Facsimile souls: Lords of the Fallen

First things first, and I feel like I'm doing this a lot, Lords of the Fallen is spoken of as a clone of Dark Souls. I played a couple hours of Dark Souls in something like 2012, and found I hadn't quite gotten the hang of the xbox controller enough to enjoy it. I told myself I'd go back, once I felt like I did, and yeah that took years. I've been meaning to, but I've been rushing through a lot of games lately.

As an aside, this game has too many buttons. It amazes me, looking back on people mocking console players for babby controller sort of stuff. The xbox one controller here has something like twenty or whatever inputs, and when I first got my 360 controller I couldn't reliably hit the right button every time. There's just so many! You know how many buttons my precious Sega genesis had? A d-pad, a start button and then three. The SNES doubled that, but it didn't use the shoulder buttons often. I'm not sure when controller design blotted up to such numbers, but it's pretty impressive

Anyway, I don't strongly remember Dark Souls, but it's pretty evident right from the start that this game is attempting to copy a lot of elements of it. I mean more mechanical elements, gameplay and so forth, not stylistic choices. As such, it's sort of a RPG, although 'rolling person game' might be a better use of the acronym.

Unlike DS, Lords of the Fallen is specifically about one mang, and one mang only. Though you can customize your mang in various ways that as far as I can tell don't matter much to the experience, you play as HARKYN, a convicted criminal, possibly of the heretical iconoclast sort, possibly of the just a violent punchy man sort. Harkyn has made his way to the... Top of the world? A temple? A place where people are and it's cold? Anyway you're here to have sex with sexy ladies and dodge roll everywhere.

And there's like no ladies up here because it's a monastery. Er. Yes.

Summer of Sonic (5): Sonic Adventure 2

I'm unwilling to spend too much time in the middle era of Sonic da Hedgehog, but there's not that many middle era games in the bundle anyway. For my purposes, I'm labeling "middle era" as everything after the Genesis/CD/32x games but before Sonic Unleashed, though there's probably some mobile games or something that don't sort evenly. The division here is that, from what I've read, Sonic Unleashed is where they actually "got" 3D even though it also has a werehog for some blighted reason.

Think of the middle age as the awkward teenage years of Sonic and you'll probably be able to visualize where it begins and ends. I would actually not mind giving Sonic Heroes a try, since it sounds bizarre, but that game isn't on Steam even though it apparently had a PC release? And no, I am not going to pay money to buy a physical media of a PC port of Sonic Heroes. Especially since I'm out of devices that I can install CDs or DVDs onto.

You ever looked at the number of Dreamcasts sold? It is pretty grim. I mean, it sold a little less than where the Xbox One is at now. Less than the Xbox One! Funny thing is a friend of mine owned a Dreamcast, but I never wanted to play a Sonic on it. Early console 3D just made me sick. That early console 3D game people gush over? Yeah? I hate it.

I don't care which. I probably hated it. On the other hand, the Dreamcast is always well remembered by those who played it. Excellent arcade ports, Crazy Taxi and Power-stone and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. It's interesting how a well-liked console managed to barely sell.

Anyway, Sonic Adventure 2 was more interesting than 1 to play because it introduces Shadow. Also, it introduces Rouge the Bat, who is like... Knuckles frenemy love interest? Or something? Both of these characters are beautifully terrible. Shadow is the ultimate edgelord, while Rouge is like campy 60s sex appeal except they put a bat head on her. I could totally see her facing off as an Adam West era Batman villain, if she wasn't a bat. If they didn't put a bat head on her. Yeesh.

It's just batty. This is Summer of Sonic review number five of nine; the previous review (which is early era) is here while the next (bonus) review for the middle era Sonic is here and the next review into the modern era will be here.

Muffin Knight

There's not really much to review here, so we'll keep it snappy and quick. I sometimes watch Total Biscuit's output on youtube, ideally, the videos where he doesn't get a bit too self-righteous or rambles on about esoteric video settings I can not care about. When he's actually reviewing things, though, I kinda get the impression we're very similar gamers.

So he mentioned some... I don't even know, Crate game? While reviewing 'Super Mutant Alien Assault' which, the game itself, looked pretty good. What does this have to do with Muffin Knight? Apparently this is some sort of platforming action sub-genre, and SMAA is 'better' than Muffin Knight, which is apparently a straight clone. I've never played whatever the original title in this equation is, but I do own Muffin Knight from a bundle or something, and SMAA looked pretty good in his review.

So I installed Muffin Knight and ... Well, for one thing, the game is another one of those 'SNES 16-bit era' looking visual treats. I'm not sure as to the exact rendering style, but it isn't that it is pixel art but rather that it is nice and easy on the eyes. Picking up the game is really easy and visual elements just work nicely. Lots of green.

Two pack review: Puzzles Galaxies and Save Halloween: City of Witches

So much like the last time I did a two pack, this is two smaller indie games I didn't get that much play out of. On the plus side, they're both puzzle games, so at least it feels like we have a theme this week.

You can actually get the gist of Puzzle Galaxies basically from looking at the screenshots - which look nice - in that it is a "match four on a platform" game. You highlight two platforms at a time and transfer crystals until a platform is homogeneous, and then it locks off. After you get all the platforms done, the little space station launches and that's the entire game. This is pretty good for being a relaxing, simple brain puzzle you can play at a little to mellow out. It certainly looks fine, and as bundle fare goes, it's fine.

Except it has enemies who pick up and steal crystals to swap them around. This is such an odd decision, since you often end up in the last 25% of a board waiting for the enemies to drop their crystals. There is nothing lamer in a game than sitting there waiting on a timed board for the game to move on, but here you go and there it is. I wouldn't really recommend puzzle galaxies, as it is very simple and yet doesn't really do well with being a simple relaxation game for that. Also, it only has four music tracks, which get repetitive quite quickly.

I would, oddly enough, recommend Save Halloween. I know for a fact I got this game from a groupees greenlight bundle, where I honestly remember seeing it and expecting like a trash HOG or VN or something. But those basically always have cards, so like, why wouldn't you pick it up in a $1.50 bundle you're going to make fat stacks of card bux on?

Instead, Save Halloween is actually a very campy themed match 3 game with a ridiculous amount of variety. The board shapes change with pieces flopping on on the dialogue, the piece icons change, you get lots of power ups and upgrades you gradually unlock by adding things "to your house" which is of course a spooky Halloween looking mansion. It also has various roadblocks to slow your progress, like parts of the board being blocked off til you break barriers or spiders that spread til you destroy them. Oh, also you get activated abilities, though I didn't get far enough to unlock all of them. The game at its core is very simple, but with timed mode off it is extremely relaxing and plays quite smoothly. Most boards are completed by meeting certain criteria, and the game even has vaguely boss battles. I say vaguely because they're not especially vicious, but they do add to the variety.

The art assets especially are just so ridiculous, and the early steps of the game are voiced - and then replaced with text only and suddenly all the grammar in the game breaks. It's not a "good" game, but it is weirdly delightful and I think I'll buy a copy for my mom on sale day just to see her laugh at it since she's a big halloween fan. I wouldn't recommend it if you want something really stunning out of your five bucks, but it's certainly a solid enough match-3 if you're looking for one to goof around with.

I can't really explain the deal with the voice acting dropping off five levels in and being replaced by euro-broken english. It's just very strange. You only paid the woman to voice like, all of four or five lines? And only paid for the translation on like 17 clips?

Still, it honestly just adds to the silly camp humor.

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.