985 so it could be a bit grating on the ears, but we all here enjoy video game music right?

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
And The Shame Would Leave A Permanent Scar

P.S.  I also just realized that I get massive Elevator Action vibes from this song, although both songs are vastly different in melody and tone.  So I do not quite know what is going on there.  Just wanted to tack that onto the end.

Game EXP: Long Ago: A Puzzle Tale (NS)

 Disclaimer:  I received a review copy of Long Ago: A Puzzle Tale from developer and publisher GrimTalin before the May 28th release of their game on the Nintendo Switch.  The game was given and received without expectation or promise of a positive review, only that the game be played and reviewed honestly through our site.  At the time the game code was given, there was a no review embargo mentioned so that the game could be openly reviewed and elements of the game shared through social media channels before the May 28th release of the game.  All words and pictures used in this article, unless otherwise noted, are from my own experience playing the game.

Long Ago: A Puzzle Tale
Platform: Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Steam
Release Date: May 28, 2021
Publisher: GrimTalin
Developer: GrimTalin

Long Ago: A Puzzle Tale from GrimTalin (The Adventures of Elena Temple: Definitive Edition) is a low-key puzzle game played on an isometric board with a fantasy story told in the background that plays an ancillary role to the actual gameplay.  The game is broken up into two modes that function in nearly identical ways where you direct a stone ball that rolls in a single direction until it is stopped or the direction is modified by an obstacle while collecting either feathers (quill pens since the story unfolds as each feather is collected?) or coins that are scattered throughout the stage.  Feathers progress the story while gems unlock chapters.

The first game mode progresses the story, told in a fully voiced rhyming fairytale storybook style, telling the tale of a Princess longing for a different life than what awaits her and the adventure the follows.  In these stages, you have to collect all of the feathers that are scattered throughout the playing field, and failing to collect all of the feathers within a set number of moves forces you to replay the stage.  So far (60% of the way through the game as of this paragraph) I have found that the number of moves you have is just enough moves needed to finish one of the story stages (with exception of the first stage as pictured above here); meaning if you have 10 moves, you will not be able to complete the stage in 8 moves.  As you progress through the story stages, the complexity of the puzzles increases as new mechanics are introduced, but the learning curve seems pretty just.

Like this:

There are six story stages in each chapter with there being a total of five chapters, each with its own visual aesthetic.  Once you complete the six story stages, an additional 10 stages are opened up along with the six storybook stages where you now collect coins, and based on the number of moves you used to complete the stage, you are given a three gem rating.  Coins are used to purchase different skins for the stone ball and have no other effects outside of being a cosmetic option.  The gems on the other hand are used to unlock additional chapters.  It is interesting that in the achievements menu (here called Feats of Wisdom) these coin/gem stages are referred to as "optional stages," even though you are required to complete at least enough to earn enough gems to open the next chapter.  

On the counter in the upper-left, there are a series of colored bars ranging from gold to bronze, with each bar counting as a move and showing the number of coins remaining as there are some puzzles where the coins are hidden or must be unlocked before they can be collected.  If you can complete the puzzle while still in the gold range, you will earn three gems, two for silver, one for bronze, and an automatic failure if you are unable to complete the stage in the number of moves given.  For me, the coin/gem stages were where the real challenge lay because, in the storybook stages, the game told you how many moves you had to solve the puzzle, but in the coin/gem stages, using the above stage, for example, you had between 13-18 moves, depending on how many gems you wanted to score.

One of the key mechanics in Long Ago: A Puzzle Tale is the hint system.  In both types of stages, there is a meter on the left side of the screen that slowly fills up over time.  For the storybook stages, once the meter fills up completely, you can press the Y button to receive a hint as to which way to direct the ball in the puzzle.  However, you must use the hint from the start and once you move on your own without a hint, then the hints stop.  You can undo moves at will to take yourself back to a moment before you moved on your own to get additional hints.  In the coin/gem stages, your meter is broken up into thirds by bronze/silver/gold with the hints directing you to complete the puzzle in the color that the meter has filled up to.  So if the meter is only filled through the silver, the game will only give you hints to solve the puzzle to earn two gems.  I am not sure if the meter fills an additional color when you started with just one filled if the hints compensate, or if you have to wait until another attempt.  Once the meters are full, you can use as many or as few hints to get you the solution, which is actually nice to have in the back of your mind.  One other thing I wanted to note about these meters is that they do not reset, so if you leave a puzzle with a meter half full, if you come back 15 puzzles later, the meter will be at the same level as when you left, which is a nice touch.  

