Mario Kart 8: refinement extraordinaire

Is Mario Kart 8 perfect?  No.  The series has stagnated in terms of its single-player mode, the battle arenas are no longer arenas, and the time trial ghosts are a bit glitchy. But those surrounding aspects do not  change the fact that the central game is utterly glorious, and remains a superbly fun experience.  The racing gameplay has been refined with new items (and the loss of some old), the track designs have been meticulously put together, and everything is balanced beyond compare.

A good player will win 75% of their races.  A great player will win 90%.  The chance for less talented gamers to win keeps them interested, and while it's fashionable to claim that there's no skill and too much randomness in the game, that is less true than ever with the addition of the horn item which can destroy blue shells.

I've been working my way through the 50cc tournaments, but have just learnt that completion of 100cc and 150cc unlocks the lower levels anyway.  Practising on 50cc has helped in any case, and my first 100cc cup was a breeze.

The other amazing aspect of the game is MKTV - not the short-lived Milton Keynes endeavour, but rather a replay mode which enables uploads to YouTube and replays on its own website.  The details that you can see when watching these replays are quite amazing.

Mega Bomberman: completed!

Time is a great healer. I remember the underwater levels, the giant boxers on the last stages. I remember the final boss, with his dragon machine. What I wasn't expecting was the slowdown.

Particularly on the final level, with many enemies on screen, the start of the stage slows to a crawl. This makes it more difficult, since you can no longer judge well how long the bombs will take to go off. Instead, you have to learn times in terms of the distance you can walk.

Still, I managed to complete the game with a minimum of lives lost. I've completed it before of course; attached to the manual was a post-it note with a few passwords, the last of which was 0515 which corresponds to the final level.

I then moved onto the battle mode, and tried to remember what each type of louie does. The pink louie appears to dance.  I set the green bomber to be a fat one, and he won the first set of games and almost won the second. I snatched victory in the final game.

The Conduit: one-hit killed

I have still played relatively few first person shooters using the Wii remote, which is surprising when you consider how well it works. It's easy to aim at an enemy quickly, and as long as you fiddle with the sensitivity settings it can be much quicker to turn than a pad.

I enjoyed my time playing The Conduit's multiplayer, although I was hopeless. I'm pretty sure that a couple of the games I played were ruined by hackers - people who came into a room, survived a few headshots, and killed me with one shot. If they're not good enough to play properly, so be it.

I may well try the single-player game at some point.  It was great to see a vibrant community playing the game, and I hope that they can find another similar game to play going forwards. Maybe The Conduit 3 on Wii U …

Battalion Wars 2: you sank my battleship

I had never played this.  I've played the first game on the Gamecube a bit, but not huge amounts.  I remembered it's a real-time strategy game where you control units directly.  What more did I need before launching myself online?

I decided to see if anyone was playing a cooperative game first, because that way I could try to ride on someone's coat tails while I learnt the controls.  This was a good idea; I didn't even understand the objectives to start with.

I took immediate control of a battleship, and started shelling the enemy ships.  This seemed to go well until my other units and my colleague's units started to get a bit too close to the enemy.  I think I sank one of my own ships before I worked out how to change which unit I was controlling.

Having been left with a solitary infantry unit, I was glad to be given reinforcements when I landed on the beach.

Many of them didn't last long either.  I was instead left to blunder through the level following my colleague in arms, and even that didn't go to plan.  I tried to help a little too much, and got all my units killed.  Luckily there were some prisoner of war camps nearby that my men were rescued from.

A final push up the hill, and I completed the mission.  Easy!

It's a really good game, actually - I just need to find some time to work my way through the single player modes of the first one before I tackle this.  Maybe some time in 2037.

Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection: a last hoorah

Pikmin 2 has taken a bit of a back seat for a while, as I was finally able to get hold of my Wii games from the loft and play through those that use NWC for an online connection.  Today, you see, is the last day of full service, with the closure of GameSpy taking NWC down with it.  Before it disappeared, I wanted to see what I would otherwise miss.

