Tag Archives: XBox Series X

Junkster

Leave a reply

You know those platformer games where you are trying to collect all of the things, because collecting those things allows you to collect other things and eventually achievements, but really there’s just something satisfying about knowing you found them all? Like with the Koroks in Breath of the Wild, but if it were actually possible? Or, in this case, if it were incredibly easy.

Junkster luckily has a gimmick. Yes you’re jumping around and fighting space monsters occasionally, but also like half the game is about solving puzzles by building new paths out of the junk you find. There are all shapes and sizes of stuff, from square, to small square, to rectangle, to skinny rectangle, and you attach them to little platforms that can only hold so many, and you have to figure out the way to use them to get where you want to be. Sometimes there’s a timed puzzle element, sometimes there’s a robot you build and then navigate with, sometimes it’s just getting to somewhere impossibly far away or impossibly high. Lots of variety across the twentyish levels.

I can’t exactly recommend it, but it was a bit of not quite mindless fun spread out over like six or ten hours, and also at the end I had another 1000 points of gamerscore on my account. So, y’know.

Star Wars: Outlaws

Leave a reply

Star Wars: Outlaws is basically like if you took the serious parts of modern Grand Theft Auto games, and instead of ratcheting them up to 15[1], you replace the main character with someone likeable, who doesn’t just go around murdering anyone who gets in the way, and also the setting is, you know, familiar.

It’s like this. You are Kay Vess, a mostly orphaned thief and slicer who lives in Canto Bight[2] along with her pet… whatever he is, Nix, during the years around the height of the civil war between the Empire and the growing Rebel Alliance. After a medium-sized tutorial section in which you learn how to bet on fixed horse races, pick pockets, and climb around, you are asked to join a heist of the vault of a rich local crimelord. Only, things go sideways, and before you know it, you’re on the run, trying to clear a pretty astonishing bounty from your head, and learning how to freelance in a world galaxy full of criminal syndicates, not to mention the Empire and those pesky rebels.

I did not find everything, despite my best efforts. That said, I think I could pretty easily find everything? With a walkthrough, I mean. Because the stuff I’m missing is clearly identified. It wouldn’t be like finding all the damn koroks, for instance. But there’s really a lot to do. In addition to the main quest and various side quests, both to work with syndicates and to find people who will train you to unlock special powers, there’s lots of driving around on speeders, lots of flying around in space, lots of sneaking around in armed fortresses, lots of shootouts with bad guys, lots of Kay refusing to do anything unless there’s a paycheck in it for her, and even the most adorable mini games you’ve ever seen in which Kay and Nix eat dinner at various street cafes on various worlds.

I cannot imagine anyone ever having enjoyed an open world sandbox game about crime and not enjoying this open world sandbox game about crime, is I guess my bottom line.

Well. Unless you play open world sandbox games about crime because you really deeply identify with criminals in your actual life and wish more games would let you shoot prostitutes to retrieve your money that you spent on them a few minutes ago, I guess. I am sadly certain that demographic exists.

But if you’re anyone else, see above. And I haven’t even mentioned the part where this is maybe the best treatment of how droids exist in a galaxy far far away. Definitely top three.

[1] on a scale of 10, natch. (Here I am describing Saints Row)
[2] which you will not recognize as the casino city from The Last Jedi

A Game about Digging a Hole

Well, I don’t know what I was expecting.

No, it was acceptable fare, I just like the line. A Game about Digging a Hole is, I would argue, a self-contained and self-evident description of what to expect, but there are (technically) more details than that. See, you find a bulletin board advertising a house for sale, $10,000 as is, but it comes with an electric shovel and a treasure in the backyard, to which the new owner is welcome.

So now you’re digging a hole.

In the hole there are various bits of detritus aside from loose soil. Rocks, coal, that sort of thing. Happily, the various ores can be sold for money, and money can be used to recharge batteries, buy equipment upgrades, that sort of thing. Eventually, one presumes, there is a treasure.

