Video Games

2022.05.09 – Elite Dangerous Log

I’ve reached a point where Fortnite is starting to get annoying, so I’ve been slightly aimlessly wandering between games again. One I keep meaning to play more that I have been playing quite a bit is Elite Dangerous .

There is quite a bit to do, and yet almost too much. I worry about not being efficient about things or getting my ship destroyed, probably too much so.

Or worse, getting lost and stranded.

Anyway, I really need to figure out how to take nice external Screen Shots.

I figured out how to take fancy screenshots in #elitedangerous

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.

Review – Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance (GBA)

Oct 24th, 2018

by Ramen Junkie.

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Konami – GBA- 1 Player

Itching for more Game Boy Castlevania action after completing Circle of the Moon, I set out to find a copy of the Castlevania Double Pack. This is a repackaging of Harmony of Dissonance and Aria of Sorrow onto one Game Boy Advance cart. Both games are complete and there isn’t any extras so I’lm just going to review them as separate games.

Since Harmony comes first in release order, I’ll start with it. It is however the third game I played through. I started it second but after about five minutes of play I couldn’t stand it and decided to give Aria of Sorrow a go. I can’t really place why, but I just don’t care much for this game. One major gripe is the controls. Most Symphony style Castlevania games have a “Back dash” button. This one has a “Dash Left” and “Dash Right” via the L and R buttons. While this almost seems intuitive since it means always dashing in one direction, when you’re used to always dashing backwards with one button no matter which direction your sprite is facing, it becomes a problem.

That seems a bit confusing. Ok, traditionally, if you’re facing “left” and press “back dash”, you slide backwards, to the right. This is regardless of which button is assigned to back dash. With the new system, if you’re facing left, and press the L button, you dash forward, press the R button and dash backwards, if you’re facing right, L makes you dash backwards, and R makes you dash forwards. Anyway, it really screws with your head when you’re just trying to dash somewhere and you keep changing direction.

The next issue is the graphics. They are just plain huge and ugly. They tried to make them colorful and flashy but it just ends up being kind of a mess. Also, many of the enemies have different looks than one might expect them to. First rule of sequels, if you’re recycling enemies, make them resemble the same type of enemy from previous games. You can update the look somewhat but a previously fat heavily armored “Armor” enemy shouldn’t suddenly be tall and lanky.

Also what’s up with Juste’s constant glow. He’s also too huge for the screen. Actually it’s possible he’s not any larger than our other protagonists but I just found he seems slightly too large, especially for the small GBA screen.

Anyway, this game uses a new magic system as well. You gain magic books based on elemental properties as you progress. These books combine with your traditional sub weapons (knife, axe etc) to create a more powerful “Item Crush” style attack. The problem with this system is that you’re limited to one type of sub item at a time. Finding the better items isn’t always easy and occasionally you can accidentally pick up another item and loose your useful one. The result is that you’ll pretty much just end up using one or two of these abilities ever (generally the most useful are the rotating shield ones).

Also, your only weapon is the whip. While this was also true in CotM, it would have been nice to see the return of Symphony’s multi weapon system. Instead of new weapons, you equip your whip with various stones to give it additional powers. Essentially it makes the whip a little stronger.

The primary saving grace for this game is the plot, which is actually pretty decent, even if it does come off as a rehash of Castlevania 2. There is a bit of a twist fairly early in the game involving the castle itself that is pretty well done. Also the plot points surrounding Maxim are rather intrigue, though really obvious once you realize what’s going on.

As far as new school Castlevania goes, I’m going to have to rank this one at the bottom of the barrel. It’s fun for many of the reasons Symphony and Circle were fun, but at the same time it all around feels like a huge rip off from lots of previous Castlevania games. While I wouldn’t go out of my way to find a copy of this game, if you can get the Double Pack with Aria then it’s well worth it.

Review – Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (GBA)

Oct 17th, 2018

by Ramen Junkie.

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Konami – GBA – 1 Player

Castlevania is a game series I haven’t always cared much for. The early games were just plain too difficult for my tastes. If I was going to play a tough platform game I’d play something fun and fast like Blaster Master or Ninja Gaiden. After many recommendations I picked up a copy of Symphony of the Night. It languished for years, un-played, on my game shelf. I’d never been a big fan of the whole “horror/gothic” thing, why would I want to play a game full of it?

I then of course played Symphony and loved every minute of it. This sort of side scrolling action game just isn’t made anymore on these next-gen systems. It’s all about 3D! Sadly, Symphony left me wanting more. Armed with my trusty Game Boy Advance, I managed to find more with Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. 2D is all but dead on the home console but it’s still pushing it self out on the Portable system.

Fortunately, Konami realized the popularity of the new format used in Symphony and continued the new exploration and RPG style elements from SotN into its Game Boy series of Castlevania games. This installment takes us back to the whip thrashing heroes of the older games with out hero, Nathan Belmont, err… Nathan Graves. Nathan sets out with his companions Morris and Hugh Baldwin (No relation to the actor) to slay the newly resurrected Dracula. There’s pretty much only one staple for the Castlevania series, and that’s the fact that Dracula is always pulling the strings SOMEHOW and is pretty much always the final boss. If you didn’t finish by killing Dracula, you’re probably not done yet or you got a “bad ending”.

