HG101 2021 Game Finish Challenge

[ommadawnyawn2]

"The recent rerelease adds a button to change option modes which I didn't realize the original version doesn't have."

That's a nice change. I don't really play games for the cutscenes, especially not shooters but there's more of a level hazards focus which I also like. At least there's more of it in MUSHA than most previous top down shooters I wanna say, besides Elemental Master and Outzone.

MUSHA has a lot of personality to me, idk. The intro and overall style are great and the music fits what happens in the levels well, like sometimes it gets more intense just as you're facing a mini-boss.
They fleshed out the story side more in Robo Aleste but I found it a bit bland with worse backgrounds, more uneven difficulty and didn't like the music as much. It has some issues with bullets being harder to see and they also changed the drone formations for a not great charge attack and drone shields (which are cool but found them not completely reliable). It does have more level hazards though, one more weapon (a cool homing weapon), multiple endings and some alternate paths through levels. 

That's cool. Super Aleste is nice, just has kind of overly long levels and generic visuals. Aleste 2 (MSX) I found great too; it does has a weird difficulty spike in the first level though where I pretty much had to stick with weapon 0 to make it, and it's less forgiving in general. Would actually recommend easy mode there. 

[dsparil]

If I hasn't been obvious, I've been blowing through some of the NSO Genesis games waiting for Paper Mario to come out today Banjo Kazooie comes out in a few weeks which I've played maybe ten minutes of, so when I'll get to Ys IX is an open question at this point…

Contra: Hard Corps (Genesis/Switch, First Time)

I had always stayed away from this as I'm not a huge fan of Contra in general, and that was a huge mistake! This feels like a mea culpa on the part of Konami for not backing proto-Gunstar Heroes and having the future Treasure team leave as a result. I don't think it's quite as good as GH, but it comes very close. Four different characters with four different weapons and a semi-branching structure are the obvious improvements, but adding in the ability to switch from free and fixed firing modes is a huge boon. I also thought the difficulty was a little more moderate than its reputation seems to be as the slide giving you invincibility takes a lot of the edge off in some places.

I finished in 2:14.

Rating: 9

Ristar (Genesis/Switch, First Time)

This is a game I've always felt somewhat ambivalent towards despite it showing up in so many collections. After finally finishing it, I do like it quite a lot. I think the big problem is that it doesn't quite put it's best foot forward, and it takes a few levels to get to the good stuff. Even the credits sequence is super charming! Only real downside is the final boss being such a gigantic difficulty spike.

I finished in 2:36.

Rating: 9

[personman]

Castlevania Portrait of Ruin (NDS, emulated on 3DS; replay; 21 hours)

I really, really did not like this one back in the day. Mostly for the markedly lighter tone and I found the characters boring to play, plus when this came out I was having a really awful time getting used to college so my memories of it are soured even further. When I got my 3DS modded and was gathering roms I seriously planned on skipping it entirely. Thankfully I resolved that lately I'm going to revisit as much as I can to see what time has done to it (or me I guess you could say). Welp, I've done a complete heel turn on this one.

There is still a bunch of things I don't like about this one and even though I can respect it now much of the tone is pretty grating to me. I get Castlevania is no bastion of art and story telling and all that but the whole thing just reeks of that really annoying hyperactive and silly saturday afternoon anime vibe that seemed to be dominating media at the time. However you can clearly tell they had a lot of heart put into it and enjoyed making it so I can't hate it anymore even if its not my cup of tea. But seriously I hate John and Charlotte so much lol, his walk cycle looks so nonchalant smug and I want to punch him, and Charolette's one trait as a character is... shes a smart girl and that's it. The fact they both wont shut up half the time drives me to leave the sound off most of the time too, which isn't a big loss to me since the music I don't care for either. Like the compositions are good and many have some cool moments (the guitar in the opening area is great) but most of it is just grating to me somehow. I think they were trying to match the energy that Bloodline's soundtrack had which this game is a sequel to but in the end I just find it kind of obnoxious.