I'll write up some games in more detail over the next few weeks, but in general I was surprised to find that in all but one case I was able to find people to play against or with.  This, on a console thought to have the least active online community, in some cases on games that are seven or eight years old.  It has been quite a contrast to Xbox Live, say, where if you're playing a game older then a few months it's rare to see anyone else in the world.  This may well, of course, be due to people logging back in to play the games one last time before the server shutdowns, but still …

For some of these games it meant taking the wrapping off - they've been sat on the "to play" pile for years.  Battalion Wars 2 was really fun, and I suspect I'll go back to that (though I never completed the first game).  I was hopeless at The Conduit, though I did manage at least one kill.  Mario Strikers Charged Football is a great game, even though I did lose the first game 28-1 because I couldn't find the tackle button (and there was a fair amount of lag) - the second game was a loss too, but at 3-2 it's a bit more respectable.

A lot of my time has been playing Mario Kart Wii's time trial ghost challenge mode, where you get one attempt at beating a ghost that's downloaded (which has a time just ahead of your best time, I think).  It's incredibly addictive.

Pikmin 2: almost paid off by day 34

I told you it was going slowly.  I have now completely cleared all treasures from the Valley of Repose, and almost all from Awakening Wood.  My total value collected stands at 9,895 wotsits, so the debt of 10,000 is well within reach.

Some of the caves have been tricky, mainly due to one or two areas where the combination of enemies makes it difficult to plan well.  However, I've found that returning to these levels normally has a higher success rate, so I'm guessing it's just a case of being more familiar with the territory.  In the Subterranean Complex, for example, I lost half my pikmin in the first few levels the first time I went down there, leading to an early escape, but on my second excursion ...

Collecting bulmin helped as well!

Completing the Subterranean Complex gave me a light bulb, which the robot space ship thing told me would be used to light up the caverns more.  I've not really noticed a difference.

The end boss of the Frontier Cavern was tricky - the Empress Bulblax returned but this time was giving birth to bulborbs throughout the level, making it tricky to even get to her in the first place.  The first time I battled her, I was left with only 14 pikmin at the end, but luckily some of those were purple and they were able to carry the treasure.

Day 32 was one of heavy casualties.

So, nearly finished.  I'm sure there's meant to be a fourth area on the selection screen - maybe it appears once I've paid off the debt?  I wonder if I will ever 100% complete this game ...

SigCorp Holiday Special: completed!

It seems that once the story for this little additional chapter had been completed, the developers decided they'd done enough and didn't bother to update To The Moon to link to it, or even add in any saving ability.  It's short enough to not need saving, but the fact that I didn't even know that it had been sitting on my hard drive for a few months indicates that there should have been some effort to integrate it into Steam.  Instead, I had to find the game folders on my hard drive and launch the game manually.

It's not much of a game, to be honest.  There's very little exploring to be done, and it's all very linear in giving you one task to do at a time.  To The Moon may have been similarly linear, but it didn't always feel like it.

After a brief explore of the facility, and learning that people are picketing outside, the game within a game provides a reasonable distraction, being a very basic and surreal version of the first game's story.  Piloting Neil through top-down levels, avoiding "zombievas", and collecting some of the memory triggers from River and John's story.  There was a bit of challenge here, but not much.

It was nice to see Neil and Eva again, and it's certainly renewed my interest in the next game.  I can't help but feel that it would have been better to release this at a later date though ...

Sonic Dash: offputting microtransactions

Sonic Dash may be the best Sonic game for years - in that it's not trying to be anything other than a fast run through scenery.  It's an endless runner, with controls which match Sonic's standard abilities - jumping in a ball, rolling in a ball, and running fast.  You have to jump over, roll under or dodge obstacles, and roll into enemies to kill them.  From time to time there's an easy boss battle.

There's a bit of added complexity which sits behind the main game.  By completing missions, which vary from simple things like "collect 200 rings in a game" to difficult things like "avoid rings for 1000m", you can build up the multiplier applied to your score.  You can also double the multiplier by filling up the dash meter (the bar in the bottom-right, filled by collecting rings) and not activating it.  By doing this I now have an X38 multiplier, and my high score is 997,000 (compared to the next highest on my friends list of 67,000).

One thing to note that I couldn't find elsewhere on the Internet - one of the missions is to "use 5 revives in one run" which I assumed meant that you had to revive Sonic five times; since the number of tokens required doubles each time I assumed this meant I'd need 31 tokens.  Instead, the mission completed when I revived for the third time, which was annoying after I'd been saving up revive tokens for two weeks.

There are other bits to the game as well.  Over Easter there was a special event whereby collecting eggs randomly placed throughout the levels let you earn additional unlockables.  I managed to collect about 220 eggs over the period, which meant that I unlocked Cream the Rabbit.  Yes, real name.

