Video Games

15
Jan
2018
Solomon Rambling Talks About DLC and Patches

Solomon Rambling Talks About DLC and Patches

The First Step of a Semi-Attractive Relationship

 

This video has come two years sooner than expected.  I never intended to enter into the YouTube world until I had developed some sort of meager fan following.  Posting my articles online was a major accomplishment for me.  Before this website, I hadn’t written anything creative for a long time, and when I launched Solomon Rambling, I had fundamentally developed a forum for my writing to be criticized or lauded by people other than me.  Because I was uncertain about publishing my writing (I have a degree in it, for god’s sake), the thought of making videos—something I have never touched—gave me the nervous jitters.

Then I was gifted a video capture card and a microphone, and it felt wasteful to put off recording until I magically developed a spine.  So I spent a week doing test runs, playing with ideas for content, and grappling with the Elgato software.  A week won’t make anyone a professional, but it was enough for me to take the first dive into video.  After seven takes/failures discussing a variety of topics, above is the best I could manage for my first experience.

Even though this video is my child, I can recognize it is an ugly, messy thing.  Here are just a few of its issues:

  1. The video bugs out at the 2:20 mark.
  2. After the 16-minute mark, the in-game sound effects become louder than my commentary.
  3. My ability to talk and play puts the “par” in “subpar.”
  4. I stutter and umm like a heater with faulty wiring.
  5. Jokes are largely absent.

These difficulties will certainly not prevent me from creating videos in the future, and I plan to toss a video out every week.  I have hope that—with time—my skills will improve and speaking will become more natural.  Everyone needs to take a first step.  I may have twisted my ankle from the very start, but I’m fine with limping for a while.

If you have any critiques or comments regarding how to improve my strut, hurl them at me.  Let’s make a video man out of me.

Posted by Solomon Rambling in Video
15
Jan
2018
Solomon Rambles About Burning Food

Solomon Rambles About Burning Food

Overcooked!  Special Edition

An excuse to link to “Too Many Cooks”

My college education had nothing to do with programming, let alone with anything that could earn a reasonable income.  Despite my love for video games, I never took an elective video game design course.  While I spent my college days writing poetry about toilets (no joke, and no, I will not hyperlink to them), I learned zilch about the 1s and the 0s.  Thus, I have absolutely no idea how hard it is to program a game, specifically how to port one to another console.  I still marvel that I can convert Microsoft Word documents into PDFs through a simple dropdown menu.

Overcooked 2

My ignorance does not stop me from expecting flawlessness from ports.  Barring some changes to resolution and other cosmetics, a game should play the same on every system.  Overcooked! Special Edition does not rise to my expectations.  Again, I have no concept of how difficult it is to port a game, but difficulty does not excuse performance issues.  With Overcooked, its ingenuity remains intact, but its sloppy execution on the Nintendo Switch nearly tears it apart.

What is it?

Whereas the Mario Party series ends friendships, Overcooked destroys romantic relationships.  I am told this is a compliment.  The key to ruining a relationship is cooperation, and Overcooked makes you cooperate more than a high school group project.  You and up to three others are in charge of preparing meals in a set period of time.  The more orders you fill, the more points you get, and these points translate into up to three stars at the end of the level.  There is a story involving the end of the world, but this simply gives the game an excuse to throw you and your partners into the most dangerous cooking environments.  Who knew fine dining was so popular in haunted houses, pirate ships, and moving vehicles?

Overcooked 5

The end of the world involves giant meatball monsters, copy/pasted fires, and dark textures.

The actual cooking takes inefficiency to a new level.  In addition to dealing with the hazards of your workplace, you must identify how to best access all of your resources.  Supply crates contain ingredients which often have to be sliced on a cutting board.  The food is then placed in an oven or on a pan where it will cook until it is ready to be combined with other ingredients and sent out as a completed order.  On top of this, you need to clean dishes, prevent any food from burning, and clear counter space for ingredients and other objects.  Cooperation is as much about delegating responsibilities as it is staying out of each other’s way.