The amount of time it takes for the meters to fill up is well-paced as in both modes (Bronze: 3m; Silver: +4m; Gold +5m).  In both modes I found a lot of the puzzles required multiple attempts as new mechanics were introduced allowing enough time to discover how they functioned individually and in tandem.  Oftentimes, by the time the meter reached the silver level, I might have been able to figure out what I needed to do to reach a gold/ three gems.  I would say that more than half of the time, I could figure out the silver/two gem solution on my own and before the meter filled.  On rare occasions, I would let the meter fill while doing some other daily life activity if I became too frustrated with a stage, or I would just leave the stage to come back later.  The one problem I had with coming back to stages later, especially stages in previous chapters was that I would be out of my rhythm in terms of the mechanics used as they did not always compound across chapters.

Now, I feel like the mechanics for the hint system and the hint system are really what make this game approachable and fun, at least for someone like me who can have trouble with puzzle games like this that require items (in this case gems) to unlock additional chapters.  Had I been thinking beforehand, I could have not used the hint system at all to see how far I would be able to make it in the game before being locked out of chapters due to not having enough gems.  I think it is a great touch that works well in this game and possible others (looking at you Chess Knights: Viking Lands), but I recognize that it may not be suitable, warranted, or wanted for all puzzle games.  I could even imagine people harking on the existence of the hint system as cheapening the game and somehow invalidating their own accomplishment in being able to gold/three gem each puzzle stage in under a minute.  But for me, whose brain does not work in the same way by figuring out how the ball will interact with obstacles five or 10 moves ahead, it is a welcome addition.

As for features of the game that I did not use too often, there are different control and input methods as well as being able to slightly rotate the camera.  For control schemes, the default felt the best, which has you point the joystick in the direction you want to roll the ball and then activate the ball by pressing A.  Others have you holding the joystick in the direction and it moves automatically and another one that has its own meter that moves the ball after a few seconds.  There is also touchscreen functionality, but I found that my sausage fingers obscured too much of the playable area.  Rotating the screen is not really so much rotating as it is slightly angling the screen a few degrees to the right or left, presumably to get a better angle on the ball and feathers/coins, but I never ran into an issue of not being able to figure out where the ball was or that a feather/coin was intentionally obscured and only visible by moving the camera; this is different than the feathers/coins that are hidden inside logs that you roll through.

Lastly, I want to briefly touch on the music which is suiting for this type of game.  There are no grandiose orchestras reminiscent of a ring going south, just calming background music while you try to solve an ever-developing puzzle.  One thing that seemed a bit out of place was when you complete a chapter, a song plays that is drastically different than the rest of the in-game music.  And by song, I mean a song with lyrics being sung.  At first, I was afraid that this was going to be the new in-game music at all times as it seemed to continue playing through the various menus and into the rest of the game, but once the song finished, the game went back to the regular background fantasy music.

Long Ago: A Puzzle Tale is in definition, a relaxing puzzle game that you can make as easy or as difficult as you like. It is a fun game to have in the back of your mind, to pop in and go through a couple of puzzles or even power through (if you find you are on roll) and complete an entire chapter.  You are under no obligation to use the hint system but it is there in case you need to.  The story seems like it is there to give a bit of narrative through the puzzles but it is not integral to being able to solve any of the puzzles nor does the existence of puzzles explains anything that happens in the story.  With 110 puzzles to complete (30 story levels & 80 coin/gem stages) to varying levels of completeness, there is a fair amount of content here that will take you longer if you rely on the hint system, or you may find that you use it less and less as you slowly become more proficient at recognizing GrimTalin's thought process in developing the game and then using the environment to your advantage.  

