Backlog Beatdown: Double Dragon. No single dragon nonsense.

Double Dragon Trilogy was a game I bought months ago from GOG having had an email from them promoting the game. I remembered enjoying it when I played it on my mate Adam’s NES years ago, bought it on a whim and it’s taken me until now to give it a go. I dug my old controller out, booted up the game, remembered how hard it was and hoped that this time I’d be able to beat it. You should be aware that these notes refer to this updated version of the game.

The premise of the game is that you’re one of a pair of twins, Billy and Jimmy Lee, and you’re on a quest to fight through a street gang called the Black Warriors to save Billy’s girlfriend, Marian. The game is one of the earlier efforts of what later became known as the Brawler genre, with your character able to move around the floor section of the screen, kicking, punching and special-moving your way through the levels and the enemies. The game was originally released in 1987 and the genre was very popular in the arcades at the time, but is it still any good today?

That’s a loaded question if you’re asking me, because I will always compare a game like this to the standards of Streets of Rage 2, which is the best game of all time and everyone should play it. But as a game released roughly five years before that, Double Dragon does OK. It’s a standard brawler with some new features (for the time) and satisfying game mechanics, let down at the end by a horribly cheap final level, (we’ll get to that.) You have a button to punch, a button to kick and one to jump as well. You can also to a jump kick, but I got through the game without doing this because Billy kept kicking backwards. I didn’t find out until later that you’re supposed to press the punch button to make him kick forwards!

Batter him...

The enemies usually go down after one or two attack combos, and there are some colourful characters and bosses to liven things up. Double Dragon was also the first game of its kind to allow the use of weapons, which added an extra layer of depth as you have to balance range, speed and timing. The whip, for example, was a fast weapon but didn’t have a lot of range, whereas the baseball bat was slower but had more reach. Both required good timing. The knife was a throwing weapon, which would one-shot kill most of the lower-level enemies and help a lot with a boss. You could also throw boulders, boxes and barrels.

Aside from being able to select the difficulty (I went with easy; games like this often require you to know them inside out to be able to handle the harder difficulties,) the Trilogy version comes with two modes – Arcade and Story. It took me a couple of goes to work out the difference: In Arcade mode you play through the game, you have three lives and can continue when you’ve lost them all. In Story mode, you can select any of the game’s four levels once unlocked, starting the game with four lives and no continues. I beat the game on Arcade mode. I did try the story mode but found it very difficult, and here’s why:

Remember that horribly cheap final level a couple of paragraphs ago? This purports to be the gang’s hideout in some kind of temple. The first half of the level is trapped with sliding blocks and spear statues that drain a lot of your energy, and with the blocks in particular there seems to be nothing you can do about it. They appear in a random pattern as soon as you get close to them, and will kill you after two hits. There’s no skill involved with this, just luck, and you’ll lose a lot of your lives navigating it. Then there is the game’s final boss, Willy, whose weapon is a gun that will one-shot kill you the moment it hits you and will never be dropped. It is possible to beat him, but without the option to continue the game once you’ve lost your lives, it presents a far greater challenge than is fun.

Once you’ve beaten the game, Billy rescues his girlfriend and the credits roll. Apparently if you play in multiplayer mode you then have to fight Jimmy for her affections, but as I played this game on my laptop, I doubt I’ll ever see this! All in all, it’s not a bad little game, I had some fun with it, despite the last level. Give it a go – but don’t spend any substantial amount of money on it!

Backlog Beatdown: Fantasizing about Sweets in Sweet Fantasy. No, really.

Right…

I was actually wondering whether I should bother to blog this one, given the potentially embarrassing subject matter and the fact that it is barely even a game, but if this online tracker of my journey to beat all my games is going to mean anything, I need to be showing the worst of this as well as the best. So yeah. I played, beat and yes, completed Sweet Fantasy. 

This was the first thing to come up on
Google Image Search...

This visual novel was brought to my attention by the Co-Optional Podcast hosted by TotalBiscuit, Dodger and Jesse Cox in the release section they do at the end. I enjoy the show and it is how I hear about a lot of games, and having heard a brief description of Sweet Fantasy I thought I’d give it a go. I’d never had a visual novel game before, so I don’t know if this one was a good one to get started on. It’s about a dryad called Pumpkin, who is hopelessly in love with her mistress, Ms Amethyst, and she’s trying to make a love potion in order to get Amethyst to sleep with her.

