Friday, May 15, 2015

The Official Chessasaur 2015 Playlog #7 - Playstation Plus and Cats

Aaru's Awakening Image Aaru's Awakening (PS4) - Someday, when I decide to no longer pay a yearly fee to Sony for Playstation Plus and am unable to play all the "free" games I've gotten, this will be one of the ones I won't miss. Mind you, it's not a bad game at all. It's a very well made 2D side-scroller with simple mechanics, excellent art style, and innovated design. However, like soooo many games I'm playing this generation, it's too damn hard! I got stuck on basically the sixth "world" (let's call it 2-3, in Mario levels) because I wasn't fast enough to jump, jet (like double jump), shoot a teleport orb, and then keep myself out of lava while watching for the right moment to jump to the orb. A single platform, that's all I would have needed to make it through this level.

*** Insert Rant Here*** : What is it with games these days? Developers seem to relish punishing players and the gaming media fuels the fire by praising their efforts. Or is it an intrinsic machismo of gamers that they need a harder and harder challenge to show off "bigger thumbs" to their rivals? Whatever it is, I'm getting tired of running into games that look intriguing but require a level of skill (or long-term commitment) that I don't have. Please, give me a game that doesn't make me feel like a klutz with a controller!

MonsterBag Image Monster Bag (PS Vita) - A cute, if somewhat IRRITATING game where you play a little monster (shaped like a bag, I suppose) who is trying to get back to his owner, a little girl. You do this by jumping between people standing in a line, throwing them things they need, but you have to make sure they don't see you move. (Apparently they can't feel you land on them.) It's a unique concept, but I got stuck on the third level when they put in a person with really tiny eyes. Rage quit time.

**Update #1**: I went back to this one and got a little further. It's not as hard as I thought at first, but it still is pretty challenging. I do love the cartoon like quality of the graphics!

**Update #2**: As much as I thought I'd be able to move on from this one, I kept coming back...and I'm so glad I did! It's now another game I finished in 2015 and one that I will look back on with fond memories. The story just got stranger and stranger (as in "...and then the Apocalypse happened!" kind of strange) and by the time I got to the end, I was in tears. I guess I'm just a sucker for a story about a girl and her trusty backpack/monster trying to keep her safe. In some ways, the game reminded me of Limbo, but with a much bigger and better emotional payoff. (I'll always maintain that Limbo did everything great right up until the end.)  I also enjoyed that the developer, IguanaBee in Chile, didn't hold back on the cartoon violence, and the difficulty never got too bad. I did have to look up a couple puzzle solutions, but only to speed up the process. Interestingly, I started playing this one because it was a Beyond podcast "book club" selection, and when they talked about it, they were most put off by the death animations taking too long. While I saw a lot of those, I never felt it was something that would make me stop playing.


Catlateral Damage Image Catlateral Damage - I not only backed this game on Kickstarter, I chipped in enough money to get a picture of Olivia, one of my kitties, into the game. It's a very simple 3D game where you play a kitty doing naughty things - knocking stuff off shelves and tables, biting plants, and generally making a mess of houses, museums and grocery stores. Items are low-res but the environments are fairly large and it runs smoothly. And, of course, there are the pictures of all the kitties (and a doggy or two) that people (like me) paid to have in the game. When you find a picture and knock it down, it gets added to the game's gallery that you can view from the menu. Needless to say, I'll be playing until I find Livy's pic.

Yesterday's Worlds #7 - Constantine

Constantine Image Constantine (Bits Studios\THQ\2005) - Once in awhile, the passage of time can be a good thing. In my case, it helped both the Constantine movie and the game....but in the case of the latter, only so much.

When I first saw the movie many years ago, I didn't know anything about the comic so I was more than a little lost. Since then, I've watched (and enjoyed!) the NBC TV-series which has helped me better understand Constantine's personality and the world around him. When I watched the flick the other night, I was amazed how much I enjoyed it, and also slightly horrified at how badly Keanu Reeves portrayed the character. It took another, more talented actor to show me what Constantine was really like. Reeves (or rather his direction) was so stunted that I didn't get a feeling for what Constantine was like.

Similarly, I had tried a demo of Constantine, the PS2 game, back when I used to get Official Playstation Magazine demo discs (those were good times). I remember being somewhat bewildered by the gameplay and actually thought it was intrinsically broken. What I think it was, after playing the full game some, was that my PS2 gaming skills at that time were so rudimentary that I was just overwhelmed. Well, that and they did sort of drop you into a fight in "Hell L.A." without much introduction.

Interestingly, the game starts out with a nearly shot-for-shot recreation of the opening of the movie (with an even passable KR sound alike). Then, unfortunately, the game shifts gears to its own story, one that seems like it might be going in the same thematic direction as the movie but with different characters and settings. It made me yearn for Batman Begins - say what you want about that "stealth-lite" game, but it kept to the original movie storyline and that was a plus. I was able to get through a few of the missions, but got bogged down in an endless trek around an underground basement (with, of course, sewers) and have decided to skip the rest of the game. I have nothing against older games, but I need to feel that there's a reason to play them instead of newer, more sophisticated titles.