Game Reviews

Review – Dead Cells (PC)

I have to full be upfront here. When I first started playing Dead Cells, I hated it. Well, I liked it, but grew to hate it. I reminds me a lot of Rogue Legacy in it’s presentation, but it’s quite a bit faster and more difficult than Rogue Legacy is. I really really liked Rogue Legacy. Dead Cells also feels a lot like a Metroidvania title, though many will argue it’s not really a Metroidvania game, it has a very similar gameplay feel, even if the actual loop is different.

It’s closer to being a Roguelike platform game than a Metroidvania game, I’ll accept that. You do revisit areas, but not out of necessity to collect missed items or areas by using new skills, a Metroidvania hallmark, but because in Dead Cells, you live, you die, you live again. Actually, I’m not even sure you’re ever really ever alive, or maybe just you’re never dead. Your ACTUAL character is basically just a big sort of, blobby fungus thing. You start the game and possess a body and go from there.

Each iteration through the game, the levels are the same, but the layout is randomized. The route is also somewhat randomized, in that you can often choose where to go next. The choice can come at a trade off though, as the game gives bonus rewards for speed. Your equipment is also randomized. You get an assortment of initial drops to choose from and enemies drop items, but the secondary abilities and stats are all randomized out.

Between lives, you can unlock some permanent perks though. Which will help with progression as things get more and more difficult. This is where my chief problem with this game WAS. I’ll address it, but I do want to emphasize the “was”. The progression, really does not keep pace with the skill leaps on each stage. And dying at certain point in each run can mean losing any chance of progressing your ability at all, which results in a LOT of repetition and feeling of going nowhere. The ability to unlock skills only comes at the end of a stage. There is also a larger upgrade option for drops that only occurs every few stages. When you die, you lose all of your collected souls, which are used for upgrades.

You can unlock the ability to keep some of them, but it’s such a small amount it’s almost worthless. It also means the only incentive you have to spend early on, is on the ability to save souls between lives. So you never actually GET stronger for a while. It also doesn’t help that some of the unlockable items are kind of worthless and only serve to pollute the potential pool of drops.

After throwing myself against the first boss a few dozen times, then the stage that comes after the first boss, I completely shelved this game. It was fun, but not, THAT fun, to play essentially the same 2 levels over and over endlessly for a minuscule boost in power.

The game was eventually patched to add a difficulty adjustment slider, which brought me back and suddenly, the game was super enjoyable. Funny enough, this isn’t the first game this sort of thing happened to me with, Control did the same thing with the same results. Some of the more “hardcore” people complained, but it really doesn’t affect anyone else to play on an easier difficulty.

With the new ability to slide things to be less brutally difficult, the game was suddenly incredibly enjoyable. It meant going much farther long, beating more bosses and the game, and actually being able to progress along with unlocks. This also meant that the progression system was meaningful and the difficulty could be raised a bit as things became too easy. It honestly felt a lot more how the game was meant to be played.

Gameplay aside, the graphics use an interesting dense pixelated style that, despite it’s pixelatedness, really shows off all of the motion and environment well. Everything stands out well and looks pretty nice, in a slightly gross and morbid sort of way. The enemy variety is alright as well, each zone has it’s own sort of stable of enemies that show up, though some of them do get repeated.

There are also some more difficult enemies that only show up on higher difficulty levels. In addition to the difficulty sliders added in the mentioned patch, the game itself has a mechanism to increase the overall difficulty based on how many times the final boss is defeated. In order to unlock the “true ending”, the final boss must be defeated several times on increasing difficulty levels.

There are also several mini games and additional time attack modes that can be played for some extra challenge if that’s your jam.

The core gameplay loop is still a bit repetitive, and there is a lot of repeating each level, which may not be for everyone. There is still some trickiness to the difficulty as well, even on “easy mode”, which can be a turn off. Still, it’s a fun and fast platformer that plays a lot like traditional Castlevania/Metroidvania types in it’s mechanics.

