Humble Sales Are Very Dangerous – Part Fifteen

Fortune Summoners: Secret of the Elemental Stone – Arche moves to a new town and starts attending magic school, but needs an elemental stone to do magic and her family can’t afford one, so she goes adventuring to find one. This is a side-scrolling action-rpg with a very “anime” feel, published by the same folks who did Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale. And it…really didn’t work for me. The story is trope-filled and I found it boring, but I could push past that if the gameplay was good and it really wasn’t. The controls are wild and floaty; Arche needs to take out her sword (by button-press) every time she wants to fight (instead of having it out in danger zones like a sensible character); hitboxes are wonky and monsters are way too strong in the early game even in Easy mode. Meanwhile, there’s lots of platforming with those weird floaty jumps and it’s often unclear where you need to drop down and what’s a bottomless pit. I didn’t even get to the magic system, as I found the first dungeon frustrating enough that I wasn’t willing to fight through it. Oh, well.

Questr: Swipe Right For Adventure - This had caught my eye a while ago because it seemed like a cute casual game. The thing is, I’ve never used Tindr (or any other app this is parodying) so I’m sure I’m missing a lot of jokes, the game file is way too huge for what you’re getting (I’m going to guess it’s badly coded), and the actual gameplay loop (swiping right to choose adventurers for your party to go through quests) isn’t actually very good. It feels like there should be a lot more choices, but you only get ~6 swipes (left OR right) to fill a three or four person party. There’s an implication that you should be able to get adventurers to be your friends and join for multiple segments, but friending has a low success rate, they only stay for one more quest, and you can only have one friend at a time. The entire setup feels half-baked, like they threw this together, stopped development and called it good enough. I’m glad I paid less than a dollar for it.

Record of Lodoss War-Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth - A pretty decent Metroidvania that doesn’t require foreknowledge of the anime it’s based on (which is good, because I last watched it in high school and remember basically nothing). The big gimmick is that you have fire and wind spirits that accompany you, and you can swap between them with a button-press, and each comes with both special abilities and immunity to certain attacks. While the puzzles are often clever and the maps are linear but not painfully so, I think my complaints revolve around the lack of ability to grind (most normal enemies give very little XP, so you can’t really level past problem bosses) and the fact that so many of the bosses are humanoid rather than monstrous. Humanoid bosses are consistently the hardest in Castlevania games, and they’re similar here, because they have a lot of varied patterns and are very mobile. And in several places you have double bosses that you can’t save between; the final boss of Chapter 5 was a major speedbump for me because I had such trouble with his first form, and then there was a second form as well. The difficulty ramps up even more after that; the sixth area has long stretches of powerful enemies without save points, but nothing you can grind or buy gives you any real advantage over them. The Invisibility spell, which creates an image that enemies target, is a very clever spell and honestly rather broken; but it’s also the reason I was able to finish the game. So I’ll call this a good game, but hurt by certain design decisions that make it much harder than it needs to be.

Timespinner – Another Metroidvania with heavy rpg elements and a deep plot revolving around time travel; and I really liked this one. I had been upset that I couldn’t do enough grinding in Deedlit; this game lets you gain levels for your character, your weapons, your special attacks, and your familiar. There’s money that’s entirely worth collecting because it lets you buy consumables, armor, and the accessories that give you new abilities; and at a reasonable pace. There’s a quest system with a variety of tasks. The supporting cast all have personalities and react to circumstances. (There are butthurt reviews of people complaining that many of the characters are queer. I think I should start intentionally looking for things that specifically attract people to write those reviews, because they seem to be a mark of things I’ll like.) The map is more open that you’d think and there are clearly cases where I could have gone in one direction but went another way first, and it did me no harm. (I ended up needing a guide to get 100% map because of a few secret rooms I missed; but I found all three items for the best ending by myself first.) The time-stop ability you have has major combat applications, but also periodically comes up a problem-solving/mobility tool, even relatively late in the game. Also, I loved what they did for the easy mode: You just get a free health refill whenever you die. No system changes, you just have effectively infinite health. (It also disables the “beat X boss” achievements, which is half of them, but whatever.) I probably could have managed this on Normal mode in retrospect, but I was more in it for the exploration and I got frustrated by the difficulty curve in Deedlit recently. I will heartily recommend this to Medtroidvania fans.

There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension - A point-and-click puzzle adventure game that would like to make it very pointed known that is absolute is not a game and you should really just leave now. (In a humorous, light-hearted tone with a vaguely Russian accent.) While the major chapters follow the general action of a classic puzzle adventure game and an action-rpg (…and a free2play rpg, and a credits sequence), most of your action is figuring out how to disassemble the interface to solve the puzzles in ridiculous roundabout manners. It gets really meta at the end, but that’s pretty much to be expected. ARR played parts of this with me and, while a little obtuse at times, we found it very entertaining.

Overall: Timespinner is heartily recommended; There Is No Game was also lots of fun. Deedlit is only recommended with reservations.