So the question is: Is it any good? And the answer is no. The idea is puerile, but it allows an unashamed exploration into a lesbian relationship between a dryad and an elf (I’m assuming Amethyst is an elf; her ears are pointed,) and had potential. But the characters are shallower than a petri dish and it’s not very interesting at all. Pumpkin is dozy and silly, Amethyst is stuck up and arrogant, and this doesn’t vary at all through the ‘plot.’ There are other characters in it, a snail and a mermaid, but they’re all ‘One-shots’ (only appearing in their scene) and don’t contribute much more. The plot is a mixture of a short journey and confused ramblings: you either find what you’re looking for to make the potion or you don’t; it doesn’t go anywhere else. Also the localisation wasn’t very as good; the text could have used an extra pair of eyes to check spellings and grammar. I know that sounds like a minor gripe but if you’re trading on the idea of being a visual novel, we could at least expect some competency in the text!

Your first task is to find these mushrooms...

As for the so-called gameplay, that comes down to a couple of decisions you have to make with regard to how to handle certain plot points. This reminds me more than anything else of the old ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books, and I guess fits in with the idea of a visual novel. But there’s no skill involved; no indication of what you’re supposed to be doing, or which choice is the right one. It is guesswork, nothing more; you either get it right or you don’t. The small amount of challenge comes from remembering what the wrong choice was, re-loading the game and choosing the other option. Any game needs to have an enjoyable process and a satisfying outcome, and unless you really like soft porn slideshows, this doesn’t have much of either.

So is there anything good about the game at all? Well, the art is very well drawn, I’ll give it that. Obviously an anime style, but it works. It’s clear that this is where most of the effort went in to development, perhaps to over-compensate for a lack of writing talent. There’s no game-breaking crashes or bugs that I could see, and it was designed competently enough to at least include a ‘skip’ button for parts of the dialogue that you’ve seen before. Very useful when re-playing sections for the better ending! And at least it’s not very long; I’d seen the whole game in roughly 40 minutes.

Now I know what you’re thinking: “But Matt,” you’re thinking, “what did you expect? It should have been obvious what this was; an over-sexualised piece of fan service. How could you have possibly thought this was going to be any good?” Well, in fact, I didn’t. It was a dip into a genre of game that I hadn’t looked at before, and I’d never have known until I tried it. Now that I have, I feel no need to do so again.

Backlog Beatdown: Fortune and Glory with Lego Indiana Jones

I find myself playing a lot of the Lego games these days, and a lot of the points I make about them are covered in the review I did of Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga a while back. Given my preference to play games in order, and having beaten Lego Star Wars, the next step was Lego Indiana Jones, and I’ve been playing this game quite a lot over the last couple of weeks!

He doesn't always have that gun...

The premise of the Lego games are simple enough: Play through the plot of whatever property they’re based on using Lego characters, in this case the original Indiana Jones trilogy. They are competently designed, easily accessible and provide a challenge in puzzles and collectables. The puzzles are largely based around deciding which characters and their abilities to use for each level, either to progress through the story or unlock all the extras later. One slight criticism is that it doesn’t work quite as well in multiplayer as some of the other games, as this one was designed before they started splitting the screen to accommodate both players, but as this was very much a single-player run-through, this didn’t affect me.  

I wondered how Telltale Games would make it work with Indiana Jones, as at first glance there didn’t seem to be a wide-enough range of characters to make it work, but I soon found an understanding of what everyone was supposed to be doing. Indy has his whip to swing across certain gaps and disarm opponents, archaeologists have shovels and can dig for treasure, mechanics fix things, scholars can open hieroglyphic doors, Nazis can open certain doors restricted to them and blow things up with grenades and rocket launchers. The ladies in the game have certain skills that apply to their characters. They can all jump slightly higher than the men and that is as good as it gets with Marion, Elsa also has the scholar ability, and brilliantly, Willie has a scream that can shatter glass and later destroy certain enemies. I also liked how certain characters have phobias: Indy clams up when he’s near snakes, and so does Willie when she’s around bugs.

