Super Motherload

Oofa doofa. It's been a while since I ragequit a game and immediately uninstalled it, especially so close to its end. Wait, is this the exact opposite of "burying the lede"? No, not digging up the lede, I wasn't trying to be cute there. What I mean is, I should probably start from the beginning.

Super Motherload is a truly unfortunately-named (they know it's motherlode, right? Or was the MILF insinuation deliberate?) digging cycle game from XGen Studios which, like Team Meat with Super Meat Boy, takes an earlier flash game produced by the same studio and greatly fleshes out the concept with considerably more content and a graphical facelift, and then adds "Super" to its title to designate the change. Digging cycle games are what I've tentatively named a specific sub-genre in the Indie world where the player is given the tools to dig under the earth, and must occasionally return to the surface to cash in all the ore and valuables they found, using that money to replenish their resources and buy upgrades before resuming the dig. There's been a few of these games in recent memory - the most famous of which is probably SteamWorld Dig (or, well, Minecraft), though I'm partial to Full Bore and the way they built diabolical brainteasers around the concept. Back in 2004, Motherload was on the cusp of this burgeoning genre, maybe even its originator, and when Super Motherload followed it a mere nine years later in 2013 it had been well and truly established. For me, this type of game fits snugly along with hidden object games and an easy-to-master puzzle game like Picross: when done right, it produces a slow endorphin drip of repetitive but engrossing gameplay that can be a salve after, say, completing the majority of a taxing month-long daily blog series.

The game has this whole Soviets vs. Americans Cold War presentation that doesn't quite materialize in the single-player, but I'm sure gets more focus in the multiplayer if there's two separate teams competing for resources. The player lands on the planet of Mars as a member of a shady corporation, and as they descend through the various sub-bases put there for the purposes of refueling miners and performing scientific study on the planet's mysteries they overhear various troubling reports of people going crazy and everything mysteriously breaking. A trope as old as The Lord of the Rings, there's always something darkly fascinating about a "we dug too deep" plot, as the game's early cheerful mega-corporation "we're only pretending to care about your well-being, get back to work" satire gives way to something more sinister as you continue to dig deeper beneath the planet's surface and put together the mystery behind the sabotages piece by piece.

The basic flow of the game is similar to anything else in this genre - find ore, fill up on ore, get back to surface to cash ore in, buy upgrades if you can afford them, go back down to find more ore, try not to lose all your fuel or health - but Super Motherload does have a few interesting divergences: for one, the player learns how to smelt ore in the field, and by collecting two specific types of ore they can merge them into one that's slightly more valuable than the two of them separately. Merging ores this way is also economical for your storage space, so to get the maximum benefit you have to carefully consider the order in which you collect nearby ores. The most valuable hybrid ore early on is found by collecting silver and bronze, and then taking the resulting sterling silver and mixing it with gold to create white gold. It's more valuable than all three pieces put together, but it does mean having to patiently weave your way around the tunnels to collect all three each time. The game won't conveniently let you mix with whatever ore you're carrying; it has to be the last two pieces you collected. The other opportunity for bonuses comes from collecting the same type of ore in a combo: the bonus increases with the chain, but this bonus is based on the original value of the ore as well. If you decide to fill up with the cheapest type of ore, you'll probably not make a whole lot of cash from the chain even if it gets gigantic. This route is best saved for when you occasionally come across a, well, motherlode of the same valuable ore type with few other compatible ores nearby to mix it with.

Upgrades tend to involve the expected stuff like maximum health, drill speed, fuel gauge (this fuel is for the drill, rather than your vehicle, so you can still safely head back to base once it runs out) and the speed of your drilling vehicle. Stronger drillheads for breaking through tougher ground are given to you automatically as you make progress. There is also specialized equipment which commands a high price, but include useful boons like drilling through the usually invincible rock and making money from drilling through regular soil. Finally, there are also bombs, which can be bought and found while mining, and these tend to be necessary to emancipate particular high-value ores which are surrounded in otherwise un-drillable rock in little self-contained puzzles.

So I should probably address what got me so steamed at the start of this rundown, huh? Well, this will take some explanation of the late-game, so keep that in mind if you want to go into Super Motherload relatively fresh:

As you dig deeper, you'll occasionally see "forward bases" of the corporation, each dubbed a letter of the Greek alphabet: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and so forth. Working your way to these bases should be your main priority early on, because it'll take longer and longer to return to the surface with all your ore even if you keep your fuel and storage space upgraded. Each new base, which are around two vertical kilometers apart, provides a new home base to restore fuel and health, drop off all your ores and buy new upgrades. It's not until you reach Delta that you effectively reach the end of the game's willingness to be convenient. Beyond that point, around 8000m down, you're on your own and must return to Delta whenever you get too far and run out of fuel or available storage space. The actual "bottom" of the game, or I suppose I should say the planet's core, is somewhere in the region of 20000m down. That's about ten times further for the final stretch than any previous base to base checkpoint. Add to this the game's "final boss": a particularly pissed-off intelligent alien chicken who happens to be the last scion of the Martian Empire. If you choose to decline his offer of helping him blow up Earth (I demurred - I'm not that much of a Marvin the Martian fan) you then have to race him to the surface by closely following his ship as he makes a serpentine rapid ascent with a rising pool of lava following closely behind. Get too close to his ship, and you take damage from the exhaust; get too far, and you get submerged in the lava and quickly die. If you happen to die at any point in this process, you're dropped off back in Delta base with the limited resources you had upon death, and have to retake that 12000m journey to trigger the end sequence again. After dying twice to that part, I determined that the game is entirely contemptuous of my time and patience, and therefore deserves neither. So now it's gone away. A shame too, because everything up to Delta was fairly engrossing in that sort of repetitive Zen-like way. Well, I suppose I can always boot up Terraria if I get that itch again.

The Verdict: Nooooope.

< Back to May Mastery '16

All right, I'll come clean: May Mastery is starting to take its toll. I think what separates Mastery and Madness most is that Mastery is built around games I genuinely want to play rather than a random grab-bag of potential crap, and that goes a long way towards keeping me invested in seeing it through. Of the fifteen games I've covered so far in this year's May Mastery, only two of them were disappointing to a degree that I bailed on them, and I've discovered at least thrice as many games that would've hit their respective GOTY lists had I played them when they were new and eligible. Even so, after twenty-eight entries and around 30,000 words, I'm about ready for it to end and for me to return to a more palatable and relaxed posting schedule. I love games and I love writing about them, but there's limits to that enthusiasm. (I'm always impressed and mystified at the few video game writers out there, like Jim Sterling, who have maintained a similar pace of near-daily coverage for years. Do they have ghost writers?)

I've also added two new games to the non-Steam backlog, which isn't quite as bad as the Steam one but still fairly indomitable. Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies are two games that I've been waiting forever to drop in price, so parsimonious are Nintendo with their game pricing both online and off. For a company struggling to get the Wii U to sell, it might behoove them to take on some harsher discounts for their mostly younger and less independently wealthy audience to take advantage of, let alone old skinflints like me. At any rate, they've been added to the handful of PS4 games I have left over from the haul I bought at the end of last year, and everything else on my 2016 List of Shame. All right, weekly kvetching over. Let's get into some news!

