The 2024 Backlog Challenge

[Gloves | 11,846]

I took a break from beating games to play the ever loving hell out of Battlefield 2: Modern Combat (PS2) online. There are a number of PS2 games with small communities dedicated to playing their online versions (gonna play some OG Killzone in a bit here...) and there was an achievement set added to BF2MC, so I felt the call of the completionist as I tend to do with competitive multiplayer FPS games. Yesterday I wrapped that up, earning the final achievement I needed for 100% completion.

The whole thing took around 90 hours to do, which honestly is actually less than I expected. The existing player base is insanely highly skilled at the game, and I ended up rank 21 upon completion, so I believe we can now consider me to be insanely highly skilled at the game. There was a pretty significant early game hurdle to get over, the people playing are not very welcoming in their gameplay style; sure they'll greet you nicely enough on Discord, but in-game you're gonna get fuckin' stomped. I had to really suck it up and git gud quickly before it got too frustrating, and while I still go "ugh, this guy - may as well just turn the game off" when I see certain people hop into the game, I got there in the end; there may even be a person or two now who see me login and go "ah shit I'm fucked".

Anyway, that's my annual dose of bragging. That out of my system, I can get back to playing normal human games.

[Brickman | 4,023]

I’m back from my holiday which means it’s back to gaming and backlogs. Finished off Hoshi no Kirby Yume no Izumi DX for the GBA (aka Kirby’s Adventure).

Several times I’ve tried to beat this game on the NES but end up getting distracted and play something else.

I stuck with it and really enjoyed this game. It is an insanely easy game, which I guess is just Kirby games in general. I added some challenge by avoiding any health items but it didn’t add too much challenge.

That aside, the graphic upgrade looks nice on the GBA and it has one of the best Kirby soundtracks imo. The levels are fun and offer some alternative paths to discover.

Overall, a game worth playing if you haven’t and need to fill some time with a cruising game.

Just gets over the line for an 8.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,598]

Resident Evil 3 Remake

Last year I beat the original Resident Evil 3 (7/10) and the Resident Evil 2 Remake (8.5/10).  This feels like it splits the difference to a degree.  It, like the original, also feels inferior to it's part II counterpart.  It's shorter, some of the content feels like a bit of a rehash, and the Nemesis is arguably handled worse than Mr. X was in RE2.  Some people argue about content that didn't make the cut from the original game, but I didn't really care about any of that.  Did we really need to find a bunch of door keys in a police station again?

Still, even a rehashed, lesser RE game is usually a good game, and this one is no exception.

1. Bloodborne (9.5/10)
2. Tunic (9/10)
3. Yakuza 2 Kiwami (8.5/10)
4. Firewatch (8.5/10)
5. Assassin's Creed: Black Flag (8/10)
6. Bayonetta 3 (8/10)
7. The Stanley Parable (7.5/10)
8. Resident Evil 3 (7.5/10)
9. The Talos Principle (7.5/10)
10. The Quarry (7/10)
11. A Plague Tale: Innocence (7/10)
12. Bravely Default (6.5/10)
13. Pikmin 1 (6.5/10)
14. Beyond Oasis (5/10)

[Brickman | 4,023]

2 hours ago, Reed Rothchild said:

Pikmin 1 (6.5/10)

[Reed Rothchild | 9,598]

5 hours ago, Brickman said:

[Brickman | 4,023]

4 hours ago, Reed Rothchild said:

 

[Reed Rothchild | 9,598]

1 minute ago, Brickman said:

I'd give Pikmin 3 an 8.  We'll find out shortly with 2 and 4 

[T-Pac | 7,590]

17/40 - Twinbee 3 [Nintendo Famicom - 1989]

Finished: 2024/03/27

Caveats: Used turbo-fire.

[T-Pac]

[T-Pac | 7,590]

Alright - it's just about the one-quarter mark of 2024 and I've finished 17 out of 40 games for my backlog this year.

Feeling pretty good about that - hopefully I can keep the momentum going. And I'm really looking forward to a lot of the games left on my list (plenty of shoot-em-ups), so that should definitely help.

[T-Pac]

[Lago | 224]

It's been a while since I posted.  I got bogged down with games I wasn't really enjoying and got disconnected with what I think is the spirit of the backlog challenge.  Playing the backlog, not necessarily beating every game on the backlog.  Thanks @Sumez for the reminder.

