“Whatcha Playin’, Pixels?” – #012
10 min read
A weekly roundup of games enjoyed by the writers of The Pixels
Sonic the Hedgehog 2, the sequel to the 2020 sleeper hit, Sonic the Hedgehog, arrives in theatres today! Are you going to see it? We know one of our writers watched an advanced screening of the film and to say that he’s excited is a gross understatement. But enough on movies about speedy blue rodents – there are games to be talked about! So, it’s Lights, Camera, Action as our Pixel writers share with us the games they played this week!
Oh man, what a week this has been!
Sunday night, I continued to stream Phantasy Star IV. Man, I’ve been itching for a tough RPG and this game delivered in spades! My characters kept dying consistently, I had to keep going back to the inn to revive them and I was all here for it! I dunno, guess I’m a masochist for that kind of thing?
I’ve completed Tunic this week! Tuesday’s stream was devoted to taking out the final boss and man, what a fight that was! It was a two-parter too! I beat him in the end and watched the bad ending… But I made up for it on Thursday by traversing The Golden Path and collecting the final page needed to get the true ending of the game! Tunic is such an amazing game and it’s one I would recommend over and over until I’m blue in the face. More on that later.
Off stream, I’ve continued with more CrossCode and the plot is getting real! I won’t spoil it, but the main character gets a rude awakening when a certain someone reveals the terrible truth of her existence within the MMO. And again, I thought immediately of .hack//SIGN, but this game took it to a whole ‘nother level in terms of the story! I’m certainly having a fantastic time with it!
Finally, it’s time to address the elephant in the room: SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2! My goodness, I have no words to describe what a FANTASTIC time it was to watch this movie! It was definitely a step up from the first one and I’m trying really hard not to spoil it, but man, oh man, y’all gotta go watch it when you can! It’s a definite love letter to the Sonic fans and quite possibly the greatest video game movie of all time. Fight me on that.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take a long nap (I’ve had three hours of sleep due to a post-Sonic Movie high).
Well, I finished God of War, and let me tell you, the end sucks. The final string of battles, much like the rest of the game, alternates between enjoyable combat and annoying repetition. While I still look forward to the rest of the series, I am happy to be done with the first entry.
Since completing that game, I have been quite consumed by Kirby and The Forgotten Land. It’s a lot of fun, and I am really enjoying it so far. I’m actually enjoying it so much that I haven’t made any progress on my Paper Mario review since I started playing. Whoops! I have nearly completed the new Pixel Playlist, though.
While Coffee had his Sonic fix, I got my dose of Chrono lovin’ this week. Chrono Cross got its re-release and I’m glad for it. Chrono has been ignored by Square Enix for too long. Even gladder am I, however, to see Radical Dreamers get an official translation and release in the West! I dabbled previously but played it again this past Tuesday on stream. It reminded me how much I once loved text adventure games and choose your own adventure books, like good old Goosebumps. I got eaten by piranha, though. Poor Serge.
While I wait for my physical copy to come in from Play Asia, I’m continuing my separate and very different journeys through Elden Ring, Final Fantasy V Pixel Remaster, and Kirby and the Forgotten Land, though I am really excited to start streaming THE GOAT next week. That’s right, Chrono Trigger on Twish next Monday! It’s been too long~
~Red
Well, I finally beat Jenny LeClue – Detectivu, and I’ve got mixed feelings about it. Ninety-nine percent of the game was great. I loved it. The collectathon elements, the puzzles, the mysteries and ever-expanding problems of a little detective’s world, it all drew me in and had me in its grasp, and then…it pulls a To Be Continued. The story is incomplete. There was kind of a resolution for the initial mystery but even that fell flat as the mystery was solved but the problem the mystery was meant to fix remains. I wasn’t left feeling satisfied and eager for more, I was left feeling like I only got half a story, and there’s no sequel to run to to finish it. After how good the rest of the game was, it was a major letdown.
On the other end of the spectrum, though, Horace was a pleasure from beginning to end. I like to say that I don’t cry from fictional stories much, but even I was biting back tears at the end of this one. It pulls no punches when playing you like an emotional punching bag. For a platformer about a kindly British robot whose goal is to collect a million pieces of trash, it’s quite the roller coaster. With a roller coaster. There’s a whole theme park area and everything. It’s great.
Finally, I was offered a copy of a little indie game called Astro Ace by the dev team and had the pleasure of showing it off yesterday on stream. It’s a very chill roguelike where you pilot a ship around a single screen and try not to die. A little bit shmup and a little bit arcade, it’s an enjoyable challenge that leaves you going “one more run” after every run. If you’re looking for something to relax with for a few minutes, I can definitely recommend it.
Literally five minutes ago, as of the time I’m writing this, I finished off the main storyline of Ghostwire Tokyo and let me tell you straight away that this is… unusual! After weeks and weeks of Elden Ring, this felt so different in so many ways, not just in terms of perspective and pace, but in terms of my approach to it as well. I genuinely had no idea what to expect from this one, even after playing the visual-novel prequel that I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago. Truth be told, I’m glad I did play through that first because it set up some of the secondary characters quite nicely, and fleshed them out in a way the main game only ever teases. The game presents itself as a bizarre hybrid of ZombiU and Resident Evil 2: certainly not a disappointing combination of influences, however, there are some definite Evil Within / Silent Hill moments as well where areas merge together with others in a nightmarish fashion. Thankfully these moments are used sparingly and do generate an impressive effect when they are used.