Review – Wario Land 3 (GBC) (2000)

Feb 3rd, 2023

by Ramen Junkie.

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The next part of my reverse adventure through the Wario Land Franchise, is Wario Land 3. I decided I had enough to say about this game that it kind of deserved it’s own post all it’s own. I’ve finished the game, though I did not (yet) collect all of the 100 treasures. I have no idea what Wario Land 2 is like, maybe that game is similar in nature to this one, though I will say, this gives me a bit of new perspective on Wario Land 4 which I’ll touch on a bit as well.

An Exercise in Insanity

There really feels like there is some sort of weird META concept going on here with Wario being kind of crazy and greedy more than evil. As the saying goes, Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. And this game is all about doing the same things, over and over and over.

The basic concept here, there are 25 levels, each with 4 treasures of different colors in each stage. The catch here is, you can’t collect more than one treasure in one run. It’s impossible, collecting a treasure ends the level. It’s also impossible because you usually can’t even reach any more than one new treasure each trip. Each treasure you collect, will alter a level in some way that either opens a new level, or allows access to a new area in an old level.

So essentially, you get to play each level at least 4 times. Granted, there will be different sections depending on how much you have unlocked, but the starting areas are always the same, and they are sometimes extremely tedious, which I’ll get to next. It’s a neat idea in concept, I actually kind of like this aspect of it.

The real annoyance I have is that this “repetition” aspect plays out in the level design itself. The game has no lives, Wario literally cannot die. There isn’t even a timer. You could drop Wario into a pit or monsters and lava and leave the game just running and it would go forever with no consequences. A private hell for a digital character, if you want to be a weird psycho.

That said, there are in some ways “lives” in that the game makes liberal use of transformative traps that often pull your character back tot he start of whatever exercise you’re working your way through. Sometimes back to the start of the level. It’s effectively, the same as “dying” in a normal game. This isn’t even a real problem, it’s kind of a unique take on the idea of dying.

The problem is that almost everything is essentially a “1 hit KO” when it comes to these. There is no “Small Wario” or even a “jiggle the controller and escape”. You get hit, you light on fire, or turn into yarn, or become a sludge zombie, and you end up back at the start of the level when you become normal. Since you don’t “die”, the game seems to have taken this as a signal that, “you can just fake die ALL the time.” There are a LOT of places that feel intentionally designed to be “cheap shots”, that feel like the designers justified this as “well, you didn’t die”. In any other situation where you are draining lives, it would become infuriatingly impossible to pass some of these areas without running out of lives.

This just leads to the already built in repetition of the treasure gimmick feeling much much worse. Because doing each level 4 times, becomes essentially doing many levels, 20 or 30 times. Because some zombie popped up on top of you and now you’ve fallen through the floor all the way down, or you got caught on fire and now you’ve fallen off the screen back to the start area.

Too Ambitious

I had an issue with the configurations on my Retroid so the select button wasn’t working, which made for an interesting time with a few features that I thought were missing but ended up not being missing. Part of the crux of that issue was it felt like the game was just, limited by the capabilities of the Game Boy. This game is a Game Boy Color game, and I always forget that the GBC and the GB were just, a D-pad and 2 buttons. No L or R, no 4 button control pad. Just 2 buttons.

I stand by the idea of this game being too ambitious. Wario Land 4 almost goes to show that, not because of improved graphics, but just the improved controls and how much more solid the controls feel. Going into Wario Land 1 after this, I can appreciate how much cleaner this game is that WL1, but it’s not nearly as clean as the Game Boy Advanced Wario land 4 in it’s polish. It definitely feels like it’s just, really pushing things right up to the edge.

