Now Playing: A Lotta LEGO games

Hi folks, I’ve been doing these “now playing” posts for a while but this is officially the last one. Probably.

Back in July last year, I purchased a big bundle of Lego games for the PC. I only really wanted two or three of them, but when a nine-game Lego bundle appears at a massively marked down price, I just can’t resist. It’s taken me a while to play all of them (minus the two I’d already played), but I wanted to write a little about each one and about the overall state of the Lego game phenomenon that has been valiantly propped up over the last eighteen years by British developer TT Games.

First of all, having played quite a lot of these Lego games now, I have reached a general conclusion. I think Lego games that feature ‘ordinary’ human people are significantly less fun than ones that feature super-powered people. Basically, Lego games peaked out of the gate with Star Wars. The combination of franchise and form was utterly perfect. Droids and ships made of Lego = cool. Smashing bricks with lightsabers = cool. Using the force to build things = cool. Every other Lego game has kept the template but changed the context, and it doesn’t work nearly as well. The exceptions to this are maybe DC/Marvel Superheroes, and possibly Harry Potter, because (again) powered-people are fun to play as.

Lego Jurassic World (2015)

With that in mind, let’s get onto Jurassic World. What could be so interesting about playing as a bunch of people whose abilities are “hitting things with their hands” and who are differentiated by the type of machines they can operate? Corporate workers can access certain computers, intellectuals can solves puzzle boards, archeologists can put bones together or dive into piles of poo… but you wouldn’t know from looking at them because they all look like ordinary Lego people. In fact, this is the first game in the franchise I’ve noticed where the characters’ abilities are written underneath their names!

Then we have voices. Again, back when Lego games used simple pantomime storytelling, you didn’t need voices. Putting voice samples from the actual movies into these games is a practice that started with Lego Lord of the Rings… with mixed results. Sound quality tends to come across muffled when they do that, especially compared to the new voices for other characters. In Lego Jurassic World, it definitely sounds like they got some of the recent cast back to do new lines, but this is mostly limited to the final quarter of the game, where suddenly the characters are incredibly verbose and obsessed with telling you exactly what they’re doing, while scenes from the earlier films are largely mute outside of cutscenes.

Still, the developer treats all these franchises with respect and good-natured humour, and I do enjoy the family-friendly visual comedy they add to the scenes. Particularly amusing is how nobody dies in this game. Dinosaurs never successfully eat anybody, or their victims miraculously escape unharmed. Even that poor tortured woman from Jurassic World survives inside the mouth of the mosasaurus!

Lego Marvel’s Avengers (2016)

This one is based on the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movies, rather than the wider Marvel comic characters. As such, it doesn’t feature the likes of the X-Men or Fantastic Four, nor does it cover anything after Avengers: Age of Ultron, thus no Spider-Man either. But there are still non-MCU characters in here, and it does offer a varied selection of abilities that are fun to use. The story mode jumps from one movie’s scenes to the next, not necessarily in chronological order, but all handled with the usual Lego flair and humour.

On the face of it, then, this game offers the best of both worlds – the excitement of playing as larger-than-life powered people, with the fun of seeing movie moments played out in Lego form. However, a few things let the game down. Firstly, it’s very focussed on combat, namely smacking legions of near-limitless identical baddies to pieces. When you’re trying to activate switches or aim your cursor at things, this onslaught of enemies is tedious and frustrating. The game tries to make combat more interesting by giving you powerful finishing moves, but these amount to nothing more than watching drawn-out animations, and it’s often difficult to know when you’ve got control and when you haven’t. Indeed, a lot of the action is spent watching little snippets of animation, Lego pieces falling into place or machines being activated, and the down time (when you can’t move or do anything) feels longer than it should be. It’s not a problem unique to this Lego game, but it’s especially annoying here.

Lego Marvel’s Avengers brings back a very similar (and very large) Manhatten open world that was featured in Lego Marvel Super Heroes (2013), but it also adds additional ‘mini-hub’ areas from the other movies, like Asgard, the SHIELD base, and the South African coast. Taken together, the game is absolutely massive and takes hours to fully complete. The most fun part of these games is flying around the city as your superhero of choice, doing checkpoint races, side quests, finding gold bricks and rescuing Stan Lee. The feel of flying around at high speed is well captured and exciting. It’s everything else that lets the game down and makes it feel tedious. I keep telling myself I won’t get 100% completion on these Lego games, as they become an obsessive grind – compelling and addictive, but not actually fun. And yet, I keep doing it anyway! No more, seriously.

Lego Ninjago Movie Video Game (2017)

I didn’t know there even was a Lego Ninjago movie, never mind that they also made a game of it. For that matter, I didn’t even know what Ninjago is, but it seems to be a bit like Power Rangers, with a team of multicoloured martial artists fighting the forces of evil with the help of giant mechs shaped like legendary animals. With scenes taken from the movie cutting in every so often, it’s clear that the movie is built on the success of The Lego Movie and uses a similar style of computer animation that looks like it’s made from stop-motion models. That style of animation works into the game’s own graphics as well, giving the characters stiff plastic limbs with none of the bend and stretch properties Lego games usually exhibit. This makes it feel more like you’re actually playing with Lego.

The gameplay is very similar to other Lego games, but they’ve at least tried to make the combat more interesting as it is the focus of the game. While you can button bash enemies to pieces, you do occasionally have to mix up your attacks to stop them from blocking you, and some of the special moves are quite satisfying. The acrobatic ninja skills deployed when running around the city, running up walls and swinging from things are also very fluid, while the wide open level design allows for unhindered movement, and not the cramped and confusing design of previous games. It’s a reasonable improvement in most areas.

The game is shorter than some others and has streamlined a few things, but often for the better. While it’s not going to win any awards, I did enjoy playing through this more than most Lego games I’ve played recently. If I had a particular affinity for the IP, I’d probably enjoy it more. Maybe I’ll check out the movie some time.

Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2 (2017)

This sequel to Lego Marvel Super Heroes (2013) returns to business as usual, with bendy/stretchy character animation. It’s not quite as combat-focused as the Avengers game but it still feels cramped and full of uninterruptible animations and unskippable cutscenes. The story is original and features the comic versions of the characters, but although the game isn’t based on the Marvel movies, it has clearly taken inspiration from several of them, including Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Strange and Thor Ragnarok.

Kang the Conquerer has merged different places and times into a single megacity called Chronopolis, which forms the explorable hub world. Much like New York, it’s full of crimes in progress, collectibles and Stan Lee in perilous cameos. Flying around the city is still kind of fun but doesn’t feel as good due to changes in control sensitivity. On the other hand, Spider-Man’s web swinging has improved since the previous game and he can now scale walls properly. The Fantastic Four are not present in the character list, due to some licensing issue, but there are plenty of other characters present and the game gives time to some more obscure ones that I otherwise wouldn’t have heard of.

Technical improvements include more advanced graphics, seamless underwater transitions, and a very comprehensive character creator! However, when playing the story levels, the interface is a little clumsy, the character icons often obscure the button prompts, it’s very fiddly switching to a character that you want, and context-sensitive actions can get confused in the muddle of crowded areas. Basically, all the problems you usually get with Lego games, plus a few more. It’s a decent co-op game, full of kid-friendly humour, with a nice presentation, but it offers little that’s new, and at this point I’m starting to get extremely tired of the formula.

