Pikmin 2: completed!

After a long break, I decided to go back and try to finish this before it was lost forever.  I had completed the first two areas, and had a remaining debt of just 105 doodahs.  It shouldn't take too long, thought I.

Straight away I found another bit of treasure outside in the Perplexing Pool.  It was on a high ledge, which could only be accessed by yellow pikmin due to their added throwing height.  I had to throw them up to a platform, walk around myself, and throw them up to the top.  The treasure was worth 100 pipplies.  So close.

So I went down into the shower room, a cave system which required me to have water, fire, electric and poison pikmin.  I didn't take enough poison pikmin for the first few levels, as half the enemies were spewing purple gas and I had to fight through with my little band of twenty.  The levels were quite inventive though, with a good use of previous enemies and some new ones - floating jellyfish in particular - thrown in.

Of course, after the first level I had made over 10,000 jinglies, but I wasn't going to stop there.  One of the frog enemies killed about 25 of my pikmin in a single jump; an electric jellyfish killed more.  Half way down I found a level which let me regenerate some more pikmin, and it randomly gave me some more red ones.

Which was annoying, as I managed to clear out the entire cave apart from one treasure - a set of false teeth underwater, which required twenty pikmin to move.  I had only 14 blue pikmin left.

The boss was hard as well.  A larger version of the wibbly slug on the surface, which meant I knew I had to attack the flower on the back.  It killed a large number of pikmin, and I'm still unsure of the best strategy to beat it, but I got there with brute force.  I went back to the surface, and ...

The end-of-game scores are presented as a leaderboard, hinting that other people should play this copy or I should go back and do it all over again.  Maybe not.

There's more game to play though.  Louie's been left on the surface; Mr Boss Man says he'll go back to get him.  There are a fair few treasures in the Perplexing Pool to collect, and a whole new area has opened in the top-right of the map.  I may well be back.

Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition: completed!

OK, hardly the longest campaign or story mode, but it has taken me quite a while to beat.  I'm not great at SFIV - I was great at SFII on the Mega Drive with the 6-button pad, completing it with every character, but this is less straightforward.  I got the original SFIV ages ago and played through the arcade mode a few times, but Seth beat me constantly.  I was resigned to having to dial down the difficulty a bit if I wanted to win.

But I managed to beat Super SFIV on medium, with no continues, using Ken.  Seth is still a git, but I managed to defeat him, finally.  I then played through again using Zangief, who is pretty slow but handy with his spinning clothes line move.

And then I was delighted to find that the game automatically saves replays of your matches, so I was able to bask in glory at my defeats of Kieron [planneroftowns] and John [BadHead] (and ignore the matches where they won instead).

They didn't lose all the time, of course.  Sometimes they fought each other.

Gaming moments: E

Essential Sudoku DS (DS)

After competing 999 picross puzzles, there was one left.  Surely the pinnacle of difficulty, it's surely going to be a trophy or medal or something special.  Oh no, it's really easy and it's a pie chart.  A bloody pie chart.

Earth Defense Force 2017 (Xbox 360)
Earth Defense Force 2017 Portable (PS Vita)

Both games have many highlights, but the thing I will remember most is the mission in which you are sent into battle against the massive walking fortress.  I destroyed more of the city than the fortress did while trying to attack it, and finally the mission ends with you withdrawing because your weapons aren't powerful enough.  Sorry I broke the Space Needle for nothing, guys.

Exit (PSP)

One of the characters you have to rescue is very fat. I called him Fatty.  I pushed boxes onto him.  He died.

Ecolibrium (PS Vita)

Playing on the train, on the tutorial.  And then the game requires me to look around 180 degrees with my Vita to see the animals behind me.  Not going to happen; never loaded up again.

Endless Ocean (Wii)

I recently went back to this as part of the "Au Revoir Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection" drive, which was pointless as the only online mode it has is to connect to a friend who is simultaneously playing the game; that will never have happened.  Anyway, during my brief play I watched the most stilted and awkward cutscene ever made.

EyeToy: Play (PS2)

Accompanying the cleaning suds game with "When I'm Cleaning Windows" was a work of genius. 

Gaming moments: D

Dear Esther (Mac) 

The end sequence will probably stay with me for a long time - but only when combined with the crash scene and hospital bed at the bottom of the cave.

