The Gameing Continues - 2024 Edition

Whoa geez, February already, huh? Paying $5 a month so I can FTP posts for this dang blog, better make it count.

Save Room (Switch)

Ah! It was supposed to be Trials of Mana! That was supposed to be the first game I finished this year! But alas, I instead beat Save Room in two sittings (y'know, short break to stretch a little).

Save Room is an extremely brief (again, like, two hours with a little walking around time in the middle there) puzzle game that has you arranging items and weapons in an attaché case. "Oh, like Resident Evil 4?" you might ask and...yeah. Like barely even legally distinctfully so.

It's a fun little game, though I do wonder how fun it would be to a newcomer who lacks that Resident Evil knowhow (like combining herbs and gunpowders to make room). Some puzzles cleverly have you eat poisonous items so you can use your healing items to make more room in the case - again, the sort of thing that you just kinda have to know ahead of time before coming to the game.

Anyway, I dunno. It's extremely short and is over before you know it. If you can get it cheap, then sure, why not.

Trials of Mana (SNES via Switch)

I was pretty vocal last year in my disappointment with Secret of Mana, especially coming off the humble-yet-sublime Final Fantasy Adventure. The story didn't do much for me, the gameplay was a pain in the ass, and while a tiny part of me will miss PUNGUS...nah, just not a game for me.

So, Trials of Mana! I hemmed and hawed over whether to play the fancy 2020 remake, or the freshly (well, as of 2019) 1995 original, and figured...hell, sure, may as well round out Collection of Mana once and for all, right?

Turns out, it was a good call! Playing through the game with Hawkeye, Riesz, and the beast boy prince named, uh, Kevin, I found just about every aspect of Trials to be superior to that of Secret. Granted, I was kinda glued to a guide for most of it, and had I played the game in a more legitimate fashion (than save scumming like a madman), the hunt for ??? seeds to unlock each character's final class would have driven me absolutely insane.

Going with the crew I did (I'm saving Duran, Angela and Charlotte for whenever I play the remake), I was barred from using magic for a shockingly long stretch of the game, which made a lot of combat counters kind of miserable. Getting those first few class changes about halfway through was a game-changer, and I kinda breezed through the rest of the game. Kudos to Kevin, who spent 95% of most combat encounters constantly healing my dying crew, and the other 5% doing sick suplexes or tornado kicks.

I won't lie, the story in Trials ain't much better than Secret, but it was just enough of a carrot on a stick to keep me going. Will I go back and replay this one with the other three party members? Hell no! See what I said about those ??? Seeds. But I'm glad I saw it through!

Kirby Star Allies (Switch)

Nah.

Alright, I won't be that dismissive of it, but I'm getting the feeling that maybe, just maybe, Kirby ain't for me. While I enjoyed Kirby and the Forgotten Land well enough, Kirby Star Allies just kinda feels like going through the motions. It's cute, some of the boss fights are pretty hard, but nothing in it made me feel, y'know, "ah damn wow I'm glad I spent the dwindling, finite hours of my life playing this."

The thing the game does with the Joycons after you beat the game is cool. Some of the bonus modes are more fun than the main game, I guess. I think my completion is at 98% or something, and the idea of doing boss rushes on the highest difficulty to finish that...nope. Let's say I finished this one well enough.

Wait, no, one last thing. Does the whole, uh, "Hey Kirby is actually secretly very dark. He's Eldritch. He's an uber-powerful monstrous god in a cute pink ball form. The final boss? The real final boss? They're messed up as heck."

Does that really do anything for anyone?

Because it just comes off as kinda corny. I dunno.

Maybe, just maybe, Kirby ain't for me.

50 Cent: Blood on the Sand (PS3)

(Sorry for the YouTube screenshot, forgot to grab my own while playing it)

Ah, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. I played this ages ago when it first came out on the 360, but never got around to playing the PS3 copy I bought around the time I decided I was more into playing PS3 than anything else. No year like 2024 to rectify that, I guess!

50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is a hoot. It's aged horrifically in a number of ways (the depiction of the middle east, the misogyny, the homophobic taunts, you name it), but the core gameplay, the extremely arcade-y score multipliers, the constant challenges that pop up, and hammering-in of the left stick at every opportunity to make 50 cuss and taunt relentlessly (hey, it's funny and it boosts your score!)...god what a game. It's a shame Curtis Jackson's son supposedly had as much sway as it's legendarily claimed, as far as every boss encounter being a helicopter fight, though I'm not sure the AI would have put up as interesting a fight on-foot as those suckers do. I also have some quibbles with the Taunt Packs and Melee Packs you can unlock in the game...I never got to hear any "Mac Daddy" tier taunts, or see these karate hybrid finishers...oh well. 

Plenty has been said about 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand that I would just be retreading here. It remains the disc-only game in my collection that has me seriously contemplating getting an Xbox Series X, because...hey...what if I did play this in 4K...what if...

What a weird time capsule of a game. Incredibly problematic, but really simple and fun, too. A real "they don't make 'em like this anymore," for better and worse.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (Switch)

Yes! Yes! Here we go!

It seems like expectations for Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown were low? Not for me, I'm normal, but the deck seemed stacked against the game with half the crowd angry this wasn't a Sands of Time full-3D affair (seemingly forgetting Prince of Persia was originally a 2D game), and a real nasty racist half taking digs at the main character's design.

That...sucks, because not only did the game look great from that initial reveal, but it wound up far better than I could have ever hoped.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is hands-down one of the tightest platforming games I've ever played, not only for a Metroidvania/Search-Action or whatever you wanna call it, but just in general. The controls are responsive and dead-on precise, which is fantastic on its own, but entirely necessary for the absolutely insane trap-laden traversal gauntlets the game throws at you. Some of them were wild enough that I could have sworn I was veering off the main path, but nope! The game has confidence in your ability to manage what it throws at you (though there are a number of accessibility options to help people get through it, if not), and that's...really refreshing, these days.

Combat, likewise, is very precise and enjoyable. Some enemies are a pain until you learn what makes them tick, or circle back around them with new abilities (the ghost enemy that will phase right next to you and whittle you down to a single pixel of health ain't that scary when you can chase him into the dimension he hides in and knock him around). Those new abilities are also a blast, serving multiple purposes for traversal, combat and puzzle-solving.

Also the 2D whiners are nuts - this game is gorgeous, with incredible art design and sense of scale. The music is similarly amazing. My little screenshot up there doesn't do the game much justice (it's just from a cool moment early on), but look it up - it's great.

Admittedly, if there's a weak aspect at all in the game, it might be the story. It's not bad - the story of a squad of elite Persian warriors on a quest to rescue a kidnapped prince from a cursed mountain city lost in time...it's a good set up, and the twists throughout aren't bad, if maybe a bit telegraphed. Where it falters, I guess, is in how it feels like it sort of rushes to a conclusion, as well as feels like it omits at least one boss battle with a very ominous character who vows to hunt you down.

That's really my only complaint with the game! That, maybe, and the weird text-to-speech voiced character that has been since patched out with spoken lines (that could not possibly be more different than those original robotic lines, it's kind of hilarious).

If I had to pick a numero uno for the year, early going, it's gotta be this one. Not sure how anything else this year will top it, but the year is young yet! We'll see!

OK! Hopefully it won't be too long before I update this again. Haven't had time to play much else, and honestly...I can't figure out what to play. Do I play this Atelier Marie remake that's been sitting in my Switch forever, or do I keep beating my head against the difficulty and my ailing reflexes with Mushihimesama...choices...