When you play it, you'll shoot bricks - Hyper Princess Pitch

It's December, the holiday season, Christmas is in a few weeks, with the new year right behind it. the snow and cold means it's a good time to stay indoors and play some games. It also means idiots like me running stupid little blogs nobody reads are required to review Christmas games. Well, I say that but the truth is I've got a good Christmas themed game, one that I like to play for a bit each year and while my medical issues mentioned in my last post prevent me from readily playing and reviewing games for the time being, I figured rather than close the year here on that, I should try to put aside some time and pull myself together to give this game a review.

Hyper Princess Pitch is a top down action game based on an old action games like Smash TV, or the old DOS Operation: Carnage, which the developer says this title is a remake of. I'll admit I have never played operation Carnage and am not very familiar with it. but I don't think that's too important to enjoy the game, just under stand that this is a fast paced, arena based top down shooter and you'll have a good idea of what you're in for.

When a game starts with a scene like this, you know you're in for one hell of a ride.

The game has a simple story. you play as Princess Pitch who, along with her legless, jet powered cat named Catstrike, head to the north pole to rampage through the factories of Mecha Santa in an attempt to stop Christmas, because she never got any presents. while the story is mostly just an excuse to run around shooting things, I have to hand it to developer for coming up with a completely insane story that sets the tone for the rest of the game.

Gameplay in Hyper Princess Pitch is fairly simple. Each of the games stages are broken into several rooms, each room being a sort of set piece, with waves of enemies that swarm into the room that you have to defeat to move on. An interesting feature is that while the game boasts about 70 rooms to paly through, you don't see them all in one game, instead each room can have multiple exits, leading to each stage having several branching paths. it leads to a good amount of replayability as it will take several playthroughs to see all the rooms.

enemies like to attack in huge swarms

To clear the rooms, you have several weapons at your disposal. Starting with a basic gun that shoots bricks. Yes, bricks. you also have a rainbow gun that shoots bouncing projectiles, and an ice gun that has a short range, but can destroy some projectiles. There's also several powerups, giving you temporary access to abilities like spread fire or extra movement speed, or even an airstrike from your cat Catstrike to clear out large waves of enemies. while there's only a few weapons and powerups, each one feels unique and nothing feels redundant or useless.

The game also has plenty of enemies to fight. from killer elves and tops, to trains and sleighs armed with cannons, some rooms even have unique or rare enemies not readily found anywhere else in game. this culminates in the boss, which are as crazy as the rest of the game, wither it's a massive robot elf or cat headed tank, each boss is massive, filling most of the arena and takes some effort to bring down. there's also what happens when you beat the bosses that While I won't say what happens as I think it's best if you see it yourself, I will say it involves a lot of explosions and is fitting over the top for a game like this.

Some rooms like this, offer some unique challenges

The game uses pixel graphics and while it is Christmas themed, it handles it in a slight unusual way. This is a Mecha Santa we're dealing with and the game's graphics reflect it with you fighting off elves and Santa hats in giant metal factories. graphics for the most part are simple and fairly clean, every thing is nice and colorful, and simple enough that the details don't detract from the frantic action on screen.

The sound in the game is fairly retro, all bleeps and bloops that fit the game nicely, and don't become annoying when the action gets heated, there's even a few lines of voice acting which are suitibly over the top and fit the tone of the game nicely. The music however, is easily the games greatest strength. interestingly, Hyper princess Pitch does not use Christmas music, but instead has an original score that consists of some rocking chiptunes that while somewhat short, are a lot of fun to listen to and back the action perfectly.

Each stage ends in a fight against a large boss

The game surprisingly doesn't have any major flaws. i haven't encountered any bugs, helped by the fact that the developer still supports it, releasing a new patch about once a year or so two tweak things. The game even has two separate executables to make sure it's compatible with as many systems as possible, which is amazing given this game is a small freeware Christmas game. The game is fairly short, but is built around replayability with local high scores and multiple difficulty levels to play through. Plus it's free, meaning it's not like you're paying anything to start with.

