Chris Dow's Completed Games of 2022 (Part 1)
As the story goes, a few years back, whilst procrastinating at work, I found that the safe search filter employed by the school I taught at did not block the games message board Resetera. These days, my current employer does block the big R, and although this means my interactions on that board have dropped off significantly, I do still partake in one thread: Wozzer’s 52 Games. 1 Year.
For years now, Wozzer has encouraged people to aim to finish the equivalent of one game a week across the calendar year. People were free to log their completions any way they wanted. A short review. A score out of ten. Number of hours it took to beat.
2022 is the fifth year where I have bested this challenge.
This year, the Steam Deck meant that the amount of games I beat dropped significantly as I was playing more, but finishing less. However, with just a few days to go, I hit the magic number.
If you enjoy this sort of thing, please consider subbing to our Patreon. Backers get live updates as I finish games throughout the year via our very special Discord channel.
1. Barbie and her Sisters: Puppy Rescue (PS3) - 03/01/22 - ~8 hours (All Trophies [PSN])
This is how you start a year!
This was a serviceable kids game for the first hour or two, then became a massive trudge. Find dogs, care for dogs, rehome dogs. That’s it.
What was mildly perturbing about the setup was just how many puppies (for there are no full grown dogs in Barbieland) are lost and how readily Barbie and her family are prepared to just give them a bath and then stick them up for immediate adoption.
The town is made up of a single street, a park, and a looped suburban cul de sac, yet no residents ever call to say ‘As the sole rescue centre in the area, have you found my pure-bred puppy?’ leaving Barbie to just ship them out to a brand new home as soon as their nails are clipped?
All the trophies revolve around completing certain tasks a certain number of times, which is fine early on, but gets really boring in the late game when you need to complete 20 agility courses, or de-flea 15 dogs, as all activities have a one in three chance of popping up, meaning 15 flea treatments require at least 45 dog rescues, etc.
2. Terminator Salvation (PS3) - 07/01/22 - ~8 hours (All Trophies [PSN])
An interesting one, this.
It's not a good game. Like, at all.
But! I haven't played a cover-based shooter, LET ALONE a cover based shooter from this generation for bloody years. I was really hot on the first Gears of War back in the day and then just totally tapped out for ages. Despite its mediocrity, Salvation was actually quite enjoyable - nothing on GoW of course, but enjoyable. Pop and shoot, pop and shoot.
The game is pretty repetitive as there are only a handful of enemies across the 9 chapters of the game, BUT, there are only 9 chapters of the game. See where I'm going here? The whole thing took me maybe 6 hours across a few short play sessions and for its length it was absolutely fine. Totally serviceable. Being forced to play on hard to unlock the platinum trophy meant it was a reasonable challenge at points, and checkpointing wasn't always that great, but I rarely felt outright frustrated, just mildly peeved.
3. Nubla (PS4) - 09/01/22 - ~1 hour (All Trophies [PSN])
A student made art game, all about art. Or at least the art housed in Spain's Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.
I've played this before and didn't mind it - and decided to give it another go for a quick platinum trophy on my new PSN account that I started last year when I got a fresh Vita. The game has pretty unsatisfying movement and unnecessarily complicated controls for a game that only ever really asks you to walk left or right and pick objects up. One button picks up, another drops, yet you can only hold one item at a time and you can't hot swap items without dropping what you have stored meaning that one button would have sufficed just fine...
Puzzles are simple, but collectibles are either placed in plain sight, or missable if you're not leaping into totally un-signposted areas. I say un-signposted but they are actually hinted at in the trophy icons themselves which is both clever in a CODEC-frequency-on-the-back-of-the-box king way, but also really stupid.
Having played Radiohead's Kid A Mnesiac recently it was interesting to see a digital museum presented in a vastly different way, but if you hadn't guessed, the recent PS5 offering is much, much stronger as a way of presenting interactive artwork.
4. Noby Noby Boy (PS3) - 20/01/22 - ~2 hours (All Trophies [PSN])
Ever played Katamari and thought ‘I like the whimsy, but this is far too gamey for me’? If so, Noby Noby Boy is for you!