Aside from a victory-locked access to most of the achievements, that’s it. That’s the whole entire game. I’m glad I played it, but having finished, I… am not interested in starting over, just to get the 8 or so achievements I did not get already. It was fun for a few hours, but it wasn’t that fun.

My Friendly Neighborhood

If you ever found the puppets on Sesame Street a little creepy[1], have I got a horror game for you! My Friendly Neighborhood tells the story of a kid TV show from an alternate, slightly darker turn of the millennium America. Somehow, their unnamed Vietnam went even worse than ours did, and kids / parents just kind of stopped watching children’s programming, or maybe I’m wrong about that cause and the true cause is public television was never invented, so ratings were the sole driver of a show’s survival. Either way, after a pretty successful 15 or so year run, the show was canceled in the early ’80s, and now, ten or twelve years later, it’s suddenly broadcasting again, overwhelming the signal of intended shows.

So you, a broadcasting engineer named Gordon[2] are sent to the old abandoned studios to shut down the signal and restore everything to normal. Only, when you get there, everything is weird and creepy and oh, right, dangerous, because I left out something important. Apparently another facet of this alternate America is that the puppets are and always were alive. And sometime between the show’s cancellation and now, they’ve gone kind of crazy. And not the normal kind of crazy where they’re just trying to kill you for interfering with their nefarious plans, although, okay, yes also that, but the creepy kind of crazy where you start to listen to what they’re saying and it sounds like what the puppets in H.P. Lovecraft’s Sesame Street would say, and also they’re not so much trying to kill you as they are incidentally killing you while enthusiastically hugging you.

Needless to say, this is all pretty great, and were I of an age where I had countless hours to fill and not enough entertainment to fill them with, I would happily play this again with cheats enabled and on a higher difficulty level, just to see what all else I could unlock that I didn’t find the first time around.

Fantastic atmosphere, occasionally legitimately scary, yet with a surprising amount of heart. Easily recommendable.

[1] I never did, and the game still works
[2] ie the main adult character on Sesame Street for a good long time, and boy howdy am I certain that was on purpose

Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends

Last year, I played a game, and I was trying to finish it 100%, only I had misunderstood a part of the early game, and ended up skipping out on a lot of information that only showed up every seven days game time, so now at the end of the game it was a lot of pointless busywork to get to the several pieces of info I needed to finish. Which would still have been okay, because kid friendly games are hard to come by, but then I started playing some Mario stuff instead, and it never happened, and now Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends has fallen off of Gamepass, which means it will never happen, but unlike a lot of games I played enough to form an opinion of but then never finished, at least I’m here writing a review of it.

The deal is, you’re a robot who makes (or maybe more appropriately, serves) sushi, and you’ve been hired by this old mayor to make his town popular. Half of the game is, every evening you open your restaurant and tell your sushi-making machine to start, er, making sushi, which you then try to match to what your patrons are in the mood for. They give you money and acclaim if you do well at this. Then in the other half of the game you use the money and acclaim to buy things. Furniture, ingredients, costumes, that kind of thing. But you also are trying to make friends with all the people who live in town and newcomers as the town grows, because doing so will allow you to unlock newer, cooler things to buy as well as letting you delve into the (improbably sushi-based) mysteries of the town’s origins.

Anyway, I did all of that, but didn’t quite get all of the possible sushi recipes, because some of them were locked behind a traveling sushi chef who visits once a week, but I didn’t start talking to her until pretty late in the game, because I didn’t know when or how to find her at first. Oops.

It was pretty fun, though towards the end even before this sushi chef fiasco, it started to feel more like work than fun to unlock the last few bits of relationships, mysteries, etc. I think maybe a lot of games do that, towards the end. Which is a pity.

A Plague Tale: Requiem

A couple of years ago [let’s say], I played a game set in medieval France wherein a teen sister and young brother are on the run from deadly swarms of rats and the Church, because of alchemists. The sequel, A Plague Tale: Requiem, picks up some short time later, with the reminder that. yep, younger brother Hugo’s affliction is not resolved.