The levels are pretty small, but feel large, the puzzles are clever for the most part, aside from the artificial difficulty of constant cheap shots. It’s also fairly long, or at least it feels that way, but even if I could play through things perfectly, it still feels pretty long. The repeat visits to the evolving levels on it’s own is a neat and interesting gimmick as well. Though once again, too ambitious. The game really could use some more obvious sort of visual indicator on which levels need to be revisited next and which still have what color treasures in them.

The Golf Game

Call it PTSD, but I completely forgot about the bull shit golf mini game until I went to dig out screen shots for this post.

Holy Shit this game is bad. It’s a pretty standard 2D Golf game, you press a trigger to start, trigger to pick power, push a trigger to select accuracy. And it’s REQUIRED. A lot of times the mini games, which I generally dislike, are optional. Which is great. I played like one mini game entirely through Wario Land 4. I can just skip it.

This is not an option in Wario Land 3. Several of the puzzles amount to, “Find the golf game and beat it to open a door.” And the game itself is not fun at all. The levels are random, how much power affects things feels random. The PAR needed always feels like 1-2 shots too low to be even remotely fair.

And it costs coins to play. The screen shot shows 10 coins but the more you play it, the more it costs. By the end of the game it costs 50 coins. You could easily run out of coins and then have to go farm them just to proceed. And coins serve ZERO other purpose in this game besides playing this shitty Golf mini game.

There is even a more complex version of this you can unlock by getting all the treasures, which does NOTHING for the story of gameplay. It’s optional. But it’s clear that some dev made this golf game as a pet project and just REALLY wanted it out there to be played.

Wario Land 4

It’s really interesting to me how much Wario Land 4, feels like an evolution of a lot of what was shown here in Wario Land 3. It’s also almost, a serious dumbing down of those concepts, and I’m not entirely sure if that’s good or bad. The main thing is the evolution of Wario himself. At the start of Wario Land 3, your abilities are pretty limited, and match more to previous games. Throughout WL3 you gain a lot of new skills, and a lot are skills you just sort of have in Wario Land 4. It’s not 100%, but it’s still kind of interesting that there is a bit of continuity there.

Though somewhere between WL3 and WL4, Wario lost his invincibility skill. So I guess there were some sort of drawbacks in there. The level design in Wario Land 4 also feels like it’s sort of mimicking the revisiting gimmick of Wario Land 3, but instead of revisiting, you just, have to pay attention and catch everything in one trip. This actually makes WL4 feel incredibly short next to WL3.

Review – House MD (the Game) (PC)

Jan 15th, 2019

by Ramen Junkie.

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Legacy Interactive | Released: 5.26.2011

NOTE: This review mostly concerns itself with Chapter 1, I plan to go through at least one more chapter and if there are significant game play changes I’ll note them but otherwise it can be assumed to be more of the same. Also this review is image heavy because I had too many good shots to narrow it down.

Occasionally something that seems slightly ridiculous shows up on my radar and I just can’t help but give it a try. House MD the Game falls into this category. The company behind this isn’t one I’ve ever heard of but judging by their website they specialize in this sort of point and click mini game based adventure game. They also have some games based on other popular prime time shows available.

I am a fan of the show, sort of. I really enjoyed it up through the end of Season 3. After they broke up the original team and started adding other subordinates things started slowly moving downhill. I can’t say I’ve watched much past maybe halfway through Season 4. This game features most of the more current characters so it is at least based on the what’s relevant now as far as the show goes. Everyone is there, House, Wilson, Cuddy, Thirteen, Foreman, Cameron, Chase, and Taub. The graphics on this are good enough that everyone is easily recognizable. I won’t go so far as to say they are great though only because some of the facial expressions House gives are a little… odd…

The game itself does a decent job of replicating the general aspects of the show. There are 5 Chapters or cases to solve which must be solved in order. There is the basic set up, some inconspicuous situation leads to a person landing in the hospital. House and his team brainstorm and test for various illnesses. There’s even the “side patient” clinic side of House’s job that shows up. Eventually after several failed diagnosis, House has an epiphany moment (through the use of a bouncing ball mini game) and the solution presents itself to the world more or less out of nowhere.

