“Whatcha Playin’, Pixels?” – #032
12 min read
A weekly roundup of games enjoyed by the writers of The Pixels
It’s Pumpkin Spice Season! September is here and it’s time to take down the umbrellas, store the beach equipment and bring out the fall decor. Fall is a time of change and new beginnings – school is starting or has already started for most kids, the leaves change colour and the air becomes a bit cooler. Not to mention, the biggest games for the holiday season are right around the corner.
Speaking of games, our writers play them! Let’s see what they’ve been up to this week:
Your favourite caffeinated deputy editor is back! I was off last week for a well-deserved break. Alas, a bout of sun poisoning (which is a thing) transformed my Costa del Vacation into Costa del Hell’s Itch. Despite that, it was nice to just relax for a change. But did constantly itching and burning skin and enjoying the natural bounty of the world stop me from playing video games? Absolutely not haha.
Last week, I finally collected all of the Secret Reports in Neo: The World Ends With You. Picking up the reports and reading through them provided a ton of additional behind-the-scenes detail about Shibuya’s situation after the first game, Rindo’s ability to turn back time, the destruction of Shinjuku and the intricate game played by the Angels – the higher beings who oversee the cities of the world. Unlocking the full report also triggers a secret ending for the main game. Watching it made me feel that the series ended on a high note. While I think it would be interesting to see a sequel starring Minamimoto, I doubt we’ll see more of The World Ends With You. The past four months spent playing The World Ends With You and its sequel have inspired me to put up critiques of both games. I expect to have those ready by the end of September.
This week though, after dealing with the aforementioned health issues, I started Live A Live. On first impression, it’s vastly different from any other RPG I’ve ever played. The traditional elements, like shops and money, are put to the side in favour of the story-driven narrative and the strategic battle mechanics. I started off in Prehistory, which was a fun story, before moving on to Imperial China. Thus far, that one is my favourite – it reminds me of a lot of old martial arts movies. I’m now playing through the Twilight of Edo chapter and doing a pacifist run. I’ve read enough samurai manga to see the traumatizing effects of what happens when young men are forced to kill. I don’t want to subject poor Oboromaru to that fate haha.
Over the last couple of months, Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak has been occupying most of my time. What a great, great game. I will never grow tired of the infinite gameplay loop of hunt, craft, and repeat. And while I could nitpick all day about certain careless changes to mechanics or lacklustre monster additions, ultimately I would just be an old man mumbling to the aether. I basically ended up playing it twice: my initial playthrough, and then a second accompanying my lady through her introduction to the Monster Hunter series. She has utterly fallen in love with it. Watching someone go from barely making the 50-minute time limit on a hunt for a small bird, to duelling and slaying a colossal mythical dragon—that feeling, that exhilaration and triumph, is to me what Monster Hunter is all about.
After playing through several sweeping epics, I wanted something that wouldn’t require any effort to consume. That game is Shin-chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation – The Endless Seven-Day Journey. It is an odd little adventure game based on a ’90s kids’ anime. You play as an annoying five-year-old, who finds himself in a seven-day time loop during his summer vacation. It is extremely childish, silly, and so delightful. The best analogy would be Animal Crossing, since there’s a lot of conversing with people, fishing, foraging, farming, etc., but there’s also a compelling story. It’s precisely the thing I was looking for!
It’s always an unusual week for me whenever I take on a new project and this next one is a doozy! Unfortunately, it’s also a seeeeeecret for now. I can’t share the deets. What I can tell you, though, is that I’m back to streaming and I’ve embarked on an epic journey to complete every Super Nintendo role-playing game. Yeah, you read that right. I think I’m using one of the most comprehensive lists available, comprised, collated, and corroborated by several other lists I consulted. Note that’s Super Nintendo RPGs, not Super Famicom RPGs. For the sake of sanity, I’m compartmentalizing, otherwise I’d easily double the size of my list of games. Yeah, yeah, I know that many SFC RPGs got fan translations or later re-releases, but for this project, I’m focusing on the original SNES RPG canon.
I opted to begin by streaming Illusion of Gaia, which you can catch on weekdays at twitch.tv/thewellredmage. Why Gaia? Why not? No but seriously it’s because I started streaming it once upon a time and didn’t get very far. I wanted to revisit it while it’s still fresh in the mind. I’ve thus far reached the Sky Garden and I’m getting this heavy Indiana Jones vibe. It’s a cool game!
I’m also playing through Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars with my eldest and we’re currently in the sunken pirate ship. He’s finding it about as difficult as I did when I first played the game. Good thing we packed the Pure Waters!
And of course, I’m still stuck on playing Total War: Warhammer II, currently exploring the Vampire Coast faction. I guess I’m just into sunken pirate ships this week? They’re a pretty cool mix of artillery and range with disposable undead hordes, just not as flimsy as some other undead armies I’ve seen. I plan to pillage and raid across the coastlines until the world recognizes me as the ruler of the seas.
I promised demos last week, so let’s talk about demos! I didn’t have a whole bunch this time from Gamescom, but what I tried was a mix of games I’ve been anticipating, games I was aware of, and games I didn’t know. The two I anticipated, Shumi Come Home and Soulitaire, I was quite happy with.
– Shumi’s an adorable platformer with a relatively large world to explore. Maybe a bit too big, honestly, due to the general freedom of movement provided. I spent a little time going in circles because I kept climbing walls to go “what’s up here?” and the answer turned out to be “Oh, the place I just left.”
– Soulitaire is a unique game mixing solitaire with tarot. Play solitaire to fill a card with the answer to your client’s question, then do your best interpretation of the image. I get the feeling it’s going to be a game where your choices have big consequences. Plus, I enjoy a nice game of solitaire.