I found Lego Indiana Jones more challenging than Lego Star Wars, if nowhere near as long having only three films to cover rather than six. The enemies are harder to take down as in most cases they have to be taken out in close quarters, and will take three or four hits to drop. Guns will destroy most enemies straight away but very few of the characters have guns by default; you need to pick up guns dropped by the enemies. While this rarely gets in the way of progressing through the game, it can make certain of the collectables hard to find if you’re not careful.

Funny how this scene is so iconic with Indiana Jones,
given that it only happens for moments in the film!

This being a game about archaeology, there are a lot more traps and puzzles to get around which provide an even greater threat. It’s not insurmountable though, and there’s a nice sense of achievement when you figure out how to open a door, or disable a trap. It’s a good way to vary up the pace and fits the theme of the game perfectly.

But of course, this being a Lego game, the heart of it is all about the collectables, and this is why it took me a relatively long amount of time to play through a somewhat short and easy game – I was aiming for 100% completion. To do this, I had to do the following:

·        Beat the Story Mode: This is easy enough, you need to get from one end of the game to the other, although I did get stuck on one of the bosses at some point. It was the boxer from Raiders of the Lost Ark; I didn’t realise that the plane had guns you were supposed to be firing!

·        Post all the Mail: This was a bit of a funny one. At some point on each level there is a parcel you have to find and put in a red post box. You almost always have to do this in Free Play mode, as you need different characters to access the locations they’re in. You’re rewarded when you do by optional ‘Cheats’ you can buy – anything from faster digging to multiplying the number of studs you pick up.

·        Collect all the Artefacts: There are ten treasure chests in each level, and collecting all ten forms an artefact; an ancient relic of some description that may or may not have featured in the films. Collecting all of these opens some of the bonus areas. This provided a challenge to begin with, but it got much easier once I’d unlocked the Artefact Detector in the previous section. Some of the things you have to do to make the chest appear are a little contrived, though, and on these occasions I found myself using a guide to find the last few chests. By this time I was looking to complete the game, not get bogged down.

·        Achieve ‘True Adventurer’ on all the levels: This is a feature common to all the Lego games where you have to collect a certain number of Lego studs along the level to achieve the reward. This only becomes a problem when you keep dying, because you lose all your studs. Funnily enough this happened to me because I couldn’t work out some of the puzzles and traps far more often than getting killed by enemies. It became much easier to do this once I’d unlocked the score multipliers!

·        Beat the Young Indy, Ancient City and Warehouse stages: This is the best kind of Post-Game content; things that you don’t have to do in order to see the story through to the end but provide some fun nonetheless. The Young Indy stage takes you through the opening scenes of The Last Crusade, but there are no collectables this time; you only need to beat the level. The Ancient City is an interesting one; you have to destroy some scenery and build some other bits of scenery to get one million studs. It was challenging because there’s no guidance on it this time. It’s not a case of getting from one end of the level to the other; you have to work out what to do with everything in it and the solution isn’t always obvious. The Warehouse has the same goal, and I thought I was going to have to faff about making tracks, as that was what some of the Lego blocks were insinuating. In actual fact, if you head over to the right side of the level there is a target there which cannot be destroyed and releases studs every time you hit it; I just did this to beat the level.

Once I had done all that the game was completed to 100%, and I just had to unlock a few achievement points to get 100% of those as well. This is one of the few games I own on the Xbox 360 where I have a hope of managing it, because in this case none of the achievement points are tied up in online multiplayer. Most of them unlock as you’re playing through the game, some you have to do by destroying one specific character with another; they were easy enough. I had a bit of bother with the one where you need to kill five enemies with one explosion, but after looking at some community advice, I chucked a grenade onto a group of spiders that rush you in one of the Temple of Doom levels and the problem was solved. The ones that were hard were the ones that require you to perform same action multiple times, such as using Willie’s scream to shatter 50 glass panels, or using the Nazis to unlock their restricted areas 50 times. It wasn’t difficult, but it was a faff! I found myself restarting the City of Danger level several times, as there is an opportunity to do both right near the start of the level.

