Summer of Sonic (1): Sonic the Hedgehog

I had been thinking about picking up Sonic: Lost World whenever I next saw it on sale when humble bundle dropped the Sonic 25th anniversary bundle. I was going to buy it, when I realized it had tiered keys, which I rather hate. Then the latest Steam sale began and... Ugh... So I just cashed the $10 tier.

This steam sale was terrible! None of my friends really bought much of anything. Oh, it was also the highest grossing steam sale. Hurray for average consumers! You've gone mainstream, Valve, extract money from da dopes. Whatever. I bought a bundle.

And then decided I should review a chunk of Sonic games, to go with said anniversary. I'm technically a Sega and Sonic kid; my parents bought me a revision 1 Genesis and it is probably the console I've played the most in my life. I'm not going to review every Sonic game (good lord) or even every Sonic game in the bundle, rather spend the next eight weeks going through a selection of them depending on how much I enjoy myself.

Sonic the Hedgehog, the first, has a copyright of 1991 on the title screen. I can actually remember getting this game as a rental even, right after it came out. I remember because I was so upset I couldn't get Sonic to move when I first tried to play it. Turns out the controller was half-plugged in and the d-pad wouldn't work. That moment always stood out to me as memorable, mostly because he would jump up and down but he could not go fast. Since I didn't own it, I never actually beat Sonic the first as a kid, doing it much later in maybe 2010 or so.

Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas

There are a fair number of mascot, high profile games that define or defined a genre that you see surprisingly few clones or at least attempts at. For all the complaining about Darksiders being a 'zelda clone' (whatever) you really don't see many others in spite of it being a pillar franchise for an entire console. There's not really many Megaman clones - not precisely, not really - and very few Sonic clones. There are lots of platformers, of course, but of those very few really live up to Sonic or Mario. They're all brownity torture platformers that don't really have the same crisp, refreshing feel of those games.

(I've always been, as a total aside, completely baffled by the treatment of a lot of mascots and their games. Sonic is obviously the most confusing one, where they seemingly just toss out random garbage to weaken the brand, but it feels like the recent efforts in Starfox and Metroid are just baffling. Metroid especially. Metroidvanias have a market, Metroid has a market, Nintendo has ... Never mind)

Oceanhorn is ostensibly a zelda clone, or something, although I haven't played enough recent Zelda games to pretend I'm much of an expert on the matter. It is a Zeldalike more toward the charm and simple puzzle solving, also it has boats and I feel like there's some major Zelda games that had boats. It is otherwise a charming, colorful game about a boy with a sword and a shield and he has bombs and hearts.

Yay.

Bad Gaming, maybe: Sacred 3

One of the interesting things to me about living in this "accursed millennial age" is the outlook people have on sequels, reboots, remakes and that weird thing where Doom4, which is a sequel to Doom64 and not Doom3, was just titled Doom in spite of referencing Doom. which is weird. But the thing that interests me is the fact people complain a great deal about it happening, but usually the complaining doesn't actually matter. It most cases people who complain are invested fans. You think the people who lined up to buy Doom 3, who later complained about "the flashlight" (hint: light the darkness with the shotgun like a proper doom slayer) didn't come back for more when Doom came out? Yeah, they did. They complain then they buy.

In Sacred 3's case, it seems to have done so. This is pretty unique to me.

I haven't played Sacred 1 or 2, but I have played Sacred Citadel, which was a button mashing pretty decent side-scrolling brawler. It wasn't exactly stellar, and I think I reviewed it at a C grade a couple years back, but it was decent enough at being what it was. It had bright colorful art and a silly, vibrant style that matched up with it well. It was a humorous game, in that janky european way, so that and that alone colors my expectations.

Meanwhile Sacred 3's rating on Steam is ... Man, it is bad. It is "Mostly Negative" which is a pretty low bar. I mean, for example, Bound by Flame is "Mixed" and Blood Knights is "Mixed" as well. Both of those are janky, weird games, and Sacred 3's rating is far lower. I mean that is bad, that is hobo in a greasefire bad.

So when the humblest of bundles ran a Deep Silver 2 bundle, which put Sacred 3 with all the DLC up for a $1. And some other games, most of them I already have. So yeah, $1 to see this "mostly negative" disaster? Sounds like a plan!

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.

Roguelite space platforms: Shattered Planet

I don't have a long history of playing roguelike games, but I do have a basic understanding of them. Ye olde venerated classic "Diablo" is actually - to what I imagine most people barely seem to recognize - based around roguelikes generations ago. I want to say it was based on "Angband", but I could be getting my history wrong. That's a dungeon in the pre-LOTR middle earth lore, if you don't know. A lot of the elements, like fog of war and unidentified items, owe their origins more to those games than the ARPG genre that later ran off with them.