Apart from the main story mode, two DLC packs are included as well as a competitive mode.  The DLC packs offer more stages with a jungle or winter holiday theme, and they feel like natural extensions of the main campaign.  The competitive mode, meanwhile, pits two teams of two against each other to see who can attain the top score.  If you have two or three players, whoever does not have a human partner can switch between their two cooks, just as you would if you play the normal stages by yourself.

Overcooked 6

What’s good?

  1. Overcooked is one of the best cooperative experiences on the Switch. Even with four people, there are enough chores to keep everyone panicking.  Although there is a certain pleasure in running a chaotic kitchen, working as a coherent team of cooks provides maximum satisfaction.  Playing with one, two, or three others player does not necessarily reduce the game’s difficulty either because with more players, more points are needed to secure that three-star ending.
  2. Each stage presents a challenging blend of time management and puzzle-solving. Few kitchens offer a simple route from food prep and delivery, so your first attempts will typically see you reviewing your resources and developing a plan.  Then, as you execute the plan, you’ll undoubtedly screw-up at some point, freak out, and spend the rest of the level praying you get that last order in before time runs out.
  3. The gameplay never grows stale, largely in part to the gimmicks and unique layouts featured in the stages. Most levels are inventive enough to incentivize a second and third play-through, and more stages (even on top of the DLC) would have been welcome.

Overcooked 4

What’s bad?

  1. The porting sucks meatballs. Nothing about this game screams that it is too power-hungry for the Switch, so it is baffling why the frame rate fluctuates below 30 fps.  Combine this with loose controls, and picking up a plate becomes more difficult than it should be.  One of my friends could not stand to play the game with me because he found the flow of the gameplay so broken compared to the PC version.
  2. Playing alone is a kitchen nightmare (HA HA HA). Unlike Lovers in a Dangerous Space Time and Death Squared, Overcooked does not provide a control scheme to salvage a single-player experience.  If you are alone, you still have two cooks to control, but you can’t move both at the same time.  Instead, you bop between them, moving them from station to station and consequently creating gameplay jerkier than the framerate.  This problem is present in the competitive mode as well if you don’t have a full team of four players.
  3. The ice levels are straight from a frozen hell. I have played enough ice levels in video games.  We don’t need them anymore, and global warming should erase them forever.  Slippery controls are a flaw in gameplay, not a video game mechanic.  While we’re at it, lava levels should also be ashamed of themselves.  Water levels aren’t present in Overcooked, but screw them, too.
Overcooked 3

Solomon hates this level, but he played it for your sake. Stare at it and recognize his sacrifice.

What’s the verdict?

If you have friends, go buy Overcooked and have a good time yelling at each other for your own mistakes.  If you have a PC or another console, go buy it on that system and enjoy a smoother experience.  If you have no friends and no other system other than a Switch, well…geez…Breath of the Wild is pretty good, right?   As far as Overcooked goes, it’s fun and wacky enough to overcome some of its porting problems.  It is by no means the best the Switch has to offer, but it belongs with the rest of the couch co-op and multiplayer games that have made the Switch a multiplayer godsend. 

Arbitrary Statistics:

Scoring Policy

Posted by Solomon Rambling in Review
08
Jan
2018
Solomon Rambles About Bad Caving

Solomon Rambles About Bad Caving

Spelunker Party!

The Descent Part 3

 How do you convince people to pay for a video game that is already free?  God knows we’re stupid enough to buy bottled water, so how far of a stretch is it to pay money for a free game?  Mom Hid My Game! removed all of its ads and decided that was enough to tack on five bucks.  Levels+: Addictive Puzzle Game not only took out their microtransactions but added a “+” to “Levels,” justifying a $7 price tag.  MUJO decided to just give everyone the middle finger and charge $10 for the Switch version of the free-to-play game while changing nothing, including the in-game microtransactions.

