Game Review: Just Shapes & Beats

I thought Seb would like this because it reminded me of Geometry Dash when I saw it, and he does.  The trouble with these games is he starts playing them in the real world, moving objects around and 'singing' the songs.  Ah well, at least he's happy...

Just Shapes & Beats (PEGI-7) is a game about, er, shapes and beats.  We bought it on the Switch, and it's an ideal Switch game.  Good fun if you're playing on the small screen, or step it up and turn up the bass on the big screen.  Plus you can have up to 4 players in local co-op, or play online, if you want to.  Basically, it's one of the fun 'play anywhere with your mates' games that Nintendo likes to talk about when advertising the Switch.

It's a 'bullet hell' game, defined by Wikipedia as:
A relatively recent subgenre that features overwhelming numbers of enemy projectiles, often in visually impressive formations.

It certainly fulfils those criteria!  You are a small shape and you have to dodge all the pink things on the screen.  There are some really intense levels with crazy pink stuff everywhere.  Some are hard!  (Though probably not as hard as Geometry Dash, which is impossible for most people, after all.)  All you can do to dodge the pink shapes is move and dash.  

There is a story mode (with bosses), score attacks, challenges, and also a party mode, which is easier and goes on forever.  It's a way to enjoy the music, which is one of the main draws of the game.  It's chiptune stuff by artists like Danimal Cannon, Nitro Fun, Sabrepulse, Bossfight, Chipzel and Big Giant Circles. Seb loves this stuff.  He memorises the music to games like this....

If you're playing co-op you can 'help' your friends when they've taken too many hits, which helps prolong more difficult levels. (Some of the bosses are insane compared to the difficulty of most of the game.)

The visuals are kinda hypnotic and fit brilliantly with the music. I was going to say it's almost a work of art. But then I felt that was a bit pretentious...

The game is £15.09 on Switch and is also available on PC (£15.49 on Steam).

Game Review: Slime Rancher

Here's a decent game you should play, if you haven't already - Slime Rancher!  (PEGI-3)  Seb has been playing this on the PC with an XBox controller and he's been having a LOT of fun.  It has a metacritic rating of 81, and the award '58th best PC game of 2017'.

You are Beatrix LeBeau, and you've moved to the Far Far Range to farm slimes.  These strange blob-like creatures are all over the place.  They eat then they poo 'plorts', which are used for all sorts of things.  Pink Slime plorts are used for things as varied as household cleaning products and coffee sweetener.  Tabby Slime plorts are taken by athletes to improve their performance, though overuse can result in 'uncontrollable butt wiggles'.  (Hehehe.)

The idea is you vacuum up some slimes, take them to pens you've constructed on your ranch, feed them, vacuum up the plorts, and sell them.  This is more complicated than it sounds.  You have to feed different slimes different things (they have favourite foods too), so you need to grow veggies, chickens etc as well.  To make this easier you can create hybrid (largo) slimes (crossing Pink Slimes with other slimes can make them less fussy about food).  To create a hybrid you feed a slime a plort from another slime.

A large part of the game is exploration.  There are lots of areas to unlock, with slime keys you get from gigantic 'Gordo' slimes.  How you get them is a little mean, since you feed them until they explode.  Still, they don't have to eat the stuff, so I suppose it's their own fault.

The areas have different dangers.  Feral Slimes are particularly nasty, ferociously attacking you if you go near them.  The Tarr is a type of slime created when a hybrid slime eats the plort of different slime.  It's black and rainbow coloured and looks scary.  And it will destroy all slimes (and ranchers) in its way, given the chance.  (The games's Slimepedia informs you that water can stop these guys, though it also says, "Alternatively, many ranchers recommend running away with their arms waving, screaming."  An option I often like to use.)

Some slimes aren't deliberately dangerous but are still problematic, like Rad Slimes (which give off radiation) and Boom Slimes (which explode).  To farm these tricky slimes you need different equipment and care regimes on your ranch.  Other slimes need specialist environments too.  For instance, Phosphor Slimes need darkness, and Puddle Slimes need water.

Those are the basics, then.  It's hard to explain why it's so good, but it's just so, well, charming.  The slimes are super cute.  It's fun to expand your ranch and add new pens and gadgets.  The latest update has introduced further farm automation in the form of drones.  (The most useful automation comes in the form of automatic feeders and plort collectors, which give you a bit more time to go exploring.)

It's fun finding rarer slimes and rearing them.  Failure isn't too harsh, since you just end up back at your house with a bit of time having passed, having lost what you were carrying.  You can decorate your ranch and house, if you want to, and there are little quests where you fulfil orders for people, and 'star mail' that progresses the story, such as it is.

The only down side to this is that it gives me motion sickness really quickly!  (Dad and Seb don't have this issue.)  Googling the problem shows that I'm not the only one.  Adjusting the Field of View did help a bit, but the game still makes me sick.  I think it's just too fast paced for my brain...  Poor old brain...

[You can also play on PS4 and XBox One.]

Ramble - Nintendo - ROMs and other (slightly odd) decisions

Today I'm going to ramble about ROMs, defined by Wikipedia as:
"A ROM image, or ROM file, is a computer file which contains a copy of the data from a read-only memory chip, often from a video game cartridge, a computer's firmware, or from an arcade game's main board. The term is frequently used in the context of emulation, whereby older games or computer firmware are copied to ROM files on modern computers and can, using a piece of software known as an emulator, be run on a computer."