It's not just vanity that makes me dislike the characters though, really I just don't find either of them nearly as fun to play as Soma before them. John is functional, he's pretty much a stock Belmont from any CV with some half hearted efforts to give him some technical stuff like Ritcher. His one gimmick is the subweapons you get improve with use which just kinda of incentivizes that you stick with him and neglect Charolette which uh, the whole big feature of this game was having two characters. In fact as the game goes it pretty much unviable to have both of them present which is too bad because I love the idea of having the two of them work in tandem to cover each other and I was looking forward to playing with ways they both could be of use but all it really does is just deprive you of MP. Worse yet Charolette is kind of terrible to play as where she must sit still and be a spell turret in a game that starts to be very fast paced and demand evasion. And sitting still and pressing up and y over and over again isn't terribly fun. Not to mention much of the utility spells she gets would be fun to use, if they ever worked on anything. God I hate that so much.

I won't lie I was starting to have the same feelings as I replayed this but once I got to the later half of the game things started to click and it won me over quite a lot. My biggest complaint about Dawn of Sorrow was the castle was rather dull to look at save for some flourishes here and there. Well here the artist just went ham and frankly this game is goddamn gorgeous with only two of the areas being disappointing. Some I have to share and gush about: 

it may be a palette swap but what a palette it is. It's almost like vapor wave Egypt with a neat 3d SPhinx in the background. Shame that most of the level is underground but for the time you get to see this scene its striking enough to stick with you.

I love night scenes in general and this city here just looks majestic. I happily took a few moments to just sit and look over this screen to enjoy how cozy it looks. The early version of this level, City of Haze deserves a shout out too for the 3d buildings that both stand out yet fit with the background.

 I can't think of a better place to have a boss fight with Legion. Really the entire Nation of Fools level is very striking which seems to me like a circus frozen amidst a bombing in the middle of a city maybe? This does take place during WW2 after all. And then you get to the middle of the map and the background gives that perfect feeling of being at the eye of the storm of something terrible and foreboding, and then Legion shows up and its just perfect. Really the only thing it does is make the later version of this level feel incredibly underwhelming with a really poorly design medusa fight lol. 

And that's just a couple examples. The main castle has so many animated flourishes and memorable little mechanisms compared to Dawn's, it blows it out of the water. What really great is then the quest system take advantage of much of this giving form a function which I just have to say throwing things like little dumb quests to do in games like this is absolutely perfect. Ever since I got into this genre with Super Metroid I was always just dinking around and goofing off so by all means give me silly tasks to do so I can have a purpose behind all of it please. They brought back the variety of items with funky effects that Symphony had as well, maybe even a bit more. 

 You can tell they tried to bite off a bit more than they can chew though because neat of some of these additions are the polish is pretty lacking. For one, the quest system is reliant on having items that you can only get once through playthrough and if that wasn't bad enough you'll be locked out of a good number of quests that are stuck behind completing those specific ones. This may have been done to incentivize people to use the weird shop mode where you can sell stuff to other players but come on guys, that was stupid. There are a ton of easy to find bugs and exploits (never skip the pre fight dialogue with Death for instance) and as I detailed before the main characters themselves are rather undercooked. But despite that I feel the level design, art direction and some of the other mechanics they have in place to encourage replay value overcome the short comings really well. Once you complete the game you can even cap your level at 1 for a real obnoxious challenge... which I'm doing now because I'm completely psychotic. One of the rewards is carrying the Vic Viper from Gradius around, I have to do it lol. And then there's the extra characters which sounds like they got fairly creative with too. Not sure I'll get to them but nice that they're there. 

 Really dramatic change on this one for me and I couldn't be happier. I'm so happy I've decided to do this second pass with games I grew with even if much of the time I'm seeing things in a more critical light its fun to understand them better I feel and its real nice to have that be an overwhelmingly positive thing this time around, ha. I still not sure I'd say I like this one the best of the DS trilogy, and honestly my soft spot for Dawn probably still stands. But now after scoffing at some many people say Portrait was the best of them I now can see what they're saying pretty well. I have a feeling I may like Order of Eclessia just a tiny bit more from what I remember but suppose I'll just have to see. For now though this will be serving me well as I grind sub weapons on my breaks at the hangar and inching through this stinking lvl 1 hard more I locked myself into. 