An interactive toy at its heart, you control a strange snake-like creature that you can extend from either end using the analogue sticks. You can eat things, you can give people rides on your elongated body. You can wrap yourself around the floating map. It seems like there isn’t a lot to do, but hitting this sort of wall says far more about your propensity for play than it does the game’s interactive options.
When I was a kid, I loved making up little games. ‘Who can hit that sign with a pebble first?’; ‘Who can drop something in this pool of water to make the best noise?’; ‘How high can I climb up this tree?’. Being young is about chasing those little peaks of dopamine any way you can, and Noby Noby Boy prescribes to a very similar philosophy.
How many people can you hoik onto your back? How big can you make your own bum? Can you fart out a meal through a suspended hoop? The handful of trophies in-game reward some of these things, but Noby Noby Boy’s only real failing for me is that there aren’t enough of these. Most are ‘hidden’ which encourage mad experimentation, but imagine this game if it had 100 things to formally discover, or 200 things?
The controls are deliberately incomprehensible - a nightmare blend of just about every face, stick and shoulder button, PLUS combinations of these with motion to control the camera. The menus are bizarre - hold the left analogue stick in different directions and then press start to load different pages of options. But this all feeds into this madcap feel the game carries. The game released nearly 15 years ago at this stage, but it’s still a treat to dig into for an evening, even if some of the joy of finding new interactions live, or actually contributing the collective progress of the character Girl’s solar system journey (something that was completed and wrapped up years ago at this stage), has been lost with time.
No idea if it’s even accessible anymore if you don’t already own it, but definitely worth giving a go if it’s available.
5+6. Foxyland / Foxyland 2 (Vita) - 21/01/22 - ~4 hours (All Trophies [PSN])
At some point in the last year or so, Playasia released a double pack of games for the platformers Foxyland 1 and 2. They weren’t meant to be super long, so they seemed good candidates to start building my completions for the year too. As they were originally released separately I’m counting them as two completions. All good?
The Foxyland duology isn’t bad at all.
The first game is really quite basic. Collect gems and cherries across 40 or so short stages. I think I was done in an hour or so, and essentially 100 percented it, short a few costume unlockables that would have needed me to grind out the same short levels again and again for currency.
The second game was a real step up in quality. Longer stages, a story, improved art and music. More mechanically dense in its levels too which made them a little more fun to explore as they weren’t just straight A to B dashes. More of a challenge. All round a much better little game. Some of the final stages got really tough, but over maybe 4 hours or so I did finish the thing with all hidden stages and collectibles unlocked.
Now the team responsible for porting these games, and many others, to Vita in its twilight years, is Ratalaika Games. I may have whinged about this before, but their modus operandi; to license really interesting bitesize indie games from the PC space, BUT ALSO to award platinum trophies like sweeties, really does my head in. In both Foxyland 1 and 2, I was ‘done’ in a trophy hunting sense, about 2/3rds of the way through these already pretty short games. I did push on in both titles, to collect and do everything there was to do and collect. But. BUT. BUT!
I enjoy trophy hunting on Playstation platforms, I used to enjoy achievement hunting on the Xbox, though I really don’t think trophies or unlockables should come at the total detriment of the game experience itself.
I can’t imagine how disheartening it must be as a developer to see people drop their games an hour in because an arbitrary system has said the player is ‘done’, when you’ve had to go to the effort of creating a game, getting it published digitally on a big storefront, and then fighting to get it immortalised in a limited print physical release.
So, Bug Studio - Foxyland 1 and 2 are a good time, and I’d definitely recommend fans of simple platformers check them out. And Ratalaika, as much as I’m grateful that you helped keep the Vita afloat for as long as you did, I wish it was done so out of a love for the games you were publishing, with a little less of the inherent cynicism that was ever present in the way you marketed and pushed these titles.
