Hey there! Hi! Hey, you! Heyo! Howdy! Hola!

When @dankempster put forth the idea of a Backlogtober blog, I immediately jumped in and said, "Oooh! Me too! Me me me!" I'm a dick like that and I love stealing good blog ideas. Dan's structure is a thing of beauty. He has games planned out, an estimation on how long each game will take, and a short description of how each game

My approach is similar, except not at all. I'm shootin' from the hip, aimin' my scatter gun at the broadside of a barn and hoping I hit. Look, it just wouldn't be me if I did things like "prepare" or "think about anything at all." That's for the intelligent people out there. Guys like me, we say, "Well, hell, I guess that stove top could be hot but who has the time to read the dial? Let's just grab that sumbitch and OH SWEET JESUS MY HAND! Wait, which burner was it again? OH GOD NOT THE OTHER HAND WHY DO I DO THIS TO MYSELF?! Hey, is that a Skittle or a thumbtack? Lemme just chew on that..."

You get the idea. Plans aren't in my blood. Neither, apparently, is checking on the release dates of games. See, I thought Disgaea 5 was coming at the end of October, not in a very short week. I thought I'd be sitting around, twirling my thumbs waiting for the end of October to hit so I could get my hands on some turn-based RPG goodness, but nooooooo, Amazon wants to ship the game early. And since I've got vague plans in place to blog the everlovin hell out of that game, just like Disgaea 4, I've got a lot of writing ahead of me.

What this will be is an exploration of some of the games in my backlog. I plan on playing any I can to completion, though with time restraints being what they are, I'm not going to beat myself up if I call it quits on a crappy game or I feel like I've seen enough of a good one. There won't be any real rhyme or reason here, but I do plan on keeping this to the PS4 and PC for now. I might revisit this idea if there's a nice big drought on current gen releases to play some old school RPGs on the PS3, but that's a thought for a different day. Probably year.

For today's day-early Backlogtoberganza (totally not a rip-off of @dankempster's better title), I'm exploring two wildly different games about being a policemanofficer, one about psychotic fish bait armed to the gills with explosive sheep, and a game about kicking people in the face. Let's get this business started.

LA Cops

My most recent purchase and one of the games on my Pile of Shame I was most dying to play was LA Cops. I liked what I saw of the quick look, despite the reticence of the fellas. Two cops bust up crime in small levels meant to be beaten in a few minutes. The player swaps control between both characters, leaving the uncontrolled character on overwatch, with a roughly 60 degree angle to watch over his partner.

The controlled character, meanwhile, has a bit more precision and can run around. This basically leads to situations where you're moving characters ahead in short spurts, never quite leaving the overwatcher's line of sight as you try to mow down enemies quickly and with some pre-planning. Sneaking up behind a character is obviously ideal, as you deal more damage and take less yourself.

It's a cool idea in principal. In reality, the execution of my carefully planned overwatches and movement never goes according to plan and I always wind up in a desperate gunfight with overwhelming numbers of bad guys, all of whom have substantially better AI than my partner because they have the distinct advantage of being able to move.

As a turn-based game, or quasi-turn-based ala Jagged Alliance 2, this game might have had some real potential. But with everyting in real time, with three or four enemies rushing you at a time through different doors at different angles, it quickly becomes frustrating having to switch between characters rapidly, making small precision adjustments to the field of view on the fly. The controlled character's aiming feels wildly uneven and kind of buggy. I'm never quite sure if I'm actually hitting anyone until they've gone down, or until I've failed a mission for the umpteenth time.

If that core aiming mechanic isn't any fun, then what's the entire point of the game? There's little story, and what's there is eye-rollingly bad and retroactively distasteful, given the current clime in the United States. I'm not at all going to feel bad about putting this one back on the metaphorical shelf, this time permanently.

Completed? No

Time Spent - About two hours

Percentage Finished - Judging by the overall missions, I'd say about a third.

Play Again? Not a snowball's chance in hell

Divekick

Joke vomit.

I thought for a brief moment about just leaving that comment alone and moving on to the next game, but Divekick does deserve a bit more than that.

I get that there's more to Divekick than a fighting game tourist like me would understand. But after having played through the game with several different characters on both the "meh" and easiest settings, I'm just not feeling it. The overall joke of only having two buttons to fight with grows old fast, and the game is often head-scratchingly easy against the AI. I felt like I was burning through matches on the meh difficulty, so in order to facilitate the process even faster, I went ahead and switched down to the easiest difficulty to see if the game grabbed me.

Unfortunately, it didn't. I'm sure a lot of the jokes within this game play to a very specific fighting game crowd, but it shouldn't have to. The great appeal of guys like Dave Lang is that they're genuniely funny without reverting to inside humor. Unfortunately, that easy appeal is completely absent from Divekick.

