First Impressions: Goldenheart (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Goldenheart through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

Goldenheart
Systems: Windows, Steam OS
Release Date: November 19, 2024
Publisher: MAVC
Developer: Millenniapede
Time Spent: 5.9 Hours
Playthrough Videos on YouTube

Before I started Goldenheart, I had read people describing the game as either a return to The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind or even a first-person Legend of Zelda akin to The Ocarina of Time, and honestly, I don't see either of those comparisons.  The in-game description of the combat difficulty can be switched between Story (easy), Normal (normal), and Souls (hard), presumably because the combat is more punishing, like a Souls-like game, but I don't think that's a valid comparison either.  Goldenheart is a first-person adventure and exploration game with combat that takes a stamina bar into account.  There are no standard RPG elements, such as leveling up, although you can find hidden gems that increase your HP by 1 scattered throughout the world.  Weapons are only acquired at context-sensitive moments, and the only incentive to kill enemies is to chance either a health or an arrow drop since there isn't any kind of EXP.  One of the biggest differences between Goldenheart and most other action/adventure RPGs from the early 2000s, and the reason why I had to stop playing, was that I realized that Goldenheart came across to me as an NES-era adventure game built in an early 2000s retro-style-engine but ignoring one of the most important advancements adventure games had made in the last 30 years, a manual save feature.

Now, I don't hate Goldenheart, and I wouldn't even say that I dislike the game.  There's a lot that I like here, despite having to change the aspect ratio every time I turn the game on.  I like that the story is intentionally vague at the start, when your troupe/band/group is waylaid by an increasing amount of monsters on the road between villages.  It's never made clear what your character brings to the group that you're in, although possibly because you're chosen to try and find a way through, maybe you're one of the few who are somewhat experienced with weapons, although you do require training from another member of your group prior to heading out into the world to look for Marren, another member of your group, and to ultimately find out what's going on in the world during which you uncover more expansive world-building lore involving an ageless warrior named Cazanseco who hermited himself away in a tower to further study life-extending magics and who is likely somehow connected to the evils that the world/area/region is now experiencing.

As I rewatched all of the videos I had recorded of my time playing Goldenheart, it made me a little sad that I felt as frustrated as I had, and all of that frustration was centered around the saving mechanic.  Saving in Goldenheart can only be done by reaching checkpoints.  This is a problem for several reasons, the biggest of which is that to me, it discourages exploration and experimentation.  When you have save points relegated to unknown checkpoints, it feels like the game is purposefully being hard for the sake of being hard, but not in the good way that Souls games or even Super Mario Bros. can be hard.  It's being hard in the cheap way that NES-hard games will use gotcha-moments or purposefully obscure enemies in the background with foreground elements.  The best way I can describe how saving in Goldenheart works is that feeling you get playing Neverwinter Nights, Morrowind, or Resident Evil (the original or the GameCube remake), or any adventure game that doesn't have autosave, and you die after not having saved for the last 20 minutes.  By limiting saves to only at checkpoints, Goldenheart has artificially recreated that feeling of realizing that you haven't saved and that you're going to need to repeat the last 20 minutes.  That feeling of self-loathing for forgetting to pull open the menu and clicking a button, taking all of a couple of seconds because you got caught up in the story and action, is a horrible feeling.

I do have a solution, and a rather simple one at that, too, because I'm not about to criticize (this time) a core game mechanic without offering some kind of a solution.  Scattered throughout various areas of the game are wells that exude a purply-pink mist that heals the player to full HP when they come in contact with one; coincidentally, this is the same substance that has kept Cazanseco alive when everyone else around him died.  Had these wells also functioned as a place to save the game along with the checkpoint saving feature, this would make exploring the game so much more tolerable.  Giving some agency back to the player is what I feel this game would need to make it just that much more accessible and playable.  This way, there is still some level of player choice when it comes to saving and you prevent the player from save-scumming through some of the more difficult areas.