 Rating: 8

[ZenithianHero]

Graviter (Switch, First Time, 2 hours)

A physics type puzzle game as you manipulate planet size and positioning so a comet's trajectory changes, collecting the game's pawprint item. Simple to learn, even comes with a clean minimal graphic option. The solution often deal with pausing the comet so you adjust the angle from there as well as avoiding moving debris. You have limited amount of pauses, and often pausing a fast moving thing leading to experimenting. This also result in spikes in difficulty, as opposed to having long stretch of hard levels. You can skip a hard level if you like, though.

8/10

[Woody Alien]

Witcheye (first time, PC/Windows, about 3 hours)

Another random cheap game bought during the Steam summer sales. Originally it was a mobile and Switch title so you could play it by swiping the screen, now for the Steam version you have to use the mouse so I took my time to get the hang of it, and now I need to rest my wrist...

You control a witch turned into an eyeball that bounces off surfaces and picks up diamonds and other stuff. Tracing the screen with the mouse moves it around and clicking stops it in midair. There are mid-bosses and bosses too, some of them are rather clever but the rest of the game is nothing special, given that it was a mobile game meant to be played in short bursts. The soundtrack is quite good too, and I like the pixelated graphics, very colorful with multiple parallax levels, reminiscent of Western computer games of the early-mid 90s.

There are unlockable difficulty levels, time attack modes and boss rushes, but I'm not really interested in revisiting it for now.

6.5/10

[spanky]

Super Mario World (SNES via NSO, Replay)

My 3 year old isn't super into video games but he likes to watch me play them occasionally. I thought Super Mario World would be a pretty good option - bright, colorful, fun characters. Plus it scratches a nostalgic itch for me. I was absolutely obsessed with the game after seeing some screens in a magazine. When the SNES launched I distinctly remember walking into the Wal-Mart electronics section and they had a TV with a SNES running the game. This was before they had the demo station I guess. However, there were no controllers plugged in, so the title screen demo just ran over and over again. There was a kid sitting in front of it, slack jawed and moving his fingers like he had a controller in his hand while he watched the demo. I started doing the same thing. We were poor and my parents weren't huge fans of my video game obsession but I eventually did get this as a pack-in for the SNES in Christmas 1992 and boy, what a triumphant childhood moment. Years later my mom told me later what clinched it for her was the fact I went and asked Santa Claus for it. She knew I didn't really believe in Santa anymore (I was 8) but according to her, "you were hedging your bets."

Super Mario World miiight just be the finest Mario game ever made. OK, some of the 3D games, like Odyssey might be better but I think this is the best of the 2D games. I know a lot of people prefer SMB 3 but I think this one just edges it out. When I think of "video game" in the abstract, this is what pops in my head I just love how the game looks, sounds and plays. 

There's not much else I can say about a game that almost everyone has played, but I'll touch on a few things.  The control is perfect and the cape is such a good powerup that I usually don't even bother with fire unless I have to. I also love the evolving overworld concept and the fact the game takes you out of the Mushroom Kingdom. Dinosaur Land feels a bit like a real place rather than the disparate worlds of many other Mario games. The music, where everything is the same melody but different arrangements is a really subtle and cool way of showing off the SNES sound chip - it's not something I even noticed until year's later. The graphics are wonderful as well, characters from the older games are injected with even more personality and the capabilities of the SNES are a bit...restrained? There's something tasteful about it. And of course, the secrets in the game do something that the previous games didn't do - they don't just give you extra lives, power ups, or warp you ahead - they open up alternate paths, essentially giving you more game.

I had no problems playing this on the NSO - I tried playing Yoshi's Island a couple years ago on there and the slight input lag completely threw me off, but I didn't have that problem with this one. My kid enjoyed it too and had a lot of fun giving every new enemy he saw goofy nonsense names.