Lego The Incredibles (2018)

If you were upset by the absence of the Fantastic Four in the last couple of Marvel Lego games, you can have the next best thing in The Incredibles, with Elastigirl, Violet, Dash, JackJack and Mr. Incredible himself all possessing a range of powers that are remarkably similar. Indeed, Pixar’s The Incredibles movie was arguably the best Fantastic Four film there’s ever been!

But there’s something about Lego-ifying this particular franchise that doesn’t sit quite right with me. It’s hard to explain, but changing live action characters into Lego mini-figs creates a cute interpretation that stands out. Pixar’s animated characters already stand out, with fantastically unique forms, expressions and bold silhouettes. Converting them to Lego makes them all look the same. Sure, Dash has stubbier legs, Bob has a giant body and JackJack is one piece of plastic, but something has been lost – larger than life CGI characters are swapped for less lively CGI characters.

The gameplay fits the theme really well, with familiar powers and obstacles, with a focus again on co-operative play. It’s well put together, if nothing new, and the integration of new voices into and around the existing scenes is really well done. The weird thing is the story mode puts the second film’s levels first, and the first film’s levels second. Why? I don’t know. I can only speculate that they wanted to push the second film more heavily as it coincided with the release of the game, but the first film is superior and its equivalent levels more fun – even if changes are made to the story to make it even more child-friendly and provide co-op opportunities (Gazerbeam is alive and playable, for instance!).

Beyond the story levels, there’s a city to explore, crimes to solve, characters to unlock (including a few surprise Pixar cameos) and bricks to collect. There aren’t many flying characters in the world of The Incredibles, but pick one of the few that can fly (with or without capes!) and it’s good fun to zoom around the city at high speed, homing in on collectibles with a handful of helpful red brick ‘cheats’ switched on. Despite the hundreds of collectibles, Lego The Incredibles is a little more streamlined than other superhero games in this list, but that’s absolutely fine, quite frankly.

Lego DC Super-Villains (2018)

The bad guys being the protagonists is nothing new – in fact, half of the original Lego Batman (2008) was spent playing as the villains. But with the release of the Suicide Squad (game and film[s]), Birds of Prey, and the upcoming Marvel equivalents, the anti-heroes are becoming popular again. This is the fourth DC comics Lego game, but the first one not to centre around Batman as the leading man.

There are solid production values here and the voice work is good. I recognised many of the voice actors straight away, including Mark Hamill’s Joker, Jeffrey Combs as the Scarecrow and what was presumably one of Kevin Conroy’s final performances as Batman (RIP). There are a lot of characters here, many of which I’m not familiar with, including alternate universe versions of the Justice League, who form the antagonists for the villains (and are secretly villains themselves – yeah, it gets a bit confusing).

Lego games have always allowed custom characters but this is the first one to incorporate one into the storyline, where you play as a ‘rookie’ villain who can absorb powers as you progress through the game’s 15 story levels. As before, there’s heat beams to break gold, bombs to break steel, electical beams, telekinesis and all the same powers you get in all of these games. Even the ‘mirror portal’ power from Marvel Super Heroes 2 reappears in a new form, as each Lego game takes elements from the previous one and builds upon them. But I am starting to think that these games aren’t intended to all be played – the fact that they’re all so similar makes me think you should just pick your favourite franchise and go with that – you’ll get broadly the same experience anyway.

Yet, here I am, playing through a massive collection of Lego games, because I am quite mad. There’s just one more in this bundle before I wrap things up. Let’s finish this…

The Lego Movie 2 Videogame (2019)

Not gonna lie, I don’t remember much about the second Lego movie. I recall that I enjoyed it but it wasn’t as memorable as the first. The videogame adaptation is not much help in jogging my memory as it features no clips or voices from the movie and, as far as I can tell, bears little resemblance to its plot. Instead of story levels, there are just a series of mini-hub worlds in which you must complete tasks to collect enough purple bricks (not the estate agents) to continue to the next hub, occasionally fighting some giant bosses, all while narration loosely links the events together.

This is a weird one, and I feel bad for complaining about it because I’ve spent the last two thousand words complaining that all these Lego games are the same, and this one is at least different. But it also feels ‘phoned in’, done on the cheap, and the lack of cutscenes also means it’s lacking the charming Lego humour. I can’t really recommend it, but it is at least pleasantly streamlined and doesn’t have the annoying unskippable sequences the other games usually have. Plus, it looks good, the whole game is made out of Lego and it has the movie style animation where everything is made out of solid plastic pieces.

But on that last point, there is a game that takes the solid plastic Lego aesthetic to a whole new level.

Lego Builder’s Journey (2019-2021)

Surprise – a bonus entry! I wasn’t intending to include this, as it wasn’t part of the same bundle… but it only took three hours to complete and it’s still technically a Lego game.

Developed by Light Brick Studio, originally for Apple Arcade for iOS and Mac, Builder’s Journey is a lovely (short) puzzle/story game, and nothing whatsoever to do with the TT Games Lego action titles above. This has more to do with building things than it does smashing them, as you move small pieces around a succession of dioramas in order to move a little Lego parent and child around on an adventure. It manages to tell a completely wordless story, about work, play, growing old and imagination (possibly, it’s vague!) and it’s really nice and atmospheric.

The puzzles layer on complexity gradually and teach you rules through experimentation. There’s often more than one way to finish a level, but there’s usually a specific thing you’re expected to do, like make a path to reach the other side, or activate a machine in a specific way.

It doesn’t always make sense and it’s sometimes too fiddly for its own good (I played with a control pad), but as a first release for this particular developer, it’s remarkably good and I recommend it highly for anyone who likes charming short games with cute stories. It’s also the most realistic-looking Lego title I’ve yet played.

Well, there you have it – I’m done with Lego games for a while! TT Games released Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga last year, which seems like it’s their biggest and most ambitious Lego game yet, going back to the franchise that made them so popular in the first place… but I need a break before I dive into that. Thanks for sticking with this rather epic blog post about some games I’ve been playing! I’m probably gonna stop writing these for a while. Bye for now!

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Playing every Tomb Raider game – Part 3: Crystal Dynamics’ second trilogy

I started playing through the Tomb Raider games again in 2018. I figured it’d take a while to get through them all — ha! You can read through my previous retrospectives here and here.

To be fair, I didn’t get these latest three games until quite recently, and a new computer on which to play them even more recently, but now let’s finish this retrospective series with Crystal Dynamics’ second trilogy, or ‘reboot trilogy’, starting with…

Tomb Raider (2013)
Remarkably, this game was released on the same platform as Tomb Raider Legend (2006). The two games look at least a generation apart! Well, they kind of are. Legend was cross-generation with the PS2 era, while Tomb Raider 2013 only came into its own on more powerful systems.

Let’s talk about that name for a moment. This isn’t ‘Tomb Raider: Origins’, or ‘Tomb Raider: Young Lara’, or ‘Aventures of Tomb Raider: Island Survivor’. No, this is TOMB RAIDER. So confident were Crystal Dynamics (or publisher Eidos) in their product’s quality and authenticity, that they gave it the same name as the iconic 1996 original. I can see why, then, so many people were disappointed that there weren’t many tombs in it.

Tomb Raider 2013 takes a leaf from Nathan Drake’s book and very much apes the bombastic style of action and cover-shooting from the Uncharted games. This is supposed to be an origin story for Lara Croft, but it’s been altered from what was originally shown, and now a young Lara finds herself shipwrecked with some friends on an island full of murderous cultists, with a supernatural storm preventing them from leaving.