I decided to stop playing after dying in a challenging area that contained constantly respawning enemies (both melee and ranged), and multiple color-coded locked doors.  Maybe the lack of desire to continue also had to do with dying while in a conversation that I couldn't stop, which put me back 12 minutes, which I know isn't a lot when I write it out loud.  And while I did make it back to the same area 3 1/2 minutes later (because I avoided all of the enemies I knew I didn't have to kill, it was a hard death to take.  But that death left me feeling deflated, so when I died in the maze, I dreaded the thought of having to go back through this area, not being able to avoid the respawning enemies and finding the key(s) all over again.  I just didn't have it in me.  And so I exited back to the main menu.

It's not a great feeling when you feel that you've been enjoying a game only to realize that one of the core mechanics is something that has tainted an otherwise well-constructed game.  I feel sad that I'll likely not find out what happened to Jaconian's troupe, whom he left back in Histahnia Village, or how Cazanseco and his search for eternal youth has affected the world and the monsters or if it's just as simple as bad guy with bad mutant monsters; I get the feeling it's not that simple though.  Maybe I'll just watch someone else's playthrough from where mine left off.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
The Stars are Shining with Consense

#IndieSelect: Gateways (PC)

I received a copy of Gateways on Steam from Indie Gamer Chick to be played for #IndieSelect.  The game was given and received without expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and the experience be shared on social media to help spread the word about indie games.  All pictures and words unless otherwise noted are my own from my own playthough.

Gateways

Systems: XBLIG, Windows

Release Date: September 13, 2012

Publisher: Smudged Cat Games Ltd.

Developer: Smudged Cat Games Ltd.
Time Spent: 8 Hours 36 Minutes

If I wanted to quickly and inaccurately describe Gateways, it would be to say that it is essentially a 2D Portal.  And while not entirely inaccurate, Gateways offers a lot more complex and mind-bending puzzles than what would be possible in Portal.  Yes, there is a gun that creates portals for you to enter and exit while solving puzzles, but there is also a Resizing gun, a Rotation gun, a Time Travel gun, and a Multi-Gun that lets you combine elements from all four guns albeit with some caveats.  Gateways is a wonderfully thought-out game with puzzles that both stumped and impressed me in their complexity, as well as infuriated me at my lack of being able to think my way into finding a solution without assistance.

Gateways was released by Smudged Cat Games back in 2012 as part of Xbox's Live Indie Games lineup.  You play as the scientist Ed who finds himself in his laboratory unsure as to what just happened to him, who broke into his lab, and why his Gateway Gun has gone missing.  The first 20% of the game does in fact play very similar to a 2D platforming Portal in that you are introduced to the world, there is jumping on platforms and around enemies to solve puzzles until you find the gateway gun.  Like Portal, the Gateway Gun allows you to create portals on specific walls to access areas that you cannot walk or jump to.  Passing through one portal leads you to the other portal, and vice-versa.  There are a handful of puzzles to solve as each puzzle gives you greater access to the map, opening up new puzzles to solve while avoiding enemies and environmental hazards.

Before we go into a further in-depth description and analysis of all of the other types of guns you find in Gateways, because there are more, we need to do a little bit of housekeeping.  Along with different types of guns, you can also find additional Health (allowing you to take an extra hit), an extension on the amount of time you have with the Time Travel Gateway Gun (more on that later), and the number of echoes you can have running around when you go back in time (more-more on that later).  Scattered throughout the areas of the map are 500 glowing blue orbs that can be used to purchase solutions to puzzles.  Each puzzle is a specific location and the way that the game implements this help/hint system is pretty ingenious.  

Any time there is a puzzle to solve in the game to grant you deeper access to the level, there is a Help Kiosk that gives you the choice to purchase the option to see if this particular puzzle is currently solvable and if you then want to purchase the solution to this puzzle.  Because there are several guns that have different functions throughout the game, some puzzles require you to backtrack to solve more complicated puzzles, and because this is the type of game that often requires the player to attempt a puzzle multiple times, trying different angles and different types of guns, it may not be obvious at first if you can solve a particular puzzle if you do not have both high-jump upgrades or if you do not have enough echos.  In the late game, as I was going back to solve previously unsolved puzzles, on at least two occasions, I found out that even with nearly all of the guns and a bunch of upgrades, I still could not solve the puzzle, so rather than wasting any more of my time, I left and had a nice red mark on my map so I knew where to go back to when it automatically turned green when it became solvable.  If the puzzle is solvable and you are still having trouble (no shame, as I used this feature quite a few times in the late game), you can buy the solution, at which point the game asks if you want it to take over, and you watch as the puzzle is solved for you in real-time, and once you clear the puzzle, the game relinquishes control.  What is doubly great about this mechanic, is that if part of the puzzle is about getting through a difficult area, you can simply activate the Help Kiosk again (without having to pay any more Orbs) and the game will again take over control until it reaches the end of that puzzle.