So, all rosy.  The downside to the game is that it's full of microtransaction rubbish, where you spend rings to get new characters or upgrades, and collecting the rings in-game takes ages so you feel like spending real money to get more rings.  And it's not as if it's really hidden.

It's odd, I would happily have paid a few pounds for this game given how well it works and its production values, but I won't spend 69p on virtual currency in the game even though I got the whole game for free.  They're making significantly less money from me.

Earth Defense Force 2017 Portable: they're spitting acid!

It's just like the 360 game.  That's great.  I've played the first ten levels on normal, and am now trying them on harder difficulties just to try and find better weapons.  I'm dying a lot.

Pikmin 2: a veritable army by day 18

After finding the yellow pikmin, I spent a couple of in-game days building up the numbers to around 150, before exploring the Awakening Wood and finding electrified gates that I could now break down.  Some of these led me to the blue pikmin, meaning that I now have some of each type.  I've also ventured back into the White Flower Garden, so I have 15 white pikmin and 18 purple pikmin in the rockets - but the white pikmin came at a cost, since I lost around 30 reds in the fight at the end of the cave.

The blue pikmin are extremely useful in gaining access to new areas.  Annoyingly, I've rolled out a few bridges over water which other pikmin don't seem to be too keen on keeping to - I've lost a fair few yellows and reds (and a couple of purples) when they've decided that walking on the bridge was far too sensible and they wanted to skirt around the outside into the river instead.  Survival of the fittest.

Pikmin 2: slow progress until day 7

Without the overall time deadline of the first game, there's less incentive to rush around the levels, having multiple groups of pikmin on multiple tasks simultaneously.  Instead, I spent a couple of days just exploring Awakening Wood, building up my red pikmin numbers before entering the second cave.

Down in this cave I found white pikmin, adding to the purple pikmin I had from before.  The white pikmin are resistant to poison, which should come in handy, but only because the game has introduced poisonous enemies and obstacles.  It's a bit more complicated than the first game, and there are new 'sprays' which I know I'll never get around to using since they're a disposable item.

I find it pretty limiting that the white and purple pikmin can only be gained by going into the caves - and the caves are all a bit dark and miserable.  As a result I've got very few white pikmin left, particularly after half of them died in the final battle in the white flower cave.

Still, with poison-resistant pikmin in my party, I was able to break through to new areas, and I've found the yellow pikmin as well.  With the lack of time limit, I feel that my next task will be to build up numbers again ...

Euro Truck Simulator 2: get out of the way

My word, this is amusing.  I'm hopeless at it though - reversing into the spaces is just hilariously bad.  Cars seem to have a habit of driving into my side as well, meaning that each trip is earning me not much money.

On my first trip I made the mistake of discovering Birmingham.

Unfortunately I didn't blow it up.

My second delivery was to Swansea.  There were some horrifically narrow roads on the way there.

And some stupidly slow drivers.

I was glad to work out the key to flash my lights at everyone.

Team Fortress 2: a great community

I felt like playing an online shooter, but I'm not sure where my copies of various Halos are and I've not bought a Call of Duty game since number 2 (and that was in Portuguese).  I've completed Portal a number of times and have made my way half-way through Half-Life 2 (as described the last time I wrote about it - the last bit I remember was playing with Alyx's dog and then being separated from her by a tunnel collapsing, but that was a good few months ago), but have never played Team Fortress 2.  I decided to change that.

I'm really glad I did.  The game's not particularly friendly to newcomers, with the different classes seeming bewildering, but I decided to just jump in and try to work it out as I went.  Of course, this meant that I died a lot, but that just meant I could experiment more with different playing styles.

I quickly realised that the best class for me was the pyromaniac, which was surprising since in most games I don't like getting up close to enemies.  The pyro has an advantage in that the weapon - a flamethrower - doesn't need to be completely accurate, though it relies on an extended contact with enemies.

I also played a few games with the spy, which was great fun - trying to act like a member of the other team in order to prevent getting discovered, while sneaking in to the base to steal the documents.

The thing I found most difficult was learning the maps.  I only played on two different areas, one with two forts with identical mazes within (on which I played capture the flag), and one where the idea was to make progress through the level.  I was on the losing team on every game but one, and I can't help but feel my participation may not have helped on that.

