Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

@themcnoisy Harsh but absolutely true! VF2 is both an eyesore and a brainsore to play. I can only imagine how awful Virtua Fighter 1 looks 😬

Great reviews @Th3solution @mookysam @RogerRoger ME is waiting for me at father's Day Yeees! P5 was fantastic and after this review I'm definitely buying Royal! Bound is a game I've always skirted around but I'm intrigued for sure.

Great writing, information and skill well played.

@nessisonett Interesting, I may have a butchers at VF1.

Game: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Played on: Nintendo Switch

The year is 2017. The day is march 3rd. The time is 00:30. You've just picked up your switch from a midnight launch and you turn it on. You then install the best game on the console at that point. Vroom in the night sky The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. You turn on the game and your jaw drops. I wasn't one of those people as I got the game a year after it was released but my reaction to the game was very similar to what I just described. Here is my review of my 4th favourite game of all time, Breath of the Wild.

The Story
Starting off with the thing I most dislike about the game, the story. Link (yes, this is THE link, you don't choose his name) wakes up in this cave called the shrine of resurrection. You're told by this old man who is revealed to be the ghost of the former king of Hyrule, King Rhoam, that you were asleep because of a big battle against Calamity Ganon who has taken over Hyrule Castle. Your mission is to free these big robot animals called the divine beasts, gain the powers of the beasts pilots, the champions and face ganon in Hyrule castle. The reason I hate this story is because it does a lot of implying. You might talk to an NPC and they'll say "Woah! You're the hero from 100 years ago! It was so cool when you did that thing with the thing!" You see what I mean? There are cutscenes that kinda explain what happened but my problem is that clears throat THEY'RE OPTIONAL! THEY MADE THE STORY OPTIONAL! Even then, it doesn't even tell you what happened in the battle against Ganon 100 years ago! They tell you what happened beforehand!

The gameplay
This is the first open world Zelda game and in my opinion, this should be the direction the series goes in the future. I could never get into the older Zeldas but for some reason, this one really gripped me. You can climb literally anything if you have a lot of stamina and defeat any enemy if you have good weapons and a lot of health. You find weapons across the map and they can range from a Tree Branch to the ultra powerful Lynel Crusher. One problem is, to stop you from using one weapon religiously, the weapons break. A lot of people framed this as a bad thing but I have to vehemently disagree with that. It forces you to plan and think of creative solutions when a weapon breaks. It’s kinda like Skyrim except the horses can’t climb mountains. This game plays so well. From climbing cliffs that seemed unclimbable to perfectly dodging a Lynel's attacks to deflecting a laser right back into a guardian's stupid one eyed face. It all feels luscious.

The music
Usually in Zelda games, the music is really memorable and epic but botw said “No.” The music is only saved for battles, story moments and dungeons. Sometimes when you’re walking around in the overworld, little piano tunes kick in. The reason that botw has very little music is because in the world of the game, everyone’s dead. This means that the music is less epic and more slow and piano heavy. I actually really like this change.

The graphics
I could lie and say that this game runs terribly but I won’t. The game runs at an almost solid 30fps at 900p. This might be a turn-off for some people but the frame rate only really dips when there are a lot of effects on screen like in the Korok Forest. The game also has a really nice cell shaded art style. It looks like Skyward Sword and Wind Waker had a baby and some locals in the game are breathtaking.

Extra little bits that I couldn’t really fit into any of my usual categories so I’m just writing them here so yeah
This is the first Zelda game to have full voice acting. A lot of people are torn on this choice (including me). Some characters are really good like Revali who sounds just as cocky and arrogant as he looks. Some characters aren’t so lucky. Specifically Zelda. Her voice actress says every line so dramatically and she sounds like an american trying to do an accent that sounds somewhat like a British accent but not quite. It just doesn’t sound good. No hate for the actress, she tried her best.

Conclusion
Overall, while there are a few minor problems, this game is still a masterpiece. It's a piece of art. The amount of work that was put into making this game is astounding. Is it my favourite game on the switch? No, but it's the second best!

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
10/10 Outstanding
Pros
Drop dead gorgeous graphics
Fun combat system
Massive world that’s fun to explore
Lots of secrets to discover

Cons
Poorly executed story
So, so voice acting

this took me way too long to write and I don't know why

@Jackpaza0508 A lot of people dislike Zelda's english va, and I can kinda see it, but I still liked her interpretation of the role. Then again, as a fellow American, fake foreign accents don't bother me nearly as much as they bother a lot of non-Americans.

