(Retro) What have you been playing this week?

[Kit]

More progress with Fusion. Just unlocked the varia suit so I can now go to hot and cold areas of the ship. Had another encounter with the X parasite which was pretty cool. The suits starting to look more like the one I'm familiar with from Prime.

[noobish hat]

Now I'm getting angry.

[danstan21]

The Japanese version of Mario Kart 64 having bought it off noobish earlier this week. Some of the version differences, such as wario and luigi's voices are a bit... weird. Basically though, it's the same game I remember playing as a kid.

Although it sure is boring in single player. Not that that's what I bought it for, but still... the AI is horrifically rubber-bandy. I just played Rainbow Road on 150cc and the first 5m 40s might as well have been pointless because everyone was still immediately behind me (and two dudes edging in front) as I approached the finish line. It was a good time to get triple greens to cement the victory If nothing else, it's reminded me how good Double Dash is, what with all the special weapons, the all cup tour, and the godly rainbow road music.

[noobish hat]

I couldn't stand the game when I first played it because the AI is so ****ty and cheats all the time. For some reason on replaying it recently, I found myself enjoying it a lot more, and found it a lot easier. As soon as you put it on multiplayer though, all the unfair weapons, jumps from 1st to last place, cheating AI etc go from maddeningly frustrating to hilariously chaotic. If you take it too seriously, it's not a great game. I find that it's especially fun if you play it with some kids, since presumably you aren't acting super competetive and trying to beat them, and instead you get to see their glee when, for example, they manage to win the race after being in last place the whole time, or if they come back as a wheely-bomb in Battle Mode and get revenge by blowing you up.

[noobish hat]

I recently completed Picross DS 100% for about the third time, and man does it take forever. I thought I'd finally get round to playing Mario's Picross on the Game Boy, which I bought new from Toys R Us many moons ago, and never really put much effort into. I beat the whole game just now. It really is nowhere near as good as Picross DS. Obviously, with it being on the Game Boy, the completed pictures do not get colourised, so that's a step down, but an expected one. Secondly, the completed pictures do not animate, which is arguably also because of the limitations of the hardware. I doubt it was though. I suspect it was down to laziness. But whatever. You also don't get to see the pictures when you go back to the puzzle selection screen. It doesn't even tell you what the picture was! All you get is a tick. Pretty lame. A lot of the pictures are also pretty poorly drawn, and sometimes don't really look like the thing they're supposed to be.

Ok, all of that I could live with, but the controls are just not as good as in Picross DS, and it has nothing to do with the limitations of the GB. First off, you can drag your chisel (creating a line of filled squares or blanks), but this will erase anything in its path. In Picross DS, if you have a completed line, say, with a few filled squares, you can drag the cursor across that line whilst holding the blank button, and it will fill in the blanks but leave the filled squares as they are. It's incredibly convenient, but on the GB version you can't do this. It's very tiresome to have to stop and start as you put in the blanks, and you always have to be careful not to accidentally delete a filled in square. This is even more bothersome because of the games biggest problem - the controls are incredibly stiff and slow to react. You play Picross by moving the cursor and counting squares. In Mario's Picross this is very frustrating because the game can't move the cursor as fast as you can count in your head, so it all gets confusing and it's easy to overshoot and incur a penalty. Many other blunders occur because the game can't keep up with quick button presses. If you press up and then quickly press A, it will often not register the up, and just chisel the square you're currently on. Of course this leads to more penalties.

What's more annoying though is another simple convenience from the DS version that isn't on the GB, despite it being no problem, technologically. In Picross DS, the game will very handily grey out the clues that you have solved, so you can instantly see what needs adding to any particular row or column. In the Game Boy version, it doesn't do this. Which means if you have an incompleted column that requires something like six 1s, it means you're going to have to count them all yourself every time you check that column. This is easier said than done, especially on a small screen. Think it's easy? Ok, tell me how many 1s are here:

111111111111

Not too simple is it? You probably had to recount, or maybe cover them with your finger as you went along. You have to do that constantly in Mario's Picross because the game doesn't have the courtesy to grey out the ones you don't need to worry about any more.

The game doesn't even have that many puzzles, and they're really not that hard at all. There's an Easy section, then Mushroom Course and Star Course, and finally a Time Trial mode. The biggest grids are only 15 x 15, and there's no 'free' difficulty. 'Free' mode is only available when you play Time Trial.

Overall, it's a decent logic puzzle game for the Game Boy, and a must if you're a fan of the handheld and nonograms, but it really doesn't bear comparing to Picross DS in any area. I'm pretty sure you can even download all the Mario's Picross puzzles for Picross DS anyway (I know you can get the SFC version puzzles at least), so really, there's not much reason to own this.

EDIT: I just realised I've written rather a long post about quite an old game that probably no one knows or cares about or is likely to ever play anyway. But this is my thread and I'll do what I want!

[danstan21]

I read it. I didn't have any interest in Picross before, and unsurprisingly your post hasn't made me develop any.

I couldn't stand the game when I first played it because the AI is so ****ty and cheats all the time. For some reason on replaying it recently, I found myself enjoying it a lot more, and found it a lot easier. As soon as you put it on multiplayer though, all the unfair weapons, jumps from 1st to last place, cheating AI etc go from maddeningly frustrating to hilariously chaotic. If you take it too seriously, it's not a great game. I find that it's especially fun if you play it with some kids, since presumably you aren't acting super competetive and trying to beat them, and instead you get to see their glee when, for example, they manage to win the race after being in last place the whole time, or if they come back as a wheely-bomb in Battle Mode and get revenge by blowing you up.