7. Disney Pixar Cars (GBA) - 27/01/22 - ~3 hours (100%)
An isometric racing game that’s not as good as Super Skidmarks or Rock and Roll Racing or RC Pro Am or…
The sprites are massive, which means that reacting to corners and obstacles is basically impossible, something that the development team clearly knew about, seeing as the left shoulder button toggles a map overlay to sits in the centre of the screen which loosely telegraphs the upcoming track in a simplified form. Handling is poor. There’s not much to do. There’s only one song that plays in menus, and then just silence other than engine noises during races. You can revisit each race to collect coins but they can’t be spent or used anywhere. Every race is easy to win even if you spin out on every corner.
Glad that I can now say that despite never having seen the Cars films, I have completed one of the Cars games. Well done me.
8. Disney Pixar Cars: Mater-National Championship (GBA) - 29/01/22 - ~3 hours (All Achievements [RA])
A late release GBA game. A straight to game sequel to a Disney film. A surprisingly competent 3D polygonal engine?
Seriously, there’s not much to say about the core content of this one - race across about 20 tracks with AI that you will absolutely lord it over with even minimum effort - but the technical nous shown here is quite something. A fully textured polygonal car for the player character. A mostly perspective correct 3D track. 3 viewpoints! If nothing else, at least watch a quick YouTube clip of this one as it’s tremendously impressive considering it’s on a handheld with precisely zero hardware 3D capability.
I had to play this through on both regular and expert mode to unlock all of the achievements as listed on RetroAchievements.org. Not a tough ask by any means, but this did mean the play time was a little longer than it would have been just to reach the credits.
9. Arcade Racing Legends (DC) - 03/02/22 - ~3 hours (Career / Arcade 100%)
One of the most impressive aftermarket Dreamcast games, from a visual standpoint at least. Sturmwind raised the bar for 2D presentation, but Arcade Racing Legends may be one of the first independent releases on the machine to operate with a full 3D engine. It may look a little bland by 2022 standards, but you have to remember, this is built by a tiny team WITHOUT the SDK that developers of the era would have had access to. It’s quite a feat!
The game has several modes. I spent all my time with the career, which is a series of time trials / head to head / multi-lap full grid races; and then the arcade mode which is just a simple 3 lap race around each course. None of it was particularly challenging, though every once in a while a particular race or event would give me loads of grief.
At first, when I hit these walls, I thought a change of vehicle may help, but every car in the game (of which there are many) has the exact same stats and handling, at least to my hand. So aside from a cosmetic change, I don’t think visiting the garage helped or hindered my actual progress.
I had a strong feeling the team involved in this game were also behind the not-half-bad ‘Classic Racers’ on Steam that I played a few years back. Something about the handling and UI felt very familiar. Re-installing the game though? Doesn’t seem to be the case. Does anyone care about this stuff but me? U N L I K E L Y.
10. Lumines Electronic Symphony (Vita) - 03/02/22 - ~25 hours (All Trophies [PSN])
Went through this one see-sawing on whether or not this is the best Lumines game. After 25 hours, I’m pretty confident that it’s not.
In its favour, the Voyage mode is excellent, and really set the groundwork for Tetris Effect’s Journey mode years on. Using a range of electronic music from the 80s to present day, the skins in this version of Lumines are both the most considered in terms of sequence, but also the most listenable. Song stems are used intelligently, and the ebb and flow of Voyage’s playlist really makes it a memorable experience. However, on the flip side of the coin is that the more vocal heavy tracklist makes this game grow stale a little quicker than the idiosyncratic tracks in Remastered, Live or Supernova in particular.
The other downside, and this is a big one, is that it doesn’t have the variety of Lumines games before it. No puzzle mode, no versus mode. No mission mode, no dig down mode. It’s got a time attack mode to complement the Voyage, and also a master mode which asks that you beat increasing tough clear criteria without powerups, but it’s not quite enough. The game just feels a little incomplete. Even using the trophies as a metric to push yourself forwards, for someone like me who is good at Lumines, I had cleared all skill based challenges after a few short hours. To finish the game though meant grinding to level 50 - at least 20 additional hours of Voyage runs, which really started to sour my good will on the game.