The next gun gives you access to the Resizing Gateway Gun which allows you to either shrink down to (roughly) half your height, or nearly triple your size if you pass through the larger of the two portals; the Resizing Gun creates a large portal and a smaller portal, and the size you end up as depends on which portal you exit out of, but you cannot get infinitely small or infinitely large.  Looking back, I can only think of one or two puzzles that required you to be larger than your default size, as the Resizing gun was primarily used to shrink you down to force you into small tunnels/hallways.  It really felt like a portable version of Wayne Szalinski's Shrinking Machine and I would not be upset about an entire game that gave you greater freedom to manipulate your height in either direction.  I just wanted more instances to use this gun to be bigger, but that is acknowledgedly more difficult to do in a map designed around platforming, spiked floors, and patrolling enemies.

The most confusing gun in the game and how best to implement it was the Time Travel Gateway Gun.  I seem to recall that the game did a decent job of explaining the basic mechanics of the gun, in that you needed to use the time-shifting function to exit the room you had just entered, but the developing complexity of how best to use the gun, the game did not prepare me for.  Let me see if I can explain how the Time Travel gun worked because again, it is still somewhat confusing.  When you first use the gun to place a portal on the wall (we'll call Portal A), it activates an on-screen timer, showing you how long you have until Portal A closes on its own.  Once you place the second portal (Portal B), Portal A closes and you have set the length of your time loop (that might be a bad way of describing it) if you do not enter Portal A before the timer for Portal B reaches the end, then it will close.  When you enter Portal B, you exit through Portal A at the time that you set Portal A, and you now see your past self (echos) doing whatever it was you were doing before you set Portal B and went through it.  If you happen to touch your echo in any way, both portals disappear along with your echoes and you continue where the collision occurred and have to reset your portals.  These potential collisions can get very tricky later in the game when you often have to have multiple echoes activating and standing on pressure-sensitive buttons to open doors.  This gets even trickier in the late game where the amount of space you can place portals is limited so the area around your entrance/exit becomes very hazardous.

The last type of gun you find is the Rotation Gateway Gun, which after playing the game for just over eight hours I find a little hard to explain without a visual diagram.  Unlike the primary Gateway Gun, which reorients you upon exiting the exit portal regardless if it is on the wall, floor, or ceiling, the Rotation gun can rotate the world based on where the entrance and exit portals are placed.  This is when the difficulty in the puzzles really ramped up.  Knowing where to place your two portals to get the desired effect was oftentimes confusing for me, and only once after watching the game solve a puzzle for me did I figure out that the easiest way to flip the map 180 degrees was to place both portals on the same surface (in this case being the floor).  There was one puzzle that required you to enter the same set of directional portals multiple times to solve the puzzle, something that had not happened before and I was not mentally prepared for that kind of solution.

The final gun you find is the Multi Gateway Gun, which combines all of the previous guns so that you can use more than one type of gateway at a time.  Previously, you could only have one type of gateway activated at a time, so if you want to activate the Rotation Gateway, you have to close the Resizing Gateways you have open and when you close whichever gateways you have open, you revert to normal (your size goes back to your default size, and any rotation from the Rotation gun reverts to normal gravity).  Before the multi Gateway Gun, solving puzzles was a little more straightforward in that once you figured out which gun you needed, then it was a lot of trial and error to solve the puzzle.  With the Multi gun, I was a little afraid that knowing which combination of guns was going to be confusing, and the mechanics around the Time Travel gun only compounded that fear.  Because when using the Time Travel function in tandem with the other functions, those functions have to be used first before using Time Travel, because once you place a Time Travel gateway, you cannot place any other gateways.  This is definitely one of those times when learning all of this was a lot easier by doing rather than trying to figure out what I am talking about by reading.