The story attempts to show how Lara became such a brave survivor, but it doesn’t take long enough to establish anything because of the breakneck speed of the plot. Within minutes of playing, Lara is shrugging off life-threatening injuries, killing animals and humans aplenty, and making death-defying leaps onto and around precarious structures. She goes from having to psych herself up to kill a deer with an arrow, to learning finishing blows with a pickaxe or a shotgun to the face. It’s crass, violently gory and poorly judged. But beyond that, it simply doesn’t have many tombs in it. Occasionally, you come across an optional area you can explore, but these ‘side tombs’ are usually just a single room navigation puzzle. They’re fine – all of the game is fine, really – but nothing here excites, nothing is original or surprising or unique any more. It’s a glossy, over-the-top action game with some crap characters in it, lacking in the awe and wonder that made the series so successful.

That said, the game apparently did very well and warranted to a sequel, so what do I know?

You can watch my entire playthrough on YouTube below:

Rise of the Tomb Raider (2015 / 2016)
Crystal Dynamics’ second attempt at ‘NuTombRaider’ takes the template of the 2013 game and basically makes everything bigger, more polished and more fully-featured. As a proven survivor and adventurer, Lara now puts her skills to the test in search of an ancient relic in snowy Siberia. The game doesn’t delight in torturing Lara as much as the first one did, but it still portrays her as a ruthless killer with an arsenal of deadly weapons (including the return of the bow and arrows) as she is pitted against a secret organisation’s trained militia. Perhaps in an attempt to rescue her humanity, the game features friendly characters you can help with little jobs and side quests.

Everything Tomb Raider 2013 did is back and built upon: crafting weapons and equipment, making ammo, upgrading abilities, fast-travelling between campsites, finding relics and solving optional tombs. To its credit, the level design integrates tombs more organically and more frequently, but it still strikes me as ridiculous that they’re considered optional challenges in a game called “Tomb Raider”. The climbing and traversal mechanics are good and the game has many nice-looking indoor and outdoor environments. The simple joy of throwing yourself around, climbing walls, vaulting over obstacles, rope-swinging or sliding down zip-lines is retained and enhanced. If the game was nothing but that, I’d be perfectly happy, but with everything else, it feels over-designed, stuffed to breaking point with things to find, collect or kill.

The game would also do well to know the value of silence, to know when to shut up and let the imagery do the talking, but its world is instead littered with too many audio logs, old letters or irresponsibly discarded tape recorders, robbing the sense of mystery from the game’s world-building. The story and dialogue are generic and clichéd, but the gameplay is enjoyable and mostly easy enough to push through to the end. Outside of the game’s main campaign, there appears to be some kind of build-your-own combat scoring component that makes use of randomised loot boxes and in-game currency (adding to an already overstuffed package) but I would very much like to ignore all of this ‘modern’ games nonsense, so I’m pretending it doesn’t exist.

Again, you can watch my entire playthrough on the below YouTube playlist:

Shadow of the Tomb Raider (2018)
I know I’ve called this the ‘Crystal Dynamics second trilogy’ but it’s worth noting that they only did some supporting development on this third game, with primary development being handled by Eidos-Montréal. Not that you’d be able to tell, the game looks and plays very much like the previous two, and with production values pushed even further. Aside from some graphical glitches here and there (flickering lights and a character having invisible arms at one point) the game looks pretty incredible and makes me wish I had an HDR display or OLED to truly do it justice.

Unfortunately, the game also continues to double down (triple down?) on all the aspects that I didn’t like about the previous ones, such as its side quests, crafting, levelling up and bombastic set-pieces. The actual environmental traversal and exploration is enjoyable (grapple-rappelling is great fun), but it doesn’t let you just get on with it. Instead, the game delights in putting you amongst small villages and populous settlements, with NPCs giving you quests. Resources are quickly maxed out unless you frequently sell them at markets, leaving a world full of things that you can see but can’t collect. It’s unnecessary, overstuffed and over-designed. (I was occasionally reminded of Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, and that’s not a good sign.) When Tomb Raider is eventually rebooted again, I hope a simpler approach is taken; I hope it can go back to basics.

The ‘Challenge Tombs’ are easy to miss in a first playthrough (I only found two before hitting the end credits) but you can go back and search for them later. Going off the beaten track, using your rope and equipment to lower yourself into unexplored tombs, and finding these hidden underground caverns filled with ancient contraptions, is very cool. It captures the essence of Tomb Raider for me and I wish the entire game was like that. There are also extra tombs accessible from the main menu (which can apparently be played in multiplayer), but these are not integrated into the main game. They are quite good, though.

One last time, you can watch my entire playthrough on YouTube below:

As a series, Tomb Raider has undergone significant changes, reboots, adaptations and spin-offs. I don’t really know what the future of the series will be, if it will keep chasing cutting edge graphics and expanding all of its mechanics in an effort to become everything to everybody. That’s not really what I want from the series, but perhaps if it can offer those little moments that feel distinctly Tomb-Raidery, I will keep coming back for more. For now, however, this is the end of my series retrospective and video series. Thanks for reading and watching.

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Now Playing: Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury

Mario game lineage and nomenclature can be very confusing, so let’s start by clearing things up. Super Mario 3D World (2013) is a follow-up to Super Mario 3D Land (2011). 3D Land was the first attempt to make a hybrid Mario game, based on the classic 2D games but brought into three-dimensions, and helped along by excellent use of the stereoscopic screen of the 3DS handheld console. So although you could run around 3D environments, they tended to be linear courses with flag poles at the end, filled with classic enemies, blocks, power-ups and so on, with movement in only eight directions and a separate run button for going full-speed – just like the classic 2D games. I loved 3D Land and it remains one of my favourite games on the 3DS console, but a lot of that love comes from the stereoscopic presentation, which not only made the courses look like adorable dioramas, but genuinely assisted with judging distances and informing spatial awareness. (You could play the game with stereoscopy turned off, of course, but why would you want to do that?!). I suppose it was only natural, then, that Super Mario 3D World did not immediately wow me. Without a stereo display, the game can only be presented in regular ‘flat-o-vision’.

It’s bold, colourful and inviting. Aesthetically and technically, this game shines.

It was a Wii U game first, of course. Remember the Wii U? That successor to the Wii that everybody thought was just a tablet add-on for the Wii and so nobody bought one? Lots of its games have since been re-released for the much more popular Nintendo Switch, including Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze and New Super Mario Bros. U, and in 2021, Super Mario 3D World was added to the list, for which I am grateful, because I don’t have a Wii U.

Bowser has put these little pixie people into jars. That’s the plot but, like, who cares?

Nintendo loves to put a new twist on all of its games. It rarely releases straight sequels without changing something about the gameplay to justify it. The twist in 3D World is that it is a multiplayer game. Up to four people can play together, controlling Mario, Luigi, Toad or Peach, and try to reach the goal together. It’s not the first multiplayer Mario game, but it’s the first one in 3D that I’m aware of. Unfortunately, since I don’t have anybody who wants to play it with me (and I don’t have an online account anymore), I have not been able to take advantage of this multiplayer mode. It is still an exceptionally good single-player game, and it’s testament to Nintendo’s design ability that it works both ways, but I would have liked to get the most out of the game as I did feel at times it was missing a certain special something.

“Everybody, everybody, everybody wants to be a cat!”