Overall. If you want a good game to play around Christmas time, this is it. it's fun, crazy, highly replayable, and is freely available for download. It's even a very small download, only about 20mb zipped. so there's very little reason not to go and give this thing a try.

Hyper Princess Pitch was developed and published by Remar Games. It is available from the developer here. it's soundtrack is available on Bandcamp.

A small delay

Just a heads up. on top of the holidays, I am currently dealing with some medical issues, nothing major, but it's keeping me away from the computer, which in turn means I can't readily  play and review games.

I do have one game I'm hoping to review for this month. But past that I'm not sure I can do much else until things improve. Expect things to be slower than normal, if not outright stopped until then. Hopefully I'll be back to normal in January.

My apologies for things suddenly grinding to a halt like this.

The first part of one of Falcom's biggest series - Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky

If there's one trend I would of never seen coming in gaming, it's Japanese RPGs on PC. outside of stuff by indie devs, JRPGs had been content to stick to consoles and handhelds, but lately there's been a trickle of them showing up on Steam and there seems to be a slowly growing interest on seeing more of them on PC. enter The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. the first part of a trilogy, itself part of a much larger series. This game had initially seen a release in North America on the Playstation portable, with no sign of the second and third games being released until last year, when XSEED announced not only is a translation of the second chapter in the works, but it, along with the first chapter, would see release on PC.

Trails in the sky is about a pair of characters named Estelle and Joshua, and their attempts to become what are known as Bracers, basically adventurers for hire. As you might expect, this seemingly simple task ends up anything but. I should note that there is a LOT going on in this story, not only due to it being a fairly long game, but because this is the first game in a trilogy, so the game has to lay out a lot of ground work for the later games. Fortunately, while there's a lot of information to chew through, I never found the game very hard to follow. It helps that the game has some wonderful characters and a good sense of pacing: The story is serious and treated as such, but there's enough humor and lighter moments to keep thing from getting too straight faced for it's own good.

You will meet several characters in your journeys, some weirder than others.

At it's core, the gameplay for Trails in the sky should be fairly familiar for anyone who's played a JRPG before: you travel a very large world, solving various quests and fighting in turn based battles. it's worth noting however, that battles battles have a bit more to them than a typical JRPG, rather than your party and enemies lining up to trade blows, battles take place on a grid that characters can move around on. This changes things form a more typical JRPG because you can't simply attack, you have to be able to reach enemies to hit them, also spells take some time to cast and while many can simply target a specific area, some have an area of effect need to be targeted, forcing you to think ahead to where enemies might be in the next few turns when deciding where to aim them. at the same time, some enemy attacks can be avoid by using your characters turn to move out of the way. It forces you to think about how the battle is going and not just constantly attack, pausing only to use the occasional healing spell or item.

Another thing that stands out in the game is orbments While the game does have various pieces of equipment your characters can wield and wear, orbments are how you really customize them. Each character has an orbment with several slots you can put what are called quartz into. These quartz have various elemental values and the total value of the quartz decide what spells the character has access to, on top of that, the quartz themselves can have various stat bonuses or penalties on them, as well as extra bonuses like decreasing the casting cost of your spells, called arts in this game. it's actually a fairy complex system, where slots can require certain types of quarts, and there's lines that decide how your quarts various values are added up. fortunately it's easy to come to grips with once you've tinkered with it for a bit, and the game has a built in magic list so you can see what values you need for what spells.

Battles take place on a large grid

On top of a lengthy main quest, the game also has a number of side quests. From the bracers guild in any town you can pick up any of a number of side quests that range from finding lost items to exterminating dangerous monsters to delivering items.  Fortunately, these side quests are not your typical MMO-style 'find x items' or 'kill x monsters' quests, some of them involve various puzzles, and even the simplest of them: exterminating dangerous monsters' have specific encounters for you to deal with and aren't just random monsters. There's even some hidden quests if you're willing to explore and not just rely on what's in the guild. It helps break up the main quest and gives you a good reason to explore the world beyond what's strictly necessary.