The powerups are worth nothing too. This game keeps the classic ‘clear everything it touches’ block which can be used to quickly remove half of a built up playfield, but also adds an incredibly frustrating shuffle block. Wherever this block is placed, any touching pieces are randomised meaning that any strategy you were trying to employ in terms of building and stacking for combos is instantly gone. Annoying. Being on the Vita, and being a launch title, Electronic Symphony also demands you use the back touch panel of the handheld to build up your ‘avatar’ ability. It’s a waste of time, honestly. Get the trophy for triggering it 200 times, and then just try to forget it’s there.
If you want to play a single run of Lumines, Electronic Symphony is a great choice. An emotional, dynamic journey through music. If you want to get good at Lumines though, stick to Remastered or Supernova.
11. Guitar Hero (Clone Hero) - 05/02/22 - ~10 hours (all songs 7-starred)
After a few years hiatus from Clone Hero, I’m back on it in a big way. After recently getting a modded guitar with mechanical frets, a new strum bar, arduino innards, etc, etc, etc, I finally reinstalled the game on my laptop and got to work filling my library.
The original Guitar Hero included 49 tracks, with two of those being locked away on the disc and then uncovered years later by hobbyists picking apart the ISO. It’s the easiest legacy game, especially when played using the updated strum windows in Clone Hero. Still, that doesn’t stop a few of these tracks being real pigs to squeeze to a maximum 7-star rating.
Tripolette is still insanely tough, and Decontrol is a real ask in terms of star power management to squeeze enough points to tip the rating to its max.
Guitar Hero 2 is significantly tougher, and almost double the length of the first game, so I’m not convinced I’ll chug through it quite as quickly, but that’s the mission anyway!
12. DJ Hero (Clone Hero) - 13/02/22 - ~5 hours (all songs 7-starred)
One thing I’ve noticed since getting back into Clone Hero is how different development teams had wildly different charting styles. Harmonix were the series originators (who’d eventually splinter away to create Rock Band) and their charts are always clean, and relatively simple - frontlining precise lines and patterns. When Neversoft took over with Guitar Hero 3 it was all about excess, lots more 3 and 4 button chords, lots more overcharted solos that had you hitting more notes than were actually being played. They make you feel great when you nail them, but always felt a bit over the top, at least to me.
Then there’s Freestyle Games. DJ Hero and its sequel were excellent games. Freestyle really nailed how to chart mashup tracks for the deck controller, and everything just felt right using the turntable. The first game also included 10 songs that could be played co-op with a deck and a guitar, and these tracks, naturally, have made their way to CH. When played in isolation, you realise that Freestyle really didn’t have a clue about making a guitar part feel good to play.
Of the ten tracks, only a couple of them were difficult to get a decent score on, but some of them are really fucking hard to 7 star or full combo. Now this is not because they have 7 minute solos as in Freebird, or because of the song being a physical trial like the gruelling triplets in Slayer’s Raining Blood or in some of the longer Metallica tracks. They’re tough because their note charts for guitar just aren’t very good, and your fingers often trip over themselves because they’re not charted logically.
Additionally, a few tracks also include uneven numbers of star power passages meaning that pathing, squeezing and activating can be a real trial. The final track, that took me at least 2 hours of this play time, was Fight! Smash! Win! / Intergalactic. Not a hard song outside of the extremely fast solo in the middle, but the amount of notes in that section means that you have to forgo bothering with the SP at the end of the song, and just focus on nailing the solo pretty much 100%. When I finally hit 7 stars, it was on a run where I’d missed 4 notes at the tail of the solo. Missing even one more would have meant I dropped to 6 stars. Really tough.
13. The Lord of the Rings: Conquest (PS3) - 15/02/22 - ~10 hours (All Trophies [PSN])
I beat this years ago on the 360, and started it again on the PS3 out of morbid curiosity to see how well it held up. I like it.
Beat the first half of this game, had my Playstation 3 ‘Yellow Light of Death’ on me, had it repaired by some wizard on YouTube, then beat the second half on the console’s safe return.