Game Genie Guy and Assorted SNES Replays

There are a bunch of SNES action games I have fond memories of, but I only have a limited amount of patience and skill for. Some of them I developed actual skills for, back in the day, but a number of them I only beat (and generally replayed) thank to Game Genie and emulator cheat codes. An issue I’ve had with my emulator handhelds (that I feel like I’ve commented on) is that most of the emulators don’t support cheats. PocketSNES, in particular, is an excellent emulator but (at least the version I have) lacks any kind of cheat support.

Enter Game Genie Guy!, a utility that creates a hacked version of the rom with the cheat applied. It doesn’t work for all codes and it doesn’t work for all games (and there are some codes that work fine when applied through SNES-9X but seem to do nothing when applied this way), but it’s a solution for some. In general, setting something to "infinite" tends not to work, but invincibility sometimes does (presumably by not registering hits). Setting a starting value for something like lives or money generally seems to work well. I’ve been experimenting.

Smartball (SNES, Replayed on PocketSNES on RG350) - I can't remember the last time I played this; it's probably been 15 years or more. It was one of the earlier SNES games I got and it still holds up decently as a platformer with some tricks. It's short--16 levels that you can finish in an hour-- but there are a decent number of puzzles and secrets, even if finding them isn't strictly necessary. Among other things I learned while trying to find more information on it: The Japanese version of the game is called Jerry Boy, a play on the L/R confusion because Prince Jerry is transformed into jelly. The Japanese version also actually had cutscenes, interactive town areas, and in-game plot. The story (part of which made it into the English manual, at least) is that Jerry’s brother Tom was tempted by an evil wizard, who cursed Jerry so that Tom could marry Jerry’s fiancée Emi. (There are some entertaining bits we missed out on, including an angel village in the clouds that the evil wizard escaped from, and a group of people trapped in the belly of a whale!) Back in the day, I never did figure out what's up with the random boy in a dead-end room halfway through the game. It turns out he’s an alternate ending to one of the stages that they didn’t fully remove when they localized the game—in the original he’s lost, and rescuing him takes you to a town scene with some free 1-ups. There’s a fan translation of the original version, and there’s a full LP on Youtube of it.

Contra 3: The Alien Wars (SNES, Replayed on PocketSNES on RG350) - Contra, as a series, is the classic example of “NES hard” gameplay—there are bullets and enemies everywhere, the slightest touch kills you and removes your power-ups, and you have very few lives to get through all the stages. This even has a hard mode on top of that, which adds even more enemies and some extra attacks for a couple of bosses. With cheats, so you’re either invincible or have infinite lives (and preferably keep your special weapons when you die), it’s possible to beat that hard mode, and I have fun touristing / massacring my way through it. I’m sure that someone has done it honestly, but that person is not me.

The Legend of the Mystical Ninja (SNES, Replayed on PocketSNES on RG350) – This actually was the first SNES game in the Ganbare Goemon series and one of very few that made it to the states. In our version, Goemon is renamed “Kid Ying” and they try (unsuccessfully) to make it a little more welcoming to American audiences. (We just ended up not being able to tell what was a Japanese reference and what was just general wackiness.) I loved the fact that there were rpg elements; that you can collect money and buy armor, healing foods, extra weapons and special abilities. Also, the third area is a carnival with completely unrelated minigames. For the few times I beat the game, I spent a lot of time grinding in the first two stages. There are nine stages, but I'm not sure I ever beat stage 8 as a kid. (I didn't actually remember what happened after it; it's really long and has some really hard jumping segments. I had to use save states this time around.) I had beaten the final boss, though, because you can use passwords to jump ahead. I remember having a lot of trouble with the jumps in stage 4, too, but I know I eventually got through those without help. The mix of ¾-view areas (with grinding, shops and minigames) and side-view jumping stages is a strength of this game, even though things like needing to buy the pass and the text to advance are just padding. I definitely couldn't remember where most of the secret areas were, which meant I didn't find many extra lives at all. Also, there's definitely a different flavor to the game playing two players rather than one, but for the jumping areas, either you both need to be very good, or one of you needs to be amazing to manage the jumps in piggyback mode. I believe there are fan translations of the sequels; I should really give them a shot.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV – Turtles in Time (SNES, Replayed on PocketSNES on RG350) – A friend noted that this is based on an arcade game, so you can just emulate the arcade version and pump as many virtual quarters in as you need. While I agree that’s an option, my nostalgia is for the SNES game that I played many sessions of (particularly with my cousins at family gatherings; I didn’t own many 2-player simultaneous games). This is such a well-done example of the side-scrolling beat-em-up genre. You have multiple special attacks, including multiple variations on the jumping attack, throwing foot soldiers at the screen, and the insanely-useful “puny god” maneuver, where you smash a foot soldier back and forth and instant-kill anything you hit with him. (The two-button special attack that’s unique to each turtle but costs health really isn’t worth using.) They also get really creative with how the foot soldiers appear on the screen and the variety of weapons they use (the pair of boomerang-using foot soldiers still haunts my nightmares), and also the other enemies and their attacks. Really, it’s a masterful example of the genre and it very much holds up.