ALMOST a new Forgotten Gates release
O Holy Night by Placide Cappeau, music by Adolphe Adam, English translation by John Sullivan Dwight, as performed by Josh Groban
Hi all. Had a happy Thanksgiving? Mine was the usual large family gathering, which is good. I managed to carve out a little time with my brother to have him try out what I've got of Forgotten Gates, which was fun. And speaking of...
I was hoping to be able to report that I'd released a new version of Forgotten Gates with the first ACTUAL STORY QUEST and an introductory cutscene, and I got very close...but when testing what I thought would be the release cut this evening, I ran into a crash in the randomly generated quest after doing the story one. X) Ohhhhh well. I imagine I'll be able to fix it and do the release within a few days...although since I've missed the end-of-month "deadline", I might make a few more little improvements too.
Escape Simulator:
You guessed it, another game from that Escape Room bundle. Escape Simulator is probably the most famous of the bunch -- I've seen ads for it on Steam, and I can't say the same for the rest -- yet I'd say its level of polish isn't quite the highest. The visuals are between Escape from Mystwood Mansion and Escape First Alchemist, a bit simple and cartoonish. There's also very little in the way of story, just environmental implications. You just select a stage, most of them part of a thematic series but with no carryover of items or clues from one to the next, and are dropped in to solve the puzzles.
The main thing that sets Escape Simulator apart from the rest of the games in the bundle is the compactness of the stages. Most of them are roughly square rooms with the puzzles and elements scattered on the walls, floor, and occasionally ceiling. Some of them you could almost just stand in the center of and look around to have the things you need to interact with all within reach. The downside of this is that you don't get to explore much or feel clever for remembering that thing off in another corner of the slowly-expanding game world that could be manipulated by a new object you just found; the upside is you don't get stuck for hours on end. X) In fact, there's a challenge time limit, 15 minutes on most stages, and while I didn't beat that time on over half of the stages, it seldom seemed unreasonable to expect a smart person could manage to beat it on their first try. Seldom. ;)
Finally, it turns out Escape Simulator has the capability for players to create and share their own stages. I haven't looked into how it works and I've only tried one community-made stage, but it's always nice when a game lets players be junior developers, even if most of what gets shared is meh. X)
Not much else to say, really. If you like solving puzzles, Escape Simulator gives you a bunch of clever ones.
Pikmin 4:
It takes me a long time to get through most Switch games because I save them for times when the system's portability comes in handy, mostly during lunch breaks at work. X) I finally got finished with Pikmin 4 this month, which is a relief because I'm looking forward to getting my teeth properly into The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. ;) And of course, there's also Super Mario Bros. Wonder which I've so far only played a few times during parties with family, and eventually I'll want to pick up Princess Peach: Showtime, and Mario & Luigi: Brothership just came out...yeah, I might be a little more liberal in catching up on my Nintendo backlog for a bit. X)
Anyway, as typical for sequels, I'm mostly going to talk about the differences and innovations from the core series. The big one this time is that in addition to commanding pikmin, you have a 'space dog' with you, a large two-legged creature called Oatchi. Oatchi acts as both a fighter and worker worth several pikmin, and as a second playable character which you can control directly -- or even give him orders to carry out on his own, like rounding up loose pikmin or going to a particular spot. On top of that, Oatchi has a variety of special abilities: carrying you and however many pikmin you like, jumping onto short ledges, sniffing out valuables, eventually even swimming so that you can bring non-blue pikmin across bodies of water. Carrying the pikmin comes in especially handy during boss fights, as it means you don't have a cloud of vulnerable pikmin trailing behind you. Oatchi also has a charge attack which will fling any pikmin he's carrying forward when it makes contact, setting them all at once upon the target (assuming none of them fly past, which can happen against certain things).