There is probably a life lesson somewhere in that.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
I'm Not Ashamed to Reveal

Game EXP: Donut County (NS)

 

This is Donut County:

Whoever put together the trailer for Donut County (presumably someone at Annapurna who published the game) did a brilliant job, because the quickest way I found to explain what this game was to Conklederp was to say that it was like Katamari Damacy, but with a hole that swallowed things instead of rolling them into a ball.  And Donut County is kind of like that in that as the hole swallows more things, it gets wider allowing it to swallow even larger objects, but if Katamari Damacy was a Monster Energy Drink, Donut County is a nice cup of chamomile tea with a fresh donut on the side.  I am bad at making analogies.

Donut County is broken up into two segments: story and gameplay.  During the story sections, you are introduced to new characters beyond the two main characters, Mira and B.K. the raccoon.  The dialogue between everyone helps to  give context to what you are doing in the game, all of which happens in the present.  Your cast of characters find themselves in the bottom of a hole, some 999ft below Donut County.  As the characters talk to each other, one of their experiences comes to the forefront and then you transition to a playable level that is part Katamari-adjacent, part puzzle, and mostly just chill.

What makes Donut County so much more different than Katamari Damacy, is that there is no sense of mania in collecting objects through your ever expanding hole.  There is no timer, there is no moving camera, there is no benevolent alcoholic overbearing father figure on the verge of demeaning you at the drop of a hat.  For a while I was actually wondering if I was doing something wrong, if I had accidentally set the game to some type of easy difficulty, or if I was playing a demo.  No, Donut County just seems like it was designed to be about enjoying an amusing experience and not trying to remember where a specific object is to roll up (or swallow in this case) otherwise your timer will run out and you will have to start over a stage that can run 15 minutes.  In Donut County, you start out each stage with a hole that is small and only able to swallow up a few objects, but those objects will allow your hole to grow in size letting you swallow up even larger objects.  The first handful of levels, this is what you do, essentially to get you used to the mechanics and the overall vibe of the game.

Later stages introduce objects to interact with, either as object become stuck in the hole or you gain access to new equipment like a catapult-type-launcher that lets you vomit our specific objects to effect the environment around you.  There was only one stage early on that I thought I had gotten myself into a hole (badum'tiss) and restarted, although looking back I do not think that I really needed to do that.  Which is something to be said for the game design, that there were no instances of the game breaking or getting stuck so that I could not proceed any further in the game.

The physics engine though can be a little wonky at times, especially with larger and oddly shaped objects that only just fit down the hole.  It never got to the point where it was frustrating and if anything, it just added to the hilarity as large building bounced around the screen in a completely unrealistic manner.  As if there was an attempt at realism in a game about a mobile hole that swallowed up objects and left no damage to the ground itself.

Lastly, I want to touch on the writing.  The writing in this game is hilarious, well executed and often times self-aware.  In the game there is an index of items you have had your hole swallow titled a Trashopedia.  By the end of the game it is pretty clear what is going on with the descriptions for items here, but even knowing who the prince is (inside joke) doesn't diminish the descriptions.  Even the overarching story, of which there is one although there is no real attempt at explaining how or why there are talking anthropomorphic animals that live and work in the same world as humans, is well throughout within the self-contained reality of the game.  If you think too hard about a lot of aspects of the game, there will probably be plenty of plot holes or things that just do not make much sense.  But you are playing a game with a mobile hole, so there is that too.

Donut County only took me a couple of hours to play and I enjoyed the entire experience, from the look of the game, to the writing, to just the overall chillness of the game itself.  That it is a game meant to be fun and not a thumb-wrecking challenge was a nice change of pace (although there was one part of the game at the very end that I thought I might have to redo because I was not paying attention and was almost killed).  I am very much looking forward to the next game that creator Ben Esposito comes up with next.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental

P.S.