It should also been noted that the game has a very large world. While there's only five major towns to visit, there's plenty of side areas and smaller villages to explore. each chapter of the game takes place in a different section of the world map, and exploring any one of them can take some time. Exploring is also well rewarded, as useful items are often hidden off the main path. This size however, does come with one drawback. The game has no fast traveling, and you're often required to travel between several distant locations. Granted, the game world isn't as large as a full blown sandbox game like Skyrim, but it's still a lot of ground to be stuck repeatedly traveling through.

There's a lot of ground to cover in this game

Graphically the game is pretty decent, the game uses 3D graphics mixed with sprites that appear to be based off 3d models, everything looks nice, textures are nice and colorful, and hte game world is nicely detailed without becoming cluttered. The only major fault I noted is the animation for some of the 3D objects in the game seemed a bit choppy, but otherwise there's nothing to really complain about.

The game's sound is also decent: Everything sounds like it should and while the game doesn't have much voice acting beyond a few lines used in battle, what's there is done well enough. The music, is actually very nice. Falcom is known for producing some great soundtracks and this game is no exception. Though I should note for those who know of Falcom mostly through Ys and are coming here from that series, this game is an entirely different beast so sorry, no rock music to headbang to.

Attempting to take items form the same chest twice has interesting results

Overall I would highly recommended this game if you like RPGs, JRPGs in particular. it's a very large game that took me over 40 hours to beat, and even then I missed quite a few things, the story is well told and the characters are very likeable. As I've said before there seems to be a recent trend with JRPGs showing up on PC and out of all the games involved, this is one of the ones to get.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky was developed by Nihon Falcom and published by XSEED and Marvelous USA, Inc. It is available on Steam and GoG. It's homepage is available here.

Gravis Gamepad Not Incluided - MURI

NOTICE: please excuse the windows borders in the screenshots. the game had some issues with me taking screenshots and this was the only way that didn't upset it.

As someone who plays a lot of indie games, I see a lot of 'retro' homages. lots of games with chiptunes and pixel graphics meant to mimic old 8 or 16 bit systems, usually the NES and SNES. I don't mind this, and some games manage to do an amazing job with mimicking the look and feel of these older games but I prefer it when developers decide to base them game on something more unusual. For example, 80s DOS shareware games.

MURI is a platform game about the disappearance of Mars, the game actually has more story than you might expect for a simple platform game, told through cutscenes at various points through the game. it's not a massive story or an insanely complex one. That said, since a big part of the story is finding out what's actually going on, I can't give any actual details for fear of spoilers. I will say however, that the story felt like something out of and old 80s anime, which does a good job of fitting with the retro tone of the rest of the game.

cutscenes like this tell the story

Gameplay is fairly simple. This a classic run and gun platform game, you job in each level is to simply find the exit. levels however are fairly open. you do have to explore a bit as the exit isn't always simply to the right. even when you do know where the exit is, exploring is still worthwhile as levels can be full of side passages and hidden areas which include powerups and extra lives on top of bonus points. there's also a cell hidden in each level, which you can use to get extra powerups to help fight the boss at the end of each episode. So it pays to thoroughly explore each level.

Each level also has plenty of enemies, and there's a good variety of them in game. ranging from wall turrets to combat robots to tiny flying drones. Each enemy can come in several variants, these variants are not only tougher than the original enemy, but have extra abilities like jumping or shooting. to fight them, you actually have a decent selection of weapons. Weapons are mostly straightforward but get the job done nicely, wither it's rapid fire or a spread shot. Some of the later weapons however, can have some interesting abilities, such as a laser that splits and bounces off of walls.

you can even bounce off enemies Mario style

Each episode in the game ends in a boss battle, and the boss battles are pretty good. They're nice and big, take some effort to beat, and finish off each episode nicely. boss stages are also where the cells I mentioned earlier come into play. Before the boss you're presented with some doors blocking the way to various powerups and the cells unlock them, meaning if you managed to find some cells in the episode, you can get some extra help with dealing with the boss. it's not required as the bosses can be beaten without having any cells, but it's there if you need it and a good way to reward exploration.