Pandemic did their best to shoehorn LoTR into the Battlefront formula, and mostly succeeded, but the focus on melee attacks means that battles can sometimes be frustrating when your stun-locked and juggled by a group of warriors whacking you with their swords whilst you try to get a hit in to buy a bit of breathing space.
14. Little Nightmares II (Switch) - 17/02/22 - ~6 hours (Credits)
Excusing the Switch port’s load times, the original Little Nightmares and its DLC was fantastic. It looked great, even on Nintendo’s weedy machine, the trial and error cinematic platformer gameplay was mostly really solid, and the story, aesthetics and atmosphere were all first class.
The second game might be even better.
Slightly more involved gameplay, more varied locales, an even more fucked up story that takes a lot of the nightmarish infant imagery of the first and ratchets up its body horror and supernatural leanings.
I found parts of this game so unsettling me and my partner had to set it down for weeks at a time - I am a big scaredy cat though, so I might not be the best yardstick to review its spooks.
There are collectibles I could go back and find, but for now I’m happy in having got through the main games in this series, start to finish (ignoring the strange mobile spin off). Tarsier hit it out of the park again.
15. Race With Ryan (Switch) - 17/02/22 - ~5 hours (100%)
I’ve got a thing for shit kart racers, what can I say.
Race With Ryan uses the lucrative Ryan’s World licence, to present a ‘baby’s first Mario Kart’. It mostly succeeds. Controls are responsive, there’s hops and drifts and mini-turbos. The usual items, etc.
The problem is the utter lack of content. At launch, this game had just 6 tracks. You could play them in reverse meaning that charitably you could see there were 12 locations to race through, but compared to Mario Kart 8 DX, or even the execrable Renzo Racer I played last year, there just isn’t enough here.
There are 6 cups in the career mode, all of which use different mixtures of forward and reverse circuits, and three difficulty modes. I beat them all, and in the process unlocked a bunch of extra characters. Something I guess?
Special shout out to the atrocious audio mixing in this game. Ryan offers frequent soundbites, and every sample sounds like it was a) phoned in via Skype, and b) completely untreated - no EQ, no cleanup. When the rest of the game looks as pleasing as it does, its a shame this area lets down the presentation package.
I know I’m not the target audience here, but for what it’s worth, lack of content and iffy voice work aside, it’s not a bad time.
16. Crazy Chicken Kart 2 (Switch) - 19/02/22 - ~2 hours (100%)
Race with Ryan was decent. Crazy Chicken Kart 2 is not.
8 tracks this time, no reverse options. Just two championships. No difficulty options. One race you’ll win, almost lapping your opponents, the next, you’ll get hit with an item at the start, and then struggle to catch up to pole position despite a faultless drive.
Drifting is in but feels atrocious. Mini-turbos are in, but are basically impossible to build up unless you find a perfectly curved corner.
There are in-game achievements for winning on every track, beating both championships, and then winning on every track *online*. I am willing to bet outside of playtesting at the studio, there has never been an online game of Crazy Chicken Kart 2 between human beings. Unbelievable optimism on the part of the developers.
17. Picross NP Vol.1 (SNES) - 26/02/22 - ~21 hours (100%)
We all love Picross, don’t we? Back when I was organising my console when I got my New 3DS XL last year, I stuffed it with a lot of Picross. The 3DS forever lives by my bedside, and I go through phases of completing a Picross puzzle or two a night before bed, and recently got stuck back into this weird piece of Nintendo esoterica, as I realised I was pretty close to the end.
Now, quick Nintendo and Jupiter Picross history lesson: we got Mario’s Picross in the west on the Gameboy, but its sequel Picross 2 as well as Mario’s Super Picross on the SNES were always Japanese exclusives. Even more exclusive were the Picross NP games, 8 titles released by the japanese arm of Nintendo Power as rudimentary download titles I think? Even after googling I’m a little fluffy on the details here, I’ll be honest.