The thing that struck me most about the game was the community.  Everyone was playing as a team, not boasting about kills, and a couple of people actively helped me - I managed to get the documents back to our base while two others protected me.  I said thanks, they told me I was welcome.

Uncharted: completed!

They did introduce something new - but hardly innovative.  It turns out that the treasure is cursed, and all associated with it turn into the undead.  Yes, it's yet another game where you get to fight zombies.  These aren't the shambling hordes of Resident Evil, these are agile and quick and vicious.  These are just horrible.

While I did find the three-way battles between Drake, the zombies, and the mercenaries pretty clever, the general tone of the game was worsened by their inclusion.  I'm sure that many would argue that they were crucial to the plot - don't take the gold off the island, it'll make the world cursed! - but it could have just been a disease inside the golden statue instead.  Maybe it's just that I don't like things jumping out at me.

So, Drake went into the tombs, found Sir Francis, found the zombies, worked out that the gold was cursed.  There were some clever platforming bits around a 3D maze, where I had to follow signs marked either II, V or VII, which would have been a clever puzzle if it wasn't for the very obvious notes shown at the start of the section.  Unfortunately the platforming bits kept on being broken up by more mercenaries appearing from nowhere.  Also unfortunately, Drake died many times on the platforming bits because the controls are just a bit woolly.

Right at the end, there was a section where Drake had to chase the real enemy, and I kept failing it because unlike the rest of the game, there was a time limit.  I had to run past lots of zombies and mercenaries, shooting without aiming, and then jumping onto the treasure as it was hoisted into the air.  The final level thankfully had no zombies, but lots of sniping, rocket launchers, and an invincible enemy who ran from area to area.  The final battle had me foxed for a while until I realised I had to brute force it, rather than taking cover I just had to make Drake rush the enemy as he reloaded.

So, game finished, and I immediately went back to the first couple of levels to try to understand the plot a bit better, having forgotten about it in the years since I started the game.  I found a few more treasures by exploring, and was struck by how different the first couple of chapters felt, before gun-toting enemies turned up.  If only there was more of that during the game.

Anyway, while I've been a bit down about the game in my write-up, I was keen to continue it, and must admit that it's been well worth playing.  I hope that its sequels have learnt from the progression in game mechanics over time, and I'll move onto Uncharted 2 at some point soon.

WarioWare DIY: leaving it until the last minute

As part of my drive to get the most out of Nintendo WiFi Connection before it gets turned off, I've downloaded all the extra puzzles for the Layton games, loaded up games with online leaderboards such as Geometry Wars Galaxies, and played a last few games of Mario Kart DS and Tetris DS.

Deep in the DS pile was WarioWare DIY, which I'd never even unwrapped.  I've no idea why, since I loved all previous games in the series, and the idea of programming your own games seems inspired.  So I started it yesterday, playing through Mona's games, going through the initial game building tutorial, and then wondering how I could unlock all the other characters.  I built my own game (Smash TV, so called because in it you must smash a TV), followed the other tutorial, and still nothing.

This morning I found that you have to wait until the next day for the next character to unlock.  Obviously.

This wasn't a huge problem, though, since I went online last night and downloaded loads of extra games.  Some were built by professional games programmers, others came from the "weekly games" which I understand were generated by users.  I had to download one game at a time, which was dull, but it meant that I could then play loads of games last night with varied levels.

None were as good as Smash TV though.

Uncharted: it is just a shooting game

The developers of Uncharted were very clear that they wanted this to be a cover shooter with a bit of platforming thrown in, it seems.  Following the story, Drake has worked out where the treasure is buried, and we've descended down through mausoleums and libraries, using doorways that nobody else has known about.  You'd think this was the perfect opportunity for platform exploration, but no - somehow the enemy have got into these areas as well and continue their work to make Drake die.  It just feels really tenuous.

Something else I notice - when describing this game, I often call the main character "Drake", rather than projecting myself into him.  It's clear that Drake worked out the location of the treasure, since I had no part in it.  Wherever there are puzzles, Drake is the one who finds the correct page in the notebook which give the answer in an obvious way.  When there's a new weapon, Drake is the one who quips about it being a great find.  I'm not - I don't find guns exciting at all.