This plot aspect actually annoys me but it’s consistent with the show and much of modern television these days. They throw so many Red Herrings at you that there isn’t any way to actually piece together the mystery even if you’re paying attention. There is just an “ah-hah” moment and it’s done. Not a complaint against the game mind you but that gimmick reeks of annoying writing.

The game play itself involves reading through the narrative and solving several tasks presented to you. These tasks are timed mini games. You do procedural tasks which are, slightly annoyingly, spelled out step by step, so no real challenge. These involve things like “whip the area with sponge, stick the needle in the arm, no slide up to insert the needle, put the vial on to the end of the needle”.

There are also search and find the clues games. These involve panning around a scene looking for clues as to what may have caused the illness. These are a little weak because you mostly pick up random objects, none of which end up having much to do with anything. The third of the more common puzzles is the brainstorming sessions. Several different diseases float around on the screen. You must select the correct one to move on. As you select answers, letters that match will be revealed helping you to sole the answer. Also letters are revealed over time slowly. Generally you’ll do 4 or 5 of these in a row as House tells you all the reasons you’re wrong.

The whole thing reminds me a lot of the Pet Care style games my kids play. Basic mouse movement based tasks presented to the player with no true threat of loss. This is a very casual game in that it’s meant to appeal to people who don’t really play games. The type who don’t want to get a game over screen ever, they just want play a house episode.

Much of the game is very dialogue heavy. I can’t really decide if it’s good or bad or just off. I have not really paid attention to the show the last few seasons so maybe house has turned into a “Sex one liner every other sentence kinda guy” but I don’t remember him being quite this randomly nuts on the show. The worst comes from the clinic patient. House more or less mocks her the entire time telling her she needs to fatten up repeatedly only considerably more rudely. House is an ass but he’s not really all that flat out MEAN. I’ve included several choice selections in the screenshots, you’ll want to enlarge them to read it though.

The simplicity will probably turn off a lot of more hardcore gamer types. It’ll likely turn off people who just like more action in their game. It’s not real terrible for a mostly text based narrative style adventure game.

Here are some extra images I didn’t have room for…. Click to make them larger…

Review – Forza Horizon 4 (PC, Xbox One)

Jan 8th, 2019

by Ramen Junkie.

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Microsoft – 2018

The Good

Stunning Visuals
Gameplay has a ton of variety and courses and cars
The car Livery system is pretty great

The Bad

The PC version is a pretty mediocre port of the console version
There are a lot of bugs.
The Online Scene isn’t great

Racing is a genre of games that I don’t really obsess over but I often come back to. It’s quite possibly my secret favorite genre. I bought an N64 so I could play Cruisin USA, I played a ton of Gran Turismo 2 on my Playstation, I played a bunch of Need for Speed games. the only X-Box 360 title I have played with any amount of play time was Forza Motorsport 4.

I’d been kind of looking at trying one of the Forza games in the Windows 10 store, though I was a little apprehensive early on because, well, it’s the Windows 10 store. I’ve used Windows 10 enough that I can say I’m ok with keeping it around some so I went ahead and decided to dive into Forza Horizon 4, which is the newest title in the series. It was on sale and I had a bunch of Bing Rewards credit so I picked up the Ultimate Edition for a steal and have been playing it pretty regularly since.

So, Forza consists of two core series. The Forza Motorsport Series is a more traditional “Pick a race and run it” style game, the Forza Horizon series is a more open world experience. Each of the Horizon games take place in an approximation of a different real world region, Forza Horizon 4 takes place in the countryside of the UK near Edinburgh. It centers around the Horizon Festival, which is a sort of gathering for racers to show off their skills in different types of racing. The point is, there is some sort of vague plot to this game, you meet with some of the organizers and they give little cut scenes occasionally. Each race type culminates in a longer showcase event, that one of the characters has been building up to. It’s not going to win any writing awards, but it’s there. There are sub stories as well, though it all amounts to an excuse to drive a car and win some sort of race.