Spelunker Party 1

Spelunker World, meanwhile, has masqueraded onto the Switch eShop as Spelunker Party!  I’m not actually excited for the game, but supposedly some video game companies believe we should be and thus include exclamation marks in their titles.  Punctuation aside, Spelunker Party! makes a few changes to its free-to-play counterpart, including removing the ability to play with up to six people.  Microtransactions are gone, and in their place is a $30 admission fee.  Regardless of the game’s price, if you’re a sucker like me and grabbed the game, you still ended up paying a chunk of change for a free game, one that still reeks of money-grubbing game design.

What is it?

Spelunker Party! is about death and sadness. Your collection of characters is genetically predisposed to die by any kind of outside force, to the point that their parents didn’t think they’d live long enough to need a practical name.  Instead, you get these quality labels:

  • Spelunker, the man who spelunks and whose eyes show the emptiness of his soul
  • Spelunkette, the female version who spelunks but with soul
  • Spelunkette’s Sister, Spelunkette’s blond sister
  • And Dark Spelunker, who supposedly had parents who took one look at him and said, “Wow, this guy looks like an evil piece of shit and like that other guy”

Ignoring their names, they are prone to use up their five lives per level pretty quickly.  Spikes, large boulders, fire, and venomous snakes all logically lead you to a gruesome E-rated death.  Bat guano also delivers a kill shot, presumably due to all the immediate diseases from flying poop.  Then, of course, any fall greater than three feet breaks every damn bone in your brittle body.  This propensity toward death becomes somewhat endearing once you realize this is the Spelunker series’ defining feature.

Spelunker Party 5

You and up to three other players can adventure through over 100 stages, exploring the underground for treasure and collectible artifacts.  The main goal is to reach the end of the cavern, which often requires you to find keys strewn about the stage to reach new checkpoints.  These checkpoints are vital because they replenish your ever-depleting energy reserves while serving as your recall point when you die. If you lose all your lives, your teammates have 30 seconds to backtrack and touch your body back to life.  If everyone dies, your corpses forever rot in their place.  Game over.

Platforming is the key focus of the overall game, and oftentimes, success is based on timing and quick reflexes. You have a few items to aid your trek, such as bombs that clear the road, flares which scare away enemies, a blow dryer which exorcises ghosts, and an animal companion that offers various benefits.  Gear sets also impact your character’s survivability, and new gear becomes unlocked as you collect artifacts or pay a dog to dig up more.  Rinse and repeat all of this and you got yourself a Spelunker Party!

Spelunker Party 4

What’s good?

  1. Playing with multiple people enhances the experience. With a team of four people, collecting keys and progressing through a level feels streamlined and fluid.  If a teammate loses all lives, another player is likely to be around for a quick revive.  It doesn’t matter if you fail as an individual because you have friendship.
  2. There is a wealth of content. If you can ignore the game’s faults, the massive amount of stages and achievements will offer you tens of hours of playtime. If you’re a 100% completionist, you just found the only game you need for the next year.
  3. When the game is fair, it’s fun. A competent hand designed many of the stage layouts; the same cannot be said for whoever placed the hazards throughout the stage. Consequently, when a stage is focused on layout and less on insta-death obstacles, you’re presented with a true platforming challenge.

Spelunker Party 6

What’s bad?

  1. Deaths often feel cheap and luck-based, if they aren’t outright caused by frame rate issues or glitches. Levels are typically split into three to four distinct sections, and by the third section, the number of hazards skyrockets.  The ass in me assumes these difficulty spikes are the result of a microtransaction mindset.  Allow the players to almost complete a stage, then kill them in the final section so that they pay money for extra lives.  Without microtransactions, you still die the same amount; you just have to live with a game over.  Yes, “gitting gud” will reduce deaths, but when a bat shits at random intervals over a time-based platforming section while your energy depletes, I want my luck stat to be better, not my gaming skillz.
  2. If you want to see all the game has to offer, you better have at least two or three dedicated friends. The online community was dead when I bought the game on release day, and I have never found an online party since.  This would be fine if you could access all the game’s content by yourself, but without partners, certain paths and collectibles are inaccessible.
  3. Padding is pervasive. If you just push from Point A to Point B in every stage, you’re in a good mindset.  If you have the slightest bit of hope of collecting everything, prepare to double Spelunker Party!’s(?) content by replaying each stage.  Several collectibles hide behind largely unassuming breakable walls or beyond a large gap with invisible platforms, so collecting these items typically calls for indiscriminate bombing and leaps of faith.  Outside of this, many artifacts are entirely inaccessible without specific gear, so the ability to obtain everything on your first run-through of a stage is near impossible.
Spelunker Party 2

Spelunker Party! also features a compelling story of static images and impeccable grammar.