Now being based on the SNES title, they’re a little wonky, as Jupiter wouldn’t refine the series properly until the DS title years later, but once you get used to what they do and don’t do in relation to newer ports, you’re left with hundreds of exclusive puzzles, which is a lovely treat. In NP Vol. 1 there’s a whole section dedicated to Pokemon, a whole section dedicated to Japanese vistas and architecture, and a final, brutal selection of puzzles that depict olympic sports. Some of the later panels in this group are 25x20 monsters, and the size, coupled with the ‘no hints, no feedback for errors’ ruleset that’s always implemented in the Picross late game, meant that some individual puzzles were taking upwards of 30 minutes to solve.
Referring to the sports section, I say final, but clearing this section actually rewards you with a final final set of 12 grids. As generous as it may have felt originally, the thought of even tougher puzzles actually filled me with dread but luckily enough outside of one or two of these they were mostly straightforward. Big and cumbersome, sure, but not impossible.
18. Treasure Island Dizzy (Evercade) - 23/03/22 - ~3 hours (100%)
I’ve never been a fan of Dizzy games, but I think a big part of this feeling has stemmed from not approaching them in the right way. Recently, I listened to a long Retronauts episode on Dizzy and The Oliver Twins, and started to develop a new found appreciation for the games.
They’re point and click games by way of platform games by way of British micro computer restriction. There’s a uniquely British charm to the logic of their worlds and their puzzles.
Remembering that I had an Evercade cartridge that collected together basically every NES entry of the Dizzy franchise, I thought I’d give the series another stab, and what d’ya know, I beat the first game, 100%.
It wasn’t plain sailing. The one hit kills, instant restart would have driven me insane if I didn’t have access to save states, and certain puzzles still required a bit of googling, as their solutions were completely oblique (why does a painted pebble warp you into the sky when you drop it at the foot of a Totem pole?). But even with these frustrations, it’s a decent time, and when you do figure out a solution organically, it makes you feel pretty bright. There are arguably less leaps of logic than in something like Monkey Island, so take that how you will.
Not sure which game is next in the franchise, but I’m keen to give it a go.
19. Valis: The Fantasm Soldier (Evercade) - 31/03/22 - ~3 hours (100%)
Completions have stalled a little as I’m currently hooked on Elden Ring and Chocobo GP, but for something completely different, I have played and completed (without save scumming!) Valis on the Mega Drive via the new Rennovation Collection cart for Evercade.
The games here are notable not because they were big names on the console, but because to buy this collection on 12 distinct carts for original Mega Drive hardware would probably run you thousands of pounds. All of these games were low prints or limited region releases, and as such, this £17.99 package is incredible value.
Most of these games are unknown, even to me, but I did remember Valis. I’ve played the PC Engine version of this some time back, and although the Mega Drive version is actually totally different, it was a pretty good, mostly comparable time to what I remember from that experience.
A stiff, clunky, but enjoyable platform hack and slash / run and gun. I beat it once through, saving at the start of every stage and then again around the middle point each time so as not to lose progress if I died, but when the credits rolled I thought ‘I reckon I could do that legit’, and as such, two attempts later, I’d beaten the thing honest-to-goodness.
Decent game, great collection, lovely machine.
20. Neo Cab (Switch) - 06/04/22 - ~4 hours (Credits)
What a cracker.
Played the first 30 minutes of this game back when I first subbed to Apple Arcade. I fell off that service pretty quickly, as I just don’t get anything out of that sort of infinite rental package when it comes to games. I could tell it was a well written visual novel / resource management game though.
When Neo Cab launched for Switch I was tempted to pick it up, but wanted to hold off in case it got selected for physical release via any of the million boutique publishers on the platform. Lo and behold, a few months on, 1Print Games picked it up, and 10 months on, the game finally fell through my letter box.
Worth the wait, though.
You’re a futuristic Uber driver called Lina. You’ve upped sticks from your backwater home to go and live in the big city with an old friend named Savy. When you arrive, things take a turn with your pal ditching you for work, or for friends, or for a boyfriend. To pass the time waiting for Savy you complete jobs in your car, ingratiating yourself with the locals, managing your fuel level, emotional state, driver star rating, and general tiredness. What starts as a light hearted romp quickly shifts into a full on cyberpunk conspiracy, with the various passengers you’re all acting as pawns in the wider story.