While MURI is a solid platform game, it's greatest strength is easily how well it captures the look and feel of an old DOS game, the game is broken up into episodes, each of which is played separately and you can tackle them in any order, just like in old shareware games. The game's story feels like something out of that era and the gameplay does a good job of supporting this. If you've played any older DOS games like Commander Keen, Duke Nukem 1 and 2, or Bio Menace This game will feel very similar. it even has keyboard only controls, no mouse input, though you can use a gamepad if desired.

Each episode ends with a boss battle like this one.

Graphically, the game mimics the look and feel of dos games perfectly, The game uses large sprite graphics with a minimal color pallet like an old EGA game, the game can even be made to run at 16 frames per second and when run this way it looks exactly like an old DOS game. If it wasn't for the 2013 copyright, you could readily pass this as something from the 80s, it does it's job that well.

The game's sound is authentic as the graphics, which is both good and bad. It's PC speaker only which fits the game perfectly, Everything sounds exactly like what you'd expect from an older game and nothing is out of place. This is great, but it does have one major drawback: the game is fairly quiet due to a lack of a soundtrack, there's a small tune played for the title screen, but that's it. What you here fits the game perfectly, there's just very little to hear.

Levels are fairly open, and readily reward exploration

The game has a few minor flaws. Namely, weapon selection is automatic and can't be controlled by you at all. the way weapons work makes this mostly a non-issue, though it's a touch annoying if you wanted to use a specific weapon to save ammo for later. The other problem is the game is short. I beat all 4 episodes in one sitting and that took about 2 hours. It would of been nice if there were a few more stages, though the inclusion of high scores and multiple difficulty levels does give a decent reason to play through the game multiple times. Finally, and this is just a personal thing, the game does not have a demo, as the game is based on old shareware titles, it would of been great if there was a shareware demo of the first episode, and the lack of one feels a bit like a missed opportunity.

In recommending this game I'll have to note that what you get out of it depends a lot on where you're coming from. If you grew up playing those old shareware games, this game is an awesome throwback that's definitely worth picking up. If you didn't, it's still a solid game that could be worth a playthrough, but you might find it hard to appreciate what the game is doing.

MURI was developed by Ludosity and Remar Games and published by Ludosity. It is available on Steam.

Beware of the blob... - Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal

This is a game that somewhat defies description. On paper Creepr World 3 a tower defense game, except your towers can readily move. It would be realtime strategy, except the mechanics are nothing like a typical RTS. If I had to call it something I'd Say it a Tower Defense/RTS hybrid but even that might not be quite right. Whatever it is, we're clearly dealing with a unique game.

Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal actually has a fairly complex story about humanity's fight against an invading force called the creeper which is which takes the form of this strange blue slime that spreads to cover entire worlds. What exactly the stuff is and what it's doing are a major part of the story, and there's more here than I would of expected. As always I can't give much in the way of details because of spoilers, but I will say the game takes place a very log time after the first two games, and covers a lot of what happened since then. There are some references to the first two games, but you don't need to have played them to make since of what's going on here.

From this map, you can choose what mission to take on next.

Gameplay in Creeper World 3 is fairly simple, from your main base, you build weapons to fight back the creeper, and to power them you need to build collectors, which generate energy and help build a network which you need to transmit all that energy through. your main objective on most maps is to clear a path to the emitters the creeper is coming from, allowing you to build nullifiers to destroy them. and to do that the game gives you a lot of options. on top of simple lasers you can use mortars to blow small holes in the creeper, or use aerial units to get at distant areas. you can even build ore mines to produce anti-creeper, which can hurt creeper but won't damage your buildings. The whole time you have to carefully manage your power. try to build too much at once or don't have enough collectors making power and you'll have brownouts, slowing everything down as your base struggles to meet the demand.