What’s the verdict?

Spelunker Party! is so frustrating because it had promise.  If the developers took a little more time to curb the free-to-play-but-pay-to-live difficulty, reduce the collect-a-thon focus, and kill the bugs, I could have recommended this claustrophobic adventure.  Instead, these issues have drained me of any motivation to complete anything beyond the main stages, just so I could say I beat the game.  At the end of the day, why pay $30 for this game when you can instead pay nothing and not play this game?

Arbitrary Statistics:

  • Score: 5
  • Time Played: Over 15 hours
  • Number of Players: 1-4
  • Games Like It on Switch: SteamWorld Dig 2, Minecraft

Scoring Policy

Posted by Solomon Rambling in Review
01
Jan
2018
Solomon Rambles About Raving

Solomon Rambles About Raving

Mario + Rabbids:  Kingdom Battle

A Break-Up Letter 

Oh, Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle.  Each week, I select my next review through a random number generator, and for the past three weeks, I have rolled you.  I don’t want to review you.  I’ve specifically rerolled in order to avoid you, but you come back like a boomerang with attachment issues.  It’s not like I don’t like you.  You’re good, great even!  You’re just not my type, and this review is boring for me to write.  It’s a “me, not you” thing.  Really.

Mario and Rabbids 4

But here we are, and I’ve rolled into you again, so let’s just get this over with because you can’t seem to get the hint.  Loads of people sing praises of you, and I’ll do the same, but I never looked forward to playing you.  If I didn’t have a neurotic need to finish every game I own, I would’ve left you long ago.  I’m not particularly fond of your brother, XCOM, either.  You may be the more cheery, funnier version of him, but you still share a lot of his genes.  I enjoyed my time with you, but I’m ready to move on.

Who you are:

You’re unique, I’ll give you that.  You managed to combine the esteemed Mario franchise with the ear-bleeding antics of the Rabbids and create something coherent.  It’s like if Mickey Mouse teamed up with Despicable Me’s minions and birthed something that didn’t drown humanity in a cesspool of shit.  What’s more amazing is that your crossover wasn’t a platformer or minigame version of the Olympics.  No, you created a competent strategy game that retained Mario’s spirit, added the Rabbids’ zaniness, and threw in guns to quench my bloodthirst.

Our dates together focused on saving the Mushroom Kingdom from the SupaMerge, a device that threatened to make everything a Mario/Rabbid fan fiction.  When we played, I took control of Mario and two other characters (Peach, Yoshi, Luigi, or their Rabbid doppelgängers) and overcame legions of Rabbid abominations.  The enemy and I took turns abusing each other, and on my turns, each of my characters could shoot, move, or use a special (be it a status buff or a chance to fire during the enemy’s turn).  Your crazy, kinky side came through when you inserted jumps, dash attacks, and transportation pipes.

Mario and Rabbids 3

Those battles were your most attractive features, but you tried to look tempting in other ways.  You sprinkled in some simple puzzles to appear more intelligent.  You added collectible art and models to seem creative.  After I beat a world, you enticed me to return through additional challenge missions which were fun albeit nothing like your golden years.  You even offered a two-player cooperative mode (and later, a competitive mode) to pretend like you were interested in my friends.