As for the story, it's another contentious aspect of the game. I actually really like how it tethered the main narrative to optional exploration missions, as it leans into the game's focus on design freedom. In general, I tend to think that story-telling-heavy open world games, like The Witcher 3, would often be better off as more linear experiences, instead of spacing out the story bits that everyone plays for with a ton of padding.

I agree it was an impressive effort by Nintendo. With that said, it's not a trick they can repeat any time soon. It'll be interesting to see if Nintendo can improve on their game design with subsequent Zelda sequels, or if future entries will be swallowed by BotW's shadow in much the same way past 3D Zeldas were often unfavorably compared to Ocarina of Time.

Definitely your best contribution thus far!

I'm guessing BotW2 is high up on your list of upcoming games?

@themcnoisy A lot of older 3D games continue to shine despite the increasingly archaic nature of their design, but I feel like old fighting games, like old racing games, are more susceptible to just becoming... outdated. Interesting purely from a historical point of view, or for a brief nostalgia trip for increasingly old gamers who probably loved them as children.

Annual sports series like Madden are the worst, though, IMO. They become outdated, unloved trash the moment a new entry comes out.

@RogerRoger it's in preparation for VF5 remake. VF5 is great, well worth a go although it was 2 generations back. The latest Soul Calibur and Tekken games are better for sure so looking forward to seeing what the Yakuza team have added.

@RogerRoger @Ralizah Glad you guys enjoyed my review! I was gonna review Mario Odyssey but I finished BOTW very recently and thought I'd give it a review. Yeah, the BOTW sequel is very high on my anticipated games list

@themcnoisy @RogerRoger Thanks for reading, guys. It was an enjoyable game and could have been great if it just had a little more meat on the bone. In the end it was a tad shallow. But still completely worth a few hours just to have enjoyed the premise.

So I've just written my best review. The one that has taken me the longest out of every game I've ever reviewed. Where can I go from here? I could go from my 4th favourite to my 3rd favourite game and review Spider-Man 2018. Nah, that'll take too long....

Ah. I've got it.

Game: Peppa Pig: The Game
Played on: Wii

I've spent most of my time reviewing a good game, why don't I review an abysmal one instead! Recently, I was looking through my wii game collection and found this... thing. I had this game when I was very young and remembered liking it. However, my tastes have changed very much. So here's my review of one of the worst games I've ever played. Peppa. Bloody. Pig.

The Gameplay
Peppa Pig: The game is a minigame collection for very young children. It has games such as "Pop bubbles" "Flip pancakes" "Build snowman" "Hide and seek" "Colouring" and "Make a parrot say things". Almost every time you play one of these games, when you press the A button, the game counts the button press but the action on screen doesn't happen until a few seconds later. The only fun game on this... thing is happy mrs chicken. In this game, you spam the A button to make a chicken lay eggs while a fart noise plays every time she lays one. This is the only good one as the controls are never delayed. The worst game has to be the pancake flipper. In the game, you pour pancake mix into a pan, flip the pancake, land it on the pan and put it on the plate. This would be fine but sometimes, you flip the pancake and it goes flying while sometimes, you flip it and it barely goes anywhere! Also, the pancakes burn if you don't flip them and for some children, it might be hard to know when a pancake is ready since toddlers are dumb. In the bubbles game, peppa and George are naked in a bath and it made me very uncomfortable when I first saw it.

The Graphics
This game released in 2009 and since it's the late 2000s, you'd think it would be in widescreen, right? WRONG. It's in 4:3. That's probably because this is actually a port of a DS game. The animations are also very rigid and stiff. The show's animation is actually fine so it's a shame they didn't just get the animators from the show to make the cutscenes. Seriously, look up a longplay of the game and look at the animations.

The music
All the music in this game is terrible. Every song is just a terrible 10 second midi loop and when you play the games for a while, the songs become annoying to the point where you swear you're going insane.

Conclusion
Did this review go quickly? It should have as there really isn't much I can say about this game. Overall, Peppa Pig: The Game is a terrible DS port and just a terrible game.

Pros
Happy Mrs. Chicken is kinda fun?

Cons
Grating music
Noticable control delay
Terrible, rigid animations
The pancake game. Just, the pancake game.