New Games!

Mostly everyone's hiding from Overwatch this week, perhaps wisely, but there's still a handful of worthy new releases to discuss. A small handful. The only one our site has listed is Dead Island: Definitive Collection: a graphically enhanced rerelease of the first two Dead Island games that I'm sure Dead Island fans, like our own @sparky_buzzsaw, is eager to bite into. Something tells me those fans would prefer to play the long-delayed and near-mythic Dead Island 2 instead though, the future of which Deep Silver has been cagey about discussing openly. Too busy putting together risible trailers like this, no doubt. The game I'm more interested in this week isn't even a full game but DLC, but from what I'm hearing about its immense size it might as well be sold as a standalone: the Blood & Wine expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which releases this Tuesday. Almost as immense as the core game itself - I'm hearing it'll take another 30 hours to work one's way through it - and built for high-level Geralts that have been through the main campaign, it sounds like a perfect Summer companion for those itching to play more of CD Projekt Red's award-winning open-world RPG. My playthrough of The Witcher 3 is still too fresh in the mind to want to jump back in with another days-long campaign, but it's definitely something I might consider for next year.

I'm cheating with this one since it came out last week, but it hasn't received a Quick Look yet so I consider it fair game (as it were): Lumo. Like many recent Indie games, it's built to resemble and homage a specific type of antiquated game - in Lumo's case, it's the British isometric action-adventure puzzle game that were once the domain of Rare back when they were still called Ultimate Play the Game, and a frequent sight on Spectrum ZXs and Commodore 64s. If you bought that Rare compilation for Xbox One and perhaps tinkered around briefly with the likes of Sabre Wulf and Knight Lore, or played the NES/SNES duology of Solstice and Equinox, you'll have some idea of what I'm talking about. Lumo doesn't go the traditional pixel route to befit its roots, perhaps to its credit, but I'd like to find out just how indebted its gameplay is to its spiritual forebears. I really liked Equinox, you guys.

Beyond that, there's mostly dregs. Fun dregs, even dregs that might potentially be GOTY material, but nothing I'm particularly enthused about. One Piece: Burning Blood could make for another fun Quick Look from the masters of anime Jeff and Dan; Anima: Gate of Memories is a curious and potentially good anime-styled 3D action-RPG from Spain; Hitman gets its third big mission set in Marrakesh this week, so that's going to involve a lot of Moroccan Monkeyshines from Brad and his "Sherpa of Stealth" Dan; the PS Vita boob ninja game Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus hits Steam this week, which... well, XSEED gotta get paid some T&A dollars if they're going to keep chugging along with the Falcom localizations I'm far more interested in (when's Ys Seven for PC, dang it?); and then there's the sheer volume of Indie games that Steam seems to publish every day, some of which are statistically probable to be good. I count at least forty more games available on the service this week, not including those already mentioned. And that's a slow week. Yowza.

Wiki!

Welcome to September 1995! With forty-eight discrete SNES and Super Famicom games released for the first time in this thirty-day period, I can't imagine I'll be rushing through this month. It's the second busiest of the year, after the always monstrous December holiday schedule, and features a handful of pretty big names which I'll discuss briefly. First, though, we'll get the five new pages out of the way from late August and early September: Takemiya Masaki Kudan no Igo Taishou, Tenchi o Kurau: Sangokushi Gunyuuden, The Shinri Game 3, Super Jinsei Game 2 and Sakurai Shouichi no Jankiryuu Mahjong Hisshouhou. I've had to create a new "Super Also-Rans" list to accommodate them.

Let's check out some highlights from the twenty-four pages that saw the VIP wiki treatment this week:

• Majyuuou is the last August '95 game I want to talk about, a grimdark side-scrolling action game with a focus on boss rushes and an Altered Beast-style array of transformations. It saw a fan translation, though there's not a whole lot of text in the game, and it's worth delving into to witness its messed up Hell imagery.
• Big Sky Trooper is a mostly forgotten LucasArts game built with the Zombies Ate My Neighbors engine that has the player traversing the galaxy in their dog ship to destroy villainous slime aliens. Like ZAMN, it's an affectionate comedic homage to silly B-movies, though perhaps not quite as endearing.
• Some great timing saw us tackle the SNES port of Doom close to the release of its modern reboot. SNES Doom might as well be called Blurry Animated Gif: The Game, but without cheats and manual saves it's also one of the most challenging iterations of id Software's classic. Especially since you can't make out anything.
• I'd laugh at Bronkie the Bronchiasaurus - yet another health awareness game for tykes from the shovelware developer that brought us Captain Novolin - but it's so sincere in its attempts to teach all the childrens about asthma that I'd feel like a heel for doing so. I'll just say it's egregious crap and move on. That wouldn't sound overly harsh, would it?
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Crossroads of Time is the first of many DS9 games, but the only one to make it to consoles. I think early on the TV show's creators wanted to make that show more action-oriented than the more principled and erudite The Next Generation, but fans really grew attached to its serial storylines and human (mostly), flawed characters instead. The game's not wonderful, but better than you might think from a licensed Star Trek platformer.
• The SNES didn't have much of a fighter game presence, given that the console was released around the same time as the Neo Geo, but WeaponLord is one of its few exclusives that people still hold in high esteem today. Said to have kicked off the whole weapon-focused fighter sub-genre, in particular the Soul Edge/Calibur series, WeaponLord is a brutal and bloody fighter that took a significant amount of inspiration from Robert E. Howard novels and heavy metal album covers.
• Clock Tower: The First Fear is a formative game for the survival horror genre, not least of which is due to it being the first game in the venerable Clock Tower series. It's perhaps responsible for that particular brand of survival horror in which the goal is to run and hide from the nightmare pursuing you, rather than unload a rocket launcher into its dick or whack it over the head with a "rebar bent".
• Mario no Super Picross is the unfortunately unlocalized (well, until recently in PAL regions) Super Famicom sequel to the Game Boy puzzle game Mario's Picross, and sees Nintendo pursue what would become one of their stealthier bigger selling outlets. Mario no Super Picross features both a Mario and a Wario mode: the difference is that Wario won't penalize you for mistakes, but nor will he tell you if you've made any. I actually kinda prefer that system. Way to go, Wario?

May Mastery '16!

It's the last full week of this feature - after Tuesday, it's back to a less regular posting schedule and games from outside Steam. Let's once again summarize all the Steam games I've been tackling:

Cargo Commander lost some of its sheen soon after the update last Sunday due to how it makes itself more challenging in a not-fun way as the player increases in ranks and perks, but I still consider it a pleasant surprise and is a game I'm likely to hop back into every so often to find new cargo types and unlock new permanent features. There's definitely something fun and frantic about rushing through all its containers - each of which reorients you to a different plane for maximum discombobulation - looking for anything worthwhile and quickly cheesing it if there's nothing but trash and mobs skulking around, getting the maximum gain before everything starts falling apart. It's a shame it doesn't have a higher profile, because it belongs in the same class as The Binding of Isaac and Rogue Legacy as a roguelike with iterative progression that's conducive to quick sessions. I hope Dutch duo Serious Brew - two former AAA developers that previously worked on the Overlord series - make another game soon.