The rest of the primary puzzles that lead you to the end of the game required you to use multiple gateways to find the solution and this was when I used up the majority of my orbs to have the game solve the puzzles for me.  I fully admit that I used 415 orbs through some combination of determining if puzzles were solvable and having the puzzles solved for me.  No shame, because the mechanic was there in the game to be used if need be, and for a handful of puzzles, I really needed help.  Another thing I liked about having paid for puzzles to be solved, aside from the frustration of trying to figure out what to do after spending at least 10 minutes banging my head against the wall, was that there were a few puzzles that required solving just to move to the next room.  So when you went to the Help kiosk, you could activate the kiosk again (without paying again) and the game would take over control and solve the puzzle for you again.  Again, no shame in this, because that is what the orbs were for and an optional accessibility feature is a welcome feature.

An optional equipment pickup that I only found because I was doing some exploring after getting stuck on a puzzle, was the Time Suit.  The Time Suit allows you to be in the same space as one of your echos so you do not run the risk of resetting time by accidentally running into your echo.  Thinking about the final puzzle in the game, I do not know how more difficult that would make the puzzle, but I know that not having to think about that was a huge relief.  The other Time Travel Gateway Gun-related items you pick up in certain rooms upon solving puzzles, the extra echos and extra time were also welcome finds when I felt I could not solve puzzles.  I believe you need at least four echos out of the possible eight that you find, but that is only on the normal difficulty.

Yes, there are apparently two difficulties and I only realized that while trying to figure out the final puzzle in the game.  The thing with this last puzzle, is that there is no Help kiosk to solve the puzzle for you, which was a little worrisome, but I was able to solve the pentultimate puzzle so I thought that this last one was not going to be as troublesome as say, "Dancing on the Ceiling" or "Splitting the Laser."  After figuring out the different parts to the puzzle, where I thought I needed to have the Resizing gateway, the standard gateway, the Rotational gateway, and the Time Travel gateway, I realized that I was still not any close to figuring out the solution after 20 minutes of trial and mostly error.  I ended up browsing the Discussions section in Steam and managed to find a walkthrough.  The only problem was that this final room had two lasers that I had to redirect whereas the room I was looking at only had the one.  This was getting out of hand.  

I did watch Smudge Cat's walkthrough on the final puzzle and marveled at what they expected the player to have grasped by the end of the game, because I can tell you that I never would have been able to solve this puzzle on hard.  In fact, I was not even able to solve the puzzle on normal difficulty, even with all of the Time Travel power-ups (that extend the amount of time you can spend in the time loop, and the number of echoes you can have running around), trying to figure out where to place the Rotation gateway and how to wrap my brain around all of the hopping between Time Travel gateways was crazy.  Major kudos to Pup and their walkthrough of the final puzzle on normal difficulty because I would not have been able to beat the game had I not watched, rewatched, rewatched, paused, rewound, rewatched, and paused multiple times just to figure out what I was expected to do to solve this beast.  I easily attempted the final puzzle on normal no fewer than five times, with mistiming jumps, or not getting the Time Travel gateway in the right spot while trying to line it up with where I would eventually need it five steps from when I placed it.  And had I not had the walkthrough, I can nearly promise you that even if I had the gateways in the same correct place, I would have thought that I had them in the wrong place after failing on my fourth or fifth attempt.

Despite my frustration on the final puzzle, Gateways was a really fun game, that at times made me feel like a genius capable of understanding quantum entanglement, and other times incapable of describing which way is up.  Had I not been able to find a walkthrough on the final puzzle because the developers decided to purposefully not offer an in-game solution, I know that I would have a significantly less favorable view of the game overall.  I am impressed with people who have been able to solve the final puzzle without any kind of assistance and acknowledge that my brain had a hard time with both the Rotation Gateway Gun and the Time Travel Gateway Gun, especially in tadem with the Multi Gateway Gun.  I am even more impressed with Smudge Cat for thinking of a puzzle this complicated and at the same time hate them for it.  This is not necessarily a great way to finish your game and it definitely felt like whatever playtesters Smudge Cat used were also the same people who developed the game.  So thanks again to Pup for really redeeming the game for me in the end.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Out Of My Brain, On The Train

So I Bought a Wii U. Now What?