All this took me about two or three weeks; it’s nice to have a game that can be fully completed in that time! I’ve really enjoyed my time with Lego Indiana Jones, and while it will be a while before I come back to it, it’s there should I ever want to give it another go!

Backlog Beatdown: Saving the Sprixies in Super Mario 3D World

I’ve played quite a few games this year so far across a whole load of platforms, and the first one I managed to get to the end of was Super Mario 3D World on the Wii U, of all things…

The reason is to do with a mix of the game’s design, the length, the optional extras and the plot. You see, there are quite a few things that often get in the way of me seeing the game through to the end. Here are a few:

·        The difficulty. I don’t like to admit I’m rubbish at a game, but if I can’t figure out how to get past a certain point, or haven’t developed my character well enough to do it (I’m looking at you Dark Souls,) it’s not going to last very long. I could probably work it out if I keep trying, but as long as I’m doing that, there are other games I could be playing.

·        The Length. I know gamers like their money’s worth, but the fact is most games are too long for me to see through to the end. Most of the time, the plot can be wrapped up relatively quickly. But there’s usually so much extra content to play that if you breeze through the main areas in order to finish the game, there’s no escaping the feeling that I’ve missed most of it.

·        The Plot. Should we expect a good plot from a game? Well yes – but therein lies a lot of what gets in the way of me beating them. Tied in with the length, if I’ve played the game up to a certain point then dropped it for something else, I can’t remember what’s been happening in the plot of the game when I come back to it! So I necessarily have to start again, and get caught up in a cycle of having an almost obsessive compulsive need to play the game “cover-to-cover,” so to speak, and not having the stamina to do so.

·        Game Design. This one’s actually quite straightforward: If a game is so poorly designed that I’m not having fun playing it, then I won’t play it.

Super Mario 3D World is a game that addresses most of these issues. This being one of Nintendo’s flagship franchises, it is a very competently-designed game, and there’s frequently a sense of satisfaction as you beat the level or a boss. Some levels are more challenging than others, but there’s always a sense of possibility in the level design – you can get to the end if you just get that jump right – and a nice feeling of satisfaction when you eventually beat it.

Hoe the screen handles all 4 players at once
is a mystery to me...

It’s not too long – I didn’t count but How Long To Beat reckons it lasts around ten hours – but the genius move in this game is that the optional content is just that: optional. It comes in the form of collectables – Green Stars, Stamps, getting to the end of the level and reaching the highest point of the flagpole – and while there are bonuses for collecting all of these, none of them get in the way of you making progress. You can only unlock certain progression points once you have enough Green Stars, but the chances that this will ever get in your way are very slim indeed. There’s no new equipment, or levelling-up: The game gives you everything you need, and it’s down to your skill as a player.

And of course, the plot is very basic. About the only difference between this and the other Mario games is that Bowser has captured the Sprixies rather than Princess Peach – who is a playable character in this game – and there’s no need to play through the game or read a lot of journals in order to remind yourself of what you’re doing.

The result is a game that was enjoyable, casual and well-designed enough for me to see it through to the end credits, with an option of going back through the game and getting all the collectibles if I wish so to do. There either aren’t enough games like this these days, or if there are, I don’t know where to look for them!

So now that I’ve gone off on one about how it was a Super Mario game I managed to beat for the first time this year, let’s talk about the actual game…

It’s true that Super Mario has come a long way from very humble – but no less well-designed – beginnings, and it can be argued that the franchise has come as far as it can go. A lot of the design choices were cherry-picked from previous games, and the ‘3D’ nature of the worlds had a 2D sensibility about them; a free-roaming game this is certainly not! The “Cat Suit” which allows you to climb walls and make dive attacks at an angle was new, and I don’t think controlling Princess Peach or Toad in a 3D platformer had been done before, but other than that, most of it was treading old ground.

Did that hamper my enjoyment of it? Absolutely not. You see, having not owned a Nintendo console since the SNES, and no later game than Super Mario World, I actually missed out on a lot of the Mario franchise over the past twenty-five years. Most of the game mechanics and designs that were re-hashed in this game were new to me, and I thoroughly enjoyed the new challenges they presented.

This was the only screenshot I could find
with just Mario in it.