ARPGs, of course, are generally more forgiving and built around smoother gameplay, but I don't think we're supposed to talk about that.

Shattered Planet cleaves closer to the earlier roguelikes. It is a turns and tiles based game, centered on exploring the eponymous shattered planet. The game makes quiet references to the idea that some scientific disaster tore the 'old Earth' apart, but within most of the game you will rarely see any real script on the topic.

You are, or rather you are a line of, clones sent down onto the planet for the purpose of exploring the planet. The game smoothly folds that element of the roguelike concept in, but a lot of the other stuff ... Let's say doesn't quite come together.

Top down days: Hammerwatch

There is a terrible feeling when I look over my Steam collection.

It isn't the biggest backlog in history or something, but I'm at something like 200 games tried out of 1200 games. That's nice. What isn't nice is realizing I had bought a game I wanted to play, and then forgot to play it for a long time due to it falling into that giant pit of unplayed games. It's an unpleasant abyss.

Hammerwatch is one of those games. I got back in ... It looks like 2014? Yeesh, is that seriously right, that's brutal. Back logs are the most first world problem not involving purse dogs or speculating on ebay sales, but it's still kinda dismal when you flip through the Badge page and realize you've been playing games you're not exactly too impressed with instead of games with Very Positive scores and pretty consistent reviews.

It's also really bad when you go over how many games you've played from six months of the Humble Monthly - which ain't cheap, after six months - and that is seriously at a whooping 1/30 or something. Ok that's worse.

But I did finally manage to play Hammerwatch

Two pack review: an Imp? A Fiend! & Astaral Breakers

I run into this issue from time to time where a game just doesn't have enough meaningful content to discuss in a broad, long review. Having hit on two of these games in a row, and having posted nothing in months, I guess I'll lump these two together.

 An Imp? A Fiend is about the easiest game type in the universe to review. It is a torture platformer, more in line with Super Meat Boy than something like There Was a Caveman, which I enjoyed a heck of a lot more than either of the former. This is a platformer with rotating saw blades, double jump, wall jump and a lot of the usual suspects. Pixel artwork, boilerplate soundtrack, etc.

The game is... Bad sort of in relative terms. There's nothing really distinguishing here, except that your imp is pretty good in a fight, but the game is just a bit of a chore without much pay off. Screens are filled with enemies, which is lame, but the real bummer is when you get to the first town and basically no one says anything. Just screen after screen to waddle through, with NPCs that shouldn't be in the game and extra busywork. For the one town you acquire the key, but you have to thaw the key out, only nothing really implies this... So you just wander around til you find that exact spot and yeah it's pretty not great.

I got about thirty minutes of amusement here. The controls are good, and I like how your little imp doesn't exactly feel like a slouch, but eventually you start smashing your face into screens filled with spikes and saws, and it's just not that exciting. That's all there is to the game, but it's not really quite as quick or nuanced as better versions of the genre. It feels like it could use a bit more polish and a lot more consideration of game flow.

Astral Breakers is a tetris vein puzzle game of ... Oddly limited means. I was fiddling around with the new Genesis Hub thing where I have a copy of Columns, and the game is very reminiscent more of Columns somehow than pure Tetris ... But even then not all that much.

Basically you drop 1 singular colored block at a time, which is unusual. The blocks are completely nonreactive and won't disappear by themselves. At seemingly random points, the game gives you the breaker power up, which you can enable with a keystroke. The power up is added to whatever color you currently have, and it 'breaks' all connected blocks of that color. You can aim the powered up blocks at blocks of another color, they won't break, and this - in theory - sets up the combo system.


As far as I can tell, the game is about that. You can set up combos by having 'breaker' blocks set up to fall on their matching color, but I honestly found this just about never happened, because you're always competing against an opponent and whenever they do a break random crap spews on your screen.

Oh, and the game has an adoreable little intro video with a little star. D'awww.

Frankly, this game is probably a good introduction to puzzle games since it feels very under your control, but it's not a Tetris, not a columns and definitely not a Bejeweled. Maybe if you wanna give a kid a non-violent but simple game, it would work there, but for me there's just not enough to recommend it.


Anyway, I generally wouldn't recommend either of these games. An Imp? is a decent torture platformer, but I'm a poor judge of the genre since I hate these kinds of games. Astral Breakers is just too simple for its own good. It just doesn't grab you, even though it is a quality presentation.