⭐⭐☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
2/10 Terrible

why did I write this LOL

@RogerRoger Wonderful ME2 review and very thought provoking. Reading it made me analyze my memories of the game, which I think now in retrospect after seeing your take, was highly tainted by not having played the first game before it. In fact I’ve never played the first game. And it might have been my first BioWare game ever, not counting first Dragon Age Origins which I jumped off after the first couple hours. So I think my adoration for ME2 may have been the novelty of the game, despite the fact that the ornamentation of narrative choice might have actually been more illusion than I realized at the time. Coming off of a diet of more narratively linear games, I don’t think the extent of funneling through to one basic set of storyline and social relationships was clear to me at the time.

I have fond memories of the game. If I ever get around to it, I’ll definitely be playing ME1 first and I’ll have the experience of narrative choice games like Detroit Become Human, Until Dawn, and Persona 5 to compare branching storyline features (or lack therof). Look forward to hearing how you get along with the ‘piece de resistance’ of ME3. Are you going to roll straight into it or do you have ME burn-out yet?

@Jackpaza0508 The Nintendo Wii was filled with... unique experiences. Although, honestly, I'd be more surprised if a Peppa Pig game turned out to be competent at all, lol.

@RogerRoger Wonderful takedown. I haven't played it since it first came out, but you hit on almost every element I hated about this title: the dumbed down RPG mechanics, the more shootery game design, the weirdly unsatisfying structure that forces you to play it in a certain way, the lame resource-mining minigame, etc. It's good to hear about the DLC, though! I've never played a single piece of DLC from this series. Your relationship with this title reminds me a bit of my own relationship to Shantae: Half-Genie Hero, where I strongly disliked elements of the base game but felt like the excellent post-launch DLC support at least partially redeemed it, in some respects.

The artificial player choice issue is one that plagues a lot of games from this era, IMO. And, yeah, when only one sets of choices allows you to see broad swaths of the third game, there really only is one set of correct choices to adopt, which makes that element of the game worthless.

It's nice to hear someone else point out the clear issues with this game, because there was a long time where you couldn't do that without being considered a sort of contrarian. Hell, the orthodoxy, even today, is that ME2 is the true classic of the trilogy, surrounded by two lesser experiences.

I'll be sure to keep your recommendation about which DLC to play last in mind when I get around to this collection.

Amazing job with the review, as always. It sounds like you really love ME3. Maybe I missed out by skipping out on that game when this one burned me.

@RogerRoger I certainly did play ME3, and enjoyed it just fine. I even spent a little time with the online multiplayer, if I recall correctly.

My ME3 experience was also positive and I never quite understood the backlash about the ending. Perhaps since I hadn’t seen narrative choice and alternative endings done extravagantly before then i wasn’t disappointed. I always meant to go back for the DLC (The Citadel, is it called?) which was BioWare’s own great redemption story in how well they recaptured the good graces of the fandom who were bitter about the ending.

Of course, unfortunately, those good graces were quickly dashed to pieces when Andromeda underwhelmed. They’re still working on their redemption arc part II.

But yes, I liked ME3, though I never quite felt the awe and wonder that I did with ME2. But, as you say, there is a ‘first exposure’ bias that might explain it. I’m sure when I read your ME3 review then I’ll be swayed to reconsider the accuracy of my rose-tinted memories and elevate ME3’s status in my mind.

@RogerRoger Thanks for the feedback man! Glad you enjoyed my review of peppa pig: the... "thing." I definitely enjoyed writing it! Great review of ME2 as well! However, despite my profile picture, I've never played a mass effect game so I can't agree or disagree with any opinions haha.

Btw, I'm working on a Spider-Man review! Stay tuned for that!

@RogerRoger I don't have any plans to play ME since it just doesn't really interest me much. Someone posted the gif of the head spin in the comments of the legendary edition reveal and I thought it was really damn funny so I made it my profile picture. Btw, the spidey review won't be coming for a few weeks since I have a lot more to say about it than botw.

Nintendo Switch Online and Its Exclusive Free-to-Play Battle Royale Games

Nintendo Switch Online, Nintendo's paid online service for the Nintendo Switch, has arguably gotten off to a rocky start and encountered a lot of pushback from players online who complain about the lack of features that have been standard for these services since Xbox Live launched back in the increasingly distant past of 2002 (god, I feel old), the spotty implementation of cloud saves (they work great for 99% of games, but, for whatever reason, a small handful of Nintendo games that would benefit most from cloud saving don't support the feature; go figure), and the sparse selection of retro games they've made available to subscribers as an alternative to the sort of modern-gen offerings players enjoy via PS+ and Xbox Live Gold. Nintendo has had a few cool week-long trials for select third party games, but, otherwise, there wasn't a lot of carrot at the end of that stick.