I played through the game as Mario, as I wanted to play the most balanced character and let the game challenge me. And challenge me it did; the platforming mechanics are stable enough and there’s usually a gimmick on each level, a new idea you have to think through in order to progress. This becomes especially true in the later levels, which force you to think outside the box – but not too far! This gives each level its own specific challenge, a philosophy I try to adopt when designing levels on Super Mario Maker, and does a fine job of keeping the gameplay varied enough within the confines of a 3D platformer.

As the game progresses, it’s peppered with various other bits and pieces to shake up the gameplay. Boss fights are the most obvious ones, and here I think the games’ design comes into its own for its intended market: The boss fights are not hard, but if you keep bashing them they will kill you. Instead, you have to analyse their attack patterns, wait for your opportunities and dodge out the way for the rest of the time. Once you’ve figured it out, it’s not that much of a challenge – but for younger gamers, having to think about what you’re doing is a far more effective process than doing the same thing over and over again and hoping it will work this time.

Other variations include the Captain Toad levels, where you play as a Toad who can’t jump at all having to navigate his way around 3D labyrinths to gain five stars, dodging traps and using doors and elevators to negotiate the levels. This got its own spin-off game that I’m looking forward to playing. There’s also a few points in the game where you have a series of puzzle-levels; a rush where you have to beat in short levels in sequential order in a very limited time in order to get the ten green stars on offer. There’s also a series of mini-games in which extra coins, lives and power-ups are available.

There is a multiplayer mode, but I haven’t tried this yet for lack of having anyone to try it with at this point! This might come in useful for me in the future though.

So, now that I’ve got to the end of the game, what about the rest of it? Should I aim for a completionist run and go for all the green stars, stamps and flagpoles? Well, I probably will at some stage, but again, the game has happily given me the option not to do it. I’d like to have a go at the multiplayer mode at some point; when I do it will probably give me an additional challenge to the game. I think that’s a testament to a well-designed game: I’ve got to the end-credits, but I’m more than prepared for it to keep on giving!

My Unfinished Games of 2016

Well we’ve come to the end of another year and once again I’ve bought more games than I’ve got a hope of playing through. I’ve not beaten anywhere near as many games as I was expecting, although I would attribute a change in my personal circumstances and an almost compulsive need to keep myself busy to at least some of that.

Of course, there are games out there that I have played and, for whatever reason, I haven’t beaten them. Maybe they’re too long, maybe they’re too hard, maybe they’re not supposed to be ‘beaten’ in the usual sense. Maybe in some cases they weren’t very good. As I write this I’m still trying to get through a couple of games in time for the New Year but I’m not going to force it, since that sucks a lot of the fun out of playing video games for me. Nonetheless, there are a few games that I’ve had a lot of fun with, and I thought I’d take this opportunity to tell you about some of them:

Mordheim: City of the Damned

A battle in full swing...
 

I love this game. Mordheim was always my favourite of Games Workshop’s intellectual properties, and when I heard a video game was in production I really hoped it would be good (as Games Workshop have taken a somewhat cavalier approach to licensing their property for video game development, this isn’t a guarantee!) What we got was a game that grew on me as I was going along, to the point where I can look at my Steam screens and see that I’ve sunk 140 hours into the game. Not since XCOM: Enemy Unknown have I played a game so obsessively, and it certainly filled a strategy game-shaped hole left when XCOM 2 failed to engage me in the same way.

There’s plenty that I like about Mordheim. Firstly, the tutorial is kept separate from the main game. Far too many games these days introduce the mechanics as they’re going along; useful in itself but makes replaying the game far from a joy as you’re basically following a scripted sequence for anything up to the first hour. Mordheim shows you the game mechanics in the tutorial, but after that, you’re on your own. It’s up to you to learn your warband’s various strengths and weaknesses, what strategies work best with each faction, and what loots and rewards you need to be aiming for.

Developing your warband into a fighting force that can take on the game is a fulfilling experience when you know what you’re doing in terms of customisation. The skills and stats they build up along the way are always fun to apply, and even the injuries they pick up contribute to the organic story that you’re telling. Character development, when done well, can be a game’s greatest asset and this one is pretty good.