Among the Sleep was fairly uninteresting beyond putting the player in the vulnerable booties of an ambiguously gendered toddler as they attempt to make their way through a series of nightmarish landscapes to find their missing mother with the help of their new teddy bear friend. It has some neat traversal puzzles, some "hide from the monster" spooks and a twist ending, but overall struck me as par for the course in this particular genre with the usual bunch of minor key puzzles and some gaslighting tricks. In that regard, it's not too dissimilar from Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, which I played earlier this month. I suspect we'll see great things from the Norwegian Krillbite Studio in the future, though, since Among the Sleep at least shows a lot of promise.

Hammerwatch was a pleasant surprise: a slow-moving but engrossing hack-and-slash dungeon crawler very obviously styled - in retrospect - on the classic Atari Arcade game Gauntlet. Manage and kite crowds, find treasures by poking at every hidden button and illusionary wall you can find, and become a speedy death machine whenever you hit a kill combo trigger threshold. Special shout-out to what I think was a deliberate visual homage to Sensible Software games like Cannon Fodder and Sensible Soccer with its miniaturized characters. Hammerwatch was made by a pair of Danes from what I've been able to gather, so it's highly likely we have a lot of shared PAL-derived gaming history.

The Next Big Thing was a breezy if occasionally disconcerting (eh? See what I did there?) adventure game from Spaniards Pendulo Studios, who I'd yet to be introduced to despite them carrying the graphic adventure torch for years when the genre was in decline. Set in an alternate 1950s Hollywood where monsters are real and are in the process of gaining acceptance in society due to their roles in Universal Monster movies, it's a Down With Love/The Hudsucker Proxy-style homage to fast-talking 50s romantic comedies that has more than a surreal edge to its dialogue and puzzles. I should probably play Pendulo's other games, especially Yesterday.

It wouldn't surprise anyone to hear that Trine is an inventive and beautiful 2D puzzle-platformer with a protagonist-switching mechanic that allows the player to alternate between a durable bruiser knight, a thief with incredible traversal abilities and a ranged attack, and a wizard who can solve any problem by throwing boxes and planks at it. It's a lot of making your way past pivoting platforms, treacherous traps and scary skeletons without a huge amount of variation, but I was glued to it all day yesterday. Finnish studio Frozenbyte produced two more sequels, as well this month's Shadwen (which, sadly, I'm not hearing good things about), so I've got plenty more Trine to be trying out in the future.

(Sorry for all the developer country drops, but I'm just marveling how inadvertently continental my Steam playing has been this week.)

Trine

Trine has such an elegant and familiar simplicity to its puzzle-platforming that I sort of wonder if it isn't partly responsible for the increased number of puzzle-platformers I seem to tackle every year with this feature. It's not quite that old - 2009 was pretty far back, but past the nascent Indie boom that hit soon after the advent of the 360/PS3 generation - but I find myself pausing while writing to consider whether or not I should talk about how "traditional" it feels given it may have inspired a lot of similar qualities and features in subsequent games in this genre. Kind of a loaded way to say that Trine is derivative, I suppose, but the quandary is that it... probably... isn't? Good opener, everyone.

Though the three heroes of Trine acquire some additional skills as the game continues - the wizard can conjure flat planks and floating triangular platforms to reach new areas in addition to his boxes, the thief has fire arrows that can light torches for more ambient light and the knight acquires a hefty warhammer with a devastating charge attack - the actual gameplay doesn't differ a whole as the game progresses. But then, it doesn't really need to introduce too many hard swings, because the game finds ample use of the various skillsets and creates that enviable game design quality of increased player agency, where there's usually more than one way to progress. Chances are, you could get past every platforming obstacle in the game just by creating boxes and planks with the wizard and walking over all the traps. Less patient players, like myself, are more likely to rely on the thief and her ninja rope for quickly passing through areas.

The only weak link in the chain is the knight, who despite having the ability to destroy nearby objects with his hammer is really only there to cut down the skeletal enemies that spawn in on a frequent basis. I said it last time, but the combat in Trine doesn't really add a whole lot. The main issue is that it's never more complex than spamming the attack button until they stop coming, and in later stages they'll start appearing in their dozens. Monster experience is just as valid as the experience you find littered around the stage in inconveniently placed green bottles, but even if that wasn't the case you need to take care of them all so they don't interrupt your platforming - they'll often destroy any of the wizards created objects in range, for one. It just feels like the more engrossing traversal and puzzle-solving aspects grind to a halt whenever enemies appear, but then when you consider the game in a nutshell - three different characters, three different styles of gameplay - you realize that it would be hard to extricate the combat from the game's core. Not without creating a new character with a different skillset, at least, and the goofy and easily distracted knight is the only constant source of levity in the adventure.

The combat's not a dealbreaker at any rate, just another one of those cases where the game probably felt it needed to include some sort of direct conflict because that's what video games are "supposed" to have. We've seen it enough times in games more recent than Trine, like Soma and Deadly Premonition, where the more overtly "game" parts don't contribute much to the core experience besides allowing the game to avoid the indignity of receiving "not a game" and "walking simulator" tags on Steam. As always, it's one of those conditional things in game design: some story-driven games benefit a lot from the addition of a well-considered combat engine, in particular a lot of RPGs, while with others it feels shoehorned in.

I neglected to mention it last time, but the reason why the game looks so good - or part of the reason, anyway - is because I was playing the Enchanted Edition this whole time. This remake was created with Trine 2's engine and was released as recently as 2014. I've no doubt they managed to add in a bunch of gameplay tweaks and other fine-tuning to go along with the graphical facelift, so it's likely I didn't get the "true" Trine experience that others did saw in 2009. Still, if it's available, why not opt for the deluxe version?

I still appreciate much of what Trine does, especially little player-friendly touches like saving collectible progress when restarting levels and giving the player the opportunity to bring back fallen heroes by reaching a checkpoint, and I'm looking forward to its sequels largely because it's the type of game that's very conducive to follow-ups: just flawed enough that a sequel might polish the experience to a dazzling sheen, but still playable enough that you'd want a sequel in the first place. Roll on Trine 2.

The Verdict: Trine's a fantastic 2D puzzle-platformer with great visuals and puzzles, but I'm guessing that I'm the last to find out. Four Stars.

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Trine

My new strategy moving forward as the blog titles get longer is to play games with shorter titles. OK, so the real reason that today's game is Trine is because I've never played a single game in this series despite it being entirely within my wheelhouse: Fantasy RPG trappings? Sure, I'm into that. Puzzle-platformer with an emphasis on physics? I do play a lot of those. Shades of The Lost Vikings with its trio of protagonists of various specialties? Sign me up. Once I picked up the third game from this well-regarded series in a recent bundle, I knew - similar to last year's neophyte experience with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - that I should stop beating around the bush and start taking strides to get caught up.