It's maybe more my problem than theirs. I'm not a fan of the current comedic trend of "fuck it, throw everything against a wall and see what sticks." I'm not fond of directors like Paul Feig, who favors the aforementioned joke vomit in favor of actual bits or structured segments relying on something magical called a "script." I couldn't help but think of Melissa McCarthy's annoying performance in Tammy, where she shouts random things that sorta kinda resemble humor, but fall completely short. On every level, this is a Melissa McCarthy of a game, bellowing things that possibly could be jokes in a more structured setting, but never quite hitting home like the classics.

Completed? I beat the arcade mode with Dive, Kick, Johnny Gat, and whatever the monster's name was. No one was online so I could not play competitively.

Time Spent - Two hours.

Percentage finished - Probably about a third.

Play Again? Nah. I'm good. If there's a sequel and someone sits down to seriously hammer out some characters interesting to anyone not deep into the fighting game scene, I'd be into it. Otherwise, pass.

Worms Battleground

Unfortunately, here's another example of a game whose sense of humor put me off the gameplay. Worms is, at its core, very much more of the same when it comes to the gameplay. Teams of worms square off with each other, stuff goes boom, I curse at the screen when fragments of stuff gets in the way of my shotgun blasts, and so on. In terms of that sheer basic gameplay, Worms Battleground is fine. There are the usual handful of new weapons and tech (I particularly like the teleport gun, a largely unnecessary short range version of the teleport item).

That said though, the campaign is a chore. First and foremost, it's kind of a buggy mess. I started playing it a few months back and gave up due to physics based puzzles not working half the time or bad checkpoints not letting me complete missions. I ripped through most of the rest of the campaign today, but I found myself even more mired in technical hiccups and problems, especially when I managed to kill the enemy teams faster than I think the designers anticipated.

And then there's the humor. God bless Katherine Parkinson (of IT Crowd fame, which you should probably watch immediately if you haven't already), who reads her atrocious lines with all the spirit and aplomb of a true professional. Unfortunately, those lines are painfully awful. They're vaguely reminscent of the more charming Little Big Planet, in that both try for a whimsical nonsensical sort of goofiness. Worms Battleground unfortunately misses the mark and winds up feeling a bit forced and stale.

It's not a terrible game. It's just one that should have been tested a bit more for bugs, and perhaps given a different script. I'm curious as to what other people thought of the campaign in this.

Completed? Not yet. I will probably finish this one at a later date. Since there's no other Worms game on the horizon, I don't feel particularly rushed.

Time Spent - Total, probably about ten hours. That's including a lot of general versus gameplay, though. I've probably spent four hours with the campaign. Unfortunately half of that is due to bugs.

Percentage finished - Not too sure. I'm about ten or eleven missions in.

Play Again? Probably, yeah. The core gameplay is fine. It's a bit hard to see what weapon you have highlighted, but that's more my problem than the game's. The core Worms gameplay is still deliciously good.

Detective Grimoire

Ah, finally, we come to a game I can happily recommend. Did you like Contradiction? Great! Give Detective Grimoire a look. No, wait, come back! I promise there are some similarities. Really, I do.

At first blush, Detective Grimoire is a hidden item game where the items just aren't hidden all that well. But when the player can start interviewing witnesses, the game takes on a distinct style not entirely dissimilar to its grandson Contradiction. Interviewees drop clues and tidbits of information, and no one tells you the truth straightaway. The player is gently fed moments when they must piece together clues to get "ah ha!" moments, which allow the player to go back and re-examine witnesses to see if they can catch them in the act.

These elements are all a bit simplistic and laid out for you pretty easily, but this isn't exactly a game aimed at older gamers like myself. That said though, I took a lot of pleasure in the basic format, scouring each screen for items I'd missed (it's pixel hunting, to be sure, but the bright cartoony graphics made it feel at least a bit more interesting), interviewing suspects, and putting together the brief mystery.

Unfortunately, the game is very short, and while there's a "to be continued" screen, there doesn't seem to be any word of an actual sequel coming down the line. That's a bummer. I hope we get a lengthier sequel that manages to retain the heart and charm of Detective Grimoire. Definitely recommend this one to anyone with the Contradiction fever, or who is looking for something a bit more bite-sized to play between big releases.

Completed - Yes.

Time Spent - Something like two hours.

Percentage finished - Steam says I still have three achievements to get. Looks like the game rewards multiple playthroughs.

Play Again? No, but I'd definitely play a sequel.

I suppose that wraps it up for this one. I don't plan on releasing these blogs on a schedule, but stay tuned here for more from my backlog report. And again, all praise to Dan Kempster for coming up with this cool idea. You should definitely read up on his blog and cheer him on.