Mostly, what I will remember about this game is the almost-open-world nature of exploration. Finding Torii gates to disperse the life-draining fog and uncover more of the map is addictive in the same way that finding “shinies” in the recent Assassin’s Creed titles has been. There’s a heck of a lot of content here too, although most of it does feel copy-pasted from one part of the map to another: there are only so many times I can sneak up on a kappa while it’s chomping on a cucumber, for instance. The side-quests, however, are beautifully realised. Since the protagonist is possessed by the ghost of a supernatural detective (seriously, go with it) there are various mysteries to solve around the map. Some of these involve combat, some have you sealing evil portals, whilst others genuinely have you playing detective to find hidden rooms and items to help spirits pass on. To be truthful, I found these missions more interesting than the main quest.
All in all, I’d recommend Ghostwire Tokyo if you’re in the market for something a little bit different. It’s more than just a first-person shooter substituting weapons for finger-guns going “Pew pew pew!”, and I’m very interested to see where a potential sequel could head.
Nothing lasts forever, especially on Xbox GamePass. So, you could understand my shock when the game that I was right in the middle of playing, Shadow Warrior 2, just disappeared from the selection screen. Instead of getting too upset about it, however, I decided to pick up two new titles to play, both “love letters” of inspiration to their retro counterparts. The first game I played through is the aptly named Mighty Goose. It is a retro-style run and gun game that draws heavy inspiration from the Metal Slug series. It features a bounty hunting goose equipped with sophisticated weapons technology he uses to hunt down and defeat his foes. The over-the-top action of this game is extremely pleasing, if not a little overwhelming, to the eyes as countless explosions make it hard for the player to see where they are. It’s a short game too, and I was able to beat both the regular and plus modes to complete it 100% in only two days.
The fast-paced action of a run and gun is fun, but sometimes it is good to change up the pace, and maybe add a little pixelated gore as well. After letting loose the goose, I started on Infernax, an indie game that could be a clone of Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest, if it didn’t play way better than the original, that is. In this 8-bit adventure, you play as a knight returning home from the Crusades only to find his homeland overrun by demons. In classic retro game fashion, the knight takes to the fight immediately and begins to mow down enemies in a glorious shower of 8-bit blood and gore. The developer has done a great job at capturing the heart of the NES side scroller while fixing many of the mechanical problems that created a skill barrier for players back in the day. I just hope you have a good constitution because those cutscenes can get pretty graphic!
This week I put my Brave Boy Pants back on and revisited Capcom’s masterpiece horror remake, Resident Evil 2! It still rocks in every conceivable way and damn, it loads like lightning on the Series X! It’s not even had the new-gen upgrade yet!
I also got back onto DayZ after a break too! So far I’ve contracted salmonella twice and been shot in the face once, so it’s going fantastic!
Spring break here. Woot! I’m playing the fan translation of MOTHER 3. About five hours in, and the game is only just properly getting going after a long, convoluted prologue that was fun, but a little tedious after a while. I’m excited to see where it goes from here because I really remember practically nothing about it. The feel is very different from EarthBound, for all that it emulates its look and sound, as the long-awaited sequel employs a fairly strict chapter-ized structure in which you play as a series of different characters. The shift in perspectives and tones is a dizzying, exhilarating approach to telling the story, in some ways making up for the lack of freedom to explore. Only in Chapter 4 do you take the persona of Lucas, the seeming protagonist, and start to get acquainted with the world of the game.
MOTHER 3 has always been hovering near the top of my to-play pile (which is essentially a to-replay pile) since I just rushed through it when it first came out. What finally made me actually get back into it after all these years was the confluence of a couple of things: first, the convenience and comfort of 2DS homebrew emulator functionality; second, having just played through the original MOTHER in the form of EarthBound Beginnings on WiiU. I hustled to give the big N some money for it when I heard the online store was closing… and then a few weeks later it came out on the Switch anyway.
The biggest reason, though, is that for all my writing and thinking about EarthBound, I really have very little knowledge of the wider series. MOTHER and MOTHER 3 were only released very belatedly in the case of the former, not at all officially in the case of the latter, which has tended to contribute to that air of mystery and intrigue around the cult classic at the heart of the series. I tend to think of intrigue as an invitation to learn more, not to demystify entirely but at least to understand a bit of what is behind everyone’s fascination with these games. Wish me luck.
So, what have you been playing this week?
Ryan Cheddi – our friendly, neighbourhood caffeine addict – is a man of many talents: an engineer, a gaming historian, a fiction writer and a streamer. He is also a self-avowed Sonic the Hedgehog fan. You can check out his cool beans at his site – Games with Coffee – or find him on Twitter as @GameswCoffee, and Instagram as @games_with_coffee. He streams on Twitch, also as GamesWithCoffee.
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