Coffin Dodgers

For some reason I found myself looking at the amount of games I’ve played which, before starting Coffin Dodgers, was sitting at 392. I decided to do a thing called a Bean Dive which is where you earn one achievement in as many different games as you want to reduce your completion percentage. I started 8 games to get myself up to 400 games played. This reduced my completion percentage by 2.5% and added 300 achievements to my to do list. Coffin Dodgers was the quickest and easiest of the games selected so I dived right in to correcting my completion position.

Coffin Dodgers is essentially an arcade racer and a poor man’s Mario Kart. You play as a selection of old guys in a race for your lives against the Grim Reaper. The races take place in a tournament fashion where the person who finishes last dies. And then comes back as a zombie otherwise there wouldn’t be any competitors and two-man races are boring.

I think there was some kind of over-arching story which involves the Grim Reaper wanting to tear down the retirement home for some evil guy to build something in it’s place but it’s an arcade racer – there isn’t much point to a story line.

Now, the gameplay is a bit shit if I’m honest. As I said, it’s like Mario Kart in that you drive around a circuit collecting boxes with power-ups in and you have to use them on your opponents to hurt them or speed yourself up. There is also a car upgrade function and this was a bit stupid because if you don’t make the right upgrades you will find yourself at a massive disadvantage. You also can’t replay previous races to earn additional credits so if you do make an error, you will have to start again. You do keep your upgrades though and it’s a short game so it’s not the end of the world but still it’s mildly frustrating.

There is also a function that allows you to melee your opponents with your walking stick but this is something that turns out to be really easy for the AI and really difficult for the player so it gives the computer a massively unfair advantage.

Looks wise, it’s not winning any awards but it does what it’s supposed to do for the most part. There were a few times I got stuck on scenery though which is almost unforgivable in such a short game with minimal content. Musically it can do one – it’s terribly annoying.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 22 Achievements

Achievements wise, it’s a relatively quick one that can be done in less than 4 hours despite only one achievement being guaranteed on a single playthrough of the game. Upon completing the game, you unlock the Grim Reaper as a playable character and there is another achievement for completing his storyline.

You also need to win every race in the game. You have to win the last one to complete the game but the others, you just need to not die so you can finish in any position as long as you’re not in a death position at the end of the mini-tournament. You get 5 achievements for getting golds in all races in the individual tournaments and another for just winning a race.

There are also achievements associated with the power-ups where you have to successfully use them a certain amount of times. The only one of these that posed an issue was the uzi but in all honesty, most of the weapons are shit and won’t help you at all. Most of these achievements can be grinded in a two player race without AI if they don’t come through normal progress in story mode.

There is also a strange achievement for picking up one item in Crazy Granddad mode which seems to be a multiplayer, pick up as many items as you can, mode. I didn’t play this properly though, just got the item and left the game.

The final achievement I unlocked was for fully upgrading the kart and there are three achievements associated with the upgrading aspect. You can’t do this within the two playthroughs required for the rest of the achievements though so some replaying the story mode (from the beginning) is required to get this one.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Coffin Dodgers is not the best game but it does have some charm and doesn’t hang around long enough to outstay its welcome. That said for the content, it’s not worth the current £9.59 price tag and if you are going to play it, I would recommend waiting for a sale.

Back to the Future: The Game - 30th Anniversary Edition

This is the second game from my Bean Dive that I’ve seen off and I’m not sure how I feel about the experience. It took a while to get through and had some ups and downs. I bought the game a long  time ago with no real intention of playing it straight away and the only reason I chose it now was because the title is so long, it was throwing my game collection on True Achievements out of whack. The game became Games with Gold on Xbox One after I had bought it on the 360 but I didn’t get it for a second playthrough and I’m glad as I don’t think I could go through it again.

Back to the Future follows the story of Marty McFly and Doc Emmett Brown after the events of the movie trilogy. Doc has gone back in time again for some reason and Marty has to find him… for another reason. They eventually meet up and make a load of fuck-tarded decisions to try and fix the timeline after Doc is killed.