There are new features beyond this, including the cat suit power-up, which turns your character into a cat, complete with a claw attack and the ability to climb up sheer walls. It’s a slightly overpowered suit, I would say, but you don’t get one very often and it’s great fun to use. The classic Mario green pipes are now almost exclusively see-through glass, and many levels feature long stretches of pipe-travelling, where you can re-direct yourself through forks in the pipes to find secrets and things. Every level has three green stars to find, as well as a unique stamp/sticker design for your collection. It also records your best score, fastest time, and whether you hit the very top of the flag pole on each course, so there’s quite a lot to go back, replay and perfect if you like. All in all, it’s a very addictive, compelling game – and Nintendo’s usual well-judged difficulty ensures that people of different skill levels can all have fun. The later levels (post-credits) are very difficult, providing a very solid challenge.

Champions Road, the hardest level in the game.

But there’s more to the Switch re-release than just a Wii U conversion! Included in the package (and accessible from the title screen) is a little game called Bowser’s Fury. This offers a more traditional approach to 3D Mario, allowing you to freely control the camera while you run and jump around a selection of island playgrounds, completing objectives to collect ‘Cat Shines’. Think of it like a Mario Mini-Odyssey – all the charm and fun of a full 3D Mario game, but smaller and self-contained within a single environment.

Plessie the aquatic dinosaur provides quick transportation around the islands.

The twist is that the game’s nemesis, Bowser, has been turned into an enormous shadowy monster, and he spends most of the game hovering ominously in the background, floating above a sea of black goo in middle of the world. Every so often, he bursts out and goes on a fiery rampage, blasting hot breath towards you and dropping rocks from the sky, while a heavy-metal soundtrack wails on. Essentially, you have a time limit for peaceful exploration before all hell breaks loose and then you have you have to think fast and use the environment for cover. Bowser will either get bored and sink back into the water, or be repelled by collecting a Cat Shine. Alternatively, when you’ve collected enough Shines, you can turn Mario into a glowing supersized cat and battle Bowser head-on like it’s an episode of Power Rangers. It’s a really fun game, with an element of stress and even fear. I don’t feel like Nintendo have managed to make Bowser a genuinely scary character in years, but this version of him would be legitimately frightening for anyone with a hint of megalophobia.

Watch where the light is coming from, stick to the shadows, and avoid the falling blocks… and you’ll be just fine.

This isn’t the first time Nintendo have used a re-release of an old game to bundle something else in. They often do it if they don’t think the bundled game is developed or substantial enough for a full price release (and they don’t seem to like doing tiered pricing). Yet this is probably one of the most substantial ‘freebies’ Nintendo have bundled, and for those who have maybe already played 3D World, represents a good incentive to have another go. Nintendo are stubbornly inflexible with their pricing and this game has been discounted precisely once since its release, however both parts are top-tier Nintendo quality and well worth playing.

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Now Playing: The Witness

I usually know what I’m letting myself in for before starting a new game, but The Witness is not easily discernible from trailers, or even reviews, so I went into this one dark (and six years after release, for that matter). All I knew is that it was a first-person game that involved walking up to ‘Pipemania‘-style puzzle boards, set on a colourful island, and that the whole thing was designed by Jonathan Blow (who made the exceptionally clever indie platformer, Braid, in 2008).

Start at the circle, draw a line to the exit. Easy, right?

Let’s start with what this is. Yes, it’s a first-person game, but you don’t shoot anything, nothing will attack you, and you can’t die. You can’t fall off of anything, you can’t even jump. Aside from walking and looking, the only input you have is bringing up a cursor and using it to draw across the screen. Within the first minute of play, you will encounter a panel on a door; draw over the line on the panel, connecting the start point to the end point, and the door will open. This is your first lesson, and it is one of many lessons to come.

Following the trail of cables around the island is a good way to get started.

So, you now know panels do things. Next, you find panels with branching lines or grids and you can draw any path through the grid that you like, so long as the line is unbroken and doesn’t overlap. You will soon find that some paths don’t work, and then you have to discover why some work and others don’t. Symbols on the panels, for instance colour squares, stars or tetris-style shapes, will gradually lead you to realise that you have to draw around them in certain ways. Colour symbols have to be separated from different colours. Shapes have to be drawn around or grouped together. These rules are ingeniously introduced in such a way that you can learn and digest them before moving onto more complex rules.

You generally have to solve the simplest version before being able to move onto harder variants.

What’s remarkable is how you are subliminally taught how the game works, taught the language of its puzzles, without a single word of dialogue spoken or read. No awkward tutorials or button prompts – you simply learn through doing, through experimenting, through exploring. And every time you learn a new rule, the following puzzle panel will subvert it and give you an additional rule, or some other way to think, or something new to observe. It never rests on its laurels and always adds new challenges as it guides you around its world.

Some puzzle panels require keen observation of the world around them, or a change of perspective, or…

To say any more would spoil the experience, and if you haven’t played The Witness, it’s the type of game that you really need to play to appreciate it. After playing it for about three weeks, on and off, I finally reached the ‘ending’. I know there’s more, a lot more. I didn’t clear some of the optional areas, missed a lot of secrets, and maybe I’ll go back to it at some point… but I think I’ve had my fill for now. If I had any criticism at all, it’s that the game can drive you slightly mad thinking about it too much, or getting stuck in one particular place for so many hours that you lose heart.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, is in this game by accident; everything has a purpose. Yes, even those clouds.

The virtual island is strikingly beautiful, colourful, vibrant and varied, and you can explore its paths freely right from the outset. If you find your route around the island blocked, it’s not by some arbitrary barrier, but by your own ignorance of its puzzle rules. Learn, come back and try again later. In many ways, it’s a videogame in its purest form, uncluttered, unpretentious; an absolutely ingenious singular vision from a stupendously clever mind.

Collect the same colour dots with two colour lines at once, without overlapping. And this is one of the easier puzzles!

Some of my favourite games have what I like to call ‘eureka’ moments, for example in 1998’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, you learn that you can shoot wooden arrows through flaming torches to spread fire, or solve many of the puzzles from 2004’s Half-Life 2 using objects that behave with simulated physics. These are moments when you realise the rules of the game are cleverer than you originally thought, and games are lucky if they have a handful of these moments; but The Witness is absolutely chock full of them! Minute after minute, these eureka moments keep on coming. I lost count of the number of times I muttered to myself “you insane genius, Jonathan Blow!” or punched the air with delight at working out something incredibly clever. The entire game world starts to feel like one all-inclusive puzzle box, the design of which becomes more and more astonishing the more you play it and you begin to realise why it took so many years to design.

The island offers a feast of vibrant hues and pretty scenery, a mix of abstract and angular with naturalistic realism. It looks like nothing else; it screams “videogame”.

I really cannot say more without spoiling it. It’s absolutely a must-play game for anyone who likes to sit and ponder, solve puzzles and explore environments. It won’t be for everyone, but it’s one of the most memorable, intriguing and perfectly formed games I have ever played, and I recommend it very strongly indeed.

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Now Playing: Sherlock Holmes Crimes & Punishments

I hadn’t heard of Ukraine-based developer Frogwares before playing this game, but they’ve made quite a few Sherlock Holmes games over the years. Most have been relatively low budget and only for the PC, but later entries gained more recognition on consoles (and gave us the unintentional delight that is Creepy Watson).