The creeper itself is an unusual enemy, like I said before it's basically slime and it does act like a liquid: quickly running down hill or pooling in ditches or valleys to create deep pools of the stuff. The terrain makes a huge difference as trying to clean out a pool of Creeper is very different from trying to fight uphill against it. In fact terrain is a big part of the game, unlike other strategy games, the creeper doesn't make units or plan attacks, it just spreads. How it spreads depends entirely on the maps layout and how you choose to fight it.

Terran has a huge effect on how the creeper acts

The game comes with several game modes, on top of the main campaign there's two additional areas called tormented space and the prospector zone. These areas contain extra missions, complete with their own campaign map that slowly unlocks new missions as you beat previous ones. There's also the Dial Map Device which acts as a random map generator, the generator allows you to tweak several properties to effect how maps are generated, and you can even save and name generated maps to share them online with other players, or readily play other maps that players have saved. There's even a map editor for making your own maps, as well an in game browser for easily downloading and playing user maps. Put simply, there's a lot of content to this game.

In fact, the amount of content this game has is worth mentioning. Between the campaign, tormented space, and prospector zone, there's easily hundreds of missions here. Add the map generator and user maps, and you've got virtually unlimited missions, this would be overwhelming except the game handles it in a simple but rather clever way: The bulk of the content is optional. The main story campaign is actually quite short, it's only about 16-17 missions and can be beaten in only a few hours. meaning if you just want to beat the game and see the ending, it's not all that much of a slog. If you want more, there's all the content you could need, and you can readily take or ignore almost all of it.

This is a map of the prospector zone, each one of those stars can contain several missions.

The game has a nice soundtrack, it goes for more of a sweeping, orchestral score and while there's only a few tracks, they're all nice to listen to and fit the game's overall theme of fighting against impossible odds quite nicely. Sound is somewhat minimal but effective. It's mostly the sound of weapons fire, backed with the occasional whoosh of things flying up or down from orbit, backed up by the occasional beep or siren to warn you of something important, there's no ambient sound or anything like that, but that's fine as when missions heat up the sound of weapons fire becomes almost constant. Everything works and there's nothing to distract you.

The games' graphics seem to somewhat favor form over function. Unit designs are somewhat simple with a nice, clean UI that's easy to read. The layouts of some levels can be interesting but for the most part this game seems to be designed more around being readily readable than pretty, and it succeeds at that. Units are brightly colored to stick out from the terrain and it's easy to see what's going on at a glance.

Small maps are difficult in this game, as the creeper can quickly overwhelm you.

Surprisingly I haven't encountered any major flaws with this game. The only real bug I encountered is some lag when changing menus but other than that I didn't encounter any major technical issues. The worst I can say is that in playing the game, I found some of the units to be mostly useless to me, and I tend to focus on the same small handful out of what's available, though how much of that is due to my play style vs, how the game was designed I couldn't tell.

overall I'd say Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal is a game worth having. It has a really unique take on tower defense, and with almost limitless content, the game can readily last as long as you want it to.

Creeper World 3 was developed and published by Knuckle Cracker. It is available on Steam, Gamersgate and Desura. It's homepage, which includes a demo and direct purchase option is available here.

Not Half Baaaad - Escape Goat

Escape Goat has a little history to it, it started life as an X-Box live indie game, and from what little I've heard it was a decent success there, enough at least to see a PC release, and later a sequel. While the game was well praised it seems to have fallen off the radar somewhat. as of this writing no curators recommend the original, and the sequel only has 2, one of which is the game's publisher. sounds like good material for here.