Dancing Stage (arcade)

I only played this a couple of times, at the Trocadero.  The machine felt huge, and even before getting on the platform you felt energised by the lights and colours.  I had seen someone playing already, so knew what to expect, but the first time that two arrows came up the screen at the same time still threw me off guard.  Unfortunately none of the home versions quite hit the same spot, partially because of crappy dance mats.

Daytona USA (arcade)

A four-player cabinet at the bowling alley in Bexleyheath.  I had just learnt to let the back drift out and powerslide around the corners, and overtook my friend John doing so.  He shouted at me that it wasn't a powerslide, just a lucky skid.  So I did it again the next race.

Desert Strike (Mega Drive)

I actually remember this more from my playthrough on the PSP, given the use of save states which allowed me to actually complete the game. There were a number of memorable points, but the best was chasing the madman across the map in his speedboat at the end of the penultimate level.  I was raining missiles on the speedboat the whole time and it didn't explode.  Of course not; where would the last level come in if that happened?

Donkey Konga (GameCube)

The instructions speeding up a few bars into Don't Stop Me Now.  We played this again recently, and it's still great.

Doshin the Giant (GameCube)

I played this when it was first released, back in 2002, to completion. I can remember very little of it now, other than the moment when I first realised you could pick up and throw villagers.  I did it many times and they all hated me, so I had to restart the day.

DLC Quest (PC)

Three points:

1. Being unable to move left at the start of the game, and audio cutting out.  I thought the game was broken; evidently not. 
2. Meeting an NPC called Phil at the end of a long cave, who informed me that he was just there to fill space. 
3. The ending of the game not actually being the ending of the game unless you buy some DLC and finish it. 

Driver (PS)

I have never completed the last level because it was just too hard. 

Disney Infinity: searching for the game

I'm not sure what to make of this, really.  There was a very long and convoluted start, where I was introduced to the idea of sparks and had to guide a glowing orb through a world which took ages and ages, with a fixed camera and many places to get stuck.  The controls felt awful, and I hoped that it was just the vagueness of the character that led to this disconnect from the ground.

Sadly not; soon after my character took shape, and I was given control of the camera - which actually made it worse, as the game makes no attempt at all to move the camera to a useful viewpoint.  If you turn your character and shoot your gun, you would hope that the camera would swing around so you could see what you're shooting at ... no such luck.

Finally, after an absurdly long introduction, I reached Mickey dressed as the Sorcerer's Apprentice, who led me through an undulating landscape and had me grab onto a pole - which turned out to be the flagpole of the classic opening castle.

What's more, it turns out that this castle is the centrepiece for the free roam playground which is just generally empty.  Empty, that is, apart from the voice that crops up every five seconds telling you that you've unlocked things and there's another tutorial and people are stuck and and and and oh just shut up.

I went through a couple of the tutorials and then tried some of the adventures, which seemed to be just minigames with little depth.  I've not actually tried the play set modes yet, so may need to give that a go.  At the moment it all seems just a bit empty.

Goat Simulator: er, what?

What indeed.  You're a goat, you can do tricks like in a skateboarding game, you can lick things and headbutt things and destroy things.

You can wear a crown.  It's daft.

Gaming moments: C

Civilisation Revolution (Xbox 360)

I had expanded across the map, and suddenly I was attacked on three
sides by the Aztecs and two other nations. In one turn they halved my
forces, and during my turn I could do little to bring it back - I rushed
production of units on all my cities but my forces were still depleted.
Defeat seemed likely. But then the Aztecs spent their next turn
attacking one of my tank units with everything they had, all weakened
from the previous battles, and my tank held on to defeat them all. The
other two nations started to attack each other. In my next turn I was
able to push through and capture the Aztec capital and further defend,
leading to an eventual victory. Magic tank.

Crackdown (Xbox 360) 

I had almost completed the game before I realised you could get cars
delivered to the garage. I managed to drive the SUV up the side of the
boss tower and then jump it off - rather amazing.

Chu Chu Rocket (Dreamcast)
My first ever online game, and I won the first match. It was tricky to
adapt to the one-second delay on inputs, but it was that which led to victory in the end - I had placed a tile to my rocket which my opponent simultaneously directed the mice to.

Castle of Illusion (Mega Drive)

I remember Colin bringing his new MD to my house, and being in awe at
this game.  We played it for hours and got pretty far - and then he had
to go home.  He called me the next day to tell me he'd completed the game.

Conker's Bad Fur Day (Nintendo 64)

I am the great mighty poo and I'm going to throw my shit at you!