Just another example of physics engine hilarity:

MIDI Week Singles: "Can't Wait To Be King" - The Lion King (SNES)

 

"Can't Wait To Be King" from The Lion King on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (1994)
Original Music by Elton John
Composers: Frank Klepacki, Dwight Okahara, John Wright, Zack Bremner, Patrick Collins
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Virgin Interactive Entertainment
Developer: Westwood Studios, Disney Software

Perhaps an odd choice for todays MIDI Week Single and the following sentences/paragraphs may alienate some people, but those are the risks we all take just waking up in the morning.

I hate this.

I hate the stage that this song is used in in the SNES game.  I am 98.47% certain that I never beat this stage although I know I made it at least to the second ostrich running section.  You know, the one where the guiding arrows are removed to let you know when to jump over the pink baby rhinos or when to duck under the bird nests in the low hanging branches.  I did use some codes to play through other areas of the game, but if I was playing to see how far I could get, this was the end for me.  This was also only Stage 2 in the game.

That being said, the song is wonderfully arranged by whomever did the arranging from the five people who worked in the sound department at Virgin and/or Disney Software.  Most impressive, at least for me, is the "Huum!" which sounds like it was taken straight off of the soundtrack.  I do not know, it just sounds really good to me and had that been omitted (as it seems to have been in the SEGA Genesis version) it would have lost so much of that oomph that makes this song interesting.

So there you have it, a song from a game I could barely start, from a level that I absolutely hate, from a movie that I love.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Let Us Die In Our Tears Now

Demo Time: Lonely Mountains: Downhill (NS)

I've been aware of Lonely Mountains: Downhill for a couple of months now although I forgot where I originally heard about it, probably on Twitter.  What drew me to the game was the visual aesthetic, the somewhat simplified graphics, or at least the lack of detail in the textures of the characters and the world, and its take on extreme Red Bull-esque mountain biking. 

So, now I present to you, after carefully deciding on my control style and analyzing the button mapping, my first ride in Lonely Mountains: Downhill Demo on the Nintendo Switch.

Yeah.  I'm that good.

Admittedly it did take me a while to figure out what the two different control schemes meant and I ended up going with the simplified Left/Right Controls because that is what seemed the easiest to get me off of the top of the mountain, but if flight simulators have taught me anything, is that the simplified controls are not the optimal control style if you want to be increasingly better at the game aside from turning left and right.  I expect that if I do end up buying the game and want to improve my overall time on the tracks that I will need to figure out On Screen Controls.  I could, again, just be overthinking things, which would be pretty consistent, but for the time being, Left/Right Controls it is for me because it works and I am comfortable with it that way.

The demo itself consists of just one stage, which sounds rather short and lackluster for a game that is trying to encourage you to buy it, but it surprisingly works.  The stage itself is made up of seven stretches of trail and six checkpoints which function in exactly the way you want checkpoints to function, and they usually arrive right when you want them to.  There are stretches that show off the verticality of the terrain by having you ride down large boulders and off of embankments (I don't know if that is the correct word), there is an amazing vertigo indusing traverse, and a number of stretches closer to the end of the track that plays with foreground elements getting in the way of the camera, which thankfully is only fleeting and does look pretty cool as opposed to distracting.  It is a very well through out and designed demonstration stage for the one biome that you are riding through.

From what I could tell, the game ran smoothly without any stuttering or input lag.  The amount of time between from when you died, pressing A and then respawning is nearly instantaneous which is very important in this type of game where any normal person is going to crash on a semi-frequent basis.  I would say at least once between each checkpoint, but there was the stretch between CP3 and CP4 where I was able to nail the route, but then promptly biffed it right after reaching CP4.  I did not notice any collectables along the trail, although because I stuck very closely to the trail at all times probably means that I might have missed anything you could collect; and I am actually pretty happy that there are not out of the way items to collect, at least in the initial run.  There are additional challenges that do open up that appear time and skill based such as "2:30 or Less" and "2:15 or Less With 12 Crashes or Fewer."  Those could be fun although I can get down on myself when it comes to time based trials, often restarting whenever I make a single mistake which can be pretty aggrivating.