Escape goat sees you as a magical purple goat - yes, really - trying to escape a prison with the help of a small mouse, rescuing sheep around the way. to do that, you'll have to travel through about 50 some odd levels. each one a puzzle that takes up a single screen. The game is actually somewhat non linear here, levels are grouped into different areas, and you can tackle these areas in any order, with more areas unlocking as previous ones are cleared.

your ultimate goal is the rescue sheep, like this one here.

Another interesting thing about the levels is they consist of a lot of moving parts. puzzles mainly revolve around hitting switches or holding down pressure plates to rearrange various parts of the game world. Part of what stands out about this is that things don't just move, there's gears and pulleys and other things to show how and where things move, it can get very complicated and it's pretty neat to see large sections of a level move a shift about as you try to solve them.

Alongside the goat you control, you have a mouse. The, which you can summon and un-summon at any time can climbs up walls and across ceilings, as well as fit through tiny spaces and activate most buttons and plates. There's even a powerup in some levels that give you the ability to swap places with him. The little guy actually allows for a lot of possibility in lever design and the game makes full use of him without making things overly complicated.

swapping places also destroys whatever is between you and the mouse

The game also has a surprisingly good difficulty curve. While the game might seem like it's insanely hard and rage inducing, that's actually not the case. The game starts out fairly simple, saving the crazier stuff for late game when you have a better idea of what you should be doing, and most levels don' rush you much, given you all the time you need to look things over and think about how to tackle them problem. The exception to this are the post game levels, which is where the devs pull all the stops out in favor of some utterly brutal challenges, but since they're fully optional, there's no need to really worry about them. They're there if you want that extra challenge, but easily ignored if you don't

The game also has a custom level editor which allows you to make your own campaigns, I'll admit I didn't tinker with this very much so I can't really comment on useability, and unfortunately the game doesn't have any sort of built in level sharing. I was however, able to find a forum here where people can share levels, and while there's not a lot on it, there's enough to help extend the game a bit.

Levels also contain various traps, such as the one I've fallen into here

Graphically, the game goes for a simple but effective 8-bit aesthetic. Graphics are nice and colorful and everything is readily recognizable, and there's a decent amount of detail to the artwork. Overall I might have seen better pixel graphics elsewhere, but what's here is pretty decent and at worst is perfectly serviceable without being ugly.

The music however, is incredible. The game has an incredible chiptune soundtrack. While the soundtrack only contains a handful of songs, each one is well done and very catchy to listen to. It's easily one of the games biggest strengths and I highly recommend at least giving it a listen at the Bandcamp link below

Explosive crates and barrels can take out enemies for you, or yourself if your not careful

As good as the game is however, it does have one major flaw: it's short, VERY short. I beat the game, doing all levels except the bonus levels, in just under 2 hours. You could likely beat this game in a single sitting if you wanted. it's unfortunate, and it would of been nice if there was another set or two of levels in the main game to play through. Though what's there is VERY good. Also, as of this writing the game is only $4.99, which is a perfectly fair price for a game this length.

Overall, Escape Goat is a perfectly solid puzzle platformer with a difficulty curve that keeps the challenge just right. While I'm told the sequel is even better (and I may yet play and review that somewhere down the road EDIT: I finally reviewed it here), I'd say the first is still worth a playthrough. At the very least? The soundtrack alone makes it worth getting.

Escape Goat was developed and published by MagicalTimeBean. It is available on Steam, GoG and Desura. It's soundtrack is available on Bandcamp. It's homepage, which includes a direct purchase option is available here.

Some Crap Curator

So, readers might be away of steams curator program, which lets people start groups to recommend games that show up in a curator section of user's home pages?

Well, after a little talking amongst friends, I've decided to throw my hat in, you can find my page here.

I'll be using the steam curator both to recommend games I cover here, as well as other games I can't or haven't gotten around to yet that I think deserve a mention. Much like the blog, my curator recommendations will be leaning a bit towards older and more obscure titles, So if you like what I'm doing here and you're interested in finding some good hidden gems? feel free to go follow it on Steam.