 

Well, the title pretty much says it, right?

Let us move back just a little bit.  I bought Metroid Dread which came out on the Switch on October 8th.  This is, technically speaking, Metroid 5 in the numbered Metroid series which does not take into account the Metroid Prime series.  I have played (although not beaten on my own) the first Metroid game, but I have beaten Metroid II - Return of Samus (being Metroid 2) and Super Metroid (being Metroid 3).  I have not played Metroid Fusion (being Metroid 4) and I really wanted to play that before jumping into Metroid Dread.  Metroid Fusion originally came out on the Game Boy Advance 19 years ago in 2002 and I think the reason I did not buy it at the time was that I was heavily influenced by the negative reviews, that it differed too much from Super Metroid.  I also have heard nothing but good things about Metroid: Zero Mission, a retelling of the first Metroid game and was also released on the Game Boy Advance in 2004.  

Now, I still have my original Game Boy Advance, but earlier this year, I discovered that the unit would not power on, even with a healthy set of new AA batteries.  I know of a person online (Gametracks) who has been doing Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance repairs and glow ups, but the prices are a little out of my price range; not to knock their work, which is pretty amazing and it looks great and I have read nothing but good reviews of their work.  I also have access to Conklederp's DS lite as my unit is a bit busted, so I do have a way to still play some of the GBA cartridges I still have.  I mention this because I could look into buying the physical cartridges for both Metroid Fusion and Metroid: Zero Mission, but with the release of Metroid Dread, prices for those games has skyrocketed from around $20 to anywhere from $40 to $212 to say nothing about them being authentic copies and not the Chinese fabrications being sold for $10; the same goes true for Metroid: Zero Mission.

There had been, and I believe continue to be, rumors about Nintendo releasing a Game Boy Advance Online app akin to their NES, Super NES, and now Nintendo 64 on the Switch, which might include either of these Metroid titles, but they are both also currently available on the Wii U's Virtual Console.  So I started looking into used Wii U consoles sort of absent-mindedly.  But then I looked up the longevity of the Wii U's eShop as the Wii U officially ended production in Japan in 2017.  From the multiple sources I read, both official and on Reddit said that Nintendo had made a statement that as of January 2022, that Nintendo would no longer be accepting payments on the 3DS and Wii U eShops effectively making purchases impossible although you can still download already purchases digital titles.  This moved up my timetable a bit if I really wanted to purchase a Wii U for the two Metroid titles.

So last Friday (October 15th) I pulled the proverbial trigger and bought a used Wii U (the deluxe 32GB version) on eBay (my first purchase in about seven years).  So now I am creating spreadsheets to crosscheck, cross-reference, and cross off all digital Virtual Console games that I already have access to on either the NES or SNES Classic consoles, or on the NES, SNES, and soon to be N64 Switch Online apps.  And because the Wii U is gloriously backward compatible with Wii games, I now have another whole new console's physical library available to me, which means I am going to pick up Dead Space: Extraction at the very least.  But at least for the time being, my focus is going to be looking at which Virtual Console games I would like to have access to.  

But other digital games as well?  Most likely.  Metroid: Other M has always intrigued me and the Metroid Prime Trilogy is a tantalizing $19.99 rather than a whopping $65-$140.  I will have to do some scouring of the Wii U eShop after I get the system and register it to my existing Nintendo account because apparently, you cannot add games to your wishlist if you do not have the system.  So, Google Sheets it is with the lists.  And for those of you who like lists and reading lists by other people, I present to you a shortened (and likely ever-lengthening list, at least until January 2022) list of Wii U Virtual Console games that I am 69.47% likely to throw my money at.

• NES
• Duck Hunt
• Gargoyle's Quest II
• GBA
• F-Zero GP Legend
• Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade
• Golden Sun
• Golden Sun II: The Lost Age
• The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
• Mario Kart: Super Circuit
• Metroid Fusion
• Metroid: Zero Mission
• NDS
• Mario Kart DS (turns out the one I bought on eBay in 2007 was a fake from China)
• Metroid Prime Hunters
• New Super Mario Bros.
• N64 (I may have to wait on some of these if they get announced for the N64 Online App)
• 1080 Snowboarding
• Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber (No idea this was on the VC. 100% buying)
• Wave Race 64

I know I completely skipped out on the SNES portion of the Virtual Console, but there was not anything that jumped out at me that I felt I would be sad about missing if I did not pick it up before January.  And again, this does not include any physical Wii U or Wii games that I am now going to be in the market for.