Gameplay is pretty comparable to Symphony. In this game you’re stuck with using the whip for the entire game however. To help out though you collect DSS (Duel Setup System) cards. These cards are themed around mythical animals and gods and are combined for varying themed effects. For example, combining a Flame based Salamander card with the whip enhancing Mercury card will give you a flaming whip. The Earth based Golum card with Mercury gives an longer earth based whip. At the same time combining either of these animal cards with say, the Jupiter based recovery card will cause Fire or Earth damage to heal you. Only two cards, one from each set, can be used at a time though so you’ll find yourself often switching and strategizing. The cards are obtained randomly from enemies and can be a bit of a challenge to collect.

Still, you’ll end up using the same half dozen combinations for most of the game. A lot of them are mostly useless, especially the projectiles and special whips. I found only the Earth whip to be of any true use since it has a longer reach. This lets you hit many enemies before they get too close and start attacking. Hit, not kill, mind you. Most of the enemies take about twice as many hits as should really be necessary to kill them. I find the hits tended to decrease by one for each level gained but near the end of the game the experience necessary to level becomes astronomically too high. I believe while I was “power leveling” I figured up having to pass through the entire Coliseum bonus areas (filled with the toughest monsters) something like 2-3 times before gaining a level. This is not a small task and the Coliseum enemies are tough and give more exp than normal enemies. Still, with a few DSS exploits the final boss was still relatively easy to defeat at my finishing level.

At least there is a fair variety of enemies to keep you entertained in your times of leveling need. Even basic color swaps (like the armors) have completely different attack patterns. The castle is also expansive and varied enough to keep things interesting the whole trip through. You’ll do some backtracking, but it’s backtracking that makes some level of sense.

In comparison to Symphony of the Night, which is a game that all three GBA Castlevania games try to emulate to varying degrees, I’d say it’s a decent follow-up. It’s not quite as polished overall but it has its own merits and methods. A game doesn’t have to be an exact copy of its great predecessor in order to be worthwhile.

Review – Vigil: Blood Bitterness (PC)

Sep 11th, 2018

by Ramen Junkie.

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Freegamer | Meridian 4 | June 29th, 2007

So these days I try to make it a policy to complete a game before doing any sort of review. The thought is, I should experience all of it before passing judgment on it. Sometimes in order to complete this task I do resort to walkthroughs or even in game cheat codes. This tends to factor into the review however. If a game is too confusing to get through without a walkthrough or too difficult to finish properly without cheating then there is clearly a problem with it. I’ve had enough experience and skill development in a wide spread of games to know how to figure out even really tough games.

There is a problem though when a game is buggy. Especially when it’s buggy enough that I can’t seem to get it to move on or I spend more time fighting through poor controls than I do playing the game. Vigil: Blood Bitterness is extremely bug ridden. The basic controls are simple enough but the path finding of the player is terrible. I gave up trying to navigate through this game early in act 2 when I couldn’t get the screen to roll over to the next area after running around repeatedly where it should transition.

How do I know it should transition? Well, strike 2 against this game is that it’s extremely cryptic about it’s presentation. Ok, cryptic is not the right word, cryptic implies that there is a book or a note or some sort of arrow hidden in the surroundings to point you in the right direction or the right method to solve the game’s puzzles. There’s nothing of the sort present in this game. You wander aimlessly through the stylized landscape until you’ve managed to find both cut scenes in Act-1, then you pray on the circles in Act-1 then you look up a FAQ and discover you have to pray in a certain order unlock the ability to pray to another symbol in another room. There are no clues telling you to do this, without assistance you’re left to trial and error.

Trial an error is only good for artificially extending the length of a short and terrible game.

The game itself is essentially a Gothic Horror puzzle game. There is some vague plot about your character and his world being destroyed by some unknown entity (unknown by act 2 anyway). There isn’t any real explanations though of anything. The cut scenes consist of random sinister sounding one liners with no meaning or coherence. Honestly the only reason I have any idea of what the plot is about is because it was summarized in the game’s description when I bought it.

What attracted me to this train wreck of a game was the visual styling (that and it was on sale for like a buck at Gamer’s Gate). The art style is very interesting and stark using almost entirely Black and White lines. There are splashes of color spotted around to give emphasis to different aspects though they are infrequent. The IDEA of the game is also a nice draw. This sort of “dark adventure” genre is one that has started to get my interest lately. I tend to steer clear of “horror” in movies and games but there’s a difference between the horror of atmosphere and the unknown versus the horror of say, Left 4 Dead. In this respect though, there are much better titles than Vigil: Blood Bitterness to be found. Amnisia is the best example of a much better alternative in the Gothic Horror Puzzle game genre.