Why you were great:

  1. Despite being a strategist, you were always so energetic and spontaneous. It was rare for a turn to feel bland because my characters could do so much.  Bliss is vamp dashing into a mini boss with Rabbid Luigi, then pushing said enemy with a critical shot, thus activating Mario’s Hero Sight and Luigi’s Steely Stare for up to five more attacks, which then propel the foe out of bounds to die, all while healing your entire team. People who don’t know you will think I’m spouting gibberish, but you and I can treasure these intimate moments.
  2. You had a great sense of humor. You actually made Rabbids funny and endearing even though they’re just hyperactive Rayman rejects.  Rabbid DK remains the pinnacle of all that is good and holy in the world.
  3. You fashioned each playable character with love and care. The eight playable characters were distinct enough to change how I approached a battle.  Peach and Rabbid Mario encouraged high-cost, high-reward blitzkriegs whereas Yoshi and Rabbid Luigi focused on status effects and critical shots.  Admittedly, your obsession with keeping Mario on my team is a little off-putting, but at least he was strong enough to carry his weight.
Mario and Rabbids 1

When you stare at the Rabbid DK, he stares back.

Why you kinda sucked:

  1. You kept repeating yourself. I heard you the first time and the second time and the umpteenth time after tens of hours of gameplay.  Your stages provided some variety, but you kept throwing the same seven enemies at me.  I’ll admit you had a few nuggets of novelty with your boss battles, but even your mini bosses followed patterns similar to the cannon-fodder creatures.  When you wanted to be different or more difficult, you just copied-and-pasted more enemies onto the battlefield.  Talking more doesn’t mean you’re doing more, and that goes for both of us.
  2. Your sense of exploration is terrible. Your world was beautiful, yet you gave me a restricted path to follow. In your mind, “exploration” was either taking a minor detour to a dead end or wildly flinging the camera around to spot a chest behind a rock. To top it all, you robbed Mario of his ability to jump, a cardinal sin in some bible.
  3. It’s obvious that you don’t like me playing with other people. I get it; you’re a jealous person. That’s fine; just don’t pretend like you care about my friends. Your co-op mode is less about cooperation and more about whoever is loud enough to make all of the decisions. Your competitive mode, meanwhile, made me question your sanity. Why not follow the same battle structure you use everywhere else in the game? Why did you think it was a good idea to add item blocks and limit our turns to only three actions? Do you really hate my friends that much?

It’s over.

We were just never the right people for each other. We can still be good friends, but I can’t commit to you the same way strategy fans will. It is remarkable that you even exist in the first place, and I do believe almost everyone should get to know you. You’re just not the one for me. Until your next DLC comes out and we share a regrettable, sweaty, three-day fling in a motel bedroom, this is goodbye, Mario + Rabbids.

Arbitrary Statistics:

  • Score: 8
  • Time Played: Over 35 hours
  • Number of Players: 1-2
  • Games Like It on Switch: Worms W.M.D., TINY METAL

Scoring Policy

Posted by Solomon Rambling in Review
16
Dec
2017
Solomon Rambles About Bricks

Solomon Rambles About Bricks

Lego City:  Undercover

Like Stepping on Mega Bloks

Sometimes you shouldn’t 100% complete a game.  If you stick with just beating the game—doing only what you need to do to reach your happy ending—you walk away from the experience satisfied.  For those who yearn for more, you look to finish all the side quests, collect all the doohickeys, and earn all the achievements.  You get to intimately know the game, and for some games, their positive traits shine more brightly as your romance deepens.  For other games, you’ll find the more you get to know them, the more you discover their ranker sides, their obsessive clinginess, their toenail hoarding tendencies, or their underground tickling torture rooms.

Lego City 4

I should have kept my distance with Lego City Undercover (LCU).  If I had just completed the main story missions, I could have set it aside believing it to be a quirky and fun (albeit shallow and repetitive) game.  Instead, I chose to pursue 100% completion, tasking myself with combing over every inch of Lego City and replaying every damn stage.  After 40+ hours, I achieved the coveted 100% completion, but in doing so, I was baptized in vitriol and hatred.  May Lego City melt to the ground.

What is it?