One of the things I am actually most looking forward to, is actually figuring out how to play the Wii U.  Do you just put the disk in and play off of the screen or the GamePad?  Can you choose which one to play and not the other?  If you are playing a Virtual Console game, can you just play on the GamePad without turning on the main system?  Otherwise, what is the range that the GamePad has to be within of the base unit before it disconnects?  Can the GamePad disconnect from the base unit?  Can you only play Wii games if you have the Wiimote and Nunchuk attachment?  How important is it that I get a Wii U Pro Controller and will it work with regular Wii games?  I have never seen a Wii U in action, so the next month is going to be interesting to say the least.

Leave it to us here at Stage Select Start to jump in on a console nearly a decade late and then purchasing nearly nothing but ports of games released on older systems.  Classic.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Born of No Love

P.S.  According to the email I received, the Wii U should arrive sometime between Tuesday, October 19th, and Thursday, October 21st, so it will be likely I will answer a number of my questions in November's Monthly Update article.

P.P.S.  Because obviously, the thing I need to do is add to my already growing backlog of video games with ever-increasing amount of free time.

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

Game EXP: The Adventures of Elena Temple: Definitive Edition (NS)

Disclaimer:  I received a complimentary review copy of The Adventures of Elena Temple: Definitive Edition on the Nintendo Switch from developer GrimTalin.  They reached out to me if we were interested in playing a review copy of the game to which I agreed.  I did not promise to give a positive review of the game in exchange for the review code, nor was a positive review expected in exchange.  All words and descriptions unless otherwise noted are my own from my own experience playing the game.

The Adventures of Elena Temple: Definitive Edition releases multiplatform-wide on Tuesday, December 24th, 2019.

The Adventures of Elena Temple: Definitive Edition developed and self-published by GrimTalin is in its truest form, a puzzle-platformer, but it is so much more than that.  Before we get into the lamb and stout of the Definitive Edition though, we should go into The Adventures of Elena Temple, which was released back in May 2018.

What I love about The Adventures of Elena Temple (TAoET) are the multiple layers in and out-of-game that make this production great.  Before you even start, you are given the option to choose a filter for the game, each with their own has their own heartwrenching backstory about how the game was released on many off-brand computer systems and consoles only to have the game fall deeper into obscurity.  When I first played the original TAoET, I was a little disappointed to find out that the game you play is identical between the Apple off-brand Maple computer and the Nintendo Game Boy Advance knockoff, the Nintendgone Some Toy Advance.  It was probably too naive and demanding of me to expect that each system would have a different variation of the game instead of one of seven different filters.

But the filters are so much more than a different color scheme that you can select like on the Game Boy Color.  Sure the colors are semi-accurate based on their fictional system, but there each is accompanied by a frame showing the system the game is being played on along with the environmental surroundings.  For the Nintendgo Some Toy (knockoff Nintendo Game Boy), you are in what looks like a child's bedroom circa early '90s.  But along with this frame, you can zoom in and out which will allow you to see more of the room while still being able to play the game, or you can zoom in so that the playable area takes up as much of the screen as possible.  The music though does not change depending on the frame/filter and the sound effects also remain the same, which again, might have been expecting too much for them to be unique.

For The Adventures of Elena Temple: Definitive Edition, there have been some additions to the base game that is The Adventures of Elena Temple.  First and foremost are the inclusion of two additional games that function as sequels to the main game, "The Golden Spider", and "The Orb of Life."  Each game uses the same engine as the base game, now given the subtitle "Chalice of the Gods," but there are some new mechanics in each, such as spiders that move along a web when triggered, nearly invincible ghosts that chase you around rooms, and portals that transport you throughout the screen or across multiple rooms.  The objective though is still more-or-less the same: collect coins scattered throughout rooms which unlock a final series of rooms that lead to the end game.