Crazy Taxi (Dreamcast)

That huge hill at the start of the game, after you'd picked up a woman
at the tram stop.  Crazy boosting all the way down, ready to drift to a
stop at the bottom, slightly to the left, where you were dropping your
passenger off.  That's not my memory though - my memory is of the time
when my drift was too little, and my taxi ended up stuck in the wall
within the drop-off area, racking up huge bonuses as the game continued
my drift for a good two minutes.  The ungrateful woman told me I was
late - but she could have got out at any time.

Conflict: Desert Storm (Gamecube)

I played through this and its sequel with John and Kieron during
multiple gaming days.  The followup, Conflict Vietnam, suddenly removed
the southpaw options from the game, which meant two of us couldn't
control it.  Idiots. 

Dear Esther: completed!

I started this a few times but never devoted enough time to see it through - my previous work computer stuttered horribly with it as well.  I tried running it on my seven-year-old iMac and it works wonderfully, even at high resolutions.  Huzzah.

And I played through the whole game in one sitting - I'm not sure, in fact, if there is a save mechanism.  Or, indeed, a game - it is very much an interactive novel, with the story told by narration over the top of the exploration.  Sure, there are some hints to find across the island and some of the things you see constantly make you question whether this is a hallucination or dream, but you can't influence the story in any way, or die; you can only trigger the next part of the story by walking far enough.

It's a complex story as well, and by the end I think I'd figured out a decent interpretation of it.  I believe that your character is lying in a coma, desperate to tell Esther about the circumstances of the car crash which you were both involved in.  The island doesn't exist other than as a construct of your mind - there being no way off indicates the way you are trapped without hope of recovery.  Quite bleak for a game, but continuing the theme of To the Moon nicely.

Gaming moments: B

Bangai-O: Missile Fury (Xbox 360)

Having played both Bangai-O and Spirits, I was expecting many missiles.  The sheer size and number of projectiles when I first launched a MAX attack stays with me, as well as the slowdown, half of which I'm sure was fake.

Bayonetta (Xbox 360)

I am hopeless at the game itself - but I will never forget the car's radio playing Outrun music in the cutscene after the prologue.

Beyond Good & Evil (Xbox)

The final upgrade to your hovercraft ... and suddenly you have a spaceship.  Having become familiar with the world over a number of hours, being torn away to pursue the final fight was unsettling.

Bishi Bashi Special (PS)

ATTENTION!  Matt didn't read the instructions, and failed time and time again.

Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons (PS3)

Calling upon the bravery and spirit of the elder brother to cross the water. An astounding statement made with no words.

Broken Sword (PS)

Unbelievable slowdown when reaching the desert town. I gave up and played the PC verion a couple of years later.

Black (Xbox)

Having made it to the end of the game, the last corridor and boss were just too difficult.  I never completed it and resent the whole thing to this day. 

Populous: the Beginning: an enforced restart

The best game ever?  I have often wondered if that was just nostalgia talking, with the game's sublime mix of action and strategy existing only in my memory.  I've been without a means to play Populous: the beginning for some time now, but a recent GOG.com promotion let me rebuy it for £2.50 with various patches to allow it to play on modern machines.

Or, at least, that was the idea.  In order to run the game I need to delve into the game directories and find one of the executables, rather than running from the installed shortcut.  Most annoying.  Anyone else who's having issues, look for a file called popTB.exe and run that - you'll need admin rights though.

Unlike most PC games, it's well worth putting up with the game being a little unstable.  The game is as good as I remember it, if not better - the carefully balanced strengths and weaknesses of each character really shines after all this time.

Of course, I had no access to my previous saved games, so I have had to restart.  I initially had difficulty getting past the fifth level - Death From Above - because I didn't notice the timer in the corner of the screen, but soon cracked that.  After that it's been relatively plain sailing, with only a couple of restarts.

I have grown to hate preachers once again, because they have the ability to completely stop an attacking party.  In response I overcompensate by training too many preachers of my own, and as a result don't have enough attacking power.

In the last level I played, Fire in the Mist, I was constantly attacked and had to contend with a volcano near the start of the level.  Still, it made a good platform for a lookout post.

Gaming moments: A

This isn't the same as gaming memories - this is about discrete moments in games.  Moments like these:

Aladdin (Mega Drive)

After playing through a number of platform levels, each of which accompanied by music from the film, you get placed on a flying carpet for a section entitled "rug ride".  It's an automatic scrolling level, which speeds up over time to the point where you are almost required to memorise the level - but not quite.  The music that plays is an original composition for the game, and fits perfectly with the acceleration. You get to the end, and realise that for the last ten seconds of the level you've been holding your breath ... but you survived, and you are five lives up.