With that being said I have a bigger update than normal.

Games I didn't complete and didn't really enjoy:

NBA 2K23:

I have a confession to make.  I like sports games.  Especially the create-a-player mode.  Being a dominant force on the court, playing with the guys you see on TV, talking trash.  I can get totally immersed in it.  With the Eras in 2K23 and being able to play with Bird, Jordan, Kobe, Shaq, The Bad Boys of Detroit.  I was really excited.  My plan was to create a player and go through the story mode then put him in the Jordan and Bird era.

For the life of me I don't understand why you would take a basketball game and make it about everything other than basketball.  This story is just dumb.  I'll put my rant/review in spoilers just in case.

Spoiler

I eventually abandoned this, but before I did I went through a fashion quiz, I was a runway model, dropped a diss track, competed in a rap battle, won over a gas station clerk, and had to prove my mad skateboarding skills.  All to win over fans because they liked the guy that was picked one after me better than me.

That would make sense if I went one and he went two.  You're selected at number eighteen.  EIGHTEEN.  There are 17 other teams that liked other people better than either one of us.  It just doesn't make sense.  Plus, the story is just absurd.  It even says that winning cures all. It forces you to do all the other crap though, If the story had two tracks I could respect that.  But no, you better cozy up to the latest dance influencer because reasons.

I think the writers even thought this was ridiculous.  One part of the story has you having to enter/win some two on two basketball tournaments but before you can gain access you have to prove yourself on the court.  

Your Charracter: "Isn't being a professional basketball player in the NBA proof enough of my skills"

Story: "Nope."

Your Character: "Seriously."

This plays out more than once.  I just can't with this game. 

MegaMan Battle Network:

This game is solidly ok to me.  It's a product of its time.  So many random battles, and building a deck is just an absolute grind.  I'm not done with this forever, but man it will be taking a backseat to a lot of other games before I sink some more time in it. 

Live-A-Live:

You ever had a game where you're loving it and then all the sudden you're just not?  That's me and this game.  I don't not like it.  I just sat it down and don't really care if I pick it up again.

 

Now for some good stuff.

Arcade Paradise (PS5) Beat 3/30/2024 14 hours 8.5/10

This is games within a game.  I freakin' enjoyed the crap out of this.  It's a business sim where you turn a rundown laundromat into a full-blown arcade.  Each arcade machine is a fully playable game.  Between the arcade machines, doing laundry, and maintenance like picking up trash and unclogging the toilet you earn money to buy more arcade machines and spruce up the ol' arcade.

Each machine has goals that will boost the popularity of the machine.  Some machines have stories that unfold through email between you and customers.  There are daily goals that give pounds to buy things to mitigate some mundane tasks, like taking the cash out of the hoppers.  I kept coming back to this, and there is enough variety that it feels like an actual arcade.  That translates to it actually entertained my kids as well. We played together a lot.  Some of the easier, but grindier goals were perfect for them.  It gave them a real sense of achievement.  My daughter is an absolute beast at foosball, from the jump.  Highly Recommend.  

 

Edited April 2 by Lago

[Brickman | 4,023]

First RPG for my backlog done.

Tomato Adventure (GBA) 

A little under two years before AlphaDream released the Mario & Luigi series, they created a game called Tomato Adventure. This game is essentially a precursor to those games, and it really shows. It was unfortunately never released outside of Japan.  

The story is rather simple because the game is aimed at a younger audience, it is essentially based around saving your friend who has been kidnapped, but it does have some funny and touching moments throughout and it’s the journey and people you meet that really makes this game. 

The art style in this game is nothing short of beautiful, it’s colourful and crazy. Every dungeon feels unique and sometimes utterly bizarre, like Mt S.Cream (hands down one of the coolest dungeons I’ve played in a game). 

The music is solid, but the battle music never changes. It’s thankfully a catchy tune but can wear thin by the end of the game. 

One thing that sets it apart from other RPG’s is the battle system. You slowly acquire items called Gimmicks that give you a new move. When you select the move, you need to perform a certain action or do something on the screen in a certain amount of time. For example, one move has you pushing the left and right button to fill a meter, another has you pushing the same buttons that show on the screen, another has dots moving across the screen and you need to push B every time one is in a small box a certain amount of times.   