Except for the plot, this is basically the same game, so don’t come looking for innovations. The sling is still pretty cool as weapons in games go, and the mechanic for creating and removing light as a means of progressing under various circumstances is a clever one that never got old. As far as the plot, though… I guess the best way to look at it is as a fantastical re-imagining of the Black Plague, and to then not be surprised, in either this or the previous game, when just absolutely loads of people die. Inevitably, some of them are people you care about.

The goal of the game is to cure Hugo, whether via alchemist or following his dreams[1] or delving into the history of previous small children who have been afflicted with the Macula, a word which may have some meaning outside of this game that I have not researched, but probably doesn’t[2]. There are, as you might expect, lots of soldiers stalking around, lots of rats, lots of nooks and crannies to find secret story beats for completionist achievements, and a few too many “trapped with multiple waves of enemies” scenarios for my personal tastes, but on the other hand, I did finish the game, so.

It wanted me to play again on highest difficulty but with all my unlocked abilities. I will not be doing that, but I can imagine past me, with access to many fewer games, giving it a go.

[1] I mean, dreams he is having when sleeping, not like dark ages self-actualization.
[2] It turns out to be a part of the retina, which seems completely unrelated to anything in the game. Beats me!

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

In December, Game Pass got a big Day One release[1], Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. This is a graphics intensive first-person puncher in which Indy races a rival Nazi archaeologist to solve the mystery of why Vatican giants are stealing cat mummies. Aside from the punching and the field archaeology, it’s mostly a puzzle and collections game, which is a style I’ve been enamored of for most of my adult life, and then I’ve been enamored of Indiana Jones for even longer.

So you can imagine how cool it was to see the introductory scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark in a somewhat controllable scenario, before the actual game (set a year later in 1937) kicked off. From there, it’s all a Nazi-punching, globetrotting, graverobbing good time, interspersed with cut scenes that really could have come right out of an unfilmed script.

Plus, there are definitely plots left unresolved enough for a sequel or at least a substantial DLC release. …which they might make me pay for, but I hope not! Especially because I might fall for it, you know? This thing was like catnip, as evidenced by my 100% completion and 970 of 1000 gamerscore points over the course of a month and a half. I basically never finish AAA games anymore, but, here we are.[2]

Downsides: I can only think of one, which is the game started nagging me to move forward / how to move forward, much too early. I like the idea of the helpful voice, whether internal or external, telling you to investigate the thing you might have not been able to find or understand. But wait like 5 minutes, not 30 seconds. (And then the time I really did need help, there was no help forthcoming, which is also sort of a problem when you’re nagging so hard the times I don’t.)

[1] This is to say, for those out of the loop, it arrived on Game Pass the same day it became available to purchase outright.
[2] Continuing to help: DLC = DownLoadable Content, ie expansions instead of sequels; gamerscore is points that mean functionally nothing that you get for completing main or side plots, or doing difficult or implausible things that the designers thought were funny. (Bragging rights, maybe? But functionally, worthless.) AAA = I don’t know what exactly, just big budget big studio or something,

Escape Academy

This week in “We played it just before it fell off Game Pass, so now you can’t!”, I bring to you Escape Academy. The conceit is, escape rooms, but what if there was a Hogwarts for them? And really… there’s not a lot to talk about here. There is a story, technically, and the graphics are pretty terrible, but what actually matters to your enjoyment of the game is if you want to play escape room puzzles, some of which eventually get pretty tricky.

It has 2 player co-op (nice), 2 player vs (I was not a fan, but it’s not actively bad, and we only tried one mode of many), about 12 levels, and several expansions that weren’t on Game Pass and thus we did not try them, but since now none of it is on Game Pass, arguably the bundle is worthwhile I suppose?

All in all: pretty good if you like co-op games, maybe not much of a much if you don’t?