It’s the same as the movies in this regard in that you have to suspend your disbelief in terms of the liberties they take with time travel. Only the liberties taken in the game are a lot bigger and more noticeable. Essentially every concept of time travel is completely ignored to drive the story.

The second thing that annoyed me was Marty. In the movies he’s a cool, easy-going guy but in this game, he’s an arrogant fucker with a stupid face. His dialogue is annoying. His face is annoying. And his environmental movement is annoying. Although this is more of a gameplay thing, the camera angles and walk directions are so fucked up that the biggest challenge you will face is getting Marty from one location to another.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Working out what to do is the tricky bit. Unlike most other TellTale games I’ve played, it’s not linear and you will have to click on most objects in the environment just to figure out what to do. I had to use a guide for most it as most actions are convoluted.

Sound wise, the voices are pretty good. They got Christopher Lloyd to reprise the role of Doc for it as well as Thomas F. Wilson as Biff and there’s even a cameo by Michael J. Fox. They couldn’t get him to do Marty’s lines though, which is a shame because it may have made Marty likeable. Outside of the voices, the music is annoying and kept on playing the crescendo bit from the movies. All the time. Sometimes for no reason.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 59 Achievements

The game is split into five episodes, each with their own save and load section which makes getting achievements easier because if you cock up, like I did twice, you won’t have to play the whole thing through again. It’s excessively long too, each episode clocking in at over 2 hours. The gameplay isn’t enthralling either and I fell asleep a few times!

Roughly half of the achievements can be obtained just by playing through the game but the others take some planning. They all involve some kind of action, or repeated action and also relate back to the films in some way. The most irritating of these was in the final episode where you have to repeatedly talk to a cactus to get all of the ‘dialogue’ that comes out of it. It’s weird and there’s nothing in the achievement description to give you sensible directions as to what to do.

There are loads like this – too many to go through individually but that’s basically it for the achievements. With a guide it’s possible to get them all in a single playthrough. Without a guide you will be replaying forever.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Back to the Future: The Game was a partially enjoyable story albeit with an annoying Marty McFly. The gameplay was more frustrating than fun and I can see how gameplay can actually ruin the story of a game from this experience. It may be why TellTale opted for more linear games with future titles.

Achievements wise, it will take over 12 hours to run through the game to get them all, but that’s only if you use a guide.

Engimatis 3: The Shadow of Karkhala

Back to Artifex Mundi now as they round off another series in Engimatis. We are in the shoes of the detective for the last time as she goes on the trail of the preacher who is trying to bring back his master, Asmodai.

The story starts in Maple Creek from the first Engimatis game which is a bit of a change of pace from other Mundi series games and it was a nice touch to revisit some cross-game locations. The story itself is a decent conclusion to the trilogy but suffers from the same small issues as all Artifex games – either bad translation or ridiculous, out of place, character skills.

Gameplay wise, it’s mostly the same as before; hidden picture scenes or a pair matching game; logic puzzles; and the deduction board which is unique to the Engimatis series but doesn’t make a lot of sense. Other than trial and error, I could not work out a lot of deductions and some of them were very loose. It feels more like a story driving exercise than a gameplay mechanic.

Looks wise, it’s the same as other Mundi games and does what it’s supposed to. The music is a bit blah, but there was also another nice bit at the start where you can use the car radio to listen to music from the previous games.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 35 Achievements

This is quite the haul for a Mundi game but they have upped the level of story based unmissables to 13 out of 35.

In addition to these, there’s the usual faire of completing the hidden picture scenes without making mistakes or using hints and the same stuff for the puzzles. One thing I did note though is that the hidden picture scenes are a lot harder than they have been before. Some of items took ages to spot and it has been reported that they are a lot fussier now. In the past, you could get away with clicking on the edge of an item and you would get it. Now, you have to get the item in the middle of the circle and any slight variation will cause an error. Not only did this cause me to think I had the wrong item (some of the word descriptions are shoddy at best) but it also makes getting the achievement for accuracy, and for finding 3 items in 3 seconds, a lot harder. Still, relatively easy though.