How about new pikmin types? There are two new ones, as has been the pattern for all the sequels so far, although one of them is sort of outside the standard gameplay, I'll get to that in a bit. The first new type, which you encounter pretty early on, is the ice pikmin. As you'd probably guess, they're capable of freezing foes, either by having enough of them whacking the target or one of them getting munched and causing a brain freeze. X) Frozen targets obviously are a lot safer to attack and they take damage faster, but if they're still frozen when you finish them, they'll turn into nectar for boosting pikmin to full flower instead of becoming a body you can carry back to base to make more pikmin. Ice pikmin also at home in the water, and if you throw enough of them into a particular body of water (the amount needed varies), they'll freeze it and allow you and other pikmin to walk on top.
The other new pikmin type comes up in a special new type of mission: night exploration. Normally the Pikmin games tell you it's too dangerous to be on the planet's surface at night because the large predators become too active and aggressive. Well, it's the same here, but eventually they have you brave the dark to gather a specific resource that's only available then. It's found by defending "glow mounds" from the waves of night predators in a relatively short battle-oriented mission. Most pikmin refuse to come with you on these missions, but the glow mounds themselves provide glow pikmin for you to work with. Glow pikmin are sort of ghostly, and they're immune to ALL the types of elemental damage you normally have to use specific pikmin types to deal with. They'll also teleport straight back to you once they've finished whatever task you've assigned to them (usually carrying a resource back to the glow mound), so you don't have to worry about regrouping so much. Doing night missions gives you glow pikmin seeds which you can pull out during normal gameplay to boost your current party with extra glow pikmin helpers, but I never found a compelling reason to rely on them.
On a cosmetic note, this is the first Pikmin game that has you create your own custom player character, a new member of the Rescue Corps which was sent in response to Captain Olimar's distress signal. The appearance options aren't terribly diverse, but it's fun that you can make your mark at least. I modeled mine after my character Cherry, which felt appropriate both for the portly cuteness of the Pikmin humanoids and the fact that you're literally commanding an army of plants. X)
One more thing: unlike all previous Pikmin titles, there's no overall time limit looming over you to complete the game. You can take as many days of exploring as you like to find everything. That said, there is a sub-game recounting Olimar's time on the planet before the Rescue Corps arrived, and that has the traditional time limit.
Bottom line? Pretty much more of the same, as you'd expect for a sequel. Get it if you like the series.
Click to viewHi all. Had a happy Thanksgiving? Mine was the usual large family gathering, which is good. I managed to carve out a little time with my brother to have him try out what I've got of Forgotten Gates, which was fun. And speaking of...
I was hoping to be able to report that I'd released a new version of Forgotten Gates with the first ACTUAL STORY QUEST and an introductory cutscene, and I got very close...but when testing what I thought would be the release cut this evening, I ran into a crash in the randomly generated quest after doing the story one. X) Ohhhhh well. I imagine I'll be able to fix it and do the release within a few days...although since I've missed the end-of-month "deadline", I might make a few more little improvements too.
Escape Simulator:
You guessed it, another game from that Escape Room bundle. Escape Simulator is probably the most famous of the bunch -- I've seen ads for it on Steam, and I can't say the same for the rest -- yet I'd say its level of polish isn't quite the highest. The visuals are between Escape from Mystwood Mansion and Escape First Alchemist, a bit simple and cartoonish. There's also very little in the way of story, just environmental implications. You just select a stage, most of them part of a thematic series but with no carryover of items or clues from one to the next, and are dropped in to solve the puzzles.
The main thing that sets Escape Simulator apart from the rest of the games in the bundle is the compactness of the stages. Most of them are roughly square rooms with the puzzles and elements scattered on the walls, floor, and occasionally ceiling. Some of them you could almost just stand in the center of and look around to have the things you need to interact with all within reach. The downside of this is that you don't get to explore much or feel clever for remembering that thing off in another corner of the slowly-expanding game world that could be manipulated by a new object you just found; the upside is you don't get stuck for hours on end. X) In fact, there's a challenge time limit, 15 minutes on most stages, and while I didn't beat that time on over half of the stages, it seldom seemed unreasonable to expect a smart person could manage to beat it on their first try. Seldom. ;)
Finally, it turns out Escape Simulator has the capability for players to create and share their own stages. I haven't looked into how it works and I've only tried one community-made stage, but it's always nice when a game lets players be junior developers, even if most of what gets shared is meh. X)
Not much else to say, really. If you like solving puzzles, Escape Simulator gives you a bunch of clever ones.