Crimes & Punishments is the first of the series to be made using the Unreal Engine, and it is actually a surprisingly good-looking game with lots of nicely detailed textures on characters’ clothing and skin, which is useful during the TV-show-style close-up inspections that Sherlock does when analysing the people he meets. Characters also animate in a lively manner, often swaying and moving during dialogue so they don’t appear lifeless. Environments and lighting are quite nice and the sound design is also very effective at conveying the sense of place, whether that be the London street ambience outside the rooms of 221B Baker Street, or the selection of other locations you can visit during the game’s six investigations.

You build character profiles by closely observing details about the people you meet, much like the way the modern TV show does it.

Two of the six episodes are directly based on short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, while the other four are brand new. In each episode, you are tasked with both solving the mystery and with deciding the fate of the perpetrator (hence the game’s title). You can move around each location freely, using either first- or third-person perspective (I prefer the former), look at clues, talk to people, solve little puzzles and perform experiments and other activities, while the game’s extensive logs keep track of everything you’ve picked up, read or learned. Deductions then happen inside Sherlock’s ‘head space’, and this is where you piece together the clues, like connecting neurons in his mind. It’s a really nice system, offering a relaxed style of play that you can take at your own pace, and each episode can last a couple of hours (some are longer). The voice work is reasonably good for the most part and the game runs well.

You don’t get to wear the famous deerstalker hat very often, so make the most of it when you can!

The problem with a game like this is how to make you (the player) solve the mysteries instead of Sherlock (the character) solving the mysteries. The game guides you to every location, tells you where clues are, shows you which evidence needs investigating, and signals when you’ve found everything. None of this actually requires deduction from the player, just perserverence. And so, when you have gathered everything you can, you then have to make a choice as to which suspect(s) did the crime, using the game’s deduction screen to select which of all possible choices you believe are true. For some cases, there is only one feasible choice, but a few of them are quite open-ended.

Moving the cursor around until you run out of things to click on makes up a large portion of the gameplay.

This strikes me a problematic system. Sherlock Holmes is famously quoted as saying “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” But hardly anything in this game can be described as impossible and therefore cannot be eliminated. Most pieces of evidence, however iron-clad and solid they ought to be, still have two possible deductions. So long as none of your deductions contradict each other, you can form entirely different conclusions and accuse the wrong person. In an attempt to make a game about deduction for the player, it ends up tying itself in illogical knots, catering to all possible outcomes. There are even cases where the correct outcome appears to contradict a known fact, or requires a selective interpretation, in order to be true. If you do get the wrong answer, you can replay the end of a case and try a different option, but the game warns you that this might “spoil the experience”. I don’t know about you, but the thing that would spoil the experience for me is not knowing the actual real answer. Facts should not be open to interpretation.

The deduction space (with words blurred out to avoid spoilers!). Connect enough non-contradictory conclusions together and you can make an accusation and finish the case (the yellow ball).

Despite its core concept never feeling entirely satisfying, I must say that I did still enjoy playing Crimes & Punishments. Perhaps not enough to seek out the developer’s other work, but if you’re looking for an authentically Sherlocky experience and can handle a few duff mysteries along the way, there’s a lot to enjoy here.

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Now Playing: The Walking Dead Season Two

I played the first season of the Walking Dead game in 2013. To say it’s taken a little while for me to get around to Season Two is something of an understatement! Of course, I kept my save file all this time, so I was able to continue on with my choices remembered by the game… although completely forgotten by me.

You do get a brief recap of events, which helps. Season Two starts with the young girl, Clementine, now the main character that you control throughout. As she tries to survive, she meets other groups and travels with them, gets split up, meets new people, and so on. There’s a lot of that; the story is always moving to the next thing, the next disaster, the next big decision. These Telltale adventure games like to give you big choices to make – about what to say, where to go, who to save. Without playing through the game multiple times, it’s hard to say how many of these choices actually make a difference or whether they’re smoke and mirrors, but in my experience, it’s a little bit of both. You can’t completely change the flow of the narrative, but you can make ripples and affect the smaller details along the way.

I should point out that I have almost no knowledge of the Walking Dead franchise outside of the games. I’m vaguely aware of the TV show, but these games are actually based on the original comic books, which is why they have a cartoony style. Despite their appearance, they’re full of violence and gore, and have a depressingly bleak tone. Don’t play them if you’re in a low mood, they will seriously bum you out! The lore doesn’t differ greatly from most zombie apocalypse fiction that I have seen – people get bitten and turn into zombies (called Walkers), while groups of humans try to survive and often fight each other for resources. The main difference is that everyone in the world is already infected by default, and will turn into a zombie upon death – although this idea doesn’t get explored very much in the game.

Split into five episodes, each lasting around 90+ minutes, The Walking Dead is well presented, in a ‘TV show’ style, with recaps and ‘next times’ at the beginning and end of each episode respectively. This was one of Telltale Games’ earlier releases, before they became a production line churning out every franchise under the sun. As such, the game is technically competent and runs well (even on my old computer). Still, this is a 2014 release, and even at the time, it wasn’t considered cutting edge. The acting and animation can be a little wooden, the ‘action’ sequences are kind of awkward, and especially compared to some of the incredible performances and sequences you get in games today, this does feel kind of B-tier at best. Then again, what it tries to do with character choices and repercussions is still genuinely impressive and there aren’t many games even today that try to do what Telltale was doing back then.

The first season was genuinely fresh and exciting, but here we have more of the same. I honestly can’t say which season is the better of the two; it’s been so long since I played the first one, I can’t remember. I think perhaps Season One had more interesting situations, while Season Two is more bleak and its plot more meandering. Still, they’re both worth playing. I don’t know whether I’ll continue with the third season or move onto one of their many other franchises.

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Now (Re-)Playing: Mass Effect 2 and 3 (Legendary Edition)

I played Mass Effect earlier this year, not for the first time but the first as part of the remastered ‘Legendary Edition’. I was meaning to run straight into Mass Effect 2 but then I went and flew to California instead, so never mind. You can watch the first six hours or so of my Mass Effect 1 playthrough on YouTube, but for now let’s get onto the sequel…
Mass Effect 2 (2010 / 2021)

The Normandy, back in action.

Mass Effect 2 picks up shortly after the events of the first game and, within minutes, destroys your old ship, scatters your crew and leaves you for dead. A shady human organisation called Cerberus retrieves your body, rebuilds you and puts you to work on recruiting and leading a squad to fight a race of aliens called the Collectors, who have been abducting humans from distant colonies.

Your customised Commander Shepard returns, with a few battle scars. Do good deeds, and those scars will heal faster.

This setup allows the game a fresh start, giving you the option of redesigning your character or sticking with your existing setup. If you carry over your save file, key decisions made in the first game, such as which character survived the Virmire mission, and whether the Citadel Council survived, get carried over. Although these have virtually no impact on the overall plot, they are nice reminders of the series’ dedication to continuity. Back in 2010, this was a really cool feature!

Garrus returns to calibrate your guns.

I said before that these games invite replays, and this would now be my third time playing through the series. The previous playthrough was ten years ago, so it’s been a while and I had forgotten a lot of the characters. I’m not sure what was enhanced for the Legendary Edition, but if nothing else, it has been nice just to play these games with a controller, as the original PC versions only worked with a mouse and keyboard. On the other hand, the performance mode on a PS4 Pro is still not great, with screen tearing spoiling the picture in busy scenes, although not as often as it occurred in the first game.

These hacking mini-games are new to ME2 and more interesting than the bland button prompts in the first.

