Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+

Year of our lord 2015, played Pac-Man for the first time.

At least: As far as I can remember. Pac-Man is one of the 'forgotten' gaming icons, unless your name is Adam Sandler, something that didn't really hold on through the years, though more so than like ... Bubsy the cat. I honestly don't know that I played the original Pac-Man or any revision in the past, so this is a review of this game without really knowing what tier of update it is. I'm just going to shorten the title to Pac-Man, I'm not referencing any other game or version of this game. That's it, here we go, ghosts on the chomp

Gaming revivalism is an interesting concept to me, since you end up with a lot of weird phrases and ideas mixing with what ultimately amounts to marketing via the hook of nostalgia in your soft unprotected rump. Franchises at this point sort of co-exist in a market space dominated by franchises, and names don't really have a meaning beyond being "okay" for mainstream play. Pac-Man probably doesn't have the star power of say, a Ubisoft or Nintendo mass-produced product, and as such, isn't exactly a revival so much as just a game based on Pac-Man.

Like I said, I don't really remember playing Pac-Man (older versions) at any point in my life, so I don't really know or remember what the "core mechanics" are or how faithful this game actually is. It feels like a Pac-Man game but I don't necessarily think it feels like the original, or the maybe more popular Ms Pac-Man which I think I've heard was the definitive edition?

As you can tell, I don't know very much about Pac-Man and wasn't especially hyped about Pac-Man.

Cards for Stars: Steel Storm Burning Retribution

Retribution is going to be one of those dirty words I stop wanting to see in titles.

Anyway: this game didn't have cards up until recently, but I can remember ages ago wanting to play it and ending up with it in a bundle. Pre-cards, I apparently played four minutes, but it might have been before I got my first controller for my PC.

Post-cards, well, here I am.

Steel Storm: Burning Retribution is four random words strung together, titled a three quarters from the back shooter. It plays sort of like a twin-stick and sort of like a shmup - I think this sort of game used to be quite common and now is not quite so.

Steel Storm BR has most of the basics down pat: the controls work well, the game looks fine, the weapon loadouts feel good and the weapon sounds work nicely. The little hovertank feels pretty good, a bit less requiring of frustrating finesse compared to the usual twin stick controls while still engaging your hnads in a nice way.

The music isn't very good. The problem lies in the usual, the NES problem: tracks are too short and there's too much downtime where the music becomes the core of the experience.

The game itself drops the floor out from under itself. Combat feels good and relatively slick, but it becomes very obvious very quickly that the camera angle cripples you. As best I can tell, you just can't hit enemies "off the screen", which happens almost instantly once you try to dodge away from incoming fire. The enemy seems to basically not exist off the screen, they don't follow up or pursue you, they just dawdle around. You can seemingly hit them with the MIRV special weapon, but I haven't found the other weapons can reliably snipe them while you're off dodging, so you end up with combat often taking a really long time.

The game also does a lot of things that dilute the enjoyment. For one, as I said, the camera is just so far up that you can't really get into the groove of fighting through multiple enemies - you're constantly pedaling back and forth out of conflict. The game also uses health packs, but there really isn't much threat in the game except for the other big thing I dislike. Enemies are initially placed on the map, but that's not all that dangerous since as I said they don't pursue and don't really come after you. So the game teleports enemies on top of you, en masse, which is about the only time you're really threatened. You never die to attrition, so these weird health packs that heal 25% just feel monotonous. But since you're never really under any threat from placed enemies, I guess regenerating health felt like too much.

Also the game has keycards and unlocking doors and all that jazz, but it doesn't really do much other than set off teleporting enemies and pad out the game's length. The doors and stuff just end up looking really lazy, it's not like you're lowering defenses or using special circumstances to blow through them, they're literally "a forcefield" that sits around "the target". It's boring.

Basically the game's core is good, but the AI is way too lacking and the camera is awful. If you could see more, fight more at a great range with more visuals going off I think the game would have been pretty exciting. You get these great moments now and again, but on the most part it just feels sluggish. The teleporting enemies thing just leads to cheap, irritating deaths that coupled with the plodding out of combat pace make for a really dull experience. I finished the tutorial and a pair of missions and just found it too plodding.

As an odd note, I re-watched superbunnyhop's two parter on Rage and Doom a couple days ago. He talks about the gameplay of Doom as being a top down shump extended out to psuedo-3D - something akin to Maximum Carnage or Smash TV, maybe - but this game really is just that, but not in 3D. Keycards, circle strafing, dodging slow moving projectiles. It could have been great, but instead it's too slow and too plodding.

Cards for Stars: Super Star Path

The endless march of bundles games and grinding cards off them continues on after a couple week break to learn how to paint miniatures again. (Not well, mind you). Up this ... Week? Day? is Super Star Path, which I acquired in the groupees #25 greenlight bundle not all that long ago.

Super Star Path claims to be a mixture of puzzle game and top down space ship shooter. I would say this ... Is sort of true? The puzzle comes from shooting the immobile and rather defenseless "aliens". If you set your shots up wrong, you end up with a dead end path, and then you die. There are also boss fights, at the end of each level, and some shooty elements in the later levels within the level.

The game is very polished; the controls work well, the options menu is fully featured, the graphic work, sound, music and voice acting are all quite good. The steam announcements from the devs make it sound like the game has problems, but on my aging machine I never hit a hitch and my hour plus of playing was all pretty smooth.

There is a full upgrade system and a large selection of ships to purchase. Unfortunately or fortunately, the ships don't play all that differently, each one generally have a defensive advantage, or a mild offensive advantage. Different defenses tend to be keyed to different levels, you are clearly supposed to do certain levels with certain ships. It's a little Megaman-y, if you will. The upgrade system is supplied by two types of drops, enemy specific ones or just getting gems off the run off the mill enemies that explode en masse.

The game has some real issues though, and after an hour, it starts to drag. It has much the same problem of say, Block Legend DX, where elements of the game can be kind of mindless then you have to really pay attention to bosses. Super Star Path is a lot worse, though, for this.

Basic problem: The main game is a bit meandering, and often you're just sitting there in a narrow path waiting to move forward and unable to shoot whatever is threatening you - a lot of which does not care about the 'blocks' in the way or anything akin to line of sight. The column is simply too tight, and the game's rng too often produces very narrow openings that just lead to periods of being bored. Several of the later levels are better about this, but there's a dull point midway through the game. The more frustrating problem is it is easy to slip up when fighting an enemy that doesn't interact with the "terrain" and end up blocking yourself in. The whole crystallized aliens thing requires trying to aim past the front row and while it's a cool mechanic, it doesn't interact well with some of the designs.

As for the other thing, the bosses play so differently from the rest of game it ends up feeling a little jarring. The bosses also rely on mostly not paying attention to them and just dodging their shots, which is ... Kinda dull actually? I guess that is a shmup thing, but I don't see why you can't do phased sections of the fight where you get some actual dps uptime. If you like shmups, it is quite effective.

Simply put, Super Star Path is a couple good ideas, a nice looking game and then a bit of a let down. In the first hour you see very little variety, and you can only get blocked in to slowly die to the screen moving on so many times before you yawn the game off your computer - frankly, it should just have a quick reload button, since why not? I had fun with it, and I do like the music, but the potential just isn't worked with.

I don't see why some of the levels didn't have wildly different terrain or branching paths or ... Turning or just any sort of variety to break it up. The guy (guys? gals?) who did it produced a polished, nice looking game with good assets, but they could have made a much better game with some minimal expansion. Anyway, if it looks appealing, grab it on sale. I'm not complaining about the first forty-five minutes, which is pretty fair for paying like forty cents or something for it.