I originally bought this on the PlayStation Vita in 2013, and had given up on actually completing it. I finally beat it on the Steam Deck today. The game is a platformer with sixteen levels over four areas, but apart from the final one each level is randomly generated. It is incredibly difficult, and is happy to kill you within seconds of starting. Each time you die you have to start again with freshly generated levels. You can unlock shortcuts to the later areas as you go by providing items to a man digging tunnels.
This may be the fifth time that I’ve gotten all 120 stars in this game, although it could be more. My brother bought this at release in the US as we happened to be there on holiday at the time. It was just unbelievable at the time, such a leap forward in video games. I really doubt we’ll ever see anything like it again. The last game I played Jumping Flash! only came out the year before and the difference in controls and depth is incredible.
I got the original PlayStation at launch in the UK by going halves with my brother. We got a memory card and Ridge Racer, which I finished the same day. It also came with a demo disk that had an interactive T-Rex, and a demo for Loaded among other games. I think there was a video for WipeOut maybe too.
This was this months pick for the Dystopian Novels Book Club. It is a science fiction novel set in a future where women have been stripped of all rights in the US. Humans have gained contact with multiple alien species, and only a subset of linguist families called The Lines are able to communicate with them. There are a group of women who are creating their own language centred around the female perspective in the hope of freeing themselves.
This is a game where you play as a border guard in 1982 for a fictional Soviet style country. Sat in your station, you call people in one by one and check all of their documents. The rules and requirements of these change quite regularly. You get paid for the amount of people you process, and get fined for mistakes.
This is another game that I played at release but didn’t finish. This time I played the remastered version by Nightdive Studios, which is pretty faithful. It feels like they did a great job cleaning it up but not changing the game in any real way.
I bought this at release, but never finished it. This time I played the remastered version that was released recently. In the original version I think I got kept getting lost, and the new version adds a feature that draws markers in the world to show you were you need to go next. I think that’s a great feature that should get added into lots of old shooters.
I played along with the Retrograde Amnesia podcast, this is the game for series 5. This game was never released in the UK, though I was aware of it at the time. I’d played Xenogears through an emulator and absolutely loved it. I didn’t have a way to play import PS2 games though. Strangely they released Episode 2 here, but it can’t have sold well since they then didn’t release 3.
This was this months pick for the Dystopian Novels Book Club. I really thought I had already read this, but if that’s the case it was long enough ago that I didn’t really remember the details.
I think this might be my favourite Dragon Quest game now, I loved it the whole way through. Usually Dragon Quest games have a fairly thin overarching story, but a great collection of little stories in each town you visit. I think this one still has the second, but they all tie in to a much stronger narrative. The game also has such a wonderful cast of characters, but Sylvando is a standout. He is just a constant source of joy throughout.
This is the Dystopian Novels Book Club pick for this month. I remember thinking that the Netflix film was okay, but very overhyped. I enjoyed the book quite a lot more, but maybe I’m just able to accept it on it’s own terms more easily without the hype.
This was published in 1939, and is set in 1930s Berlin. I’m not sure how much this book is real events and how much is fiction. The main character is the author, although he is mostly just an observer of interesting characters. Each chapter is a different subject, or a diary entry of a different time.
This book was written in a rush and then hastily extended and edited during the disastrous Truss government. It shows in places, reading like a tabloid opinion column and lacking depth. It’s fair enough given how little time they had to write it I guess.
I never got around to finishing the original Resident Evil 3, I think I got really quite far though. I remember the clock tower. From memory I think they’ve changed quite a lot in this remake.
This is a return to the earlier style of books where the plot is only there to ferry you from one joke to the next. The dungeon dimensions don’t really serve much purpose other than to add some “boding” as Gaspode would call it. I guess also to be able to wrap it all up in the end so that Holy Wood doesn’t exist again.