Trine is a 2D platformer with some absolutely gorgeous (if bloom-y) art direction and a story that sees a thief, a wizard and a knight accidentally merge their souls via the eponymous artifact and use their shared talents to locate a way to emancipate themselves from this spell, as well as maybe save a kingdom that has long since descended into undead chaos. There's a lot of emphasis on environmental puzzles, and one of the characters - the wizard - has a skillset built almost entirely around manipulating the environment with his box creation, levitation and telekinesis spells. Much of the game for me so far has been figuring out how to bring down green potions from their various hidey-holes: these potions, when a certain amount have been collected, unlock new skills for the heroes. The thief is your more traversal-friendly character with a grappling hook that helps considerably with platforming sequences and a bow and arrow for when you want to stay away from many undead enemies the game throws at you. When they do get too close, you have your Olaf-esque knight character to absorb blows with his shield and dish out damage with his sword combos. I've also been on the look out for chests: these are better hidden than the green potions and give you permanent stat boost equipment items that can be passed to whichever hero needs it most. The RPG elements are admittedly light so far, but maybe that's for the best: I like that a lot of the game's progress demands ingenuity in solving the puzzles rather than leveling up and overpowering the frankly uninteresting fights with skeletons and the rest of the undead hordes.

The game also has a fairly generous system for deaths, though it can occasionally be a little inconvenient too. When a character dies, and they will often with the amount of traps around, they remain out of commission until the player finds a checkpoint. Once there, any dead characters are restored with half their life bar. The intent behind the design here, I believe, is to balance punishing the player for messing up too often without necessarily penalizing them too harshly if they've been trying to solve a tricky sequence to reach an optional cache and have fallen into the spike trap below one too many times. It's trying to find a balance between not giving the player a free pass and eliminating any challenge with the traditional combat and platforming aspects, but not giving them too much grief when their attempts to get the game's physics engine to play nice blows up in their face one too many times. Another aspect I appreciate is that you can revisit levels with your experience and upgrades intact, in case you happened to miss a couple of green bottles or a treasure chest and want another crack at it for the completion achievement. Some of the skills you acquire by playing the game normally and not fussing too much over 100% completion can make going back to hunt for items you've missed a lot easier, especially with the wizard's ability to have more of his conjured boxes on the screen simultaneously.

I have to admit that I haven't managed to get too far into the game yet. Fridays are always a free time hog with the amount of Giant Bomb content that goes up at the end of the week, so I've yet to even scratch the surface. I'm definitely liking what I've played so far however, and hope to bring you all a more detailed report tomorrow on this game that came out seven whole years ago. Ideally, I can tick this game off my list and have the two sequels ready to go the next time I take on a backlog-clearing project like this. In other words, I'm going to keep Trine to beat this one. Yeah, I said it.

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The Next Big Thing

The Next Big Thing is the first Pendulo Studios game I've finally gotten around to... which feels sorta criminal for an avowed adventure game fan like myself, as Pendulo was of those few mainland European studios keeping the genre on life support before its semi-recent minor resurgence in the Indie market due to the likes of Telltale Games, King Art Games and Wadjet Eye. I also own Pendulo's most recent game, 2012's Yesterday, as well as all three of their Runaway trilogy, but those might have to wait another year for their turn. While I've heard mixed things from my fellow esteemed mod and graphic adventure nut @sparky_buzzsaw about a few of Pendulo's games, I've also been told I'm missing out with the others. So that leads us to The Next Big Thing.

You might recognize this game from an ancient Quick Look - @vinny is, of course, another major graphic adventure game enthusiast around these parts - where people said "disconcerting" a lot in response to the motormouth heroine Elizabeth Allaire and the unusual statements she made. She and her less enthusiastic colleague Dan Murray switch protagonist duties as the game continues, and The Next Big Thing features an unusual progression tracker that displays each of the centerpiece events as part of a series of puzzles that the player must solve, in something resembling a flow chart. Which might mean having to complete a set of objectives before you'll have what you need to complete the big puzzle and move onto the next part of the game. It actually works quite well, and while the game is careful to never tip its hand about puzzle solutions - higher difficulty modes turn off hints and the all-hotspot reveal features, if you consider those cheating - having a simple display like this is a big help whenever you're lost for what to do next. Despite the fact I got stymied a few times, the game has some very reasonable adventure game puzzles and it never drops more than a handful of locations on you to visit at any given time. If anything, the average number of available hotspots to interact with is usually on the sparse side. I also greatly appreciated how playable characters would dematerialize and rematerialize whenever you clicked twice on a location, greatly expediting movement. Really, at this point that and the "reveal hotspots" button are all I ask from a modern graphic adventure. Never downplay player convenience in your game.

Then you have what I would probably promote front and center were I on the marketing team for the game: its surreal sense of humor. This, I feel, is where The Next Big Thing comes closest to emulating a classic LucasArts game. While the vaguely selfish and apathetic sports writer Murray is a fun anti-hero, so often does he rely on a blunt weapon to solve most of his problems, it's Allaire - the neurotic middle-sister of a family of wealthy virtuosos - that has the game's share of great lines and utter lunacy. She'll panic about crocodiles as often as Guybrush does for porcelain, inexplicably compares everything - especially inanimate objects - to her babysitter Stacy, repeats the numbers twenty-twelve-one-four to calm herself down with no context given (the game is set in an alternate version of the 1950s, so it's nothing to do with dates), and will frequently repeat the words people are saying as they're saying them, as if she knows ahead of time what they're about to say. There's even an extended sequence inside her own mind that... reveals very little about how she is the way she is. Obviously, your mileage may vary on such an unhinged character, but I enjoyed her askew perspective quite a bit. It even seeps into the UI - objects will frequently change their names to reflect Liz's opinions on them, including a frozen corpse that suddenly got an entire name (with title!) when Liz was worried that someone might introduce them.

The game's surreal sense of humor doesn't begin and end with Liz Allaire, however. The vast majority of the game's characters are monsters - traditional movie monsters, that is, which the game reimagines as being hard-luck actors in the same way that the toons of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? were not so much creations of a movie studio but a group of unusual people who could only make it in the movies with the way they looked. Like Roger Rabbit, the game is set in post-war America and so most of these creatures are Universal Monsters as well as more direct homages like the zombie/vampire duo of Plan 9 From Outer Space and at least one scientist Brundlefly (the original adaptation of the George Langelaan short story was a 1958 movie - Pendulo did their homework). Most of these side characters add little, but end up being factored into puzzles in some form or another. The game does get cute with its catchphrases too - the earlier "disconcerting" as a stock response to Liz's frequent non-sequiturs, but also Dan's sarcastic "fascinating" and how frequently he'd "bet half his salary" on some foregone outcome. I want to say that was a deliberate homage to 1950s romantic comedies with frequently quipping leads - I got the same vibe from those dialogue touches that I did from the Coens' The Hudsucker Proxy.