[dsparil]

Aleste (Master System, First Time)

I ended up liking the original Aleste much more than MUSHA despite it being more generic graphically. It pretty much never lets up to the point that there's quite a bit of slow down especially if you're firing a secondary weapon. Maybe that's intentional like to give you more time to react. Bullets come in two colors which can be destroyed by your secondary weapon only for red bullets and primary or secondary for blue. Along with the slow down, this ends up evening out the difficulty compared to if it was at full speed all the time. As a side note, how is it possible that SMS FM music (technically Mark III) sounds so much better than most of what's on Genesis despite also being FM?

Rating: 7

[🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀]

Stardate 20X6 (Win10, 1st play, 33h35m)

Last DOOM wad of the year. It's made by Ribbiks (again, one of the two guys behind Sunlust), and it's got a magenta theme. Well, lots of browns and metallic greys with magenta highlights.

This is only 7 maps plus a bonus map that I skipped because it sucked. It's kind of Sunlust-y, but the maps are longer than in Sunlust. Despite there only being 7+1 maps compared to Sunlust's 30+2, this still took me about half the time it took me to beat Sunlust. That's not only because the maps are quite long, but also because they can be pretty brutal. The last couple maps are all ~45 minutes long and have very evil final fights, so I was stuck on most maps for a while. Definitely had a lot of fun coming up with strategies and learning each map (they're quite a bit more non-linear/complex than something like Sunlust). There's an even more difficult sequel out, but it has a pretty different style of level design.

Rating: 9/10

[Apollo Chungus]

Adventure Time: Hey Ice King! Why'd You Steal Our Garbage?!! (3DS; First Time; 3 hours 23 minutes)

WayForward's a developer I've never really been that keen on. I've played quite a few games by them, but while I can appreciate that they're well-made games with lovely visuals, they haven't done anything for me. I bring this all up to say that after playing their first Adventure Time game, I've finally found a game of theirs that I like.

This is a straightforward action platformer very much out of the late 80s, swapping between a top-down overworld and side-scrolling stages like in Zelda II or Rygar on the NES. There's plenty of exploration to be done, either finding items to upgrade your stats or doing one of many mandatory fetch quests. I didn't really have a problem with this as the breezy pace makes this go by quickly, and the conversations you have with many of the show's characters are quite amusing. (The conversation that enables Jake to turn into a bridge is hilarious.) But it can often feel like WayForward only had time to make so much of a game, and padded it out with these quests.

It's fairly easy, I suppose, but that suited me down to the ground on this occasion. It was nice just going through levels, seeing the very well animated characters and listening to the awesome soundtrack by Jake Kaufman. ( I ain't really a Kaufman fan, but he does a stellar job here.) Really chuffed to play a WF game I enjoyed, after so many years of being ambivalent towards their work.

Is Lupin Still Flirting? (Windows; First Time; 1 hour)

A short visual novel based on the Lupin III series, designed by AlexisRoyce, Tsushi, and Camden Dawn for the NaNoRenO 2021 game jam. Lupin's been caught by Zenigata, stuck in a train carriage with countless handcuffs on him. His only way out, as far as he can see, is to flirt outrageously with Zenigata until he can get the handcuff keys off him or at least pass enough time to be rescued by Jigen or Goemon. This is very much a game for the fans (particularly for those who like shipping Lupin with the other male characters), but it's written quite well - I could easily hear the characters saying most of these lines. I'm also very fond of the artwork; really lovely use of watercolours and the artstyle looks enough like Lupin while having its own style. The music is also quite lovely, with appropriate choices that help the pre-composed tracks feel cohesive in tone and style.

There's four endings, which I managed to get as the game is actually quite short: one session takes about 20 minutes in total, and as it's made in the RenPy engine, you can skip through the text you've already seen at turbo speed. Quite a cute and neat game, and I'd recommend giving it a look if you're a Lupin fan: alexisroyce.itch.io/is-lupin-still-flirting

[Woody Alien]

Shin Megami Tensei: Synchronicity Prologue (PC Windows, first time, about 3 hours?)