You know, I think after playing the demo and seeing some of the challenges that come up along with 15 additional trails that come with the full version, I probably will end up purchasing Lonely Mountains: Downhill, but because of the queue that I still have on the Switch [94:21:9 / Games Left:Completed:Kinda Given Up On], I will probably wait for a future sale to happen (sorry Megagon Industries and Thunderfull).  So congratulations to the demo for doing exactly what it was intended to do.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Was Everything A Man Could Want To Do

P.S.  And if you were interested in seeing me cross the finish line unironically, then I present to you my gloryful finish!

Such grace, such finesse, such poise.  I'm a natural.

MIDI Week Singles: "Lunar Express" - Dead Space 3 (PC)

 

"Lunar Express" from Dead Space 3 on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, & PC (2013)
Composer: James Hannigan
Album: Dead Space 3 Original Game Score
Label: E.A.R.S.
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: Visceral Games

This might be another odd choice for a MIDI Week Single but that is why I am here to tell you why it's not.

I like this song.  

There is the beginning of the song that is filled with a combination of wonder and danger.  Then around the two-minute mark, it is almost like Hans Zimmer or Harry Gregson-Williams takes over with whatever the strings are doing frantically.  Then at 2:24 there is something new that the strings are doing, and the intensity just keeps building from there.  And it seems like the song is going to peak, but instead, it backs off just a wee bit around 2:50, then plateauing until the horns show up at 3:05.  Then around 3:30 shit just gets intense, building on the last three minutes but not quite reaching the climax.  This really begins around 3:43 and also functions as the outro as there is just a wall of sound with high-pitched strings, blasting drums, and frantic horns.  The whole thing just screams action movie chase sequence, which is what is happening as Isaac Clarke is chased by and being shot at by Unitologists on a moving train as he boards a ship right before it makes a light jump.  Although in-game, the music is cut slightly differently than the entire track and here you get the entire song.

So yeah, no other reason than I really like this song.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

When The Night Is Overcome

Reinstalling

First off, I only half apologize for the lackluster title for this article.  "Reinstalling" was my original placeholder since this article was going to be all about reinstalling games and the name stuck in my head, so that is what we are going with as this article is going to print.

Last summer I purchased a new laptop since my previous one (an MSI CX61) I bought back in 2015, was either closing in or past the typical lifespan of a laptop.  It was also starting to show its age, booting up slower than normal, taking longer to open and close programs, and just running slower than it used to even a couple years into owning it.  I was very happy with the quality and performance even though I did not make any hardware upgrades, so I was looking into a new MSI laptop to replace the old one.  Evidently, all of the MSI laptops I was looking at (because our house is not really set up to have a desktop tower) were out of my price range and since my fall off in the PC gaming arena (as if I played competitively or something) I did not see a reason or a justification for purchasing a laptop that could run anything that came out after 2018 that would require 50+ GB of data.  

So I ended up opting for an Acer Aspire 5.  The specs were decent and I could run some games that I looked into, just nothing like DOOM Eternal.  The computer had a 10-key after all, something that I would need for my job (if I required to work from home without being able to bring home a work computer) and I just like having the option of a 10-key over a standard-sized keyboard.  I can deal with slightly smaller Return or shift keys and I can operate a 10-key faster than the numbers at the top of the QWERTY board, so that being one of my requirements limited which laptops I had looked at.  While there are some issues I have with the Acer Aspire (such as the sound quality and volume, and how the Home Keys have dual functionality that I am not fond of when it comes to taking screenshots using gaming clients that by default use the F12 for screenshots), it works well really for what I need it to, which so far has been researching and writing articles for y'all; and the occasional video game here and there.

