This was a relatively low key week as far as gaming is concerned. The main item of note is that I finished up what I had left in Rhythm Heaven Fever, which wasn’t a lot. The last few levels got kind of crazy; the final stage, Remix 10, was just bananas. It took literally every minigame in the entire game and mashed them all together rapid fire. It took a little bit of extra effort to get the medal on that one, but I eventually got it, which nets me all 50 medals in the game. I’m pretty happy with that, though I won’t be going for a perfect on every level. That’s partially because of the terrible way the game handles perfects that I talked about last week, and also due to the fact that I’m not crazy. Getting a perfect on every level would take some serious effort, and even more patience.

Anyway, that’s it for Rhythm Heaven Fever for me. It’s an awesome game, and I couldn’t be more happy with it. After that I spent some time with Dustforce. I decided to check it out after seeing the quicklook, and it’s a pretty neat game. It’s a demanding 2D platformer in the vein of N or Super Meat Boy, but puts its focus more on moving fluidly through levels as opposed to avoiding hazards. The way you can wall and ceiling run really rewards constant, fluid movement. You also get an extra jump if you hit an enemy in the air, so you can chain jumps together as long as there are enemies to hit. The game’s scoring system also rewards such play. One of the key categories is “finesse”, which is judged by how long you keep a combo going. If you don’t keep moving and picking up dust, your combo will reset. This encourages you to move fast and efficiently, and the moves at your disposal certainly coincide with that notion.

That focus on movement makes Dustforce a pretty interesting platformer, and there’s a lot of precision to the controls that leave a ton of room for people to get really good at the game. In fact, you can view the top runs on the leaderboard for every level, and some of the stuff people are able to pull of is pretty mesmerizing. I really enjoyed watching those replays, but it also drives home the fact that Dustforce is a score chasing game. Beating levels is not the goal of this game; getting a good rating is. I’m not a score chaser in the slightest, so once I realized that I was more or less done with the game. I quickly ran through the handful of levels available at the start, and since simply beating levels is not the focus of this game, it’s not hard and has no reward. And that was that. I think Dustforce is a really cool game, but it’s not for me. That’s just how it goes sometimes. Oh, I should mention that it does have an awesome soundtrack, which is something I can always appreciate!

The rest of my week was spent playing some good old fashioned multiplayer, mostly StarCraft II. We discovered that people have made pretty neat custom maps that implement Day[9]’s “Team Monobattles” concept, so we’ve been having a blast with that. It’s a fun twist: in a 4v4, each player must pick one unit at the start of the game (it can be random), and can only build that unit for the entire game. It’s a neat diversion, and leads to all sorts of hilarious scenarios. It’s been really fun. Finally, I gathered up some thoughts on To the Moon yesterday, and wrote them in a separate post. You can find that here if interested. And with that, my gaming slate’s pretty clean for Mass Effect 3! Unlike the Internet I still really like Mass Effect, and am really pumped for that game. That’s probably going to be where I spend the majority of my gaming time this week. Anyway, that’s all for now, until next time!

Currently playing: Nothing! Waiting for Mass Effect 3 :P