As a sequel, Mass Effect 2 leans into certain elements of the original while side-lining others. It’s still a pulpy space opera but with a larger emphasis on characters and action, and less on grand scope and exploration. Gone are the identikit planet terrains on which you can drive around, replaced with corridors and arenas of chest-high walls from behind which you can shoot. Fortunately, as a shooter, it’s far superior to the first game; this was an era when the third-person cover shooter genre was at the height of popularity, and although Mass Effect 2 isn’t as slick as today’s examples, it does a fine job. You can make the game as interesting as possible by specialising in ‘biotic’ powers (basically sci-fi magic) or engineering tech, and using your team of three effectively in battle. It’s still a little bit like an RPG, at times.

The weapon/power/command wheel is easier to use.

The emphasis on characters is what drives the game, as you build up your elite team. Every character, whether human or alien, has a recruitment mission and a loyalty mission. You can ignore the latter, but disloyal team members will not help you as effectively as loyal ones. In fact, every single character can actually die in the finalé, the so-called ‘suicide mission’ at the Collector base, and stay dead in the sequel, should you carry over your save file once again.

There is more to the mysterious Illusive Man than this game reveals. Stick around for the sequel, folks!

In addition to all of these missions, you also have the DLC now included as standard, so your itinerary becomes absolutely massive and you end up just going around doing weird quests in whatever order you like and the story stops and waits for you, losing any urgency it might have had. In this way, it feels like a series of bite-size episodes, which is actually a pretty refreshing format for a game like this. Its characters are strong enough for this to work well and I came to love spending time with them all again, listening to their stories and filling this sci-fi universe with new details. There are some really great moments throughout these character missions, opportunities to make tough choices, moral dilemmas to consider, and crew rivalries in which to intervene.

Paragon and Renegade ‘interrupts’ can now be triggered in cutscenes, allowing Shepard to cut in with a helpful or forceful gesture.

Whether you tackle these as a paragon (selfless, considerate, compassionate) or a renegade (selfish, arrogant, violent) is really a matter of preference. I’ve done it all ways now, fully virtuous, totally ruthless, and a mixture of both depending on my mood. However, if you’re going to go for a mixed approach, you will unfortunately find situations that you can’t talk your way out of. Only by opting for one extreme or the other can you gain enough charm or intimidation points to talk your way out of the toughest situations. There’s no room for nuance, it’s pretty much a case of get enough points to get the best outcome. So while it may be tempting to use a ‘Renegade Interrupt’ to push someone out of a high window while they’re talking trash to you, it’s best to resist and think about what sort of character you really want to become. In my case, I played this time as a pure paragon, doing good and spreading positive vibes through a harsh galaxy… when I wasn’t shooting people dead, of course.

Aboard the Collectors’ ship. Love those lens flares!

Recruit a team, solve all their problems, and take the fight to the Collectors. There’s not much more to the game than that (aside from scanning planets for precious minerals!), but it does it incredibly well and it’s just as enjoyable today as it was ten years ago. In a way, it’s the awkward middle chapter of the trilogy but I think it’s still the strongest overall. Less janky than the first game, more satisfying than the third. I’ve done a video review for Mass Effect 2, where I cover pretty much everything I’ve said above, but accompanied by footage I captured myself. It’s not very long, so have a watch, and then we can move onto the ‘threequel’ and finalé to this trilogy.

Mass Effect 3 (2012 / 2021)
The threat or promise of something in the future is always more effective and scary than the real thing finally arriving, and that’s a problem that plagues Mass Effect. How can you build up a threat like the Reapers – unstoppable killing machines from another galaxy – and then make a game where you have to not only fight them, but suggest a plausible route to victory? In the opening moments, planet Earth becomes one of the Reapers’ main targets, and Commander Shepard (now reassigned to the Alliance military) has to escape Earth and rally the other Council races to join forces. Where Mass Effect 2 had you helping individuals, Mass Effect 3 has you helping entire species.

The Reapers arrive on Earth. Time to leave!

The ultimate goal here is to build an ancient Prothean weapon called the Crucible, which is said to be able to destroy the Reapers, although nobody knows how it will work for most of the game. As you do missions on different planets, you have the chance to build up ‘war assets’ by recruiting new species into the fight. Broker a peace between the krogan and the turians and you can get both of them to help you, but you might lose salarian support. Similarly, the conflict between the geth and the quarians can be brought to an end in different ways, depending on your choices. Not only does the game let you decide how to navigate these complex interspecies politics, but it also takes into consideration the choices made in the previous games. In this playthrough, I aimed to keep everyone alive and forge peace and cooperation wherever I could, but there are different ways to tackle this game, which makes replaying it so much fun.

If Mordin survived ME2, he plays an important role in ME3. If not… well, someone else might get it wrong.

I can only imagine how difficult it was to design and script a game where all of the characters from the previous game could either be alive or dead. What ME3 does is mostly sideline those characters, having them appear as optional cameos if they survived, and omitting those scenes if they didn’t. But many of the main characters also have ‘stand-ins’, similar characters who can perform the same task or be given similar lines of dialogue, but who obviously aren’t the same person. It’s fair to say that this lessens the impact of events, and I would strongly recommend keeping everyone alive if at all possible. In this playthrough, I did exactly that, and this was actually the first time I saw Legion alive in Mass Effect 3, which led to a mission I hadn’t played before. Elsewhere, some earlier decisions actually make very little difference, or simply cause variations of the same outcome, such as the fate of the rachni queen from ME1, or the Collector base from ME2.

The rachni queen… not a clone.

Speaking of missions I hadn’t played before, this was also my first time playing some of the DLC for Mass Effect 3. The ‘Citadel’ mission, which is ostensibly a ‘shore leave’ mission before everything goes wrong, is absolutely brilliant, funny and heartfelt. It does feel at odds with the tone of the overall story, but it makes for a nice change of pace if you play it at the right moment. There is also a major character, who was originally released as DLC, who absolutely should have been included as standard because he is so integral to the story. Thankfully, this character and all other DLC is included as standard in the Legendary Edition – which means, once again, your intinerary gets loaded with an overwhelming amount of missions and side quests.

It’s a party at Shepard’s new apartment, and everyone wants to stand around in the kitchen. Now, that’s realism.

Mass Effect 3 leans even more into its shooter combat than Mass Effect 2 did. It’s a more robust combat game, with smarter enemies and more complex level design that allows enemies to flank you. It’s also a tougher game if you’re not used to third-person shooters. In fact, the game originally came with a competitive online multiplayer mode, which was surprisingly good, although that’s not really what I’m looking for in an RPG series. That mode did not carry over into this edition. But the focus on combat is immediately apparent when you realise that you can’t holster your weapon in missions; you have to walk around everywhere pointing your gun in people’s faces, which is a little silly. Computer hacking minigames are gone, as is planetary mineral scanning. There’s also the fact that, although this is a fight against unspeakably advanced giant alien space robots, the majority of what you do is fight against human-sized opponents in arenas of chest-high walls. The Reapers send down ‘husks’ and other converted organic hybrids as footsoldiers, so these become your primary adversaries on any invaded worlds. To bolster the enemy roster, you also now fight enhanced Cerberus soldiers – human extremists who seem to have been indoctrinated into the Reaper cause. Meanwhile, all the large-scale stuff is ‘happening somewhere else’, relayed to you through dialogue by other characters, except in a few instances where you do get involved in semi-interactive large-scale spectcacle. I suppose that was inevitable.