While everyone is busy with Shin Megami Tensei V, I played this short free title that was released as a prologue for SMT: Strange Journey Redux.

I must confess that I never played any of the SMT games, either of the main series or the spin-offs, excluding the very beginning of Devil Survivor. While I love the artworks, and I was fairly into learning about world mythologies and legends, those games always seemed impenetrable to me, too complex, difficult and frustrating. The little I know about them comes mostly from the HG101 books and articles, and a few other sources.

This game is a 2D pixelated side-scroller (almost)metroidvania made by Ladybug Team, the same ones behind the Record of Lodoss War side-scroller and the Touhou metroidvania (both games that I'd like to play, even though I never liked Touhou), but the game it reminds me of the most is Pharaoh Rebirth. It's as good as that one and it doesn't even have that goddamn jeep level!

You control both Jack Frost and Jack Lantern/Pyro Jack and need to switch between them in order to use their different abilities and deal the appropriate elemental damage to other demons, and also to absorb that damage since there are some hazards similar to bullet hell games, and you need to rapidly switch characters a la Ikaruga! Basically there are all the core SMT trappings in the context of a small metroidvania: elemental attacks, moon phases, demons from all over the world, the same currency, same plot of people interfacing with demons through computers etc. The graphics are quite good (and the various "chibi" demons are fairly adorable), the soundtrack kicks ass, controls are excellent, the length and challenge level just right for a free game, the story mostly holds (remember that it is just a prologue game) and there's several secret stuff: I didn't manage to find everything (I'm at 90%) or get the good ending either!

Maybe the vote I'm giving it is too high but, for an unassuming short free game published almost without any fanfare it is really quite polished and fun, and it would be nice to see a commercial version with more areas and stuff in it!

9/10

[ZenithianHero]

Resident Evil 0 (PS4, first time, about 13 hours)

Second game on my Resident Evil tour, resuming for next year's Finish Challenge.
RE0 has the dual protagonist hook, exploring and fighting in tandem. The concept is cool, offered plenty of moments to split up to solve puzzle and open up the maps. This entry ditches the storage box in favor of dropping items in any room. There is also a handy ID mechanic where you can keep track of item placement. The inventory management is more useful than my time with RE1 in some ways but if you don't drop items on the right spot you may have trouble picking them up again. Also an item like hookshot takes two slots and had to backtrack for. Juggling key items proven to eat up some of my time in general.

The campaign itself was alright. It had some annoying new enemies like the leech zombies and the monkeys. The game's bosses were also not great. I was so ill-prepared for the Bat. The puzzles were a bit challenging. I spend what could be an hour of that time on the crate pushing puzzle. I don't know chess, and my luck it was a puzzle with a trap (like the only one in the game?!).

Cannot say the story was interesting to me. Something about leeches and betrayal among Umbrella and the labs. I did like Rebecca and Billy as characters.

7/10

[dsparil]

Super Aleste (SNES, First Time)

Pretty fun with a good variety of bosses and nice music. It makes good use of various SNES graphical features even if it isn't able to throw as much at you at once like even the original Aleste. This is something like the eighth Aleste game so there's unsurprisingly some mechanical changes. All the various secondary weapons are now your only weapons and they go from level 0 to level 6 with most having multiple firing modes. The dual bullet mechanic is still around, but not every weapon can destroy red bullets. This makes the laser particularly useful as it has a homing mode with bullet destroying lasers and a non-homing mode that covers a wide area of the screen. It's a pretty easy game on the default difficulty, but it's still fun. Getting hit knocks 4 levels off your weapon level so you can take a hit or two before dying, and upgrades are fairly plentiful. Some of the stages are a bit too long, but others are really short. It would have been nice to have the lengths more even.

I finished in 01:17:06.

Rating: 8

[Apollo Chungus]

I had a dream where I played Sonic Frontiers and it played basically like Sonic Robo Blast 2 but with an open world, so I got a hankering to play some mods.