The writing is outstanding. Really great naturalistic dialogue that fits the varied cast of characters. There’s great representation here too, with characters presented ‘as-is’ - no fanfare regarding race or sexuality. These are the people that live in this city, and each passenger’s lived experience are presented with a beautiful clarity.
The game doesn’t overstay its welcome. In fact, I could have gone for another hour or two of conversation between Lina and the denizens of Los Ojos. But what’s here is all gold, with a good pace, a lovely balance of hands-off dialogue and personal choice, and a satisfying narrative arc and finish.
Big recommend on this one.
21. Boogerman (Evercade) - 08/04/22 - ~3 hours (Credits)
It's my birthday. I'm away for a couple days with my partner. Naturally, I'm also playing Boogerman.
I loved this game as a kid when I thought the voice effects were so funny I had to go and get my parents to show them whilst I struggled through tears of laughter. Whilst the fart humour doesn't hold up quite so well in 2022, I did re-watch Swiss Army Man the other day and reckon its now in my top-10 films, so perhaps my tastes haven't evolved as much as I'd like to think.
Boogerman, published by Interplay, is basically a cousin of Earthworm Jim with labyrinthine stages, off-kilter humour, and massive, well animated sprites. For my money it's also better than every Earthworm Jim game released.
A retro-classic worth revisiting, even today.
22. Flea! (Evercade) - 12/04/22 - ~3 hours (Credits)
Some of my favourite Evercade carts are the compilations of modern retro homebrew (think new games for NES, GB etc). The Indie Heroes cartridge has some real winners on it, including Flea! by Lowtek Games.
It’s a one-hit-kills, single screen puzzle platformer, whose main gimmick is that your character, a flea, is always jumping. Early stages are simple enough, asking you to time your bounces between platforms, but later on the thing becomes absolutely brutal. Lives are plentiful, and yet on my first playthrough I burnt through the 100 plus I had in stock on a single stage.
I was a little more prepared my second time through, stockpiled lives more readily on earlier stages, and didn’t really get stuck stuck again until the final boss - a really difficult autorunner which means your bounces need to be relatively perfect as collision detection can be really tight.
If you don’t have an Evercade, you can still get Flea! as a ROM file or as a physical release for either NES or Dreamcast here.
23. Telltale’s The Walking Dead (Seasons 1-4) (PS4) - 12/04/22 - ~35 hours (Credits)
I played part of season 1 way back when, and dropped off for whatever reason. Maybe I was burnt out on Telltale’s brand of adventure game after beating Back to the Future, Tales of the Borderlands, Batman, The Wolf Among Us, blah blah blah.
My personal chronology is a little wooly, but I’m pretty sure I played the episodes I did before reading the comics, and a good time before seeing any of the AMC TV adaptation.
Ladies and gents, playing through this series, start to finish with my partner has been a joy.
Telltale’s take on The Walking Dead captures the spirit of the comics incredibly well, in a way that’s much more meaningful than the big budget TV series and its spin-offs, as well as any of the other Walking Dead games I’ve either played or seen footage of. I’m not a huge comics guy generally, but I got really into The Walking Dead a few years ago because it wasn’t about the big bombastic action that drives a lot of comic stories. The zombies are really just set dressing and environmental details, and the story is always about people being forced to make tough decisions in a proper dog eat dog world.
Decisions can be brutal, and even if the choices you don’t really change the direction of the overall story that much, by the close of season 4, it absolutely felt like it was our story, despite every player’s credits crawl probably looking pretty similar.
It’s a ten out of ten.
There’s stronger seasons, and weaker seasons as with most TV. Within those seasons there are occasional bumps in pacing, lingering subplots that follow characters you may not care about. But it’s a great time overall with some really well considered narrative choices that use some of the unique opportunities of games to make this more than just a mostly passive narrative experience that I had perhaps unfairly written it off as.