So when I misjudge a jump, it's Drake who falls to his death, not me.  I feel pretty disconnected, all in all, and as a result I notice inconsistencies in the game world more than I should.  For example, Drake can jump across 30-foot gaps with ease, but struggles to reach ledges a few inches above his head - indeed, he even seems to crouch when he's jumping just so they're out of reach.  When running around the roof of a church, falling off the narrow planks results in instant death, but a similarly large fall elsewhere is fine as long as you hang from the platform.

I'm up to chapter 16 now, of a total of 22.  Given this, I'll push through to the end, but I'm disappointed there's been nothing really new in the last few chapters.  The only difference is with the story and the introduction of two new enemies - a sniper with a laser sight (who drops a pistol, not a sniper rifle), and enemies with bigger machine guns.  I did find a sniper rifle on a crate, but it had only five bullets which makes it massively limited.  The highlight of last night's gaming, in fact, was a chapter where I had to guide a jet-ski upriver, over rapids and avoiding exploding barrels (and, of course, people shooting).

999: completed!

It was the good ending - I had managed to fulfil all the requirements through the story (more by luck than judgement, I fear), so I found out about the experiments of the past, the identity of Zero, the way that bracelets worked, and the truth behind the multiple doors marked with a 9.  If you're going to play this yourself, don't read any further.

999: fourth time through

Each time I've played the game, I've chosen a different route, and have now completed three games in which Junpei was killed.  The first, he was stabbed in the back.  The second, he discovered a note in a safe which meant that he discovered the true identity of Ace, was told that Zero had lost the game, and then was knocked out by a gas grenade - I suspect he was killed after that.  The third, he discovered a submarine, then found everyone else dead before being killed himself.  Each time I've learnt more about my compatriots, the the extent that now, on my fourth playthrough, where I seem to have chosen some good doors to go through, I can piece together exactly what happened nine years ago and who everyone is.  I think I'm close to the end of the game, and the amount of extra material I've had to go through on this playthrough indicates this might be the good ending.  I hope so - I'm not sure I can face another playthrough.

Uncharted: constant shooting

Many people have complained that the recent Tomb Raider game is too combat-oriented, which is very true when you compare it to the older games in the series.  But if you compare it to Uncharted, Lara is a veritable peace-loving hippy.  Exploration seems to take second fiddle to hiding in cover and shooting enemies, then picking up their ammunition before going through the next door and taking cover again.  There have been a few puzzles, but nothing more complex than finding a key to open a door or pulling a couple of levels to flood a room.  The platforming is probably the best part of the game, having to work out how to get to high-up ledges, and it's a shame there's not more of it - and it's annoying the controls are quite so imprecise.  A lack of lock-on to enemies from cover doesn't help.

Still, it's a fun game with some spectacular setpieces, even if the best parts of these are generally non-interactive.  I've just finished a section where I was speeding through canals on a jetski - well, I say speeding, but it was easier and more efficient to inch forwards, stopping every few seconds to shoot the explosive barrels and enemies in my path.

Oh dear, it doesn't sound like I'm having much fun, does it?  Oddly, I'm looking forward to continuing - as long as this doesn't outstay its welcome.  I think the problem this game has is that Tomb Raider has since done it so much better, and this suffers from being played second.

Er, of course I did play this before Tomb Raider - I got my first two trophies on 15 April 2011 - but I was expecting a purely platforming exploration game and the constant gunfights put me off.  I cleared the first three chapters, I think - up until the submarine in the jungle.  I continued from there, which meant a good few minutes of trying to work out which button did what, causing at least one hilarious death where I threw a grenade at my own feet.  Let's not mention that.

Spacechem: my brain is getting too old

It started off so well.  I followed the tutorial easily, seeing how the reactors were built, how to drop and pick up atoms and molecules.  And then there's a spike in difficulty, where you have to drop off two atoms from the same origin point and bond them.  My solution wasn't entirely elegant.

Reflecting on it later, you could have had the blue doobrie following the red a few spaces behind, moving the atom one more space along, then the red would drop another on the original drop point, move over the first atom and bond, then carry them away before the blue tried to pick up the second.  I know that doesn't make much sense but I may try it.

Anyway, it got even more complicated than that.  Pipelines delivered atoms at different times, multiple reactors were needed, and I kept on getting the C=O molecule the wrong way around, trying to bond the Hs to the O.

Even when I did get it the right way around, I kept colliding molecules inside the reactor.  It took ages for me to work out how to manipulate the molecules correctly.  I'm sure there's a lot of slack time here, but it worked.

My brain hurts just looking at that.