Another great feature is you can increase the speed and difficulty of these required actions which will boost the damage the Gimmicks do. The tradeoff is that if you don’t perform the move successfully, you do very minimal damage.  

This battle system really keeps you engaged, especially when fighting trash mobs in a dungeon.  

Where this game falls a little short is just how easy the game is. Even with adjusting the Gimmick difficulty, you still can smash your way through pretty much anything. The bosses can add an interesting twist and require some planning, but you shouldn’t run into too much difficulty. 

The game also could have used a bit of a trim. Some sections and dungeons drag on a little bit too long. It isn’t a very long game for an RPG (clocked in at just under 20hours for my playthrough) but it gets very repetitive and doesn’t have a strong story to carry it through the slow sections. 

This game now has an English patch for it, so if you have been curious about it, I recommend giving it a go. 

8.5/10 

[Brickman | 4,023]

Kiki Kaikai Advance (GBA)

I’ve always heard good things about Kiki Kaikai (known as Pocky & Rocky in the west) but have never gotten around to playing it. I was excited to give this one a go but was disappointed to discover the GBA game was poorly received. Still, I had to see for myself if that was indeed true. Unfortunately, it was. 

There’s a lot wrong with this game and little that feels right. 

Firstly, the difficulty is almost negated by the fact that you can either easily avoid enemies or just wave your stick around and kill just about every enemy (only a few are immune to it). The powerups are also rather powerful so you can easily take down bosses. The last level you can literally hold down forward, wave your stick, collect the key and reach the boss. 

The enemies are repetitive and lack variety with their attacks. 

The game is rather short. There are a total of 7 levels and they’re rather small. There is a harder mode unlocked once you beat the game which adds a few more enemies and changes up the bosses, it’s really not enough to make the game more interesting though. 

The level designs are rather bland, they capture the Japanese aesthetic well, but they just don’t feel very inspired or too different from each other. The soundtrack is well done though. 

What carries this game are the bosses. The patterns are simple to learn but they are pretty fun and each boss does feel unique. 

There is also a high score board if you want to 1CC the game, however there’s no battery so you can’t save the scores. 

I really wish I could rate this game higher, but it sits smack in the middle and is a pretty mediocre game.  

5/10 

[Sumez | 2,995]

On 4/2/2024 at 10:42 AM, Brickman said:

I’ve always heard good things about Kiki Kaikai (known as Pocky & Rocky in the west) but have never gotten around to playing it. I was excited to give this one a go but was disappointed to discover the GBA game was poorly received. Still, I had to see for myself if that was indeed true. Unfortunately, it was. 

To be fair, you could have played the first SNES game, or even better the new remake/sequel from Tengo Project which is phenomenal. You didn't hear good things about Kiki Kaikai because of the GBA game  

[Brickman | 4,023]

6 hours ago, Sumez said:

To be fair, you could have played the first SNES game, or even better the new remake/sequel from Tengo Project which is phenomenal. You didn't hear good things about Kiki Kaikai because of the GBA game  

Yeah very true, but now I have a low point and only have blue skies to look forward to when I play those games  

[Red | 439]

On 4/1/2024 at 10:46 PM, Brickman said:

Tomato Adventure (GBA) 

I've been playing this one on and off for years.  I like the Gimmick gimmick, but it feels wasted on a game that's so easy.  The lack of challenge along with an uninteresting story makes it a struggle for me to get through.

[Brickman | 4,023]

14 minutes ago, Red said:

I've been playing this one on and off for years.  I like the Gimmick gimmick, but it feels wasted on a game that's so easy.  The lack of challenge along with an uninteresting story makes it a struggle for me to get through.

Yeah the ease of this game does make the gimmicks seem not needed. It's a great idea but would have worked a lot better with a higher difficulty.

I agree but also somewhat disagree regarding the story. It has a bit of a slow start but does pickup as you get towards about the 8hour mark. I found the overall story to be weak but the actual interactions with characters and party members along the way to be really enjoyable and I really liked the ending. It just had a weird charm to it all. The dungeons really carried the game though, despite being rather easy.