For example, one of the sub stories is a series of events hosted by a Vlogger who is showing off cars that appeared in video games over the years. Like the Ferrari from Outrun or the
Lamborghini Countach from Test Drive. Another has you participating in a series of outlandish stunts as you work do some side work for a filmmaker as a Stunt Driver. There are a series of special event races which culminates in a Halo themed run driving a Warthog. Another has you race a massive hovercraft as it storms over the terrain.

These are all in addition to the more standard races that make up the core Horizon Festival series. The Horizon races are broken up into types you might expect, Off-road racing with trucks, Street races with lots of tight corners and turns, Road races which are a little more forgiving than street races and have a few more straightaways. You start off with only a handful of events available but unlock more as you level up your skill in each type of race. Eventually the entire map is essentially covered in events.

The map itself is pretty good size. It can take a pretty good while to circle the entire area, and even just traveling across it can take five to ten minutes, depending on how much you go off road or what car you’re driving. In addition to race events, there are all sorts of activities on the map itself. Speed Trap challenges to achieve a high speed at a certain point, Drift Zones where you accumulate points by drifting around a series of turns, or Danger Signs where the object is to see how far you can jump your car. Like regular races and mini stories, doing these activities, unlocks other activities.

When all of this gets old, there’s also the hourly Forzathon events, which are sort of impromptu gatherings of players who all work to do the world activities for accumulated points. These, admittedly, get a little old, they last 10-15 minutes and it involves doing the same speed trap or danger sign jump over and over and over and over while a meter inches upwards for the group. It really feels like these could be given some more variety, maybe a series of checkpoints for everyone to race through that span the map or something. These events give special Forzathon Points which can be used to buy special weekly exclusive items.

Thinking of buying, the game’s other progression system is through accumulating cars and player outfits. You can’t exit your vehicle but your avatar appears on race start and completion screens and shows up in your car driving. You earn clothes and cars through a variety of methods, winning races and leveling up the different race types is one. You can outright buy cars with your winnings. You can also win prizes through Wheelspins which are earned from victories and leveling up your character. These are pretty much what they sound like. A big prize wheel spins and you get an item afterwards.

It’s notable to add that there is no real world cash shop. You buy the game, and that’s it. The Wheelspins especially feel like something that would normally be a “pay $1.99 and get a wheelspin” item but there is no way to buy extra wheelspins. They must be earned by racing. This is good because frankly, micro transactions are kind of hurting the game industry. It’s a little frustrating since it means you get a loot box that you can’t control and may get some garbage emote out of it instead of that rare car that happened to show up as an option. Fortunately the game pretty much showers you with Wheelspins.

So, while there aren’t any micro transactions, this does lead into my first complaint. I purchased the Ultimate Edition on sale, so it didn’t seem too bad, but the game kind of feels like it almost needs the $99 Ultimate Edition package, for anyone who has any intention of seriously playing the game and the expansions. In addition to including the current (Fortune Island) and unknown second expansion, the Ultimate Edition comes with a ton of cars and the VIP Pass, which includes a bunch of perks like double experience and free wheelspins and whatnot, all things that make the progression of the game fly by.

My other major problem comes from how shoddy the PC port itself feels. The game itself plays well and looks great and on the whole, I am happy, but it has a lot of weird quirks and a lot of bugs that feels like they stem from the whole “Windows 10 Cross Play Xbox experience” or whatever it’s called. For example, there is an elaborate and nice Photo Mode in the game, but the only way to get the photos into a useful sharable format is to first share them to your Forza Profile on the Forza website. I mean you can print screen them, but the actual export produces a much nicer quality image.