As per usual, here's the May Mastery killjoy disclaimer corner: the game has some rough edges, especially in terms of unexpected crashes, some weirdly flat animation for the characters and that a few of the more "Laytonesque" puzzles that the game throws at the player will hit with a dull thud. One in particular where you have to conduct an orchestra of colored flowers requires an irksome level of precision that, when added to the fact that you don't yet know what the trick to the puzzle is, made it almost impossible to solve without looking up a solution to make sure you had the right idea but lousy execution (or vice versa). Even the less timing-based ones were a tad on the obtuse side, though I managed to figure those out in the end without help so I guess I can chalk them up to classic adventure game puzzle logic. There's also the minor nuisance that the game doesn't save automatically at any point, which is fun when combined with the aforementioned crashes. Oddly, I couldn't find a way to save over existing save files, so now I have a couple dozen of the things sitting on my HDD somewhere. Well, I can't imagine I'll ever be that desperate to clear some room.

Overall, though, I enjoyed my time with The Next Big Thing immensely. I perhaps didn't do it any favors playing it in the same month as a The Book of Unwritten Tales game (the worse one, but still) and Dreamfall Chapters, which are both a lot more competent and ambitious, but it's definitely a worthy adventure game with an endearing premise and some clever writing that didn't get mangled too badly in the translation from its original Spanish. I don't think I ever got used to everyone saying "Ayo!" to each other to end a conversation though, since I'm not sure that particular expression is even used en Español. Still, if the localization was off in spots, the general surreal edge to the game's dialogue covered it up well.

The Verdict: While brisk - even if you're getting stuck on puzzles as frequently as I was - The Next Big Thing is still a solid example of a modern adventure game, especially if you prefer them a little off-kilter and silly. More so than ever before, I look forward to playing Pendulo's other games at some point. Four Stars.

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Hammerwatch

You know it's the sign of a good game when you sit back after beating it and realize it's 3am. If this entry seems a little rushed, I think you probably have your reason why. (As for why all the other May Mastery entries seem rushed, well... I... I'll fill in this part with something pithy tomorrow when I can think straight.) Hammerwatch more or less ended as it began with its hectic top-down crowd control-focused combat, but something curious happens to its late game if you invest enough in the combo system: the near invulnerable state when you hit ten kills in quick succession is triggered more and more often in the lower (well, higher) levels of the dungeon because of the even larger volume of enemies. So instead of the danger of being overwhelmed by swarming hordes, which was the ever-present fear in the early game, having a large crowd of low-level grunts to blaze your way through puts you in that combo state more often and you'll find that it's the means of surviving the real peril in those levels: the many traps and the wizard enemies, which come in far smaller groups but present a bigger nuisance with the way they'll harangue you with magical bolts and leave totems behind when they die, which provide any number of maladies to yourself and benefits to the enemies still remaining. It's a paradigm shift I wasn't expecting, and it helped make passing through the final dungeon floors as memorable as the early game, so big kudos to the developers Crackshell for that coup.

In an effort to paint the game's appeal in broad strokes last time, I should probably focus on a few of Hammerwatch's clever little features that helped sustain its considerable play length. Features like the vendor tokens, each of which permanently increases the discount you get from all vendors in the game, making them more valuable than any treasure in the long run. There are the skills, of which each hero appears to have three. The ranger I used had bombs that they could leave behind for pursuers, but could also acquire a skill that entangled nearby enemies to slow them down and a 360 degree spread shot that quickly allowed the player to enter the combo state. I've no doubt the other hero skills are just as applicable to their classes. Then there are the bosses and how the battle subtly changes after each quarter of the boss's health bar is diminished. With that first boss I mentioned last time, a giant grub queen, the battle grew in intensity at 75% boss health, when the side walls opened to reveal more enemies that threatened to pincer you between themselves and the boss, then at 50% boss health, when the arrow traps on the north wall started firing indiscriminately into the arena, meaning you had to dodge those as well as the boss's attacks and finally at 25% boss health, where the far floor tiles became instant-death spike traps, and your playing field was limited to a small square around the boss. Before 25%, there was a small nook at the top right of the arena that allowed you to avoid the boss's spreadshot attack, but this became untenable at the 25% mark. It's as if the game is suggesting to the player that their hopes of cheesing the boss without incident are now dashed.

Hammerwatch isn't perfect, though what few reservations I have about the game are trivial but for this one: it just doesn't have the longevity that a loot RPG like Diablo or a roguelike has, in part because there isn't that constant drip-feed of slightly better equipment that encourages you to keep playing new game plus after new game plus, but also because the game is deliberately limited in its scope and customization options. That's by design, rather than an unintended fault with the game: Hammerwatch is deliberately meant to hearken back to Gauntlet and a simpler age of Arcade top-down shoot 'em ups with the trappings of a fantasy RPG, and while the game provides a few different routes for power-ups they're on the whole perfunctory and necessary numerical boosts to damage output and intake with a small amount of player agency regarding which skills they want to invest into and how much they want to rely on the combo system (which, as stated above, becomes godlike on later floors of the dungeon). Even with a higher difficulty and a number of other classes left to try, the game's dungeon layouts and secrets won't change and neither will the core gameplay, and after some ten hours or so of investigating practically every wall for switches and illusions I'm less inclined to jump back in with another hero. Like most dungeon crawlers that aren't randomly generated, once you've uncovered all the secret passageways, grown powerful enough to crush mountains and defeated that final boss, there's little impetus to do it all over again. Maybe that's just my take on this genre though.

The Verdict: Another pleasant surprise, Hammerwatch is a little barebones but you can't beat its Arcade approach to the humble Indie dungeon-crawler or its appealing scaled-down aesthetic. Easily the best Gauntlet-inspired game since, well, Gauntlet 2. Five Stars.

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Hammerwatch

Crackshell's 2013 dungeon-crawler Hammerwatch appears to be another game like Cargo Commander in that I'm pleasantly surprised by how much I'm enjoying the game, having somehow misrepresented what it was on first glance. Ironically, while Cargo Commander was an action game that turned out to be a more rules-complex roguelite, Hammerwatch is practically the opposite: while it superficially ticks all the requisites for a game of the abundant Indie roguelike dungeon crawler sub-genre - it has a top-down perspective, has huge dungeons built in a seemingly chaotic and random manner and has a perma-death of sorts - it's actually joins a small but growing number of nostalgic throwbacks in being a deliberate and faithful recreation of a much older style of game. In Hammerwatch's case specifically, that older game is Atari's 1985 formative quarter-muncher Gauntlet. While Hammerwatch does encourage and reward exploration, the core of the gameplay is in fighting enormous hordes of rambling creatures, and in finding ways to control those crowds and retreating before you can be swarmed. Playing as the Ranger class, the game's also taken on the mantle of a dual-stick shooter where I'm often having to run around with the strafe button held down, kiting a giant bunch of enemies while looking for a way to get past them and destroy the monster spawners beyond.