In addition to the hidden puzzles and stuff, there are three sets of collectibles to find and each set carries 3 achievements. You have to find widow’s sorrows, feathers and morphing objects, all of which are a lot harder to see than previous collectibles but you can sort of track your progress as there appears to be at least one collectible in every scene.

If you play on expert from the outset, it’s possible to get all of the achievements in one playthrough. They even fixed the issue I pointed out in the Davy Jones review. You have to complete at least one pair matching game in less than three minutes but this time, it can be done in the bonus episode avoiding a small replay of the opening of the game.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Enigmatis 3: The Shadow of Karkhala is another solid offering and even better now that there is no requirement for a full double playthrough. It should take around 4 hours to complete for a full Gamerscore haul. The only real turn off is the price but you should know what you are paying for by now.

Jump, Step, Step

Unfortunately, I’m not very good at doing what I say I’m going to do. Jump, Step, Step was added to my wishlist a while back and it came up in a sale so I bought it. However, in a desperate attempt to not get a further build up of sale games I played this one straight away.

Jump, Step, Step is a puzzle game where you have to enter commands to get the game’s protagonist, Bob, from somewhere to somewhere else in order to build a spaceship to escape the block world you have landed on.

The gameplay consists of entering commands into the game which tell Bob to move forward, jump, turn left or right and later on, do all sorts of complex shit that a standard human brain would not be able to compute just by looking at Bob’s position. You have to get him from the start position to the end position in one go just by looking at his start and end locations.

It’s a great idea in principle but it suffers for two things and one of them really pissed me off. The first is the camera angle the game is set from. Everything is slanted at a 45 degree angle which makes working out left and right more challenging than it should be. The second is a killer. There is one part of the game where there are moving problems you have to get across to carry on. Now, the game is run from a user command prompt so you can enter the right commands but if you don’t press ‘execute’ at the right time, Bob will die. This is absurdly stupid as it’s down to total luck whether you get across or not.

Graphically and musically, it’s cartoony graphics with god awful music that can only have been designed to irritate.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

It’s the minimum possible haul for this one and six of them are earned from completing the game but this is easier said than done if you don’t have a guide with the images of the button commands you need to enter.

The amount of trial and error required to get through some of the puzzles must be insane, especially when you have to enter commands depending on which one of four random directions Bob could end up facing. There are more ridiculous commands after this, especially the ones needed to fight Alice at the end, and I won’t even try to explain them.

There are four missable achievements and three of them are sort of related. The first one though, it is at odds with the last one. You are required to die on a spike. Incidentally this was the second achievement I earned and fits with the trial and error philosophy as you have to know what a spike does in order to get passed it.

In between the start and the finish of the game there are two puzzles, including defeating Alice, that have to be done in a certain amount of moves or less – easy with a guide.

The last one is for completing the whole game in a perfect go without making any mistakes. Flashes of Outlast came back to me for this one, especially with the sliding platforms mentioned earlier that have a tendency to randomly kill you. In addition to that, the button configurations get really complicated and one wrong move will void the achievement. Okay, so its not the same intensity or difficulty as Outlast but it’s still frustrating to fuck it up after 45 minutes of gameplay.

Downloadable Content – N/A

It’s technically possible to get all of the achievements in Jump, Step, Step in less than an hour but this was not the case for me. While the premise was good, I didn’t think it was very well executed and the sliding platforms was a deal breaker, especially in such a short game.

Import Tuner Challenge

This was a game I bought during my period of buying games that looked easy without looking at how long they would take to complete or if they were enjoyable. Essentially this boils down to Import Tuner Challenge being hugely repetitive and taking in excess of 20 hours to complete. It will feel a lot longer than this though.