The other morning while listening to The Elder Scrolls Online soundtrack and frequently seeing ads for the new expansion for Blackwood on Instagram and Twitter, I began thinking about the game again and whether or not the Acer would be able to run ESO well enough to not crash every few minutes.  So I downloaded the client (onto my external hard drive because the hard drive on this Acer is at a paltry 256 GB and I've already used up a good portion of that on some other games and mostly music) onto my external hard drive (Transcend 2 TB, which I cannot recommend enough), waited a few hours (read 12+ hours because there was 100+ GB of data to download, patches to download and install, et cetera) and then started the game one-morning last week while Goblino was down for his morning nap.  Well, it booted up just fine, I verified my identity logging into my Bethesda account and was happy to find all four of my ESO characters that I have played with over the years.  There was Jaconian, the Nord Dragonknight in the Ebonheart Pact that I started it all with on launch back in 2014.  There was Loviner Jorlock, the Altmer Mage I created to quest with Conklederp's Magicia Sorcerella (who is a Breton Mage) in the Daggerfall Covenant.  There was the Bosmer Nightblade I created to play through the Aldmeri Dominion quests; I know that you can cross-play questlines while in different factions, I just like the idea of having separate characters for each faction.  And then I have my Dunmer Templar (Ebonheart Pact) that I just created because I had never created a Templar before outside of when I first started playing and was just tooling around with the character creator.

Well, to get to the point, the game ran fine although I do only have the graphics options set to Medium nearly across the board, although there was some befuddlement going on in Cold Harbor with the character model not turning around when running, but that went away after logging out and starting back up the following day.  So yay on that!

I also reinstalled the demo for The Evil Within which I last attempted back in 2018, so it will be interesting to see how the Acer fares.  I hopefully will do better than the paltry 8-10 fps that the MSI gave me.

I also reinstalled Dark Souls II: Scholar of the Lost Sin and ran through the opening area, although I have yet to actually create my character this time around and select their class.  Last time, I had created a mage if only to start out with ranged spells, so I may take that route, or maybe I will go with Deprived, which I did for my most recent run-in Dark Souls on the Switch.

Oooooh!  And I think I will reinstall Alien: Isolation too.  I started that game shortly after picking it up through one of Humble's Monthly Bundles, back on August 23, 2017.  However, similar to The Evil Within, the game chugged even on the low settings, although I think I hovered between 10-15 fps.  I played a grand total of 17 minutes, which probably includes messing around with the graphics and control options (gotta invert that Y yo!)

With all of this reinstalling, I honestly do not see myself moving back to a predominantly pc gaming front because it is still a matter of finding the time to commit to playing a game in 20ish minute bursts and then before going to bed, which is usually playing the Switch in bed.  So unless I were to invest ($699 - $1,099!?) in the Smach Z(ero?), which I have not heard anything about in five years or more, it is going to be portable gaming in bed for the foreseeable future.  But it is nice to know that if I wanted to, I could rejoin Loviner Jorlock or Amanda in search of her mother Ripley.  I just like having the option, even if I end up not being able to reinvest the needed time for some of those games.

You know what, thanks for making it through to the end.  I realized halfway through this that I probably could have saved it for a Monthly Update article, but I decided that I wanted to continue writing something that was mildly interesting to me and probably useless to everyone else reading.  But that is what the Internet is for.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

Game EXP: Little Nightmares: The Complete Edition - DLC The Secrets of the Maw [The Kid's Story]

I recently finished The Secrets of the Maw, a three-chapter DLC expansion for Little Nightmares as played on the Nintendo Switch.  The DLC comes packaged with Little Nightmares: Complete Edition and when I first started the game, I was given the choice to play as either Six or the Kid (the Runaway Kid according to the trailer) and not knowing anything about the game or that the DLC was specifically just the Kid.  I covered this a bit already in my article focusing on Six's story a few weeks ago so I will again refrain from making all of the judgments regarding lack of information and/or narration regarding the setting and names of characters because the format from the main game, more or less, holds true for the Kid's story.