Enter our first game: Tetris 99.

It's probably fair to say that when Tetris 99 was first revealed in a Nintendo Direct in very early 2019, the internet reacted with almost universal bemusement. Many saw it as the 'jump the shark' moment for the battle royale craze when Tetris, of all games, was getting in on the act. Yet, at the same time, it made a weird sort of sense: of course it would be a Nintendo console that got an exclusive battle royale version of Tetris. When a lot of us downloaded the game initially, I imagine most of us expected we'd play it a few times and then set it down, never to return. Tetris is good fun, but it's also Tetris. How much more blood could you possibly wring from that stone? (a similar mindset prevailed, I think, when the transcendent Tetris Effect was first revealed during an E3 preshow)

That... didn't happen. For a couple of reasons.

First is the design of the game itself. Now, the basics of competitive Tetris, where you clear lines in order to pile garbage blocks on your opponent's screen and force their pile to the top of the screen, are old hat at this point and go back, at least, to Super Tetris 3 on the Super Famicom. That is the basic strategy of Tetris 99 as well, but there are also a few strategic nuances to it that make it a more engaging experience overall. So, per the name, you're playing with 99 other people in your matches (generally; sometimes a game seems to start with a few empty slots if it can't find unengaged players quickly enough). You CAN manually target individual players, but this is tedious and wastes time. Instead, Tetris 99 uses the system's right stick to flip between a few different target pre-sets: you can hit people randomly, which often isn't a bad idea at the start of the game if nobody is targeting you, as you gain attack bonuses when you're targeted by multiple people (which can open up a risky strategy where you deliberately draw heat to buff your offensive capabilities before going to town on a target). You can choose to target people who are targeting you, with the idea being that you can take the heat off yourself if you pile junk on them faster than they can pile it on you. You can target players with the most badges, which is risky, but I'll explain what badges are in a moment. And, most usefully, you can target players who are closest to dying in order to push them over the edge.

Now why would you want to be the one to push random players over the edge? This is where badges come in, and it's how Tetris 99 incentivizes more aggressive play. If you're the one whose junk kills a player, you're awarded with badges (well, you earn a fraction of a badge when you kill a player, and killing multiple players will add up to a full badge; they build up to a maximum of four, I believe), and the more badges you have, the more junk blocks you'll be able to send over to your opponent's side. If you plan on winning a game, you'll inevitably be facing off at the end against a small number of similarly skilled killers who have full, or close to full, badges, and you'll only be able to win if you're able to give as well as you're getting from them. This strategy isn't without risk, though, because, remember, targetting players with badges is also a preset, and your opponents will often try and nip the risk you represent in the bud by taking you out before you collect too many badges. But if you play it safe and avoid earning badges early on, and you're up against a player with multiple badges at the end, then you're at a structural disadvantage to a most likely very skilled opponent.

How you clear lines also has a level of strategy to it, because, as garbage piles up in the queue, it's unable to release on you if you keep clearing lines, and will even go down gradually. So while it's tempting to structure your grid so that you only get full Tetris line clears with long pieces, the risk here is that, if you're targeted by an aggressive opponent, you won't be able to adequately defend against their onslaught thanks to your manufactured reliance on a single tetrimino. So you'll want to learn how to T-spin and vary up the composition of your pile a bit in order to be able to maximize both your offensive and defensive capabilities. It's also beneficial if you build up combos of line clears in order to overwhelm your targets with junk.

This is what makes Tetris 99 work so well, because every choice you make is subject to risk-and-reward dynamics that make it where you're never truly safe, and there are upsides and downsides to both aggressive and defensive play. Of course, even in the free version, there's more to Tetris 99 than the simple battle royale mode. There's also a team battle mode, where you pick a color/element and then fight with your comrades to take down your other opponents, although I found this mode to be a bit more simple than the battle royale mode. There is also a mode that only unlocks once you achieve Tetris Maximus by defeating everyone else in one of your games. This mode is a variant of the battle royale mode, but you only play with other people who have also achieved the rank of Tetris Maximus at least once. So, basically, it's a battle royale mode where you're only up against other skilled players, which is nice for the people who are excellent at the game and consistently outlive their opponents on the normal battlefield.