While it probably moves way too slowly for a dual-stick shooter fanatic, Hammerwatch has managed to pull off what Gauntlet did those three decades plus ago: it has created a traditional dungeon-crawler that is palatable to a player of a more action-oriented persuasion, without necessarily removing the core elements - finding secrets, collecting loot, upgrading your stats and skills - that made dungeon-crawlers appealing in the first place. You still press suspicious buttons to open walls, or destroy barrels for the handfuls of gold coins within, or avoid traps by getting their timing down. The classic RPG experience is there, but you're also throwing yourself into giant throngs of enemies and whittling them down through grit and grace.

I also like the look of the game. It's an aesthetic that's built around the macro, the bigger picture, with wonderfully detailed but zoomed out environments that helps to emphasize, as well as lets the player see coming, the huge crowds of enemies you'll be facing on the reg. I like the little top-down sprites of the characters and humanoid enemies too; they have a distinct "Sensible Slasher" vibe to them. The music's catchy as well, which is almost a necessity given the game's size and the length of time you'll spend on each of its dungeon floors. Hammerwatch appears to be a pretty big game, though perhaps somewhere in the median in terms of RPG lengths in general. Each of its floors takes close to an hour to explore, as you work your way through the hundred or so monsters in every room before sweeping them for treasure and secrets before moving onto the next wide-open area. There's no experience in the game, and no equipment to speak of: instead, every power-up comes courtesy of the game's many vendors. These vendors can be as well-hidden as the treasure itself, and each has a specialization. For instance, an Offense vendor will sell you damage upgrades and the power to critically hit once every ten arrows, while a Vitality vendor will offer boosts to health, mana and movement speed. And then there's the combo system.

The combo system, which also has its own vendor for specialized upgrades, provides a key element to the game's room-clearing strategies. By building a chain of enemy kills within short succession, the player momentarily turns purple and acquires a number of different boosts depending on what combo upgrades the player has purchased. Initially, they can move and attack slightly faster, but soon enough they'll be firing off spreadshots in every direction and regenerating health for as long as they can keep the combo chain going. It can be a powerful life-saver, but buying the necessary upgrades to make this ability truly useful means diverting funds away from always-effective passive upgrades like permanent health boosts to invest in what is, after all, a very temporary state of incredible power. The game is generous with its gold pieces, especially to those with a sharp eye for secrets, but the upgrades themselves aren't exactly cheap either. You soon learn to prioritize with what funds you have.

I'm on the second of the game's "act" as of writing, having defeated the first boss, and despite the slow speed of the game's progress I'm having a ball. The game has some classic dungeon crawler features, like multi-floor puzzles and spikes that need to be deactivated before you can go near them, and I'm only slightly apprehensive about the fact that the game gives you a finite number of lives, with more to be found in well-hidden caches. I'm at what I assume is a fairly indestructible 20 extra lives having died only once exploring the dungeon and twice on that first boss (that fight gets very nasty very quick), yet there's always the worry that I'll whittle them all away on dumb errors and be faced with starting over after getting some ten hours of progress into this colossal dungeon. I suspect if that happens, I won't be returning to the game, even with all the other classes left to try. It'll be the end or bust tomorrow - or maybe Wednesday, depending on just how big this game turns out to be. Either way, I'm into it.

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Among the Sleep

We're back to first-person spookhouse rides with Among the Sleep, a game that saw a lot of early press because of its novel feature of a toddler protagonist. I got to know Among the Sleep very well before I finally got the opportunity to play it today, specifically the opening hour of the game. Giant Bomb showed off an early build in a 2013 UPF, and Patrick took on the full game itself in a solo Quick Look. After that, it featured in one of the 2014 "Shitstorm of Scariness" episodes from the Super Best Friends Play Zaibatsu. It definitely feels like I've seen the opening section - where the infant protagonist passes through his home at night before tumbling down a rabbit hole where the game begins proper - at least three times, and the overall atmosphere and distinct perspective made me eager to see more of it eventually. I suppose mid-2016 is "eventually" enough.

Beyond its headline feature, however, the game is very light on... well, everything. It's the sort of game that might dismissively be labeled a walking simulator (though perhaps a crawling simulator would be more apt) but it's a reductive term for a game that at least has some minor survival horror "dodge the big evil unkillable thing" stealth and building a set of traversal puzzles around a tiny human with very little vertical reach to work with via moving objects around for a climbing boost.

The game has a lot of cute touches like that: The hero's new teddy bear is both a mellow voice in your ear whenever the game's atmosphere gets too oppressive and he can create a small burst of light when hugged for comfort as the game's flashlight equivalent (the button to hug is "F", which seems like an odd sequitur until you realize it was designed to make it easier for fans of this genre who instinctively reach for the F key whenever their surroundings are too obfuscated by darkness); the child protagonist can either stand upright or crawl, with the former giving him better height and the ability to climb furniture while the latter lets him move faster, but he'll also fall over if you try running too long while standing - this is one of those fortuitous cases of ludonarrative not-dissonance (harmony?) where it's perfectly natural for a toddler to lose balance and fall over, and also serves to remind players that if they're trying to get somewhere in a hurry they'd be better off crawling anyway. The game also wisely puts a lot of stock into the idea that of the scariest things in a young child's world would be the parts of their environment they don't understand; minor spoilers, but two of the big scary enemies to avoid include creatures based on your mother's coat hanging on a coatrack, which is first introduced as a minor jump scare early in the game and the furnace in the basement suddenly coming to life (which is almost certainly a nod to Home Alone).

There's no getting past just how slight the game is, though. It has three sections after the opening tutorial/prologue, progressing through which generally involves finding keys and doubling back to find the locked doors they fit into, and occasionally you'll have to elude a large monster by taking advantage of your diminutive form and hiding underneath furniture. There's a collectible sidequest - just my luck after that Saga chapter of Dreamfall Chapters a few days ago that it's yet another bunch of well-hidden child drawings - and the conclusion to the game's story might surprise you, or it might not. Like many Indie games, it's about as long as it probably needs to be, but once you've gotten used to the novelty of pulling out drawers for steps and crawling under sofas in the opening chapter, there's not a whole lot more the game has to show you beyond a few trippy nightmare environments and some minimal key puzzles. There's a short, separate prologue chapter too which is unrelated to the early builds of the game that I saw and is instead a self-contained adventure in a different household. It also has plenty of hints for where the main game's story is heading, so for as counter-intuitive as it seems I'd recommend tackling it after the main game is over.

The Verdict: Fine for an afternoon, or maybe later in the evening to enhance the spookiness, but don't expect to get much of anything out of this one. Three stars.

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Cargo Commander

I knew there'd be a catch. Well, it's not so much one big issue with the game than the combination of several smaller ones, but I think the honeymoon is over either way. If you didn't check out yesterday's May Mastery, I was effusive about Serious Brew's Cargo Commander: a gravity-switching sci-fi shooter/platformer with procedurally generated stages and an emphasis on fast, priority-driven loot collecting. No need to run down all the various rules again, so let's move onto how the mid- to late-game looks like.