Similar to the start of Six's story, the Kid's story also starts out with a nightmare, but his dream is with him swimming, surrounded by darkness.  He is then pulled underwater by an unknown. . .thing, which then ends the dream and forces him awake.  And again like Six's story, with the Kid, you have the room you start out in, then you turn to the right and go that way.  Why?  Who really knows why the Kid (or Six, or any of the other children) is there in the Maw, presumably kidnapped from somewhere and brought out to the middle of the ocean where they are turned into sausages to be consumed by rotund, obese humanoid monstrosities all the while overseen by a geisha-esque figure who oversees her entire operation to some unknown end.  Sorry.  Anyway, the format seemed, more or less, the same, but it wasn't.

As previously mentioned, I first played Six's story, and not just from a storytelling standpoint but a game mechanics one, I am glad I did because there was zero information about what you can do and how to operate and manipulate various objects.  Early on in the first chapter for the Kid, you have to pick up and throw an object at a button that is placed higher up on the wall than you can jump.  I realize complaining about a lack of tutorial system in a DLC for a game that you presumably have already played and learned the controls is odd and possibly out of place, but this was what I was feeling early on in the game.  And even being well aware of the game's mechanics and how to progress between areas, there were a number of times that I read too much into environmental cues and became stuck in an area over the course of three separate nights playing all because I failed to notice that tucked away up on the wall just next to some crates was a duct leading into the next room.  I would say I felt like an idiot for not noticing, but by that point, I was pretty annoyed at my inability to see something that was difficult enough already with the brightness turned up, and at the QA team who apparently had no issues getting through this particular area, thereby leaving it in the game without any further tweaks.

The biggest issue I had with the Kid's DLC chapters really started with Chapter 2: The Hideaway which introduces the Janitor to the Kid.  Once again, the Janitor's long touchy-Tim arms were a nuisance, and a lot of the interactions with this character was spent trying to figure out what to do in order to avoid him resulting in being captured.  A lot.  And just like the main game, the DLC chapters would take upwards of 28-35 seconds for the game to load between captured and starting over again, but we have already covered that so moving on.  Chapter 2: The Hideaway introduced semi-non-linear levels, whereas, in the main game, you were often times stuck in a room until you solved the puzzle and moved into the next area.  Here, you could often travel from one room to another, taking an object from two rooms back to use it in the room to the right of your starting room.  This section of the game I ended up having to look up a walkthrough because I kept getting lost, retracing my steps, and wandering through areas that I had already been in before but could still access, constantly making me think that there was a reason I could go back to previously explored areas and ended up fruitlessly searching through everything on screen looking for some clue or hidden puzzle piece that was never there, to begin with.

I ran into a similar experience in the final chapter, where you need to collect three objects to unlock a door (we will call it that to be semi-spoiler-free).  The three "keys" are hidden in rooms off of a multi-tiered area with various rooms to explore and like me, over-analyze.  There were so many times I would be playing but have to stop because I could not figure out what to do next, either from what I felt was a lack of clarity in the environmental clues or because I just made a puzzle's solution a lot more complicated than it actually was.  For example, there is a room you pass through full of portraits, and on the screen on the Switch, it really felt that the scale of the room was important to get across to the player.  The next room was an art gallery of sorts with buttons to push that illuminated a light above the paintings.  Now, because of the camera angle only moving when the player moves, it was difficult to see perfectly what each picture was in the gallery and if anything else happened while pushing buttons; there was also a strange statue in the foreground of the room seemingly hinting that this statue could be used to help solve the lighting problem (the lights would turn off after pressing the fifth button in front of a painting if any of the other paintings selected were incorrect).

I think what a lot of it comes down to is that I was a little disappointed both in the Kid's DLC chapters as well as my inability to solve some of the more basic puzzles in the game, like being able to see an exit out of a room as opposed to solving a complex puzzle involving Nomes, a filled mine cart, and the direction of the Maw as it rocks back and forth.  While I enjoyed the time to explore additional areas of the Maw, like the main game, I still felt in the dark about what the Maw actually is, and really, where the Kid was as they wandered from room to room.  The first area in Chapter 1: The Depths was full of water areas which introduced a swimming mechanic and encounters Granny (another villainous character who is never named) and kills her.  Then in Chapter 2: The Hideaway runs through more of the living areas and backrooms often populated by the Janitor, escapes him, and then solves a number of puzzles in Chapter 3: The Residence while defeating Shadow Children (presumably killed by The Lady as they suffer damage against the Kid's flashlight (more on that below) before being captured by The Lady at the end.  I guess I was kind of hoping that some of the questions that the main game left me with would have been answered?  