Finally, the game lets you go at your own pace. You have to collect enough Wyrdstone in a certain amount of time, and the game is over on the 4^th time you fail to do this (I’ve never had this happen to me, yet!) Other than that, it’s up to you. If a large percentage of your best fighters are injured, you can make the decision not to go on a mission while they recover – there’s no penalty other than wasted time. There are campaign missions which you have to do at some point, but if you want to raise the value of your warband so that you can beat it more easily – but risk more injuries in the process – that’s up to you.

Unfortunately the game is let down by two major flaws: Game breaking bugs and the Ironman saving system. There have been times when I’ve reached a certain point in the game – and put a significant number of hours into the relevant save file – to find that I’m unable to complete a mission because the game will not end it. Either the AI won’t take their turn, or one of your objectives doesn’t register. You have an option to abandon a mission if this happens but this comes with penalties that could potentially cripple your warband. And while the idea behind an Ironman save system – the game is constantly saving on one file so you can’t go back and load a previous save – is great for a game that relies on the consequences of the choices you make, it also means you can’t reload a save file if it is effected by a bug. Things came to a head when playing the 4^th campaign mission with the Sisters of Sigmar warband I’d spent weeks building up, and I couldn’t complete the objective without abandoning the mission. I quit out of the game and haven’t played it since. I probably will again at some point – but I have other games I could be playing for now.

Rogue Legacy

Dodge this, squire...

Since watching some TotalBiscuit videos I’ve been hearing the term ‘Rogue-like’ bandied around a lot, with Rogue Legacy being the crowning achievement in the genre. Now that I’ve played the thing, I’m starting to see why it’s so popular! The gameplay is excellent – tight controls, a charming art style and competent procedural level generation. Even better is the upgrade system, where you upgrade your skills and equipment after every run.

Because of course, that’s the whole point of Rogue-likes: You’ll never beat them all in one go but nor are you supposed to. Instead of that, you’re supposed to carry on until you die and then use what you picked up along the way to improve your chances of getting further next time. I have actually played a few games with so-called ‘Rogue-like’ elements and this one has been by far the best, for this reason: You’re always clear on how well you need to do for your next upgrade. You buy the upgrades for a certain amount of gold, and provided you know where to take your next upgrade, you always know how much you need to aim for. This might seem like a minor detail, but in actual fact it does a really good job of gauging the success of your run, rather than champing at the bit all the time.

It will be a long time, if ever, before I beat this game. And even if I do, I understand there’s quite a bit of post-game content to enjoy as well. But I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time with it so far, so it made my honorary mentions list.

Super Mario Maker

Spiny's can go upside down? What devilry is this?

Well how do you beat a game that has ongoing and almost entirely user-developed content? The answer is that you don’t; you just have some fun with it. And fun I have had! It’s good to fight your way through different levels made by other people, it’s good to have a go at some dev-designed levels that don’t appear in the Super Mario games that these are based on, and designing your own levels and seeing how they challenge people is a rewarding experience.

You make your own fun with Super Mario Maker, and when I’m building levels I try to make a gimmick for each one; a puzzle or a challenge to overcome. Whether that’s building a set of pipes in the shape of a hill, sending several Bomber Bills flying at you, or creating levels that look like a chandelier, I want to make a level that challenges low-mid level players on the right level. I may never reach the giddy heights of designing a level where you don’t have to move; just let the platforms carry you. And I may never build a super-difficult level that only the most precise platforming can overcome. But I like to build what I would consider to be challenging levels.

I come back to this game sparingly as I tend to prefer games that have an ending that I can aim for, but for a bit of creative fun every now and then, you could do far worse than this.

 

Hand of Fate

I'll beat you in the end, dealer. Oh yes.

Not going to say too much about this one as I am expecting to beat it at some point; a very difficult game but enjoyable to play and I’m looking forward to seeing how it all works out in the end. It will be one of the few PC games I’ve seen through to the end!

Backlog Beatdown: Watching Her Story with Her Story

Her Story is a game that came to my attention last year; a lot of the Youtube pundits I follow were giving it an intriguing amount of coverage. Not much – there’s not much you can do with this game on Youtube without spoiling it, and that defeats the whole objective of the game – but enough for it to remain on my radar long enough to buy it.