I also feel like the lack of a user defined radio stems from this weird Xbox wrapper. The in game radio is all right but gets a little old after a while, having the ability to point a user radio station to a folder of MP3s would be amazing. You can play whatever music you want of course on something else, but the game is really bad about auto turning to a new radio station during races and the console version apparently doesn’t have a way to permanently mute the radio at all on the volume slider. Between this missing feature and the lack of screen shots saving to the drive, it’s like the game just doesn’t have access to the file system. It’s more of a Windows 10 problem than a Game problem, but it’s kind of a problem.

On Windows 10 problems, I have also had problems getting updates to take and the game to launch, a problem others have had as well. Sometimes it just doesn’t launch with no helpful errors. I also had to do a complete reinstall to get the Fortune Island DLC to take.

I also kind of hate the complete lack of in game chat, which i understand is also a side effect of the cross play aspects with the Xbox One. The text chat is all done via these little emote meme phrases and you can only “equip” 4 at a time.

Most of these problems, aside from the literal game breaking updating issue, aren’t game breaking. The pluses really outweigh those negatives. Racing games aren’t for everyone, but this one is pretty awesome. It’s visually amazing and the lack of micro transactions despite how easy it would have been to add them is really great. I’d definitely recommend the game, especially if it’s on sale.

Review – The Binding of Isaac (PC)

Jan 1st, 2019

by Ramen Junkie.

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So, the makers of Super Meat Boy, Team Meat, apparently have an old school Nintendo Fetish of the worst kind. First you have Super Meat Boy, which has vague connotations of Super Mario Brothers. Though the reality is the name is all it really has in common with Super Mario Brothers, that and being a side scrolling platform game. The Binding of Isaac is sort of like this, only with The Legend of Zelda. It sort of has the same cadence and style in name and shares a lot of game play style.

The reality is, other than the basic interface design, The Binding of Isaac shares very little with The Legend of Zelda. The presentation is similar but the game itself is a rogue-like. This game’s primary gimmick, and the source of it’s possible lone flaw, is it’s randomness. It can be extremely cruel at times. The ability to complete the higher levels tends to be closely associated with the items and upgrades you find. These upgrades tend to be pretty random and are also often dependent on if you have enough coins to buy them. This can lead to some rounds where you manage to become an overpowered juggernaut and others where you’re essentially the same guy on Level 3 as you started out.

Assuming you can even make it to level 3 without upgrades. There is also the problem of keeping yourself alive in this random mess. Some rounds, enemies will almost always drop hearts and coins, others you’ll get nothing. There does seem to be some level of algorithm in place to keep things fair, it just could use a bit of tweaking. The game does do a pretty good job of keeping the earlier enemies easier and the later enemies more difficult.

It also is surprisingly not as frustrating as it seems like it should be. This was a trait shared by Super Meat Boy. It also becomes easier as you become accustomed to how the enemies act and move. Now, granted it does start to shove curveballs at you like nobody’s business later in the game, like having the laser blasting aliens with small corridors to navigate, and swarms of flying spitting creatures in a room full or rocks.

Despite the frustration, the gameplay is pretty solid, and decent.

The real likely turn off to some people is the game’s somewhat grotesque nature and it’s somewhat mocking of religion gameplay. The Binding of Isaac is a story from the Bible where God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. The basic plot of the story is that Isaac’s mother is told by a mysterious voice that her son has become corrupted and he must be taught humility, or something along those lines. There are numerous references to biblical elements. This is mixed in with what is essentially a horror house of bloody enemies often based on bodily organs. Often enemies spew blood pellets or drop piles of shit on the floor. It’s generally something that people who have a more sensitive disposition will probably find offensive.

This game has one final really great point going for it, it’s cheap. It’s almost like some sort of experiment in marketing but the game is only $5, which is hard to pass up. It’s frustrating as hell but it’s fun enough that it’ll keep you coming back, assuming you’re not turned off by the slightly disturbing imagery involved.

The Binding of Isaac is available on Steam here.