– Top third was a game I’d never heard of before, Everdream Valley. A potentially nice farming sim with lots of animals, but I struggled a bit with the camera controls. There’s a bit more focus on the main character than necessary, and it was easy to end up with the camera completely zoomed in on them when I only wanted a little up/down adjustment.
– Not a game for me, but fans of Crash Bandicoot-style platformers may want to look into Kukoos: Lost Pets. Visually, it struck me as trying to appeal to fans of the Fall Guys style. Gameplay felt good, and it follows the style of a mostly linear level with collectables that grades you at the end based on how well you did. I never picked up on Crash, I prefer my collectathons to be slightly more open-world, but I know it’s a well-loved style and am glad to see someone else trying it.
On top of the demos, I’ve also started Ikonei Island: An Earthlock Adventure, an early access game of crafting, resource gathering, and world-improving. Expect a review in a few weeks as I get a little more island sand in my shoes, so to speak.
My quest to catch up on the Xenoblade Chronicles saga continued this week. I cleared the extra Future Connected segment of Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition which was a pretty cool addendum to the main game. The main area where it took place was sizeable enough without feeling overwhelming and it was paced quite neatly. All in all, for what was effectively “DLC” for the original Xenoblade Chronicles, it worked very well.
And onto Xenoblade Chronicles 2 I went, expecting leaps forward and getting… well… some steps in a good direction. As expected, I’m ten hours in and still feel like I’m in the tutorial. There are aspects of it that I love: more meaningful side-quests, the characters and storyline.. and then there are some rather frustrating parts of it too. By comparison with the first game, the in-game map feels very bare-bones offering extremely limited guidance and assistance for finding and completing side-quests, and the compass is quite useless this time around. I think the problem I’m having is that a lot of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is built on very vertical areas, so the compass can lead you to the right spot but twelve floors too high. I’ve found myself getting rather frustrated by this, after Xenoblade Chronicles had such wide-open spaces, to crush everything together vertically like this feels too far the other way!
All in all, I am enjoying Xenoblade Chronicles 2 very much so far, and I aim to stick with it. My first impressions aren’t as high as they were for the first, but it’s a worthy sequel.
For my entire life, I have lived in places where I could look up at the stars and see them as clearly as house lights. Living in the country certainly has its advantages, and seeing the awesome beauty of the endless expanse of space is certainly one of them. As a result of my fascination with the cosmos, I grew up loving science fiction, wondering if it would ever be possible for mankind to travel past the stars. Video games only got me so close, but they did get my imagination going. That is the overall theme of the two games I played this week.
I revisited an interstellar shoot’em up on the SNES called Axelay earlier this week because I had a very fond memory of the title growing up. One of the easier shmups on the system (and it is still harder than nails) this Konami legend gives players everything they look for in a fast-paced, SNES shooter. Piloting the Axelay assault ship, you take on everything from rogue robots to weird cybernetic lava monsters. One of the neatest features of this game is the swapping between vertical and horizontal gameplay for different levels. The Mode 7 effect on the vertical levels is a little overwhelming at times, but overall this game is cosmically gorgeous and an absolute blast to play.
Axelay is a good space-themed game for an evening of fun, but No Man’s Sky is a title fit for a lifetime. I started playing No Man’s Sky for the Xbox Series X about two weeks ago, and I can honestly say that I have never felt so small in a game before. The entire universe is laid bare before you, and when you take off in that ship for the first time and leave the planet you were marooned on, the feeling of entering the emptiness of space is almost spiritual. This game is more than just a survival/adventure title, it is a romp in an intergalactic sandbox. Every evening when the kids lay down for bed and the house settles down, that is when I take off into the great unknown, and I don’t even have to leave my living room.
I’ve never played Pikmin but knew immediately that I wanted to play Tinykin as soon as it came out. I was lucky to win a free copy of the game while at PAX East 2022 but you can also find it on Xbox Game Pass if you want to try it out! Tinykin is a 3D platformer where you use different colored round dudes called ‘Tinykin’ to move objects, lift things, carry items, blow obstacles up, and form ladders (to name a few things they can do). The cutscene to introduce the game is a bit weak but once you are transported to the first area the story really kicks off. You play as Milo, a scientist from a distant planet who is transported to a house on Earth. Milo is about the size of an ant but that’s not the weird part, there are no regular humans. The house you are transported to has been taken over by small bugs who have made their own society. Each room has its own environment to explore and plenty of collectables. The main plot of the game centers around Milo searching for special objects to make a teleporter back to his home world. With the help of the Tinykin and the guidance of the creatures around him, Milo has a good chance of making it back. Tinykin has a great 2D art style for the characters with the world around them being 3D, it also has a wonderful soundtrack. I’m really enjoying my time with it so far and it definitely makes me interested in trying Pikmen in the future!
I recently completed the Metroidvania Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition on stream. This is my first time playing the Championship Edition and I was surprised at how much was changed from the original version. The new area in the game was interesting and harbored a new boss called El Trio de la Muerte. Other aspects of the game were changed such as the order of original bosses, special moves, and side missions. This version also adds a new training area in an old mine that was fun to complete. Guacamelee! has been a favorite of mine for quite some time and I’m glad that I finally got around to playing the complete and final version of the game.
Speaking of Metroidvania, I have also been playing a new game called Islets. It’s a handcrafted Metroidvania where you play as a shipwrecked mouse who wants to be an adventurer. The game takes place on four floating islands that used to be connected. Your goal is to reunite the islands by turning on some sort of generator on each one. The combat starts out simplistic with just a few sword strokes but grows to be more involved as you progress. You’ll also acquire more platforming techniques like the double jump and mid-air dash. The hand-drawn environments look great and give the game a cartoon aesthetic. It all comes together in a nice package that I would recommend to any Metroidvania fan.
So, what were you 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.