Sonic Robo Blast 2: A Very ATS Christmas (Windows; First Time; 10 minutes)

This is a short map pack made by RoyKirbs in tribute to a guy on YouTube named raocow, who has made gameplay videos for over a decade and gained a cult following for it. I've never heard of him until now, so I can't tell you anything more, but this map pack doesn't require any knowledge to enjoy it. Just a silly but sincere romp where Sonic delivers Christmas presents, with some really nicely drawn cutscene artwork and a decent use of music. Not much else to say beyond it's neat and I like it: mb.srb2.org/addons/a-very-ats-christmas.3474/

Sonic Robo Blast 2: Unofficial Level Design Collab: Summer 2021 (Windows; First Time; 42 minutes)

One of the long-running traditions of the SRB2 community is the Official Level Design Contest, where people submit levels they either designed for this contest or other projects for feedback. Some of the bonus levels featured in the game even began as maps featured in the contest, such as Frozen Hillside Zone, Pipe Towers Zone, and Haunted Heights Zone. The contest used to be held fairly regularly - every couple of months from 2005 to 2015 - but it stopped being held for about five years, and is now being held every six months to let people make the best possible maps.

To make up for its absence, an unofficial variant was conceptualized by MellowJacket, and then put together by Apollyon and Othius. Since then, the plan has to been to have a new collab happen every three months. I did play through the three existing collabs for Spring 2020, Summer 2021 and Autumn 2021, but Summer 2021 was the only one I beat because it didn't have levels that were conceptually interesting but a pain in the arse to play. The nice thing about these packs is that there isn't a set order to play levels, so you can skip the ones you dislike, but I feel it's fair to actually finish all of them for me to count them on here. Here's a link to the Summer pack: mb.srb2.org/addons/v1-4-unofficial-level-design-collab-summer-2021.3136/

[dsparil]

Zanac (NES, First Time)

I probably knew at one point that Aleste is a follow up to Zanac, but I'm a little shocked that Aleste might as well have Zanac 2 crossed off on title screen. There's a few minor differences, but they play nearly the same. One big difference is that the circling weapon (#3) is super overpowered in this game. With it, you can literally just stay in one place for with fire button held down for very large chunks of the game! I only ever ran out of ammo for it in one later level that's very skimpy with weapon drops in general. The version in Aleste doesn't last nearly as long, the one in MUSHA doesn't seem as powerful and the version in Super Aleste is stationary. It's probably a more difficult game with other weapons, but it's weird that there would be one that drains nearly all of it. That aside, it's still a fairly generic game with way too much boring turret destructions for bosses and mini-bosses.

I finished in 01:11:04.

Rating: 6

[🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀]

Some games I forgot about but did beat this year...

Contra (NES, replay, 25m?)

This is a little cheaper/memorization-reliant as I remember, but it's still one of my favorite NES games for sure. It took me a while to get the hang of stages 2 and 4 again.

Rating: 9/10

Streets of Rage 4 (NSW, replay, 1h55m)

Arcade - Estel
Replayed this when the new stuff came out earlier this year. I'm still a bit dissapointed by the endless mode, as it's got some balancing issues, but playing through the main game is always a good time. Estel's pretty fun to play. I've played it several times now so nothing interesting to say about it. I did notice this time around that there's an Ash cameo/reference during the boss battle against Nora, which I found a bit surprising given the character's controversial nature.

Rating: 9/10

Sonic Mania (NSW, replay, 3h15m or something? IDK)

Sonic - Mania mode
Thought to myself before replaying this: maybe I should try and go for all the giant rings this time. That'll give me a little more incentive to look around the stages. That incentive usually isn't really given in 2D Sonic games (except for Sonic CD, which is why it's one of the best ones). I thought there were one or two per stage, based on the answer you get when you google "How many giant rings in Sonic Mania", which is 32, but there's actually 63 I think.

It doesn't matter because by Green Hill Zone Act 2 I already forgot I was doing all the rings...

Rating: 8.5/10