You’ll have heard some questions about it. Is it a game? Is it not a game? Is it an interactive movie? Is it good? Is it worth it? My answer is that while it comes within the broadest definition of the word “game,” it’s certainly an experience, and one that is well worth the five pounds I paid for it.

The premise is that you are looking through a series of videos from seven police interviews with the same woman in 1994. The videos have all been edited into clips that last anything between a few seconds and a couple of minutes, for evidence purposes. You use a search function to find key words in the videos to unlock them, and piece together the story they tell.

But have they???

But it’s not that simple. The videos are old, saved on an antiquated computer with very limited functionality. You type in a word to search for the videos, but however many matches the computer finds, it will only display the first five results. You have to refine your search, and search for more clues in the videos available. You can try to arrange the videos in the right order, but it’s a massive faff. The game starts off with the keyword “murder,” and displays four videos taken from different stages in the interview process. It sets up the idea that a man named Simon has been murdered, he has some connection to the woman in the videos, and she denies murdering him and shows confidence that the police have “nothing.” (None of this is a spoiler, as it’s the first thing you see in the game and most of this are shown on the game’s trailer.)  This demonstrates that all is not as it seems, and does a good job of hooking you in, but it’s up to you to dig deeper. You’re not going to get much help from the game after those first few videos.

I like that idea. I enjoy games that keep the tutorial separate from the game. Far too many games hold your hand for anything up to the first few hours, which makes starting one a rigmarole. I prefer being shown the core mechanics of the game, and after that I’m on my own, which engages me straight away.

Here's an interesting idea: A UI that's awful
but actually adds to the experience of the game.

The game is presented brilliantly. Viva Seifert, the actress who plays the woman, does a fine job; not always with the emotion one might expect but that adds to the character the game eventually builds. The film footage was recorded onto VHS before being digitised into the game, which does a fine job of representing the time period. The screen shows the glare you might expect from early 90s monitor, which adds to the immersion although there is the option to turn this off. Also you never hear the detective’s questions, only the answers, further increasing your need to fish for context.

I’ve seen a lot of coverage on more experimental games like this. There’s a whole debate about it that could potentially run into a whole book. If you’re going to make an unconventional game, you need two things:

1.      A strong core gameplay loop,

2.      A satisfying payoff.

Her Story certainly has the former, although it would have worn thin had the game lasted for any more than a few hours. Whether the payoff is satisfying is up to you; if you are engaged with the story and are keen to hear more, then you’ll probably enjoy the game. Without wishing to spoil it, I’ll say that the game saves one last surprise for you right until the end – an ‘Aha!’ moment, if you will. Not everyone will enjoy it but that was never the point. If you want a break from the latest online multiplayer game and are looking for a different experience, you could do far worse than this.

As a post-script, I’ll add that while this is not a game that you ‘beat’ in the usual sense, I did find all the videos. However, through looking on the steam forums I found a way to beat the game without even trying. I won’t tell you what, but there is a way you can access all the videos in the right order from the start. It’s not a ‘cheat;’ it fits in with the mechanics of the game and I was astounded that it hadn’t previously occurred to me, but it’s not exactly fair play either. I’d found 75% of the videos before I did this, (I know because I got the achievement for it,) but there were some videos that I’d never have found without this method because it’s keyword was so obscure it wouldn’t even have occurred to me to try it. Despite this, there was only one major plot point I found using this method. If you figure it out, you’ll probably have to do the same, but try to make this a last resort, rather than a way to get through the game.

Backlog Beatdown: Racing in the Street with Street Racer

Street Racer is a game I’d been aware of when it came out in 1994 for the SNES, through the TV show Bad Influence. I played the Playstation port of it a few years later at my mate Matt’s house, and even though I didn’t think it represented the power the Playstation purported to have, I seem to remember having a decent amount of fun with it. I bought it a few weeks ago, again to have a light-hearted game I could pick up and play. Here’s how I got on:

You’d think with a name like Street Racer you’d be racing in streets, but in actual fact you’re rarely doing anything of the sort. It is, in essence, a go-kart racing game filled with wacky characters, colourful backgrounds and useful power-ups. Sounds familiar? Well, it was never going to shake off the inevitable comparisons to Super Mario Kart, but Street Racer does enough of its own thing to provide a different kind of challenge.