In "The Golden Spider," Elena once again delves into an underground cavern in the search of treasure, but unlike the 49+ rooms in "Chalice of the Gods," "The Golden Spider" only has 16+ rooms, which may not seem like a lot, but the challenge is still there and, for me at least, is a little more manageable.  With each room containing its own separate group of puzzles which forces you to find a gem to put into a pedestal before progressing to the next room.  Additional features in "The Golden Spider" are blocks with rotating spikes which make traversing rooms a lot more hazardous than before.  Coins were also more liberally placed throughout the rooms, and here the chests contain 2+ coins instead of the diamond that they held in "Chalice of the Gods."  I really felt that "The Golden spider" was a concentrated experience, taking all of the best parts of "Chalice of the Gods" while building on mechanics that while new, did not feel out of place.

"The Orb of Life" acts more like a direct sequel to "The Golden Spider" as the story introduces a new life mechanic that I at first was not a fan of, but then I discovered how to manipulate it; kind of.  The game introduces a life meter in the form of hearts and each time you die, you lose a heart, typical video game stuff.  I was at first worried that once reaching zero hearts that that would lead to permadeath, but that was not the case.  The other related mechanic is a sword next to a bonfire that acts as a respawning checkpoint.  The catch here is that any rooms explored and coins collected since the last checkpoint will all have to be re-explored/collected.  As the game progressed, I found myself keeping better track of where the checkpoints were so that I could backtrack, hit the bonfire to reestablish the checkpoint and refill the hearts before exploring further.  The other major game mechanic introduced in "The Orb of Life" was portals, which made traversing rooms more of a challenge as you often had to think ahead of where you wanted to be.  There was one room in the late-game involving a room full of portals that gave me some issues, but after dying a number of times and accidentally warping out of the room, I was able to solve this particular puzzle.  Less of a mechanic and more of a feature, are the inclusion of locked gates (that stay open but only after being opened from a specific direction), and one-way platforms and floors.  For the most part, the puzzles were an interesting mechanic to add to the game.

Two more advancements in the Definitive Edition were a series of achievements (in the Nintendo Switch version, these only function in-game, whereas in the Xbox and PlayStation version probably function like regular achievements) and in-game mods that can alter the way you play.  During my playthrough of all three games, I was only able to unlock two mods: one for being able to double-jump, and the other gives you infinite bullets instead of the standard two bullets.  I did try using the double jump, but because so much of the game is built around near pixel-perfect jumps while avoiding a ceiling of spikes, I found that double jumping made me more anxious. I chose not to use the infinite bullets because I felt that a number of the room puzzles require you to manage how you use your two bullets before having to locate bullets on screen, that this felt more like a straight-up cheat code than a mod.  Maybe if/when I decide to go back through the game to 100% "Chalice of the Gods" I may use the infinite bullets mod.

The Adventures of Elena Temple: Definitive Edition was really a blast to play. The controls were tight and I never felt that I died in a way that felt cheap or unfair.  The music was super catchy and I wish that a soundtrack existed and even though the sound effects never changed between filters, they still worked well regardless.  So if you are going to pick up any version of the game, I would highly recommend the Definitive Edition as it includes everything that you would get from the base game, The Adventures of Elena Temple, but includes two new stories, 40 achievements, and four mods.  That being said, if you want to support the developer you can buy the base game, and if you already have The Adventures of Elena Temple,  you can buy the Definitive Edition for $0.99.  

For me, half of the fun of the game was switching between filters/frames, which you can now do in the Definitive Edition with the L/R shoulder buttons instead of having to back out of the game to make the change.  Even though the game stays the same, it was fun playing one version like on an old Apple //e or on a knockoff Game Boy Advance.  I think what all three of the games boils down to, is that they are well-made games and that I had a lot of fun playing Elena Temple's adventures.



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
He Who Overcomes Will Inherit All This


For those of y'all wanting to know how well I did in each game, here are my end-of-game scores:

Chalice of the Gods

Maybe on a subsequent playthrough, I can manage to die fewer than 20 times?

The Golden Spider

I guess I'm going to have to go back and find out where that final Orb is huh?

The Orb of Life

And here I thought I 100%'d this game, but I guess I keep missing those elusive scrolls and extra hidden rooms.

And now that you've made it this far, I present to you the trailer!