The second reason is the solid post-launch support the game enjoyed. Now, online events are obviously nothing new for battle royale titles, but the eventual implementation was, I think, pretty brilliant, and, let's be real, most of us expected them to quickly abandon the game, because it was a weird gimmick meant to sell people on an unpopular online service. Tetris 99's first event came a month after its initial launch in the form of the first Maximus Cup. The rules for this event were simple: for three days, starting on a Friday and ending on a Sunday, players would compete in an event to try and achieve first place. The 999 players who achieved first place the most would be rewarded with 999 My Nintendo Gold Coins, which is equivalent to $10 USD in eshop credit. Not necessarily the biggest prize in the world, but it was going out to a lot of players, and nobody is going to sneeze at free money. It seemed like a fun, simple, meritocratic competition.

And I'm sure it was for the 999 or so ultra-skilled Tetris players out there who were probably raking it in every time. Now, I don't play a bad game of Tetris, and I managed to win my fair share of games, but there's clearly a skill gap between normal Tetris players and the sort of people who win competitions and rack up line clears so quickly that it'd make your head spin. So, once the second Maximus Cup came and went and I still hadn't performed well enough, I was about ready to hang up my hat when it came to future online competitions in the game.

The mode changed with the third cup, however. Maybe Nintendo was tired of giving out free money, or maybe they noticed engagement wasn't as high as they would have liked, but the "top 999 players earn eshop money" thing was quickly abandoned, and the third event featured a prize available to everyone who played. Players would earn a certain number of points each time they completed a match during this cup, contingent on how well they performed, and once they earned 100 points, they unlocked a snazzy Game Boy theme for Tetris 99. And when I say snazzy, I mean it. To this day, that first GB-inspired theme is probably my favorite: not only for the nostalgia factor, but also because of how thoroughly it transforms the look and sound of the game, with authentic sound effects, music, and chonky pixel art for the tetriminoes.

Future cups (there have been twenty of them thus far) featured a variety of themes, usually tying in with major first-party Nintendo releases on the system. It's a smart bit of cross-promotion, since it gets people playing Tetris 99 again, AND it helps to advertise a new or upcoming product that Nintendo wants to flog. These have ranged from giant releases like Pokemon and Animal Crossing to smaller and most niche ones like Ring Fit Adventure and Fire Emblem: Three Houses. The last one happened rather recently, in March, to promote the release of Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury, although, regrettably, I missed out on that event and theme.

While the game has largely stayed true to its promise of being free-to-play for NSO subscribers, and there aren't any predatory microtransactions that I'm aware of, a one-off DLC pack that added support for a traditional offline marathon mode, an offline variant of the battle royale mode where you play against bots, and local multiplayer modes was added. The biggest incentive they've use to push this pack, IMO, is locking two of the daily missions behind the single player content. But I should probably explain what I mean.

So, Tetris 99 features a system where you can earn tickets to 'purchase' extra themes and even a few of the special event themes. These tickets are obtained by completing whatever the daily challenges are. True to the name, daily changes cycle out each day, and task the player with completing a task of some sort. Sometimes these are insanely easy ("Play Tetris 99 online three times"), and other times maybe not so much (the T-spin challenges are a bit annoying, which you'll understand if you're not a Tetris master and have attempted to master the art of setting up a proper T-spin). Anyway, only two daily challenges are available for the free online content, with two additional challenges locked behind single player DLC content.

The game also features a leveling system, because literally everything has to be an RPG these days. Although the only tangible benefit to leveling up in this game is unlocking additional icons the player can attach to their profile, presumably for bragging rights. It's kind of a pointless feature, IMO, but I suppose there are people out there who feel like they're accomplishing something by seeing their rank tick up the more they play.

The next game I want to discuss is sort of unique in that it only existed for six months before being yanked permanently offline. This wasn't because it was a failure, of course. I'm talking about the (now infamous) case of Super Mario Bros. 35, by far the biggest casualty of Nintendo's bizarre approach to celebrating the iconic Italian plumber's 35th anniversary. So, for those not in on the Nintendo loop, part of the celebration of that anniversary was a free-on-NSO battle royale variant of the original Super Mario Bros. game. 34 miniaturized video streams on either side of your own display showed what other surviving players were doing in their own games. Like in Tetris 99, the goal was to outlive opponents by piling enemies onto them, which was done by killing enemies in your own game. Also like Tetris 99, the player could either target specific players or use similar pre-sets to target specific categories of players, such as people who were already targetting you or people with the most coins.