Import Tuner Challenge has some kind of story where you turn up on ‘the Metro’ with the goal of becoming the ultimate street racer. It’s not really explained why but I suppose it’s something to do. You will have to race dudes and upgrade your cars until you have the ultimate showdown with King Speed. That’s pretty much it in terms of the story.

In terms of the gameplay, as I’ve mentioned above, its massively repetitive. You have to race dudes on a very linear circuit in battle races where you have to get ahead of them and stay ahead of them until their hypothetical health bar deteriorates. Once you’ve done this, you will get some money either towards a new car or upgrading your current one. You need to do this is excess of 300 times across the game and that doesn’t include races you lose.

Aside from battle races, you will also have to do a few traditional style point-to-point races. These tend to be longer than battle races but sometimes easier as once you get in front, you just have to defend your position the whole way. This won’t work in battle races as you actually have to put some distance between you and the opposition.

Aside from racing, you will have to buy new parts for your car to improve its performance. This is necessary to win all races after the first three but it doesn’t require anything special, you just need to buy parts. There is further customisation available but this isn’t necessary to complete the game but may make life easier if you know what you are doing; which I don’t.

Graphically, it hasn’t aged well at all. It’s an arcade racer that now looks dated and it even looks and feels dated compared to Forza Motorsport 2. Musically, it’s unapologetically Japanese. There’s noting wrong with this but I did get bored of the dated J-Pop after about 20 minutes.

Achievements - 1,000 Points – 27 Achievements

To get all of the achievements you will need to do three things. The first is complete quest mode and this is where the majority of time will be spent. I used a guide to try and reduce the amount of time I had to play the game, although in all honesty, I actually had to look up how to start a race as I must have missed it during the intro.

Anyway, this was kind of double-edged as the guide I used had me smashing my head against a brick wall during the middle part of the game. What it essentially boils down to is getting the Nissan Skyline and fully upgrading it. Once you’ve done this, 95% of quest mode becomes a non-event. It’s only when you get to the end game that the fun begins. You have to race these Wanderer guys of which there are 66 of them. Some of these guys will only race against specific cars and they all have a set of rules you need to obey before they will race you. This adds an element of reading that you would need to do to try and figure out how to make the Wanderers appear – just to add further to the repetition.

Once quest mode is finished, you need to complete all the time trials within a set time. The longest two involve having to race around the whole Metro and the target time is 16 minutes and 30 seconds – a long time for a time trail. Once again though, the fully upgraded Skyline makes these a formality.

That just leaves…

Multiplayer

Xbox Live races can be started with just two players which is a relief. You need to win 100 races online to bag the remaining 4 achievements. As the online is dead, this is now another boring repetitive task to add to the list.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Despite all the mean things I’ve said, Import Tuner Challenge wasn’t all bad and did provide some fun for the first few hours of gameplay. It’s definitely a unique racing experience and definitely not one I’ve seen before. It hasn’t enamoured me to the arcade racing genre though and I’m firmly continuing on my quest to complete all my racing games and never buying another one. Well. Unless they are free with Games with Gold.

Dear Esther: Landmark Edition

I’m going to dive straight into this one. Dear Esther was another one of those ‘recommended’ games that I got via my wish list because it was on sale. The result of my one evening playthrough was that going to sleep would have been a more productive use of my time.

I may have cocked up and missed the point of the story by playing it wrong as my first playthrough of the game was done with director commentary on instead of the in-game dialogue. This immediately reminded me of Gone Home and all the nasty words I put in my review for that one. Now, the director commentary for Dear Esther was nowhere near the level of pretentious, arrogant, garbage that came from the creators of Gone Home but I still find it massively pretentious to have a director commentary for a game in any case.

Some of the commentary talks about the genre of walking simulator as a genre of ‘game’ and this appears to go back to the whole ‘games as art’ argument, something I’ve yet to address with any real vigour in the gaming community. In order to give it some real thought, I started by looking up the definition of a game. The closest one, and the one that references computer games, is ‘an activity that one engages in for amusement.’ This is interesting in itself because Dear Esther is a walking simulator where walking would be your activity. However I do not believe at any point did it either ‘engage’ or ‘amuse’ me but I’m also not one for going to an art gallery to stare at pieces of ‘art’ (damn, that’s a lot of quotations.) So I guess what I’m trying to say is it’s entirely subjective whether Dear Esther, or other games of its ilk, are considered games.