[Sumez | 2,995]

Crash Bandicoot 4 - Beaten 16/3 + all stages 22/3

Making a sequel to a franchise which already has at least 10 existing games and calling it "4" is a pretty cocky move. But a point could probably be made that Crash Bandicoot has suffered more consistently than the Contra series, and going back to the original trilogy, ignoring everything else and making a direct sequel in the same style was the only realistic way to actually make a respectable sequel to Naughty Dog's old flagship series.

Naughty Dog themselves still aren't touching the game - they are too successful making movie-games like TLOU to ever create anything fun again, but Toys For Bob manages to pick up the torch and then some. Holy shit, this game is brimming with passion and a love for Crash's unique approach to the 3D platformer genre - doing everything the original three games did well, while also completely ditching any of the superfluous mess also added by the second and third one.

It's only been a year since I played those three games for real, and my takeaway was that although all the games were surprisingly fun, the rest of the trilogy was never able to fully live up to the pure gameplay challenge focus of the first game. I don't think that's a popular take among the series' fanbase, but judging by this game I'm clearly not alone in that assessment - because Crash Bandicoot 4 tries to, and greatly succeeds at, elaborating on exactly those strengths!

But it also manages to go a bit overboard. Instead of having one gem to find on each stage, you now have six. Three of them feel superfluous, as they are all based on how many fruits you are able to find, and when you are going for all crates you will get them regardless. Of course, there's the "all crates" gem as usual, and a hidden gem on every stage which is a pretty fitting addition - and finally there's a "beat the stage with 3 deaths or less" gem, which to be honest feels like a pretty fair compromise between the original's demand that you get every crate without dying even once, and the sequel's relaxed approach of letting you retry from every checkpoint as much as you want.

The stages are all quite long, at least twice as long as any stages from the original games, and probably even longer, too, and there are a LOT of them, more than twice as many, so going for every gem on every stage is a really absurd ordeal. On top of that, each stage also has three individual speedrun trophies, a "flashback tape" to pick up, and a hardcore "get all crates with no death" achievement, which is obviously much more demanding than the equivalent in Crash Bandicoot 1.

It's all way too much for me.
I understand it, though. If you want to revive this series for one single game, allowing it to go out with a bang, you really want to get everything in there. You want to allow dedicated fans to keep playing this game for ages and still be able to achieve new goals. Where it breaks down completely, though, is about halfway through when you unlock "inverted stages", giving every single stage a new mode, which tracks the same six gems separately, meaning now there are a whopping twelve gems to find on each one, most of them requiring you to just do the same thing again, but mirrored and with an awful graphical filter applied. I don't think anyone enjoys that, and as expected it's an aspect of the game that has been quite universally panned online.

Of course, you could just ignore all this, no problem - so on one hand it's really hard to fault the game for it. But at the same time... In Crash Bandicoot 1, 2, and 3, the true enjoyment came not from just playing through the games, but from learning the stages, playing better, and getting every gem. And if you want to do the same thing in Crash Bandicoot 4, where do you stop?
Getting every gem is arduous, especially when you start factoring in the inverted stages, and then there are all the other challenges also presented to you. None of them are really recognized ingame either, outside of a completion percentage on your save file, which doesn't really mean much unless you are going for the mind-numbing 100%.

It's not the only issue with the game, though. Although I mostly really enjoyed the core gameplay, the game's difficulty quite often just came down to stuff that felt outside of my control.
Issues like unfair collision boxes and a lack of depth perception was by far the most common cause of death in a stage. It's funny, because this is something the series is often criticized for, but I don't think the old games had much of an issue with it. The first game had much more stiff movement that felt less three dimensional, but that also meant your jumps were always much more precise, and you'd always hit the exact block intended by the stage design, and I very rarely felt that falling into a pit was anyone's fault but my own.
Crash 4 is intended to be quite a challenging game, which is welcome, but often it felt to me like the most difficult parts were the ones that weren't even intended to be challenging.

I ended my game at 55%, which doesn't sound like much, but that represents over 30 hours of play.
I did go back to get a few more gems and complete every optional stage, but by that point I was already so fed up with the game I'm actually disappointed that I never even managed to get into the speedrunning challenges, which was one of the most fun aspects of Crash Bandicoot 3. I know it sounds weird to criticize a game for just being too much, but it really is Crash 4's biggest weakness, and I'm definitely far from the only person who has taken that stance, judged my the most common criticism you'll typically see of the game.
 