The goal of this game was to both not die and not let the timer run out. The timer, which never reset when you finished a level, ticked down and could only be increased by finishing a level (which added 15 seconds to your timer) or killing enemies (which added 1 second per enemy killed, unless you combo'd them with successive mid-air stomps and/or items like koopa shells and invisibility stars, with generous time bonuses being added when the player killed numerous enemies in quick succession). The risk/reward element of targeting other players, or even attracting attention, should be clear here: more enemies means more opportunities to die, but also more opportunities to increase your timer.

Of course, in SMB, power-ups weren't super common in levels, so the item roulette mechanic was added. For twenty coins, a player could activate a randomizer that would randomly spit out a power-up. This could be anything from a mildly useful mushroom to screen-clearing POW Blocks or even invincibility stars that'd allow the player to tank huge waves of junk enemies sent by other players. Oftentimes, the item roulette would be your only defense against otherwise inescapable enemy patterns, so maintaining a healthy buffer of coins whilst also managing the timer were both critical elements of skilled play in this game.

This structure seemed like a cool spin on the game design of the original Super Mario Bros. initially, but the cracks quickly began to show. SMB is a platformer and wasn't created to be a competitive experience, and so a rigid competitive structure didn't work as well for it as something like Tetris, for which PvP modes were already a thing. Gaining extra seconds on the timer was usually a pretty simple thing, so matches would frequently drag on for unacceptably long periods of time and matches would end up being wars of attrition between two players waiting for the other to screw up. Additionally, the SMB 35 didn't load levels sequentially like in the original game: levels had to be unlocked, the conditions for which were often obscure, and because players would vote for which level they wanted to start playing on and usually hadn't unlock multiple levels, level queues were established that often sent players to the same two or three levels over and over as they continud to kill enemies and add to their timers.

Alas, the game was only online for six months or so before Nintendo decided to pull it, on the same date that they delisted the digital version of the 3D All-Stars collection. Their rationale was that the software was meant to be a temporary part of a celebration event, but even if players didn't pay for SMB 35 directly, it's difficult to see their approach to it as anything other than weaponizing FOMO to sell NSO subs, in the same way that they weaponized FOMO to sell tons of copies of the 3D All-Stars collection.

The last game is one that was added to NSO only recently. Yet another battle royale experience in the mold of Tetris 99, the classic game being rejigged to facilitate multiplayer bloodshed this time was the arcade classic Pac-Man.

I'll admit, even though all of these NSO battle royale titles have seemed strange to me, Pac-Man still struck me as an odd choice. Perhaps the enduring legacy of that retro classic bumped it to the top of the list, but wouldn't something like Galaga be easier to rework so as to be fitted into this increasingly absurd mold? Nevertheless, as of April 2021, Pac-Man 99 was officially a thing.

I've played it a number of times now, and, like the others, have come in first place at least a few times. I don't really think it has as much viability to maintain interest in the long term as Tetris. Tetris 99 works well because its gameplay organically jives with online competitive chaos, and the abstract nature of Tetris lends itself nicely to a variety of unique themed events. The way you play Pac-Man is substantially altered by the shift in game design focus, at least, in a way that feels like there is also some strategy to it.

Pac-Man 99 sees you playing a game of Pac-Man alongside 98 other players, and the goal, as with the other games covered in this post, is to stay alive until the very end. Your interference with other players is more akin to SMB 35 in that you send enemies to harass them. These enemies are sent whenever you've ingested a power pellet and eat a ghost. Every time you eat a ghost, a multiplier ticks up, and if you can keep that multiplier going by perpetually keeping yourself in a powered-up state without running down the timer, you'll send progressively more obstacles to your enemies. There are a limited number of power pellets and available ghosts per board, of course, and once you eat enough normal pellets, you'll unlock a fruit near the center of the stage that sends you to the next board.

There are a lot of other factors to consider when playing, though. For one thing, hunting down ghosts when powered up would take too much time if they were all just running around individually. Each time you progress to a new board, there'll be a group of sleeping ghosts on either side of the board. Interacting with them causes them to latch onto a nearby ghost in a long train. Now, normally, even after latching on, you're unable to interact with them, but when you consume a power pellet, the sleeping ghosts become edible along with the regular ghosts, which means you can run Pac-Man into them and consume 10 - 20 ghosts at a time. The big multipliers come in if you're able to advance to other boards and consume more of these ghost trains without your timer running out (eating more power pellets resets the timer and will allow you to maintain your multiplier).