Any game has to find an effective difficulty curve to maintain player interest. This becomes a hard sell when your game emphasizes randomized levels of randomized challenge levels and de-emphasizes needing to stick around after you found the "sector key" in any given area, which lets you hop out and try somewhere else. There's six types of cargo, randomly determined for each sector, and it's worth staying around until you have one of all six so you aren't missing one of the game's elusive "ultra rare" cargo types. Beyond finding the six cargo types and the sector key, however, you're pretty much done and can move onto the next sector unless you're really invested in going as long as possible for the region's high score. If you're just there to complete the game's single-player mode by finding as many different cargo types as possible, the game has a relatively easy if repetitive cycle. That's why the game elects to enforce a difficulty curve by making the one wave that gives you the region's sector key take longer and longer to arrive as you rank up and earn more perks and permanent upgrades. The idea is that a high-level player would be able to marathon several more waves without dying and having to start over. In practice it makes each zone last way longer, either because of the time it takes for the sector key to emerge or the number of times you'll die before it gets there or probably both, and actually serves to create the exact opposite effect regarding the player's desire to keep going.

Of course, you could simply hit the magnet over and over and never leave the safe confines of your ship until the wave of the sector key finally appears, but that would take almost exactly as long and would be boring as heck. I've yet to determine if you can abort a wave early, though, so I'll stick that idea on the back-burner for the time being. The second big issue, and this could either be with the game or my PC, is that when there's a lot of enemies and objects on the screen the game's framerate shudders down to some regrettably tiny number. The game itself doesn't appear to be too graphically intensive for this system, no disrespect intended, so the framerate might be the game's side. It becomes particularly bad close to the end of the wave when the wormhole is destroying everything, because the game will often spawn in a lot more crystals in the various containers to make the trip back that much more perilous. It's hard to aim or jump effectively when the game is stuttering so badly and so the chances are whenever you enter a container with a lot of enemies, you'll be ineffective at fighting them off and will probably die as a result. What's worse is that each successive wave in any sector will have more enemies each time, putting the sector key even further out of reach.

It's not all bad though. Cargo Commander continues to introduce genuinely game-changing upgrades as you continue to rank up, including a means to find out whether or not a sector has a type of ultra rare cargo you need to complete a set by attaching a scanner to that specific cargo variety - these scanners are finite and cannot be reassigned, unfortunately - and just recently I've acquired a permanent weapons locker in my ship, giving me a free alternate weapon every time I start. I'm hoping for more scanners and more starting money in the ranks to come, though for now it looks like I'll get a permanent laser sight for my weapons next. That could help.

This will be the last time I write a May Mastery entry for Cargo Commander, with something brand new for tomorrow. I figured I'd quickly hit the rank needed to go home and complete the game today, but these new wrinkles have made that a far more challenging and time-consuming prospect. As it stands, I cannot seem to live long enough to earn the next sector key, and I'm stuck here until I manage it. Still, I could always just "git gud", as they say.

The Verdict: Even with this irritating late-game design flaw, I won't be writing off Cargo Commander because it does so much right with its gameplay cycle and is an important milestone in the quixotic quest of game design to find intriguing new ways to build games around procedural generation. I give this a solid recommendation. Four stars.

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As we head towards the final full week of May with the horrors of June's E3 on the horizon, we also enter the Summer slump in full. Fortunately, despite the comparatively low number of releases, there always seems to be at least one new game every week that captures our attention. Two weeks ago it was Uncharted 4, last week was Doom, and this upcoming week sees a little online shooter from Blizzard which I imagine will be catnip for many of us this Summer, at least until No Man's Sky finally shows up.

While I'm not particularly looking forward to moderating the always raucous chat for the imminent E3 evening stream shenanigans, I am happy for another opportunity to judge our artistically brilliant community's E3 banners again, so that's always fun. I think I've finally figured out what I'm doing for the "Alternative to E3" blog series too, but I should probably get May out of the way with first before settling on any concrete plans.

New Games!

I mean... Overwatch. The servers switch on this Tuesday, it sounds like. Is anyone going to be playing anything else? Besides maybe more Doom and Uncharted 4. I'm not going to get involved in some big online game that requires a moderately powerful system to play at the same speed as everyone else, but I certainly don't blame the legions of folks that this game has already ensorcelled with its promises of diversely talented heroes and a shocking amount of clever promotion and character work with those animated introduction mini-movies. I just wonder what their hat equivalent is eventually going to be. Don't half of them already have hats? That Ice Climber girl has a hood, and I don't know how much more you can do with one of those besides add cat ears.

Elsewhere, we have the TMNT game from PlatinumGames, which I imagine is probably going to be of a similar quality to that Transformers Devastation game they just put out (or that Legend of Korra game, god forbid). Seems like it might be a keeper for anyone in the Venn diagram overlap of Platinum fans and TMNT mainstays who haven't all died inside after watching that trailer for the new Michael Bay movie with the Run DMC cover. Weird that Platinum had both a Transformers and a TMNT project so soon after Bay did. Could a Bad Boys character action game be on the cards? Are air juggle combos about to get real?!

Rounding out the week there's the PS4/PSN release of the Neo Geo classic The Last Blade 2, that Total Warhammer fantasy war sim that is somehow not called Total Warhammer and the 3DS shop management sim Conveni Dream. I'm learning not to sleep on these cute and weird Japanese digital imports after my semi-dismissive take on Pocket Card Jockey last time.

Wiki!

Twenty-four games across July and August. Next week will see us taking on September, the second busiest month of the year, where I expect to be stuck for a while. Back to this week, two of those pages were perfectly fine all ready - both Yoshi's Island and Super Gussun Oyoyo were part of previous wiki projects - and only three required brand new pages: the horror visual novel Gakkou de atta Kowai Hanashi, the Hudson baseball game Super Power League 3 and the multi-board game simulator Game no Tatsujin (no relation to Taiko no Tatsujin, alas). Visit the usual list for more on those three. (I've actually filled that list up now, so... I guess I'll have to make another one.)