[Reed Rothchild | 9,598]

The Walking Dead - Just completed season 3 last night, so that leaves Final Season and Michonne.  I'll do those in a month or two.  On hiatus.

Dragons Dogma Dark Arisen - Defeated the dragon, started the Everfall, and recently started dabbling in Bitterblack Island.  I like WRPGs, and open world games like this.  But unfortunately the first half of the game often felt like a drag.  Constantly wandering the same mountain trails, back and forth on fetch quests, killing the same respawning mobs of bandits and goblins, with the same cyclops and chimera "boss" fights again and again.  Difficulty curve is non-existent: everything wilts in two hits, or tanks your damage.  Luckily the endgame and DA stuff seems a whole lot better.  We'll see, as I'm gonna put it on a short hiatus to recharge.

 

[T-Pac | 7,590]

18/40 - Incredible Crash Dummies [Nintendo Entertainment System - 1993]

Finished: 2024/04/02

Caveats: Used save states.

[T-Pac]

[Brickman | 4,023]

LEGO Star Wars (GBA)

The Star Wars logo appears in all its 16bit glory with the Star Wars theme song blasting in the background in beautiful stereo sound. From here, it is only downhill. 

I haven’t played a lot of the LEGO games, but the ones I have were decent and a bit of fun when played with another person. These were of course played on a console and not a handheld. 

This game just should not have been ported to the GBA. It is too big and too much is happening for the GBA to handle a game of this size.  

Let’s get the bad out of the way first. There are no intro story credits, a lot of the time it can be confusing what you are meant to be doing, so much laaaaaaag, some sections enemies don’t attack because there’s too many on screen and the GBA can’t handle it, everything looks the same or feels like you’re just doing the same thing over and over, difficulty is not balanced well, Episode 1 gets a good balance of health and difficulty, Episode 2 you will be struggling to find health and Episode 3 you get so much health that most levels become trivial. 

There isn’t too much going for this game, but it isn’t a complete train wreck. Each scenario usually will have one or two other characters you can switch between, some scenarios will even require it. Each character feels different and has different abilities, I think they did a great job with this. The Sith fights are pretty fun and do require a bit of strategy. There’s also a bit to unlock in this game and you can replay scenarios with unlocked characters. The LEGO models also look great, and they have done a pretty good job with the vehicles looking like a LEGO model. 

It’s not the worst way to spend a spare 2-3 hours but there’s just too many shortcomings to recommend this game to people. 

4.5/10 

[Sumez | 2,995]

The Talos Principle - Beaten 31/3

I think this game has probably been hyped up a bit too much, or at least I was definitely expecting more from it.
The most immediate comparison for the game is probably The Witness, a game I definitely loved. As in, it's a first person puzzle game which pretends to say some vaguely insightful things about humanity I guess.

The difference between the two is interesting though. While the puzzles in The Witness were mostly delegated to individual little boards placed around the game world, the way the world was integrated worked as quite an interesting companion to the puzzle solving, and was at least as much a part of the game as the puzzles themselves - and unsurprisingly, solving the puzzles would often creep into the game world around them.

In The Talos Principle, the puzzles are set in the game world itself, like in a traditional block-pushing puzzle game - although usually confined to individual walled-off puzzle rooms.
But where The Witness feels meticulously hand crafted into every detail, the first impression I got from this game was a set of standard assets randomly mashed together to form a game they weren't really designed for. And as you move around trying to solve the puzzles, everything just feels a bit more cumbersome than it should be due to the core engine clearly not being designed with a puzzle game of this sort in mind.
My immediate reaction was that this was some sort Unity asset flip - is this really the game people have been raving about? What's really going on, as I'd later learn, is that the game is built from bits and pieces of a Serious Sam game, which as expected really does feel quite unfitting for both the game's setting and its gameplay.

The puzzles are a bit unfocused as you start encountering different components. There's the usual stuff like boxes, or fans that move you or objects around, locked doors and keys, etc. But the components that define the game's identity to a bigger degree seem to all be based around line of sight, justifying the first-person perspective. A jammer that can open doors or disable turrets, or crystals used to connect color coded energy signals around the map. These are really interesting components, but the way they play into the solutions are usually the same across most of the puzzles they feature in, which means they eventually grow a bit old.