So, that's nice and all, but it sounds more like a score attack game and less like a battle royale. Where the battle royale element comes into play is that the ghosts you eat cause jammer Pac-Men to go to other players' boards. The weaker jammer Pac-Men are see-through, but with white outlines, and while they won't actually damage you, each one you run into will cause your Pac-Man to slow down, which can be dangerous if a ghost is hot on your tail. The REAL danger, though, are the red-outlined jammer Pac-Men that only seem to appear in the second half of any given round of Pac-Man 99. These obnoxious enemies are slower than their white jammer counterparts, but they're able to kill you on contact, and, unlike the ghosts, can't be eaten after Pac-Man has consumed a power pellet, but instead freeze in place until the timer runs down. This is often problematic if they've frozen in locations that you need to be able to pass through, so there's some additional strategy in making sure you have a clear path to the board-wiping fruit before freezing them. Eating a fruit causes these menaces to vanish from the board, until a new set of red jammers appear, at least.

It's not entirely clear what causes red jammers to appear from enemy attacks versus white jammers, but I imagine badge count contributes significantly to the number of red jammers that will flood an opponent's board when you gobble ghosts. Like Tetris 99, these badges are earned by successfully KOing a player with an attack.

Another crucial gameplay element I'd like to discuss is the way in which you can customize what happens when Pac-Man eats a power pellet. So, like in the previous games, you get all the regular presets for targeting enemy players with the right stick, but you also have another layer of pre-sets that control the duration of your timer and the strength of your attacks after ingesting a power pellet. You have four options here: Standard (no benefits or drawbacks), Faster (doubles your Pac-Man's speed, but drastically reduces your attack power when eating ghosts and attacking other players), Train (doubles the number of sleeping ghost you'll attach to nearby ghosts, but also generates white jammer Pac-Men on your board), and Stronger (permanently reduces Pac-Man's speed and the duration of your pellet power, but also doubles your attack power when eating ghosts). You can freely switch between these presets depending on how you're tackling a match, and it'll pretty drastically change your approach overall.

I guess, since I mentioned speed, I should address it here. Pac-Man, at the start of a round, will begin at speed 1, and gain speed each time he successfully eats all of the smaller pellets on a board. Gaining some speed over the course of a game is crucial, because ghosts also speed up as the game goes on, and you'll want to be able to outrun them. You're also automatically granted a speed boost and instant access to the board-wiping fruit whenever you spawn into a board without smaller pellets to collect.

Like with Tetris 99, there's also single-player DLC to be purchased that gives you access to other gameplay modes: in this case, a time-attack mode, a score attack mode, and then an offline battle royale mode with bots.

While easily a stronger overall experience than SMB 35 was, as mentioned before, I don't feel like this game will have as much staying power as the Tetris variant. Still, it's a very cool spin of traditional Pac-Man gameplay. While I do feel like this model is starting to become a little stale, I do love the transformative effect it has on a variety of older games, and I'm hoping I at least get a Galaga 99 before Nintendo decides to permanently retire this line of software.

Probably shouldn't have read that Mass Effect 2 piece of yours @RogerRoger as you know I haven't played any of 'em/know diddly squat about the series beyond it's revered staus (and have yet to read the one you did for the first game too or anythimg else that's been done here for a while (my bad))...

... But I really enjoyed it and how at odds the design seems to be with the freedom of player choice (You in particular) and streamlining the space adventures of Commander Shepard. The DLC sounds good though from what you've described and the shot in the arm the game needed to correct the lack of choice.

I wonder if that has anything to do with Dragon Age Origins only coming out only a couple of months before it (and presumably the second DA already in production by this point too) that forced them to cut things? Maybe having to make ME2 run on PS3 added a spanner into the works too?

As always you have some cracking screenshots to accompany it and I like the banner you have going for both pieces too, really makes them stand out and look even more professional.

Really good stuff Rog

@Th3solution "Bound" is so under-the-radar that I somehow even missed your review of it when it was posted. My bad.