While a space battle is happening outside, I’m shooting people in a shuttle bay and hiding behind a crate.

And, ultimately, the story does have to end, which is where the cracks appear. When I originally played this back in 2012, I found the ending to fall somewhat flat. The exposition dump, the ‘choose your fate’ outcomes that are all variations of the same thing and don’t take into account any of your accomplishments, left me feeling unsatisfied and empty. Bioware actually attempted to improve the ending with a downloadable ‘Extended Cut’ some time after release, which cleared up some of the ambiguities left by the ending but ultimately felt over-egged. Still, for all the problems I have with the ending (and I could write a whole article about them!), it has left an impression on me and I still find it quite emotional now. The journey matters more than the destination and this has been an incredible journey.

Red, blue or green – make your choice, Shepard. Or don’t, that’s also an option.

Unlike the previous two games, I did manage to fully stream and record my entire playthrough of Mass Effect 3, which you can watch through the below YouTube playlist, and see all of my choices and outcomes.

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Now Playing: All the 8-bit Sonics

I’ve always liked the old Sonic games, ever since I played the first one on the Megadrive, but not having a Game Gear or Master System meant I never played any of the ‘8-bit’ versions. No loss there, I thought. After all, Sonic was supposed to be a 16-bit showcase of speed and graphics – why should I bother myself with downgraded inferior versions? (“Eight bit? More like two bit, am I right?!”). But thanks to the joys of emulation, I’ve recently given them another chance. Here are some observations.

Sonic the Hedgehog (aka. ‘Sonic 1 8-bit’) – 1991
The difference in ‘feel’ is immediate. Despite being released the same year as its 16-bit bigger brother, Sonic 1 8-bit feels like a generation apart. It’s decidedly old-fashioned, with enemies, obstacles and traps that often require repetition and learning through failure, rather than quick reflexes. Extra lives aren’t plentiful, rings can’t be regathered when you lose them, and bosses have to be beaten without taking a hit. Chaos Emeralds are directly hidden in the levels, rather than as rewards for finishing special stages. It’s quite a tough game, and it’s made harder by the slow performance – neither the Game Gear nor the Master System can run the game without it slowing down due to too many objects on screen at once. Even something simple, like an item box or a couple of enemies, slows the game to a crawl. The underwater level is a nightmare.

I always assumed Game Gear games were exactly the same as Master System games, just on a smaller screen, but that’s not really the case here. Sonic 1 was optimised for the Game Gear with substantially altered level design to avoid what’s known as ‘screen crunch’ (the cramped viewing window due to how the graphics are scaled), redrawn sprites, nicer colours and a host of bug fixes and improvements. Of the two, I think I actually prefer it on Game Gear, despite the cramped view. Sonic 1 8-bit may be a painfully old-fashioned experience compared to the timeless quality of the 16-bit game, but it’s quite enjoyable to practise and get good at, and not a bad way to spend an hour or so. I could well imagine enjoying this on the Game Gear, if I actually had one… at least until the batteries died.

I put together a full playthrough video with a comparison of both versions, which you can watch on YouTube here:

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (aka. ‘Sonic 2 8-bit’) – 1992
Is this the hardest mainline Sonic game ever made? It could well be. A team called Aspect took over development duties on these games from Sonic 2 onwards, but unlike the first game, Sonic 2 8-bit was not optimised for the smaller screen of the Game Gear. As such, several levels and bosses are incredibly difficult, the most infamous of which being the boss of the first Zone, which throws bouncing balls at you that you can barely see because they come at you from off-screen. And the less said about the third act of Green Hills Zone, the better!

Sonic 2 introduces some level gimmicks, mostly vehicles like mine carts and hang gliders. Foxy sidekick Tails is featured in the game but isn’t a playable character, reportedly because there wasn’t enough development time to include him. The game features some loop-de-loop sections in some levels, but due to the simplified physics engine, these are scripted setpieces that you can’t run back through. The game still suffers from slowdown in places, but one positive change is that you can now regather dropped rings when hit. There are no special stages or bonus stages at all.

I played the Master System version ages ago but went back and played it on Game Gear to compare (via emulation, of course). The Game Gear version is the more commonly available one, often included on retro compilations, as the Master System was effectively dead in several markets in 1992. Anyway, you can watch both of my full playthroughs using the YouTube link below (the audio quality is quite bad in the first video, apologies).

Sonic Chaos – 1993
This was the third game in the 8-bit Sonic series and the last one to be (officially) released for the Master System, which was now discontinued pretty much everywhere in the world except for Brazil.

On the Game Gear, it was known as Sonic & Tails in Japan, which I like more than the western name. You can play as Sonic or Tails, but not both. Tails is the game’s ‘easy mode’, giving you more lives and continues, flight ability and no Chaos Emeralds to collect.

As Sonic, the game is slightly harder as you have to very carefully collect enough rings to get to the special stages (where Chaos Emeralds are now found), and there are no shield items in this game to protect from ring loss. This means you have to play very slowly and carefully (particularly on the Game Gear!), which is the antithesis of Sonic games, isn’t it? Accessing the special stages also skips the rest of the level, so if you want to see the whole game, you have to either ignore the Emeralds or play it twice! For this reason, I recorded four videos for this game, covering the two characters and two versions (see below).

That said, aside from a few sticking points, Sonic Chaos is a significantly easier game than the previous two, and the technology to recreate Sonic in 8-bits has progressed here, giving you slopes, almost proper loop-de-loops, and a revved up spin-dash.

Sonic the Hedgehog: Triple Trouble – 1994
The fourth (and what should have been final) game in the 8-bit Sonic saga was only released on the Game Gear, and was known as Sonic & Tails 2 in Japan. This one is an improvement over previous entries, boasting nicer graphics, less slow-down, more variety and cool little set pieces and level gimmicks.

But it feels more sluggish, movement acceleration is stunted and the physics have changed slightly. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but rolling off a platform now unrolls you, leading to sometimes falling feet-first onto enemies. However, you can now momentarily roll into a ball from a drop or from a spring launch by pressing the jump button (the latter is required to beat the first boss).

Another significant change is that you also only lose 30 rings when you get hit, rather than losing all of them. This makes sense given there are no shield items in the game again, especially since the special stages require 50 rings to access. This time, both Sonic and Tails can collect Chaos Emeralds and get the proper ending, and I’ve recorded both playthroughs to watch on YouTube below:

Designed for the Game Gear specifically, the common ‘screen crunch’ problem is not usually an issue here. The level design is denser, more intricate and feels closer to the 16-bit games. Speaking of which…

Sonic Triple Trouble 16-bit – 2022
I’m including this purely as a side note because it’s so good. This is a fan-made remake of Triple Trouble in the style of a Megadrive game, currently PC only but Android and Mac versions are in the works. Principally developed by Noah Copeland, this remake reimagines the game as a sequel to Sonic 3 & Knuckles, setting it after those events while altering the story to explain the presence of Knuckles as a villain.
It’s extremely well made in every regard (music, graphics, level design, zone transitions) and is easily the best Sonic fan game I’ve played, almost up there with Sonic Mania in terms of quality. Grab it before Sega issues a takedown!

Sonic Blast – 1996
Not to be confused with Sonic 3D Blast, although it uses similar pre-rendered graphics that were all the rage in 1996, albeit with 2D gameplay. Basically, imagine Donkey Kong Country if it was a terrible Sonic game, and on the Game Gear, and you’re nearly there.