Advance Wars: Dual Strike (DS)

Not the big oozium level, which is the part of the campaign I can remember, but Twin Isle, one of the war room maps.  Twin Isle was in Advance Wars 2, but it never seemed a stumbling block there.  In AWDS, however, something about the balance had changed and I played that one map for weeks just trying to get an A grade.  I managed it, after working out a wonderfully elegant solution, which this margin is too narrow to contain.

Assassin's Creed II (Xbox 360)

You get towards the end of the game and suddenly you're in Venice.  And it really is Venice - I've been a couple of times and I recognised it immediately.  There have been few occasions when I've felt such a sense of location. 

Titanfall: I killed one - no, two!

Two titans, that is.  Big stumpy robots.  I was waiting for this to come down in price given its online-only and multiplayer nature, and I'm glad I did; the game feels a bit light on content from what I've played so far, with matches lasting a relatively short period of time, and everything being a little repetitive.

But it's repetitive fun, and that's the important bit - it takes a while to work out what's happening, but once you do the game's tense and exciting.  The feeling of reward you get for each kill is immense, particularly when the kill is a titan.

Endless Ocean: tickling fish

As part of my Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection goodbye tour, I went back to the seas in the Endless Ocean.  I couldn't work out what was going on at all; I wandered the boat looking for how I could play multiplayer, found that I had a dolphin companion, and went diving.

My dolphin seems to be able to bury his tail in the sand.

I swam around for ages, looking at random fish and managing to uncover their names by touching them.  Except sometimes that didn't reveal their names, and some fish I had already seen.

The area I could swim in was pretty limited, and I kept finding caves that I wanted to explore but they were too far outside the "target area".  Pretty fish kept swimming away.

Eventually I decided to try to find the multiplayer again, so returned to the boat. I have no idea why my character has a ponytail.  I eventually found the ladder leading to the Wi-Fi enabled sea, only to find that it would only let me join an existing friend who was online at the same time.  I don't know anyone else with the game.

I wandered back to the back of the ship, only to find the most stilted conversation ever.  No idea who she's talking about here.

Games Evening 23.7

A rarity, with Matt and Andrew visiting with no children in tow.  They did so in order that we could play some games, before Andrew moves 34,771 miles away.  The idea was to play like we used to, including finding games as close as we could to our old habits.  Unfortunately, a number of my games are still in the loft, so I was unable to get hold of PES4, Burnout 3, or Rockband.  We made do with what I had to hand.

• Mario Kart 8 - still superb.  Andrew quite enjoyed it, although the use of items somewhat eluded him.

• FIFA 13 - we were hopeless, until we turned the difficulty down from 3/5 to 1/5.  Playing as England against Accrington and some random Irish team, we managed to scrape a couple of wins.

• Blur - the screens were too small, unfortunately.

• Nintendo Land - the real star of the evening.  We were in fits of giggles as Andrew ran in the wrong direction, away from Matt, during Chase Mario.  We never got around to playing Ghost Mansion, which is probably for the best.

Project Gotham Racing 4: moving to the silvers

Following an evening on Wednesday where John, Kieron and I met up online to kill each other in Halo 3, race around in PGR4, and find orbs with each other in Crackdown 2, I decided to see where I was in the various modes in PGR4.  A fair way in, it seems.

Back in 2008, I got frustrated that I had to play some levels with bikes.  I got past those at some point and when I started last night I was up to the eighth of ten sets of arcade challenges, with a variety of platinum, gold and silver medals.  I managed to complete each of the remaining challenges in set eight on my first go, so was feeling confident moving on to set nine.

Suddenly I couldn't use a nice controllable car - oh no.  Big powerful slippy monsters of cars that don't actually go where you want them to; coupled with elimination events where a single mistake can mean that you're never going to survive to the end.  It took many attempts, but I finally passed them ... to be confronted with a race around the Nürburgring.  Hmm.

Still, the game remains ace, and there's also the career mode to explore, which I have obviously played some of before.  It may stay in the Xbox 360 drive for a while.

Mario Kart 8: crossing the line

I was dragging a green shell behind me, but as I turned the final corner I saw red and blue shells approaching.  The red shell would be disposed of by the green, but would I cross the line before the blue hit me?

No.  But the blast threw me forwards the 10cm I needed.  Huzzah!

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.