LCU is Lego Island doing its best impression of Grand Theft Auto.  From the start, you can tool around the entire city, which is riddled with collectibles, side challenges, and buildable structures the same way a hotel room is riddled with no-no yucky stuff.  Because you play as the undercover cop, Chase, you are free to “borrow” anyone’s vehicle for as long as you need it.  Just like police officers do in real life.  And just like real life, almost everything is breakable, so you are free to rampage, reducing various Legos to smaller pieces of Lego.

If you feel more virtuous than that, you can follow the main story mode across 15 chapters to rid the city of crime.  These chapters find Chase transported to self-contained levels which follow his pursuit to capture a convict, Rex, and discover the reason behind said convict’s recent crimes.  Like the main open world, these levels contain sprinklings of platforming and combat along with a heaping dose of kleptomania.

Lego City 3

As you progress through the game, Chase will find new disguises which unlock new abilities that cannot be executed by just any costume.  A robber getup equips you with paint gun.  A farmer’s outfit magically bestows you with a chicken to glide from one point to another.  A construction worker’s clothes allows you to take coffee breaks.  These abilities are necessary to complete tasks littered throughout the game, and if you strive to reach 100% completion, be prepared to revisit every single stage and location to finish all objectives that were previously inaccessible.

What’s good?

  1. The acting is mostly solid, and the writing is entertaining. Pop culture references and absurd humor abound, but it’s endearing how ridiculously PG everything is.  Some of the antics may induce eye-rolling, yet LCU earns its charm through its kiddie jokes and Chase’s overconfident yet clumsy nature.
  2. Lego City offers some fun exploration opportunities. Each district feels distinct from the others, and unique landmarks (tunnels, camping grounds, farms, etc.) pepper the locales with enough frequency to incentivize straying from the beaten path.
  3. Vehicles are worthy collectibles. Although the majority of automobiles you encounter handle similarly, you will come across quirky or stylish ones that offer a change of pace.  Some will enjoy speeding around in a sports car while others will take pleasure in crossing Lego City on a Segway, moving slightly faster than you would have if you had just walked.

Lego City 1

What’s bad?

  1. LCU offers a shallow experience. Combat is little more than button-mashing or waiting to button-mash at the right time.  Platforming rarely poses a challenge because Chase will often steer himself to the next platform automatically.  Even unlocking new costumes changes very little because most costumes simply allow you to press A at a certain location where other outfits can’t.  Lego games have never been paragons of complexity, and LCU doesn’t buck this trend.
  2. Replaying levels and revisiting locations grows tiring. This isn’t an issue for those who just want to beat the main story, but as I stated before, completionists are forced to slog through everything again to find every McGuffin or take a dump on every porch or do whatever the game tells you to do because that’s how you add hours of gameplay to your barebones ditty. Save yourself a headache by not striving for completion, but if you’re that special kind of masochist, have fun visiting every grime-ridden corner of Lego City.
  3. Co-op is a buggy mess. Frame rate drops significantly (just as it does in undocked mode); the game crashes almost every time you play; context-sensitive platforming or actions are unreliable or unresponsive; and car chase sequences are laughably easy because the game renders your pursuers long after you pass their spawn points.  I won’t gripe that co-op mode offers nothing new to LCU because co-op struggles to even replicate the quality of single-player.

Lego City 5

What’s the verdict?

Now that I’ve spat enough bile all over my keyboard, I can recognize my stance on Lego City:  Undercover is comparatively harsh.  Younger gamers should be able to ignore most of the game’s faults because they have yet to feel the apathetic, crushing weight of age.   Hell, even older gamers can probably get a kick out of LCU if they overlook the cooperative mode and set the game aside after completing the final chapter.  However, like an aged ass, I am too curmudgeonly and stubborn to budge from my opinion.  On its surface, LCU is a sufficiently attractive person with a semi-large nose and some noticeable love handles.  However, once you get to know each other a little better, you realize that this person is a god-dawn home-wrecking, soul-sucking bitch.  I mean, holy hell, Cindy.

Arbitrary Statistics:

  • Score:  5.5
  • Time Played:  Over 40 hours
  • Number of Players:  1-2
  • Games Like It on Switch:  Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2, Lego Worlds

Scoring Policy

Posted by Solomon Rambling in Review