Friday 17 February 2017

Week 5 & 6

   Well, I thought I was going to get through a bunch on my week off, and now here I am, a week after my week off and I got stuck on one game (mostly), which I'll come to in a bit because I did manage to squeeze some smaller games in between. So firstly

Little Big Planet 3



   Many years ago, when Little Big Planet was 'in' I played the first game, and wasn't a big fan. It was a game based around creation, from as small as character models up to making your own levels. You'd unlock extra things to use to make your levels throughout the single player game which also acted as collectables. This was all very well and good, even though I would never create a level, but it was good to know I could, much like when I downloaded Project Spark then never launched it once. but that's other people's things, Mario Maker seems pretty popular these days. The problem really was that for a 2D platformer, a genre so refined, the game wasn't that good to play. The charters were very floaty (floatey?) and the controls were very loose, sure it had our English 'charm' but without much story to go along with it. 6 years later and now being handled by another studio (albeit also an English studio) and not very much has changed. They added in Hugh Laurie to partner with Stephen Fry as voice actors (that must have confused American 'House' fans more than watching an episode of Teachers) which is a fun nod to Britishness, despite the fact that they are really hitting the wrong age group with this refernce.
   The game though, is the same. After all this time the creation suite has improved massively (or so I've read) but when the game still plays poorly, why would you want to spend so much time making a level for it? The single player itself is very short, about 4 hours, with less than 20 levels and a few boss fights. Not that I'm necessarily against a shorter game if it's made excellently. Sonic the hedgehog 2 is shorter (or similar) and was also a full priced game when it came out and was much, much better like this, the difference there is that Sonic 2 game out 25 years ago, LBP 3 was 3 years ago (also, see Inside for a modern comparison). That is an issue. You may wonder why I played it, well, it was free this month on PS plus and as it's a big name game I thought I'd give it a go. It's not the worst game I've ever played, some sections of the game are very good and it's very charming, but ultimately it's very forgettable. if you too got it free, it's charm should be enough for you to take a peek, save your money though.

 Ratchet and Clank: Quest for Booty



    I Think I might have took this Ratchet and Clank thing too far, it came free with Nexus though so I went for it as a small game to play to break up the big one that's coming up in a couple of paragraphs (or you could just scroll down now I guess). So, I was going to go for Tools of destruction, the first PS3 Ratchet game, but I heard that the series had got clogged up by mini games and gimmicks but quest for booty reset this. It's a condensed version of Ratchet and it was the same fun that Nexus was but with 2 major differences.
   The first difference is that I don't know what the whole long running plot is, I don't know who Talwyn is, how Clank was stolen or any of the call backs that were going on. Obviously that's my fault, but it doesn't help me. The other is that I played it too soon after Nexus. I should've given it a break. It was about 8 months ago I played the rebooted PS4 game, and then Nexus a few weeks ago gave it enough of a break between. This has only been a few weeks though and the game started to drag, it was like how I played Titanfall 2 and Battlefield 1 back to back last year and, even though they are very different types of fps', the end of Battlefield dragged. Point is, it was fun for the 4 hours it lasted, any longer though and I'd have got bored, I think I've blown my enthusiasm for 3D mascot platformers though, and I never even got to Jak.

Rebel Galaxy



   This game is very hard to describe in a picture, so I'll do it with my words, which will be terrible, obviously. You're a free wheeling space ship pilot in an open universe. There is a main story to go through, but this is such a small part of the game. To start with the setting then, the universe is split in to separate solar systems, and each one is procedurally generated (and named, I had an area called 'dong'). They are filled with space stations of different factions, nebula's, scrapyards, asteroid belts, enemy gangs and more. This all leads to making money to better your ship. Yes, this is a Spaceship RPG and it's a very interesting take on an rpg, it's certainly the first game like this I've played.
   In many ways it's an attempt at 'Firefly the game', but without being able to land. You can be good or evil, save ships for rewards or become a pirate yourself. you can mine asteroids, search junkyards, trade between stations where prices change depending on the status of the station, take on contracts and join guilds. Terrible description there, Moving on.
   If you are going through the story, you need to improve your ship along the way. You need to buy the new ships and armour them up. This brings me on to one thing I really appreciate which is when you buy a new ship, turret, some cargo space or whatever and want to improve it, you can get the face value back for the original thing so you're not trying to save up money for something better, you can top yourself up as you go without adding dozens more hours of grinding on to the game. The story is mainly a way to funnel you forward to more difficult solar systems so you can move along faster. As someone who spent a long time in the first solar system, take it from me to not do that. The money you can make there is pennies to what you'll make a few hours later.
   So, how do you play the game then? I'm going to assume that no one but me has played Star Trek legacy and just move past that. Steering is how you'd expect, with many different speed controls. It's the fighting that's more interesting though. You can control your broadside cannons (really fitting in with the pirate atmosphere) or any of the individual turrets, or the loose bombs weapons. This can be as simple or as complicated as you like. I ended up just controlling the cannons and the bombs while the turrets were automatically fired. I tried to do it all, controlling everything and switching like a mad man, but it was too much. I think I made the right decision.
   In summation, this is a very interesting game, I'm not sure that its 'great' but it's definitely good and worth trying. It even has a good soundtrack including AJ Styles' much loved 'No one' song and more heavy southern rock. There's full voice acting too which I didn't expect from an indie game. Try it, go on.

Completed


Mekazoo
Bastion
Sound Shapes
Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon
Pony Island
Undertale
Mighty Morphon' Power Rangers Mega Battle
Batman: A Telltale series
Super Mario run
Ratchet and Clank into the Nexus
Westerado: Double Barreled
R-Type: dimensions
Dead Rising 4
Little Big Planet 3
Ratchet and Clank: The quest for Booty
Rebel Galaxy


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