I've picked ten highlights from the pages I've worked on this week. Should be a recognizable bunch, since many of these were created in the US or are based on US games and US pop culture licenses:

• Hebereke's Popoitto: Sunsoft's mascot character didn't make as much headway in North America as it did in Europe, which frequently saw EFIGS versions of the various puzzle games that Sunsoft used to promote their Sanrio-esque menagerie. Hebereke's Popoon was a Puyo Puyo puzzle game from 1993, and while Popoitto looks similar it actually plays more like Dr. Mario. Your goal is to remove all the face icons that are already on the playing field by creating lines of four same-colored objects. Unlike Dr. Mario, the pieces actually move around until you drop something on them or box them in, making it a little more frantic and unpredictable. The game also saw Saturn and PlayStation versions, both of which also came out in Europe.
• Ultima: Kyouryuu Teikoku - The Savage Empire: Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire should be a familiar name to anyone with a GOG account: both it and its contemporary Martian Dreams were spin-offs based on 19th century literature that used the same engine as Ultima VI, and are given away freely to any GOG account owner who wants them. Like many Ultima ports for the SNES, Ultima: Kyouryuu Teikoku (which translates to Dinosaur Empire, a way better title) is scaled down but serviceable. Unlike the other Ultima ports, it never left Japan.
• Demolition Man: Waking to a future with oppressive niceness, an obtuse bathroom system and a powered-up psychopath on the loose, John Spartan's adventures in San Angeles made for a pretty decent action movie. It actually made for two distinct video games as well: an FMV light-gun game for CD-based systems,that we're probably familiar with thanks to the Giant Bomb episode of TNT that covered the horrors of the 3DO, and a more traditional version for 16-bit systems with far less in the way of chroma key Sly Stallone in a beret. It is, like so many action movie licenses, a side-scrolling shooter/platformer that vaguely covers the events of the movie it's based on.
• Killer Instinct: Presently in the capable hands of the game industry's own Belligerent Friendly Giant, Rare's Killer Instinct took the tech that allowed 3D pre-rendered models of gorillas wearing ties to go ape in Donkey Kong Country and used it to create a fighter game that, while lacking some polish, captured the imaginations of the 90s youth thanks to its brash techno music, comic book grimdarkness and our own surprisingly low standards. I think I still have my copy of Killer Cuts around here somewhere...
• Primal Rage: Enormous prehistoric creatures beat the hell out of each other while tiny humans look on in awe (or get eaten) in Atari's ubiquitous dinosaur-and-ape fighting game. Primal Rage has enough problems being a fighter game also-ran without being released the same month as Killer Instinct for its SNES debut. Though, hey, going back to giant digitized ape models and their monkeyshines, that big Chaos guy sure loves to pee on his opponents, huh?
• SWAT Kats: The Radical Squadron: Once again, going through the Super Nintendo's library provides an incidental history lesson on the various cartoons of the 90s that we've all mostly forgotten about. Riding on the coatshells of a wave of totally tubular animal-human hybrids with sick combat abilities in contemporary urban settings, SWAT Kats depicts the adventures of a couple of feline vigilantes who protect the Megakat City by night with their tricked out aircraft and crimefighting gadgets. To everyone's great shock it's another licensed platformer.
• Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island: I know what happens to people who speak highly of Yoshi's Islands in these parts and it's not pretty, so I'll just say that this is a game that features Nintendo characters in a Crayola-stylized 2D platformer that was first released at some point in August of 1995. It's actually kinda weird that this is the first super high-profile SNES game we've seen since Chrono Trigger back in March - that's not to say the SNES didn't see anything decent in 1995, but most of the games we remember fondly were released closer to the system's dawn than to its twilight. After Yoshi's Island Nintendo would focus most of its attention on the N64 and Super Mario 64, so don't expect to see too many more first-party SNES games on these lists.
• Ninja Gaiden Trilogy: This came up on the rota shortly after the recent GBEast stream for the Xbox Ninja Gaiden, which was an odd coincidence. All three of the NES Ninja Gaiden games were released here with some graphical upgrades in a Super Mario All-Stars-style compilation. It also made the third game slightly easier to deal with, which was probably appreciated by many. You can't go wrong with a package like this, but it's weird that it took so long after the NES went defunct before it came out.
• Brandish 2: The Planet Buster: This awesomely-named sequel to Nihon Falcom's (the creators of Ys and The Legend of Heroes) top-down dungeon crawler did not unfortunately see a SNES localization like the original's, which is a shame because it's slightly better than its predecessor with more emphasis on story and NPCs and side-questing. The Brandish games take some getting used to - the world spins around every time you do, so that you're always facing up - but Falcom rarely puts a foot wrong. Naturally, moving from the PC-98 home computer to the Super Famicom meant cutting out a substantial amount of content to make the data fit on the cart, but it seems like a faithful enough port otherwise. It managed to retain the mini-map this time at least.
• Donald Duck no Mahou no Boushi: Finally, we have this Disney platformer from Epoch. Disney properties were a lot easier to license in Japan than they were in North America and Europe, so we only saw localizations of every other game that was released over there. There was a Tokyo Disneyland Mickey Mouse game in 1994 that also avoided an international release, for instance. Mahou no Boushi (or "Magic Hat") is a little more open in structure, with Donald taking on odd jobs in any order the player wishes so that he can raise money for a present for Daisy. I didn't get any further than that, but I imagine it goes places once the eponymous magic hat shows up. Oddly enough, the game was compatible with Epoch's "Barcode Battler" toy via a SNES cable adaptor sold separately, with special content if you scan in barcodes while playing.

May Mastery '16!

Once again, all my video gaming this week has been thoroughly expounded upon in my daily May Mastery series, the growing contents page for which can be found over here. Here's a brief summation of the four Steam games I've played this week:

Burnstar was something of a disappointment, due to a fundamental flaw in its design that made it far less palatable than it first appeared. On the page, though, it's an imaginative spin on Bomberman and a demolitions simulator where you have a limited number of explosives and have to maximize their destructive power by studying the flammable objects in the environment for their chain reaction potential. Alas, with no way to reverse mistakes without starting the stage over, it gets exponentially less fun as the stages get larger, more complex and more exacting.

Mutant Blobs Attack might be a no-frills 2D Indie puzzle-platformer that borrows Katamari Damacy's mass-increasing mechanic to gate progression, but everything about it is so polished and enjoyable that it's one of those great Indie games that succeeds because it focuses on smaller, attainable goals with its game design and nails each one. I also like the Futurama-esque retro sci-fi aesthetic and the B-movie sensibilities of its plot about an angry blob with nothing to lose and everything to eat.

Dreamfall Chapters: I fell in love with The Longest Journey a few years back as a late-comer, and despite the franchise's ups and downs I've stuck with it up to this, the most recent and still ongoing game in this mysterious and troubled adventure game series. An episodic game, I only got three "Books" into Dreamfall Chapters before the May Mastery-ordained three day time limit kicked in, but given that the fifth and final Book has yet to transpire I'm happy to put it on hiatus until I have the complete set ready to go. My PC can barely run it and each puzzle is exacerbated by the amount of geography the game spreads its hotspots across, but I'm anxious to get back to it before too long; as an adventure game big on establishing mysteries and cliffhangers, I don't want to risk losing any threads or forgetting the decisions I made.

Cargo Commander: I'm surprising myself with how much I'm enjoying this procedurally generated run-and-gun platformer from Dutch Indie developer Serious Brew. Drag cuboid space containers into range with a powerful magnet, raid them of their treasures and bail before a wormhole anomaly rips them apart. Maybe because it involves collecting things, or because it has an upgrade tree, or because it has procedural generation, or because it has some nuts gravity mechanics and an exciting hectic nature to its timed wave-based collect-a-thons. I don't think I could point to any one thing as the big draw. I just know that I'm sorry I slept on it for this long (it's a 2012 game! That most of us ignored, including this site!).