Backlog Beatdown: Catherine. The game to play if you want to spend long portions of your evening going 'What was that all about?'

This is one of the weirdest, yet most enjoyable full-price games I’ve played on the Xbox 360 so far. Given that I own a LOT of games, that’s saying something.

I was inspired to pick up this game from Youtube’s The Completionist. I’d been aware of the game before now on the Xbox Live marketplace, but even though I thought it looked interesting, it was priced at a higher mark than I wanted to spend on a blind buy. Watching Jirard review the game changed that as I had a much better idea of what I was getting myself into, and when I could find a cheap-enough copy on Amazon (it’s not for sale in any of the game shops I usually attend,) I bought it quickly before anybody else did. Finding a physical copy of this game is not easy!

I actually had to click 'gameplay' to get an image off
Google that wasn't fan-art, Cosplay girls, or various
other people called Catherine including Zeta Jones.

The gameplay is divided into two sections, the main one being the Nightmare levels where you have to guide the lead character Vincent through a set of block-shifting wall puzzles to beat the level. It sounds simple, but the genius of this game kicks in when it starts adding variety to the blocks. Regular blocks can be moved and stood on. It’s when the game starts adding blocks that can’t be moved, or trapped blocks that will kill you if you don’t get off them straight away, or ice blocks that you can’t stop on, that things get really interesting. You have to plan your moves or you will box yourself in – but as the floor is always collapsing from underneath you, you can’t take too long about this or you will lose the level by falling off the wall.

I say this a lot but there’s something satisfyingly ‘old-school’ about games like this. Puzzle-action games[1] aren’t common in the triple-A market and you’d only buy a game like this if you knew what you were looking for; as such they’ve had something of a decline in popularity over the last decade. But it is a rare time with the Xbox 360 that I’ve had a genuine sense of satisfaction from finishing a level, as it is down to your skill as a player that you manage it. The game is hard, but not insurmountably so and while you’re essentially doing the same thing all the way through it, there’s always new mechanics to the blocks being introduced.

The other section of the game takes place in a bar, where Vincent hangs out with his friends. This, along with cut-scenes that would give Metal Gear Solid a run for its money in terms of length, is where the story unfolds: Unsure of whether to commit to his long-term girlfriend Katherine, Vincent accidentally cheats on her with a young sexy woman called Catherine. This is a part of the cause of the nightmares, where everybody appears to each other as sheep, and if they fall from the blocks they die in real life. Vincent’s anguish over having cheated on his girlfriend, his deteriorating mental state as he repeatedly gets drunk and loses sleep, and his gradual realisation that some of the people he speaks to in the bar are also having the strange dreams[2] is played out remarkably well. How you speak to and respond to people in the bar, and also text you keep getting from both girls, affects the ending of the game, of which there are a total of nine.

Yes... an Arse monster. Funnily enough not the
freakiest thing in the game...

In all cases, the game does not outstay its welcome. Even with the added block mechanics, solving wall puzzles does get old – but the game ends before that happens. The conversations in the bar happen on a timed basis, so you can’t talk to everyone because at some point, some of them will leave, forcing you to continue with the game. The cut-scenes do an excellent job of moving the story forward; the whole game is paced really well.

I’d more than recommend giving this one a go. I’ve got a lot more to unlock than anyone will manage on one play-through, but like most games, now that I’ve completed it I’m going to put it to bed until I feel like coming back to it.

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[1] The game is often referred to as a Puzzle Platformer, but as that kind of game almost always includes a jump function and Catherine doesn’t, I’ll call it what I want.

[2] Oh it’s not a spoiler, you’d have figured it out straight away.

Backlog Beatdown: Oh, oh, oh, Oh Borderlands we rruuunnn!!! (Sing to A Sort of Homecoming by U2)

If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard from me for a while, it’s because I’ve been playing Borderlands and it took me absolutely ages to complete…

I bought Borderlands in late 2013, before I started No Game New Year. I can’t remember why, most likely because I’d heard it was good and I needed a game to make up a special offer of buy two get one free. Borderlands is a first-person shooter action game with role-playing-game elements. The latter only applies in the woolliest sense; you have quests, variable weapons and armour, and you level up. The obvious comparison is with Fallout 3, but while Fallout prides itself on being gritty and realistic, Borderlands is very much high adventure and silly. And it took me a while to get in to it. I started the game several times and would get as far as the Pisswash Hurdle before I’d start wishing I was playing XCOM. But this time, after watching The Completionist get through the game, I thought I’d give it another go.

This time, I was better equipped to deal with it: Borderlands is a game best enjoyed in short bursts. You can have fun shooting up Skags, Bandits and Spiderants (your main variety of enemy for the first three quarters of the game) and doing fetch quests, and I was enjoying myself. But the pacing is rubbish. For every quest that advances the plot, there are several more side quests that make you feel like you’re jumping through hoops.

I chose Lilith for my playthrough. Her Phasewalk
ability got me out of a lot of tight situations!