Another puzzle game comparison I'd make is Baba Is You - last year's biggest standout on my backlog list, and probably the best cerebral puzzle game I have ever played.
For every single thing that game does well, The Talos Principle is pretty much the exact opposite. Puzzles are often easy with straight-forward solutions, and when the solution is eluding you it's most often because something was obscured to you. or some stupid red herring. You usually end up spending more time carrying out the solution than you do figuring it out, which gets especially bad once you encounter the item that lets you record and play back actions. And some obstacles will just straight up kill you, forcing you to start the puzzle over entirely, wasting your time.
In Baba Is You, a solution would frequently force me to think in creative manners, and employ the same abilities in many different ways, often thinking out of the box entirely. It's the sort of game where when you find the solution it's like an epiphany coming to you that feels incredibly satisfying. This never happened in The Talos Principle. For most of the puzzles, solving them just felt like work.

 

As you can tell, I'm not a big fan of the game... There are many games of this type out there, and I don't think anything about this one stands out - I'd recommend replaying every NES Lolo game over trying this one out.

However, outside of the puzzles themselves, another element to the game is the plot which feels like some super half-assed derivative "I, Robot" style story about what separates a machine AI from human consciousness. It's such an overplayed philosophic trope that nothing this game tries to throw into that crockpot managed to engage me at all. Instead it just felt extremely annoying that it would keep bothering me with the same things. And in the most non-immersive way possible, too - via a bunch of computer terminals placed around throughout the game.
These feature an absurd number of extremely long text dumps that there is no way I am ever going to waste my time reading through at the extreme pace they kept showing up. It's accompanied by a series of interactive dialogues with a computer AI, that constantly tries to challenge your world view, again in an incredibly immature and flawed way (possibly intentionally, possibly because the writers didn't have anything better to work with).

The game's sole redeeming quality are the (usually) super-secret Star collectibles, which often featured much more interesting solutions than the game's main puzzles. Often in fact thinking outside the box, forcing you to break the pressumed limitations of some puzzles, such as placing items in a way they can interact between puzzle rooms, or even escaping the confines of a room entirely, with tools in hand (something that is normally blocked).
Unfortunately, solving the puzzle is often just half the task, as even finding out where they are can result in an tedious hunt throughout every single nook and cranny, which I really didn't have the patience for. For one of the stars, my attempt at finding it ended up taking me completely out of bounds, and going both past the killplane and through the floor. That felt so janky I'd have lost all interest in hunting down the remaining stars, if I hadn't already run out of patience long before then.
 

Edited April 8 by Sumez

[Floating Platforms | 742]

I have the day off from work and decided to finally knock out the story mode of Yakuza Zero, so that first step is done.

Currently I'm at 96 hours and my completion list is a beefy 84.49%.  I spent a large chunk of time going around and taking care of a lot of things so most of what's left is the gambling and Mahjong lists. I also need to win money on various other mini games and do about 40 more coliseum battles.  Oh and get all the weapons and gear. And beat up a bunch more people with Majima. And the final substory battles. And maybe a cash grind to buy the remaining abilities. And.....

Right now I'm feeling like there's a good chance I can get this platinum by the end of April if I don't get too stuck on anything specific.

[T-Pac | 7,590]

19/40 - Section Z [Nintendo Entertainment System - 1987]

Finished: 2024/04/08

Caveats: Used turbo fire.

[T-Pac]

[Reed Rothchild | 9,598]

@T-Pac gonna finish his list first for the 2nd time in 3 years.  You're gonna have to do another bonus list

[Reed Rothchild | 9,598]

The Witness.

Loved it.

Spoiler

 

1. Bloodborne (9.5/10)
2. The Witness (9/10)
3. Tunic (9/10)
4. Yakuza 2 Kiwami (8.5/10)
5. Firewatch (8.5/10)
6. Assassin's Creed: Black Flag (8/10)
7. Bayonetta 3 (8/10)
8. The Stanley Parable (7.5/10)
9. Resident Evil 3 (7.5/10)
10. The Talos Principle (7.5/10)
11. The Quarry (7/10)
12. A Plague Tale: Innocence (7/10)
13. Bravely Default (6.5/10)
14. Pikmin 1 (6.5/10)
15. Beyond Oasis (5/10)