Yeah, it was always a multiplayer game when I was small and I certainly don't feel any need to change that now lol. It really is quite annoying how the first 2 laps of a race with the AI are just completely pointless - if you're lagging behind, they'll basically wait for you to catch up, and if you're putting everything into it and should be way out in front, they'll just get a massive speed boost and be right behind you.

I'll probably only whip MK64 out when a couple of friends feel inclined to play the Mario Kart Drinking Game™ again.

[danstan21]

Double post - ignore

[Kit]

More Fusion last night. Beat the spider boss which I found to be pretty damn challenging - could do with picking up a few extra health bars. Unlocked the jumping spin which I'm finding a little tricky to get to grips with. Currently at the part where you have to run away from the Samus X parasite while opening doors.

[kyo_244]

EDIT: I just realised I've written rather a long post about quite an old game that probably no one knows or cares about or is likely to ever play anyway. But this is my thread and I'll do what I want!

It's your party so you can cry if you want to

[nem]

EDIT: I just realised I've written rather a long post about quite an old game that probably no one knows or cares about or is likely to ever play anyway. But this is my thread and I'll do what I want!

You're wrong, because I read all of it.

Funnily enough I've been playing this as well. I agree with you on most things -- except the part about greying out numbers. I'm sorry, it's a crutch, always has been, and should be included in the game as an option at most. I'm not stupid, I can count things. Your example is also poor, because the most digits you will have is 7. So

1111111

And speaking of hand holding, my biggest issue with this game is the fact that it will ask you every single ****ing time if I want the game to fill out one line and one row randomly at the start of a puzzle. No Mario, I do not want you to do that, I'm perfectly capable of figuring them out on my own, thank you.

Also, **** you Mario if I accidentally press A when it asks me this very question and I solve the puzzle and it puts a capital H (short for Half-arsed) next to my time. And guess what, that record will stay there for ever. You have separate records for original play-through time and best time.

True story, I deleted my save and started over. I was 75% done with it too.

[noobish hat]

Maybe it's just me then, but even a line of seven 1s is very difficult to count.

I put on Picross 2 today, but I'm pretty sure the battery back up is dead, so that is a ****ter. I've also got a Pokemon Crystal, and some other stuff that needs opening, but I don't have my bloody gamebit screwdriver, so there's nothing to be done (I've tried the old 'melted biro' trick, and it flat out doesn't work). Picross 2 does look interesting though. It's obviously had more effort put into the presentation - you control Mario walking through caves of stone slabs etc, and there are pictures that are made up of 4 15x15 grids. That's a very nice feature, which will get around the limitations of making decent pictures with only 15x15 pixels, but the problem is that all the grids apart from the top left have their clues written on the wrong bloody sides! If these puzzles were in a book, that would make sense, but in a game, when all the clues can disappear once completed, it makes no sense. It's incredibly awkward and jarring to play it this way, after having solved about 500 puzzles, all with the clues along the left and top sides.

I just won Picross 3D though, for a fiver all in, so that will be interesting. I've been wanting to play it ever since it came out. I'd love a copy of Pic Pic for the DS too, but for some reason it hasn't gone down in price

[Kit]

Just made it to the boss you fight in the trash in Metroid Fusion. Really struggling with him as he just seems to randomly jump around the screen and you can only damage him by getting underneath - which is one of those 'give damage to take damage' battles. Read last night this is the hardest boss in the whole game so it looks like I'm going to be seeing the game over screen a few more times!

[aubtin]

I just finished playing through Flower, Sun, and Rain the other day (ds counts as retro right?). I got stuck about half way through this about a year ago and somehow forgot all about it. So glad I went back to it though, genuinely one of the most engaging games I've played in ages.

I loved it so much I'm gonna get killer7, a game that until now somehow didn't appeal to me much, just so I can see Edo Macalister again.

[noobish hat]

Flower, Sun, and Rain is one of the DS games I've been meaning to get recently. Got quite a few in the queue though.

Not really retro, but since I've been talking about Picross lately, I've been playing my newly arrived copy of Picross 3D. I didn't know that it was made by HAL, so that was a nice surprise, seeing as they have made some of my favourite games, including Air Fortress and Earthbound. Naturally, the presentation is fabulous. A lot better than the purely functional presentation of Picross DS.

The game works a little differently to regular picross (not just because it's in 3D). You're actually chiselling the shape out of a solid block, so you never add anything. You have two options for any given block - mark as 'required', or delete. It gets a little more complicated when you have to use 'Slicers' to look inside the block to mark and delete pieces that you can't access from the outside. It's a little different to regular Picross in terms of figuring things out. As far as I can tell, the clues have actually been thought about because you don't get clues for every row and column. This require different thinking than regular picross, and I've found myself coming up short on what to do next a couple of times.

The big problem with the game is if your DS isn't properly callibrated. My DS Lite is now getting on, and the callibration is irreparably knackered. On my last playthrough of Picross DS, I had to switch to D-pad input for the first time, because it's just unplayable with the stylus, given the tiny squares. It just isn't accurate enough. It's a little better on Picross 3D because of the much bigger blocks (which is good, because touch controls are mandatory in this version), but if you're going for 'perfects' on every puzzle, it gets incredibly frustrating very swiftly because a single 'miss' will mess it up for you. It's indescribable, how maddening it is to get a 'miss' when you were totally in the right, but the pile of crap DS had such ****ty touch recognition that it ballsed it up for you and tried to delete the wrong block.

[dataDave]

Just made it to the boss you fight in the trash in Metroid Fusion. Really struggling with him as he just seems to randomly jump around the screen and you can only damage him by getting underneath - which is one of those 'give damage to take damage' battles. Read last night this is the hardest boss in the whole game so it looks like I'm going to be seeing the game over screen a few more times!

This one?



Or this one?