The obvious counter-argument here is “Why don’t you skip all the side quests you don’t need to do and advance the plot?” Well, apart from looking for the achievement points, I’m in two minds about this: The game would have been better paced if there weren’t so much side questing. Yet if I skip it, I’d miss probably two thirds of the game. And I wasn’t in a hurry to get through the game. So I played for one, or two hours at a time, doing a few quests, increasing my headshot count and my skill with sniper rifles, and whenever I needed I break I’d stick the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection on and have a go through Streets of Rage 2. The quests in Borderlands rarely presented a massive challenge; it was only the Arena levels and the final mission that gave me any significant trouble. I think this was because I’d done all the side quests and levelled up to the point where there wasn’t much challenge left in the game, but I have no problem with that; that’s the whole point of levelling up!

The pacing issues changes once you get to the end. After you beat the missions on The Salt Flats, the game gives you entirely plot-related missions, and a sense of urgency that you didn’t have before. At this point, the game becomes difficult to put down. The principle enemies you have at this point – the Crimson Lance soldiers – are far more challenging than the other enemies in the game and there’s a sense of achievement for taking them down, rather than mindlessly killing bandits. Also, the game becomes quite linear. This is no bad thing, as instead of skirting around obstacles you have to think about how you’re going to tackle them.

The final Boss Battle with The Destroyer took a while, because I didn’t realise there was more than one place you were supposed to be shooting. Once I’d figured it out, I did it one go, and was rewarded with the ending. I know Borderlands has been criticised for having a rubbish ending. It’s true that there is much left unexplained and that you don’t get what you came for in terms of your original objective. But to be honest, I didn’t mind. It fits in with the tone of the rest of the game and leaves a lot open for the DLC and sequels. The only thing that left me unsatisfied is that I would love to have known who the Guardian Angel was, and her level of investment in it.

I have the Game of the Year edition, meaning that I have the four DLC packs as well. I haven’t touched these yet; once I’d reached the end of the game I was ready to move on to something different. I might come back to it at some point. I certainly have no immediate desire to rush out and buy Borderlands 2, which I’ve heard is much the same game with some slight differences. I’m all Borderlandsed out at the moment!

Incidentally, I bought Catherine for the Xbox 360 during my playthrough. This brings the total number of games I’ve completed vs the games I’ve bought to 4-3 to me for this year. I’m toeing the line!

Backlog Beatdown: Shooting Many Robots with, er, Shoot Many Robots.

After beating both One Finger Death Punch and Mortal Kombat, I decided that I wasn’t quite ready to get off my ‘Pick It Up And Have A Play’ horse yet, and played an arcade game I downloaded sometime in 2013: Shoot Many Robots.

This game reminds me of Metal Slug, and with good reason – it is a classic action platformer. You run, gun and jump your way to victory, using power-ups and upgrades to your weapons. Your enemies are robots, but curiously enough for a video game, most of them seem to have been designed look like they were built for function, not combat. They’re dangerous enough, but it’s a refreshing change to fight something that doesn’t look like it was deliberately designed to kill you.

Side-Scrolling BadAssery. What's not to love?

Make no mistake, this game is good fun. There’s a reason this was so popular in the 80s and 90s: The format worked so well. You run through a Post Industrial environment shooting anything that moves, and picking up anything that doesn’t move. The design of the characters and music put you in the shoes of beer-swilling rednecks who’d love to be doing nothing better, which adds to the light-hearted yet determined nature of the game. And as with the old games, Shoot Many Robots will let you get through the first few levels without trying, before forcing you to think for a moment about what you’re doing and how you’re going to beat the next level. There are obligatory boss battles, and even though some of them have a kind of ‘recycled’ feel to them, this is nothing new for this kind of game either.

But as this game is on the Xbox 360, the developers had to make some token effort to innovate, and they do this by putting in an economy with which to buy new weapons and equipment, a ‘level-up’ system similar to Charlie Murder. As far as I know, all the latter does is unlock some of the game’s later gear. Your characters can carry two weapons: A primary gun with unlimited ammo, and a secondary weapon which is usually more powerful but with limited ammo. But it’s the helmet, armour and trousers where it starts to get interesting, as they affect the way the character moves. Some gear speeds you up; others have more damage resistance but slow you down and can lock some actions like slides. Certain upgrades allow jumps to resist gravity, and you can even acquire a jetpack to keep you in the air for a few seconds. This is more useful in some situations than others. At times you’ll love floating over your enemies bringing death from above; at others you’ll miss the tightness of the controls of the regular gear.

The game also has some multiplayer modes including up to 4-player co-op. I didn’t bother with this, as I don’t usually play games with people these days. I would imagine it would be somewhere between having a laugh with a few friends, and a frustrating pain in the bum as you have to wait for each other to upgrade your gear before you can actually play the game. I think it would have to be played in the right spirit, and with the right people, but if you can find both of those things you should have a good night in at least.

Having been watching YouTube’s The Completionist, I’m developing an appreciation for the kind of gamer who wants to power through games and unlock everything. It’s not my style – I prefer to go get to the end of the game once then come back to it if I really want to – but I can see why some people make that their hobby. Shoot Many Robots is a game that caters for both demographics; getting through the game on Normal difficulty was fine for me, but the individual levels give you a star rating out of 5 and maxing out all the stars on a higher difficulty level will probably give the game a lot more mileage for the completionists among us.

So, quite a good game. Not the best, but far from the worst, and it’s done it’s job for me.