Close to the Sun

In the second half of December, right after I started the new Indiana Jones game and got my new PS5 Pro (halfway or more through the 5’s lifecycle), I… played none of those games, because I learned that a Nikola Tesla themed game I had been interested in was leaving Game Pass. Hence, another entry in my ongoing series of timely reviews for games you can no longer just get, as in for “free”.

Close to the Sun tells an extremely alternate history of the 1890s, where Tesla was successful enough with his electricity plans to corner that market worldwide, and then he built an enormous scientific research vessel, to which the main character has been invited by her sister. When the reporter sister arrives (as opposed to the scientist sister, you see), she discovers that nobody is home, but there’s a giant quarantine sign[1] and a lot of damage and weird shimmering images of people walking around.

Thus commences the barely not a walking sim exploration of the ship, to find and rescue her sister, figure out what went wrong, and ultimately escape, one hopes. As a game, it was I think only okay except for my interest in the whole Tesla / Edison thing, which elevated it somewhat. The four characters were all pretty good, the mysteries were mostly compelling, the ending was, I will say, “rushed”. All in all: decent and short enough to not crazy overstay its welcome, but marred by a truly awful save system that meant if for any reason I did not finish a chapter, I would have to start it over. So, be prepared to play for a while at a time whether you like it or not, since the XBox’s quick resume system is a complete failure on this game in particular as well as the lack of good saving I already mentioned.

In further conclusion, maybe it’s better as a game than I’m giving it credit for, and mostly the technical issues are why my estimation rounded downward a bit.

[1] I cannot explain precisely why, but it was particularly affecting to me that the quarantine sign was painted over the exit to the internal docks, in case anyone wanted to leave, but with no hint of any warning to anyone coming in.

Still Wakes the Deep

1 Reply

Sometime after I learned that there’s a game about Lovecraftian horrors on an oil rig, I learned that there’s a TV show about strange goings on in the all consuming mist (which may or may not be Lovecraftian or for that matter Kingy[1]; I wouldn’t know, as I have tried to avoid spoilers for The Rig since it seems cool enough to look into), and I have no point other than that’s a weird coincidence. Like, even if they aren’t both Lovecraftian, what are the odds that two media regarding oil rigs would both come across my radar at the same time, much less of both tweaking my interest?

None of that is I suppose especially important to Still Wakes the Deep, a game named after a particularly evocative phrase from a Scottish poem and set on Christmas Day 1975 on an oil rig in the North Sea. This is how I learned that oil rigs are not just built in relatively shallow water, but that rather they float. It is horrifying in its own right to be floating on the surface of the ocean, connected to the surface below not by four legs, but just by the drill with which you are penetrating the earth’s sunken crust. Imagine how much more horrifying, then, were the pocket you opened to contain not oil, but instead colors out of space, growing tentacles, and madness.

Caz McLeary is a man on the verge of losing everything, and his new job as electrician on an oil rig is partly effect, partly cause of this imminent loss. At least, that’s what he seems to believe and what all the evidence in the early game shows us, as he reads an angry letter from his wife, and then faces a somehow even angrier boss waving an arrest warrant in his face. But moments after that scene plays out, we and he learn that in fact he was nowhere close to losing everything, at least not then. It’s all a matter of properly defining “everything”. …and for that matter, “lose”.

I wasn’t expecting this to be a walking sim. That did not make it a bad game, but I sometimes wished for a little more control over events. Just a little, you know? Actually, as I think about it, the most proper audience for my plaintive request for more control over the events of December 25, 1975 is one Cameron “Caz”[2] McCleary, innit?

Is it apparent I liked this game? Well, I did. It was both mostly likable and immensely affective. Definitely worth a look.

[1] Why don’t we have a proper adjective for the way King writes? Probably because he doesn’t mostly write in a specific way, other than when it’s about the human horror of small towns. But it still feels like he deserves one, is all.
[2] British (in the imperial sense) people are really bad at name-shortening. Cameron = Caz? Jeremy = Jez? Come on, chaps, get it together.