Sonic Blast has all the problems associated with the 8-bit titles (slowdown, primitive physics, etc.) but also lots of new ones too! The new style of graphics are ugly and messy, making hazards difficult to see, the screen crunch is awful, character movement is slow and clunky, animations are poor, music is not good, and the level designs are incredibly basic and short. The game is also just plain BORING to play, often frustrating and picky, and the underwater level is the worst water level I’ve ever played in a Sonic game!

You can play as either Sonic or Knuckles (making this the first time Knuckles was playable on the Game Gear) but his gliding move has been nerfed and neither character feels nice to control. I only finished it once, as Knuckles, without getting all the Chaos Emeralds (so skipped the extra final boss). I have no video recorded of this one, as I have no desire to ever play it again. Awful.

And that’s it! There were other Sonic games for the Game Gear, mostly spin-offs or conversions, but I’ve covered the main ones here. These games provide an interesting ‘alternative history’ for the franchise, introducing the same characters but in different contexts, and for many players they may have been the only Sonic games they knew. Let me know if you played these at the time, if you had a Game Gear (or even a Master System) and whether you’re still a fan today. For me, these games are more of a curiosity but I think there are things to appreciate about them.

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Now Playing: Binary Domain

I’m still working through a small backlog of PC games that I’ve picked up on Steam over the years, but I’ve recently whittled it down to the last few. Binary Domain is a 2012 third-person cover shooter that went largely unnoticed at the time, but attracted a keen fanbase.

The main character is called Dan, which immediately earns it bonus points.

Published by Sega and developed by their Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, this was another Japanese developer dipping into typically ‘western’ style genres, following in the footsteps of Platinum Games’ Vanquish (which I also played earlier this year). However, Binary Domain is not as over-the-top and ridiculous, and I think it’s supposed to be taken seriously (unlike Vanquish, which comes across as a piss-take).

The ‘Hollow Children’ are reminiscent of the snatchers (from Snatcher).

The game still has a distinct Japanese vibe to it, is set in a futuristic version of Tokyo and has themes that are highly reminiscent of Snatcher (robotics company making robots indistinguishable from humans), Final Fantasy VII (a mega-corporation, two-tiered city, and highway chase battle) and many more. But the characters are all generic archetypes straight out of a b-list production and the writing is never more than passable. Burly American military men are soon joined by British special agents (complete with “cor blimey” and “we’re in a pickle” dialogue), a Chinese lady that the leading men drool over, and a Japanese local resistance leader. About the only unique character is Cain, a friendly combat robot who is also French. He’s my favourite.

This giant wheeled robot chasing your team’s truck across a dystopian megacity highway is rather reminiscent of a certain 1997 JRPG.

Anyway, you exclusively fight robots in this game, so there’s lots of satisfying smashy-smashy, limbs falling off, and explosions. Destroying enemies’ legs makes them crawl along the floor, destroying their arms makes them drop their weapons, and destroying their heads makes them target their own kind in confusion – you get the idea. There are some light RPG elements where you can upgrade your weapon stats and earn loyalty with your teammates through dialogue choices. You can also earn their trust by doing really well in battle, or lose their trust by shooting them, which happens more often than you might think given they have a tendency to walk right in front of your line of sight!

Cain, Dan and Faye.

There are apparently slightly different endings as well, depending on character loyalty. I wanted Cain to come back for the end, but he never did for me. Being an older game, the PC version runs fantastically well on my similarly old machine, although I had trouble getting my controller working without resorting to Steam’s input emulation, which always felt a bit twitchy. Also, the game features an extensive voice input system, where you can give voice commands and verbalise your responses to the characters instead of choosing replies using the controller, but I didn’t really fancy yelling at my PC and I couldn’t get it to recognise my microphone anyway. Your mileage may vary.

A boss fight towards the end of the game.

Surprisingly good, then! It’s only a tenner on Steam, and is often cheaper.

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Now Playing Superhot and Superhot VR

“It’s the most innovative shooter I’ve played in years!”

Time stops when you stop, everyone is made of red glass, and it feels like you’re in the Matrix. Superhot doesn’t look or feel like any other shooter. The pure white environments, black objects and red enemies combine to create a minimalist style that is every bit as fresh as it is functional. Unless you move, the world around you stays almost still, allowing time to take in your surroundings, assess the threats and plan your moves methodically. Every action you take, whether it be walking, firing your gun or picking up an object, pushes time forwards slightly – reactions are not important, but strategy is.

It is very cool to see your bullet trails hanging in their air, or dodge those fired by your enemies – as is throwing weapons and other objects at them, or catching the weapon of a disabled foe as it flies through the air towards you. While time stops, you can take as long as you need to aim your shots, but it’s only when you start moving that you can see how successful you are. Upon completing a level, you can watch a replay of everything you just did, but at normal speed, so it looks like you’re some kind of esports FPS champion.

There’s also a trippy virtual desktop narrative framing device, which I was not prepared for. ‘Superhot’ is supposed to be some forbidden hacked game that gets passed around message boards, but it soon becomes apparent that it’s more than that. I liked this game a lot. It’s short, clocking in at just a couple of hours to clear the story mode, but there’s always endless modes to dig into if that takes your fancy. However, I was more interested in diving into the VR spin-off, Superhot VR.

I’ve been waiting to play Superhot VR for ages (it came out for the PSVR five years ago, in 2017 – I don’t know why it took me so long) and it didn’t disappoint. Well, it did disappoint a little bit, but mostly for technical reasons. The limits of PSVR version 1 are now being slowly felt. If I wasn’t blocking my headset’s tracking lights with my hands, I was failing to throw things in the game properly, or drifting outside of the play area, smacking my living room wall with my hand, or having to recalibrate (recentre) my view at regular intervals. These problems have always been there, but it takes a game as cool as Superhot VR to show them up and makes me want a new VR system to do it justice.

Still, technical issues aside, it is exceptionally cool. It’s a separate game and story to the regular Superhot but it uses the same concept of time stopping when you stop. However, because the game is played standing still (ie. you don’t move the character around the levels, you stick to the spot), ‘movement’ is defined as any rapid motion of the hands or head. Having to carefully consider every move while watching in all directions for projectiles and enemies coming towards you is actually quite stressful. Do you have time to reach down and grab that gun off the floor before the man running towards you touches you, or should you risk waiting for them to get closer and try to punch them instead, grab their gun out of their hands, all while dodging out of the way of the slow-motion bullet streaking towards you, like Neo.

Weirdly, for a while after playing, the game left me feeling like I was still in it, consciously making small movements with my hands and keeping my head still as I sat at my desk, worried that a virtual man was going to shoot me in the head if I moved too quickly. That’s some weird behavioural persistance, or something.

Anyway, I completed the story mode, dabbled with the other modes, and I think I’m done. It’s good, but again quite short and a little frustating in parts. But it’s unlike most of my other VR games and it’s a very cool concept that I think a lot of people would enjoy trying out, if you’ve got the living room space. I thought the story/framing device in the regular Superhot game was stronger / more substantial, but that’s not really what you play this for. You play this to throw an ashtray at somebody’s face, grab their gun out of the air and shoot an uzi-toting dude across the room before he can get a round off at you. As the game likes to say constantly: “Super! Hot!”

I didn’t record any footage of Superhot VR, as it really wouldn’t do it justice; but I did record my entire playthrough of regular Superhot, which you can watch below. But, again, this is a game worth trying for yourself.

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