I just looked up the trailer for it, and, yeah, it really does look like Journey with a girl doing ballet through it! Your thoughts on the gameplay kind of echo my issue with Journey in general: it was pretty, but shallow, and felt more like an art piece than a game. I think that's probably an issue I'd have with most of these art-house Playstation indie platformers. Although it's nice to hear that the developer tried to incorporate some replayability into it.

It sounds, at least, like Bound succeeded in engaging you with what narrative there was.

Good contribution, as always! And I really like seeing people talk about some of these less-known games. I'd likely have never heard of this either if I hadn't seen your review.

@RogerRoger Thanks! Yeah, the genius of Tetris is how its gameplay can be recontextualized pretty dramatically without feeling forced, and how its minimalist, and almost abstract, presentation allows for different developers to add their own unique flavor to it. Despite being based on the same game, titles like Tetris 99 and Tetris Effect couldn't possibly feel more different. And while I'm not an amazing player, the basics of the game have always jived with me in a way many other puzzle games haven't (I've never been able to get beyond the first two levels of Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine; I did, in fact, muscle my way through the Puyo Puyo stages in Puyo Puyo Tetris after forcing myself to sit down and learn the basics of the game, but something about the gameplay has just never clicked with my brain!)

SMB 35's delisting is indeed, IMO, no great loss for future generations, and it's only interesting insofar as it'll forever be that "one weird battle royale version of NES Mario that Nintendo made disappear forever after six months!" That's kinda reflected in the screenshots. I didn't screenshot the results screen to gloat: it was literally the only snap I bothered taking of the game at all. I'd be a little sad about SMB 35 disappearing if its existence and gameplay wasn't already heavily documented on Youtube. It'll be a MUCH sadder day for me when my PS4 hard drive eventually fails and I'm never able to play P.T. again, IMO.

The Pac-Man game is absolutely bandwagon-y, and it probably shouldn't work as well as it does. Tetris 99 feels like a genuine evolution of the Tetris formula, whereas Pac-Man 99... yeah, even trying to describe it was kinda rough, because a lot of the gameplay mechanics sound very strange and random, with trains of sleeping ghosts and all that. I actually was pretty down on it when it first came out, but the more I learned about how much the new gameplay mechanics alter the flow of the experience, the more I came to accept that, as stupid an idea as it was, they somehow made Pac-Man 99 work out. Now I'm just kinda hoping they keep coming out with these absurd battle royale versions of old NES games. They beat the increasingly pitiful ROM dumps of random NES/SNES games every six months or so when Nintendo remembers they're supposed to be updating the classic console apps.

The games in my next two pieces are also going to be somewhat non-traditional as well.

As always, I appreciate you taking the time to read and respond!

It’s been a while since I’ve been in this thread as I struggle to keep up with it while flitting on the site on my phone but had to check in after @RogerRoger warned me of his impending ME2 review.

He’s now on the list.

@Thrillho Didn't know you were such a big ME2 fan, Chris Jericho!

@RogerRoger Nah, none of these games are in any danger of disappearing. Tetris is basically video game cancer and will multiply indefinitely until the end of time. Pac-Man less so, but the original is always in some sort of retro collection, and then there's usually a number of weird spinoffs that release every once in a while.

T-spinning is when you fit the T-shape tetrimino into places it shouldn't otherwise be able to go by rotating it in tight spaces. In Tetris games with a focus on scoring, it's usually worth doing because the games like to reward players for pulling it off, but it has always felt like a bit of a worthless flex to me. Although, in the hands of a master, it's just another tool in the box, so to speak, and can be used to clear multiple lines at once.

But yeah, any sort of combo preparation in Puyo Puyo basically breaks my brain. Something about it just deeply confuses me. Although I've gone from being almost totally incompetent at it to being able to set up basic combos after playing Puyo Puyo Tetris. Which, I found, is forgiving, because when I booted up the Game Gear version of Mean Bean Machine afterward, I still got stomped. Oh well!

Yeah, I think PSOne is retro gaming at this point. 80% of what I play is fairly modern, but there are some older games I love returning to from time to time. Tetris, Pac-Man, Galaga, and Arkanoid basically never get old.

Actually, I can't believe I hadn't thought of that! Battle royale Arkanoid/Breakout! I'd play that so much it'd be disgusting.

@RogerRoger A lot of what you said about the context of the game was interesting and I am curious to see whether I still feel the same about it now.

I’ve always been slightly reluctant to replay Witcher 3 for fear that it doesn’t play as well as I remember (well, that and the incredibly long play time).