I'm sure someone at Nintendo thinks these things are a good idea, but sometimes it seems like they're shooting themselves in the foot.  This week in the news we learned that Nintendo was suing two ROM sites, and this has led to other sites preemptively taking ROMs offline.  But why should we care about this?  It IS technically illegal to download the things, after all.

Well, as someone who worries about digital archiving as part of my job, I worry that decisions like this mean games are going to be lost forever.  And even if they're one of the few games 'remastered', these are not the originals.  If, one day, you want to play an old game, perhaps you really want to play the original version, not some shiny HD thing.  And how can you do that?  Emulators.  (Unless you have serious money to buy old consoles and old cartridges etc - and cartridges, tapes etc are decaying, so they won't work forever anyway...)

I haven't played many things via emulators, but I have dallied with SCUMMVM.  Using this brilliant piece of work I've played a game that I never finished on my Amiga - Flight of the Amazon Queen.  And I played it on my phone using the original point and click interface.

Most old games end up as 'Abandonware', defined by Wikipedia as:
"Definitions of "abandoned" vary, but in general it is like any item that is abandoned – it is ignored by the owner, and as such product support and possibly copyright enforcement are also "abandoned". It can refer to a product that is no longer available for legal purchase, over the age where the product creator feels an obligation to continue to support it, or where operating systems or hardware platforms have evolved to such a degree that the creator feels continued support cannot be financially justified. In such cases, copyright and support issues are often ignored."

Often the only way to play old games is to download ROMs and use emulators.  If ROM sites weren't collating these games, who would do it?  Maybe what is needed here is better rules. Clearly games that are currently available for sale shouldn't be available for download - that's piracy.  There's a line there somewhere.

I'm guessing that Nintendo's latest action has something to do with their launch of Nintendo Switch Online, coming in September.  Maybe they want people to pay to get their 'classic Nintendo library', so they don't want to risk them getting the games for free elsewhere.  I wonder whether it really would lose them money, though.  If you can conveniently play games on your Switch then you'll probably do it.  You're unlikely to go to the effort of emulating the things if there's an easy option.

Using me as a case in point, I've bought Broken Sword on more platforms than I can remember, just because it was more convenient.  And Monkey Island.  I'm sure people will still give Nintendo money to play their games. If anything, playing a few games via emulators may be more likely to get you interested in classic titles and more likely to pay for the privilege of convenient Switch-based playtime.  Hence shooting themselves in the foot.  Retro is in right now - people want to play games they played when they were young.  They want to show their kids games they remember fondly.  So yeah, I know it's technically illegal, but it's sad it has come to this.

This isn't the first time Nintendo has gone a little over the top - they are notoriously harsh on YouTube copyright issues; they introduced the Nintendo Creators Program so they could make money from YouTubers' videos.  Ok, the games are theirs, but surely it's better that YouTubers are playing the games.  You don't want to put them off.  It's basically free advertising.  Making YouTubers pay for the privilege of advertising for Nintendo seems a little extreme!

If you want to have a go at some old games, go to the Internet Archive - they have a massive archive of old PC games playable in your browser via the emulator DOSBox.  Awesome.  :-D

Article - Why can't I beat my 12 year old at computer games?

Hehe this article about playing with your kids makes some good points. I do feel I'm not that good at some kinds of games these days. Us old folks could never make it professional gamers, after all... but I do like to stress the importance of playing with your kids. Even if you are a n00b.

August 2018 PS Plus Goodies!

So, it's that time again, and I have to admit that once more I'm not super excited by this month's offerings...

On the PS4 there's Mafia III (PEGI-18), which has a metacritic score of 68, and Dead by Daylight (PEGI-18), which has a metacritic score of 64.  The PS VR title is Here They Lie (PEGI-18), which has a metacritic rating of 62.  Obviously, none of those are good family games.

On the PS3 there's Bound by Flame (PEGI-16), metacritic rating 53, Serious Sam 3:BFE (PEGI-18), metacritic rating 63 and on the Vita Draw Slasher (PEGI-16), metacritic rating 69 and Space Hulk (PEGI-12), metacritic rating 51.  Still not a lot of family fun here, though some Warhammer 40K fans might enjoy Space Hulk!

Then we have Knowledge is Power (PEGI-3), metacritic rating 71, which is a Playlink title, so you play it on your PS4 but everyone answers with their own smartphone/tablet (with the Knowledge is Power app downloaded).  You can have up to 6 players on the same wi-fi network.  (It's more fun with more people.)  There are 12 stages of trivia questions to work through.  Players choose from one of four categories in each round.  Questions are scored on your answering speed.  You can throw in Power Plays to try and slow your opponents down.  There are also three mini games - a matchmaking game, a name association game, and a pyramid climb game (this is the final part of the quiz; you start climbing the pyramid based on your score to far).  So yeah, this is a fun family game!  (If you all have Android/iOS devices that support the app...)

Not a brilliant family friendly haul, then, quite PEGI-16/PEGI-18 heavy, and not highly scored on metacritic either.  At least Knowledge is Power is a decent game.  And it gets the family together in one room to actually interact!  Shock horror...