Pikmin 4:
It takes me a long time to get through most Switch games because I save them for times when the system's portability comes in handy, mostly during lunch breaks at work. X) I finally got finished with Pikmin 4 this month, which is a relief because I'm looking forward to getting my teeth properly into The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. ;) And of course, there's also Super Mario Bros. Wonder which I've so far only played a few times during parties with family, and eventually I'll want to pick up Princess Peach: Showtime, and Mario & Luigi: Brothership just came out...yeah, I might be a little more liberal in catching up on my Nintendo backlog for a bit. X)
Anyway, as typical for sequels, I'm mostly going to talk about the differences and innovations from the core series. The big one this time is that in addition to commanding pikmin, you have a 'space dog' with you, a large two-legged creature called Oatchi. Oatchi acts as both a fighter and worker worth several pikmin, and as a second playable character which you can control directly -- or even give him orders to carry out on his own, like rounding up loose pikmin or going to a particular spot. On top of that, Oatchi has a variety of special abilities: carrying you and however many pikmin you like, jumping onto short ledges, sniffing out valuables, eventually even swimming so that you can bring non-blue pikmin across bodies of water. Carrying the pikmin comes in especially handy during boss fights, as it means you don't have a cloud of vulnerable pikmin trailing behind you. Oatchi also has a charge attack which will fling any pikmin he's carrying forward when it makes contact, setting them all at once upon the target (assuming none of them fly past, which can happen against certain things).
How about new pikmin types? There are two new ones, as has been the pattern for all the sequels so far, although one of them is sort of outside the standard gameplay, I'll get to that in a bit. The first new type, which you encounter pretty early on, is the ice pikmin. As you'd probably guess, they're capable of freezing foes, either by having enough of them whacking the target or one of them getting munched and causing a brain freeze. X) Frozen targets obviously are a lot safer to attack and they take damage faster, but if they're still frozen when you finish them, they'll turn into nectar for boosting pikmin to full flower instead of becoming a body you can carry back to base to make more pikmin. Ice pikmin also at home in the water, and if you throw enough of them into a particular body of water (the amount needed varies), they'll freeze it and allow you and other pikmin to walk on top.
The other new pikmin type comes up in a special new type of mission: night exploration. Normally the Pikmin games tell you it's too dangerous to be on the planet's surface at night because the large predators become too active and aggressive. Well, it's the same here, but eventually they have you brave the dark to gather a specific resource that's only available then. It's found by defending "glow mounds" from the waves of night predators in a relatively short battle-oriented mission. Most pikmin refuse to come with you on these missions, but the glow mounds themselves provide glow pikmin for you to work with. Glow pikmin are sort of ghostly, and they're immune to ALL the types of elemental damage you normally have to use specific pikmin types to deal with. They'll also teleport straight back to you once they've finished whatever task you've assigned to them (usually carrying a resource back to the glow mound), so you don't have to worry about regrouping so much. Doing night missions gives you glow pikmin seeds which you can pull out during normal gameplay to boost your current party with extra glow pikmin helpers, but I never found a compelling reason to rely on them.
On a cosmetic note, this is the first Pikmin game that has you create your own custom player character, a new member of the Rescue Corps which was sent in response to Captain Olimar's distress signal. The appearance options aren't terribly diverse, but it's fun that you can make your mark at least. I modeled mine after my character Cherry, which felt appropriate both for the portly cuteness of the Pikmin humanoids and the fact that you're literally commanding an army of plants. X)
One more thing: unlike all previous Pikmin titles, there's no overall time limit looming over you to complete the game. You can take as many days of exploring as you like to find everything. That said, there is a sub-game recounting Olimar's time on the planet before the Rescue Corps arrived, and that has the traditional time limit.
Bottom line? Pretty much more of the same, as you'd expect for a sequel. Get it if you like the series.