Hodja purports to have average stats,
but is a surprisingly difficult opponent.

The racing is decent enough. The tracks are short, but tightly designed with lots of corners and it’s surprisingly challenging to maintain concentration for ten laps. The power-ups consists of Stars (a bonus for collecting the most,) rockets for a ‘boost’ button, dynamite which can send you flying if you’re in possession of it when the timer runs out, and med-kits to heal yourself. My only complaint – and I’m not sure whether this is because I’m playing the game on the PS2, my disc is in quite poor condition or there’s a fault in the game’s code – is that you often get massive frame drops that slow the game right down.

 This being an early PS1 game, analogue controls are not supported here, but the rest of the controls are pretty well laid out, with the one puzzling exception that for some reason you have to press down to reverse. The shoulder buttons are where things get interesting; the top two buttons attack left or right, and the bottom two activate your special moves.

Yes, you have special moves. Each character, along with their base stats, have two of the following: A projectile attack, an attack on both sides, an area-of-effect attack that alters the handling of the rival cars, and a short flight that can carry you over obstacles but slows your car down considerably. Getting to know which character has what moves, and what you can expect if you play with or against them, is part of the learning curve of the game! Getting hit will slow you down, and if you run out of energy the effect is even worse.

The characters themselves are well-designed stereotypical caricatures that rarely happen in games these days (although they seem to be making a comeback now thanks to games like Overwatch and League of Legends.) Frank, for example, is a classic Frankenstein’s monster, Raph is an Italian racing boy, and Biff is an American baseball thug. Their stats are based on Acceleration, Top Speed, Handling and Grip. The latter two struck me as odd, as I thought they would be the same thing, but it made sense about half-way through my playthrough – Handling is how well your car steers, but if you steer for too long your car will spin out. How long this takes to happen depends on your grip.

Surf's fast, but can she handle those corners?

Maybe it’s to do with my playstyle, but I did notice something of an imbalance with the stats, as the faster characters tended to be a lot harder to handle because of the design of the tracks. Raph, for example, has the fastest car in the game and is great for straights, but as most of the tracks are made up almost entirely of heavy corners at which he is useless, he’s not an easy character to play. I tended to play as Frank, who has high acceleration so can get up and go out of the corners, and high grip so I wouldn’t spin out.

The game features three competitions: Bronze, Silver and Gold. The higher the competition, the higher the number and challenge of the tracks. The AI appears to be set up so that there is a pre-determined order everybody will place unless you do something about it, and whoever is in first place will be hard to catch, but somehow it still feels like a race as the AI cars attack each other and you in an effort to win. You get points for your position in the race, but you also get bonus points for hitting the most opponents, having the fastest lap, collecting the most stars etc.

The game also features a ‘Rumble’ mode where you compete to be the last car standing in a circular arena that everybody is trying to push everybody off using their attacks, special moves and dynamite. There is only one arena here and the championship lasts for ten rounds. You’d think it would get boring but actually there is a surprising amount of strategy as the league table takes shape. You won’t win every round, but you can help yourself by knocking out the front-runners first so that they will get the least points at the end. Biff was my go-to character for this one.

The reward for finishing both modes is the same cutscene of the pink rabbit that appears on the box art trying to cross the road and then getting in a car and looking in his wing mirror. Not sure what all that was about. Also, in certain versions of the game there is a ‘Football’ mode, where you play football with the characters in their cars. It wasn’t included in the Playstation version of the game but as I understand it, the mode wasn’t particularly well-handled. It’s certainly not going to impress anyone who plays Rocket League!

In fact, what sets this apart from the other versions of the game (not that I’ve played them!) is the CD-quality soundtrack that was the staple of a lot of early PS1 games. It was a gloriously innocent time of well-written music that complimented the level design but wasn’t necessarily ambient or atmospheric as it tends to be today.

While few would describe this game as excellent, and it will always pale in comparison to Super Mario Kart, I’ve had a lot of fun with Street Racer. It’s a nice little game that I’m glad I didn’t pay any substantial amount of money for, and it’s worth a look if you fancy doing something a little bit different with a racing game. It’s a laugh, but don’t expect a miracle.