To me, it’s a not a game and it felt more like work. As a direct comparison, Gone Home was shit but at least there was something to do with a feasible and tangible end destination. Dear Esther has you walking towards a radio mast so you can jump off it and turn into a bird and at the end, it leaves you asking the question; what was that about? It’s a good job the director commentary was there to tell me… but they didn’t really know either.

And it’s this kind of shit that pisses me off massively about creative licence. If you have no real idea where your story is going – leaving it up to other’s interpretation is just fucking lazy. It’s like turning up to a play and having the actors expect the audience to make up their lines for them. I’m all for creative interpretation but at least have an idea of what you want that interpretation to be and then be surprised and amazed when people come up with something different.

I’ll confess to not being an artist in the traditional sense where I figure out what I want convey through media and what it represents. I am very much more, here is a story – it has a beginning, middle and end - and something actually happens in the middle.

That was problem with Dear Esther – I didn’t understand why it had started, I didn’t know where it was going and I didn’t get the ending. Others will pretend they did but if they watched the director commentary, they are only lying to themselves.

None of this takes away from the effort that has gone in to making games and while I can easily sit here and write a thousand-word review about why I didn’t like it that shouldn’t take away from the effort that goes into making it – even if the person who composed the score for the game pretty much says they only used one score that she has already written because she wasn’t being paid.

In terms of the actual game though, a lot of effort has gone in to making it (my above comment is very tongue in cheek and reading around what was said in the director commentary.) Every playthrough is different and this is something I wouldn’t have noticed if the achievements didn’t require me to play the game twice. Each playthough will reveal something different about the story and while this is clever, it will in no way encourage the masses to get the full experience of the game as most people will get to the end once and say they’ve completed it and not play it again.

Another reason why people may not want to do additional playthoughs is because the pace is ridiculously slow with no speed-up option. Your protagonist walks at 2 mph and the director commentary tells you this was deliberate. The only reason I can think of for this is that if you are playing the game and find a way to run, you may trigger the next voice over bit while you are in the middle of the previous one. And we can’t have that can we, even if you’ve heard it before. It’s the same as having unskippable cutscenes on games that require multiple playthoughs.

The music is fitting but because of my lack of engagement, it was just depressing. And as interesting as a lot of the scenery was, due to the lack of interaction the protagonist has with it, this also failed to capture my interest.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

Of the ten achievements, four can be earned by playing through the main story which is one for each chapter. There are also collectible urns in each chapter and if you find them all there’s another achievement for that.

There are also achievements for ‘dying’ by drowning and falling off a cliff although you don’t really die in the true sense of the word. You also need to go off the beaten path to find all of the voice over bits in the main story and do this again with director commentary on to find all of the director commentary nodes. This is easier than the main story voice overs as they are clearly marked on the map by bright orange thingies.

Before you complete both playthroughs, you will get the achievement for taking 5,000 steps and that’s your lot for Dear Esther.

Downloadable Content – N/A

As you can probably tell, I did not enjoy the experience that was Dear Esther (this time I have deliberately not called it a game).

It’s worth pointing out that I have vented my opinion in this review quite aggressively and I will say again, just because I didn’t like something does not mean that I don’t appreciate the hard work that went into or that I don’t get it. I certainly do get it and there is a heart wrenching story here that will have an impact on some people. I am just not one of those people.

I like to consider games, films and the like as my escape from reality and I like to dive into the amazing and imaginative worlds that other people create. These ‘real life story’ games don’t do that for me. Far from it and it’s probably high time I started being a bit more choosy with my games and ignoring critical reviews.

Dear Esther is another easy and quick completion though. Despite the pace of the protagonist, I managed to get through both playthroughs in less than three hours.