The game really cleverly uses its choice of protagonist in each series to sculpt an incredibly deep relationship between you as the player and Clementine, as the primary focus and often protagonist of the game.
In season 1 you played as Lee, an unlikely caregiver and moral compass for Clem, who acts as a stand-in paternal figure as survivors start to find their place within this new world. In season 2, you take direct control of a slightly older Clem, and are suddenly faced with making tough decisions for yourself, not as someone in loco parentis. In season 3, control is taken away from Clementine, and you’re placed in the shoes of a character named Javi. This narrative choice means that when you do come across Clementine, again a few years older since the close of season 2, her actions are now independent of your control. It would have been so easy to sit you in the driving seat every season so that Clem’s ongoing survival would have felt entirely down to your choices, but the shift in perspective from 1st to third person means that when you see her calling shots and making tough choices, you view her as a proper person, not just as a empty vessel for which you’ve been pulling the strings. By the final season, you are in control of Clem again, but now with your own dependents. It’s an incredibly satisfying return.
We have the mini series that focuses on the character Michonne still to do, but I felt that, being completely independent of the main story, I would count that separately as a completion when we got around to it.
24. Tetris (PS3) - 08/05/22 - ~5 hours (All Trophies [PSN])
If pushed, I’d say EA’s take on Tetris on the PS3 and PSP is one of my favourite Tetris packages. If Effect and 99 sit at the very top, it’s then Tetris DS and EA’s Tetris that probably best represent modern Tetris.
You’ve got your regular marathon and sprint modes, but you also have a range of variant modes. Many of the rulesets here also feature in other games, but the presentation of the whole package is just really slick. It feels good to play, it’s responsive, it’s a nice game of Tetris. I’ve beaten this version of Tetris, that is to finish all the in game achievements and feats, on the PSP version several times over the years, but never the PS3 version, so here, in mostly HD I’ve been working through its challenges.
Most of the trophies are tied to beating all variants and then hitting a few cumulative goals like ‘get x amount of Tetris line clears’ or ‘x amount of T-Spins’, but it also asks that you complete two additional feats that can be pretty tough if luck isn’t going your way.
A ‘Bravo’, or all clear, is easy enough if you can memorise a setup, but the ‘Insane’ trophy needs you to build up your well, clearing only line 20, then line 10, then line 1, in order. Building the well without accidentally clearing a line is tough enough, but clearing those lines specifically leave no room for error. The amount of times I fucked the run right at the end was devastating.
Good game though, that Tetris, eh?
25. The Looker (PC) - 27/06/22 - ~2 hours (All Trophies [Steam])
A review of this game read: “pretty good for a shitpost”.
It’s a straight up hour long parody of The Witness. If you liked that game, you’ll probably like this. If you didn’t like that game, you’ll probably like this anyway.
Some of the jokes feel a little barbed, but some are genuinely laugh out loud funny.
Some of the puzzles are really clever, but because of the run time of the thing, it never really has the legs to match The Witness. After playing that game for 60+ hours, I’m not sure if there were *any* permutations of line puzzles left to explore, but here, the format isn’t given quite enough time to breathe to allow for much really cool experimentation of form and function.
26. Saya No Uta (PC) - 02/07/22 - ~4 hours (All Endings)
Basically a kinetic novel, Saya No Uta is a challenging game to talk about. Lean on the plot and writing, you risk spoiling the game’s twists for someone else. Lean on the game’s ‘erotic scenes’ and you very quickly fall into the pool of lazy discourse - part Beavis and Butthead hurgh hurgh hurgh hurgh, part ‘serious’ publication tutting at a game’s inclusion of sex immediately relegating it to low art.
It was a good visual novel: creepy and unsettling, mostly well written. Depictions of sex can be uncomfortable, but I’d argue that the majority of them are also pretty integral for this story. Choices are minimal, just 2 binary choices in the game’s 2 hour run time, but it meant it was easy to use quick saves to explore all 3 of the game’s endings.
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Pop back in a few days for the next thought splurge, with numbers #27-?? on the beaten games list!