The form of The Maw was though revealed through one of the hidden bottles in the Kids' areas, as to what these bottles/jugs are and why the Kid uncorks them is still a mystery.  Upon finding a bottle and opening it, you gain access to one piece of concept art, and this mechanic of hiding extra features I am perfectly okay with.  In one of the pieces of concept art, you see the entirety of The Maw, submerged in water with only the top section breaking water, similar to the final screen in the end of Six's story.  It really gave The Maw a sense of scale, added to the in-between cinematic in Six's story with her scaling the outside of the structure.  I felt that seeing this structure gave me a better understanding of what The Maw was, kind of, but it still gave me more of a sense of placement than before considering how many floors you move up and down, but to have it locked behind a hidden item was a little disappointing.  Until I found my way to what appeared to be The Lady's study or music room that contained a model of The Maw, displayed similar to how a Bond villain might have a globe displayed; it was essentially in a globe stand.  The painting of The Maw's lighthouse in the same room being more of an indication that the the model in the room really was The Maw.  This was definitely an "Ah, I'm glad I know what I'm looking at here" moment.

Did I enjoy The Secrets of the Maw?  Kind of, but leaning more towards I was annoyed and left wanting more.  I love the visual aesthetic of Little Nightmares but the overall lack of information left me feeling like I was just moving between rooms and avoiding enemies that I could not explain.  Maybe I just need to pay more attention, as I know that was one of my issues before I was able to enjoy Dark Souls.  I could see myself playing through a second time as knowing the solutions to puzzles would help with noticing the surroundings more instead of getting frustrated.  Plus there are a few more pieces of concept art that I have not yet unlocked for both Six and the Kid.

Maybe after I play Little Nightmares 2, but I am pretty sure that is going to happen.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

P.S.  Potential Spoilers.

So the issue with the Shadow Children as mentioned above.  These are enemies similar to The Lady boss fight in Six's story.  They appear out of the shadows and charge you.  When you point your flashlight at them, they slow down and start sizzling.  But they also start slowly weaving this way and that, trying to get out of the light and back in the shadows, but are also moving closer to you in the process.  Facing off against one is not too bad, but when there are multiple, it becomes exponentially more difficult.  On top of that when they are within a certain distance of you, they lunge and if one of them touches you, you become possessed and essentially die, forcing the game to reload.  Again, as mentioned above, the load times in this game are atrocious, taking between 20-30 seconds.  So when you spawn in an area that is infested with Shadow Children and you have to fight them off while moving a chair into position so that you can jump off of it to open a door, but you die 10 seconds later, it becomes increasinging frustrating knowing that you are spending more time waiting for the game to load than you last spent playing.  I should also mention that there seemed to be an infinite number of these Shadow Children too so it was not like you could slowly pick them all off and then move the chair without any problems.  Oh, and one last thing, is that standing on the chair offered no protection as they would just lunge up at you and catch you.

P.P.S.  The real frustrating time was when I opened the door, but the chair was positioned in a way that was blocking the entrance to the door so I had to pull the chair away from the door.  And I was killed.

P.P.P.S.  Without getting into the ending of the game, I have mixed feelings about it, although they are mostly positive.  The things that bother me are that you witness a power of The Lady that was before unknown and it is presented in a way that it automatically happens, and then the immediate feeling of "Well what was the Kid's story even about then?"  Admittedly, I had a similar feeling about Finn & Rose's arc in The Last Jedi immediately after watching it but I later figured it out so this might require additional thought processing before making a final judgement.