Nicktoons MLB

Time for the final baseball game in my collection and it was probably the hardest one yet in terms of some of the achievements. It’s another North America exclusive title too which is the only reason I had it and was playing. I actually quite like baseball now but I hate Sponge Bob so having to play a game with his face on it made my face hurt.

There isn’t an overarching story to the game or much variation in game modes that need to be played. There is a tournament mode where you have to play through seven teams, ending with a team of Nicktoons characters, and a showdown mode where you have to play as either MLB Allstars who you pick yourself or the Nicktoons characters.

There are some mini games to play as well but these are really meh. Other than that, there’s the pick up and play function for couch co-op and against the AI which seems to be the main point of the game.

Controls wise, Pitching and Fielding is easy for the most part. Just throw the ball and if the AI hits, get it back to the bases and try to get them out. Batting though, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to. The ball will go where it will go. Even if you strike the ball in the hot zone, you aren’t guaranteed to not get caught out and playing on easy doesn’t prevent AI fielders from performing amazing catches regardless of stats all day long.

The one exception to this is the gimmick of the game which is the turbo. You build up turbo by getting strikes and when you have a turbo available, you can either do a special catch, a special pitch or a special bat. At bat, if you strike the ball it’s an automatic home run.

Musically, it’s grating and graphically it’s dated and it’s a generally forgettable experience in these areas.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 35 Achievements

Despite having an estimated completion time of six to eight hours, this is real slog-fest. I started by just playing the game normally, targeting standard baseball things like getting home runs, getting the grand slam, winning really well and all the rest of it and I think I knocked out 19 achievements after playing 1 game of 9 innings.

There are only two game-playing achievements that gave me trouble. The first of these is the cycle, probably the most pointless thing to aim for in any sport. You need to hit a single, double, triple and home run with the same player. This is tricky for two reasons, the first being that running a triple is a pain in the ass and you normally need to sacrifice another player to stand a better chance of getting your runner to the plate. The second is the fact that need to get the batter in at least four times so it’s best playing a 9-inning game and also praying that you don’t get a bad hit and caught out.

The next one is the only one you need to not play on Rookie difficulty for and that’s for getting a double play – getting two AI opponents out at the same time. This came down more to luck than skill, especially the way I did it, but essentially, the opponent needs to have a runner on base, preferably one. You need to throw to a batter and pray he hits a shit return into the ground then quickly throw to second then first base. I got sensationally lucky by striking out the guy I was pitching to and the AI tried to steal third. I threw to third and got the double play. Definitely more luck than skill.

There is another tricky one for pitching a perfect game of 9 innings where the opposition doesn’t get any runs or to any bases. This is tricky because no matter what happens, the AI seems to hit at least one ball well. It took me three attempts before pulling this off.

The last few achievements involve having to beat all the teams and unlock all the cards in the game. If you’ve done the double play and cycle, this is now the easy grind to the full completion and involves beating all the National League and American League teams and playing a game of Distance Derby and hitting 20 targets in the mini game. That said, in order to get 20 hits in Distance Derby you have to deliberately miss some hits otherwise you will win without facing 20 balls.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Nicktoons MLB as mentioned above, is a very bland and forgettable experience with a completion made horrendous by that stupid double play achievement. It’s advertised as short and easy but don’t be fooled. This one is a waste of time and money, even to fans of baseball.

Arcade Game Series: Galaga

This game was no where the top of my next-to-play list but being bored one Friday, and a hankering for some retro arcade games made me jump in to the backlog and clear out another one.

Galaga is actually a game I had previously completed on the 360 arcade and it was a very quick and easy completion. On the Xbox One, it’s still quick at around two and a half hours but it’s much more challenging now. More on that later.

Galaga sees you take control of a spaceship with some limited abilities. It can move left and right and also fire two bullets in quick succession. Not three though as that might make the game fair. You need to shot millions, and millions, and millions of bugs as they are presumably hell bent on attacking earth. So it’s up to one spaceship to stop them.

There is one thing you can do to improve your odds and that’s deliberately getting one of ships captured by one of the big enemies (that take two shots to kill) and then shot that enemy to release the captured ship and create a double ship that can fire, wait for it, four bullets in quick succession. Two at a time. The irritating thing about this though is that it does cost you one of your lives and when you only get five to begin with, it’s kind of a big deal.

That’s all there is to the game play. You clear waves of enemies and move through levels of increasing difficulty, also including some bonus stages where you can relax as the enemies won’t shoot you.

Looks wise, it’s a typical 80s arcade game and has stayed true to its roots. Musically it’s done the same but it’s incredibly grating even after a short amount of play time.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 20 Achievements

First things first, clearing 31 waves is the target from a progression perspective. This isn’t hard as there is a level select function which essentially gives you 5 lives for each level so even when it gets tough towards the end, it’s easy just clearing a level at a time.

There are also some miscellaneous things to do along the way like getting an accuracy score of over 70% on wave 10 or higher. This is really dumb as all you have to do is shot once, score a hit, then let the enemies kill you and you will finish the wave with 100% accuracy.

There are others for forming a dual fighter and shooting down an enemy fighter. I’ve mentioned forming a dual fighter above but to get the enemy fighter, you have to let your fighter be captured and then shoot it. In addition to mucking around with getting captured, you have to shoot a boss while it’s trying to capture you so you can escape its tractor beam. This one is all about timing. You need to shoot just before the tractor beam touches you so you fire straight and the boss dies while you are being transported. It’s either that or cross your fingers and hammer the shoot button as you spin towards the boss.

The remaining achievements are the tricky ones. You need to clear the bonus stages from 11 to 31 by getting a perfect score. One of these levels has to be done with a single ship too. The easiest of these to do with a single ship is level 27. There are no tips for these other than keep practicing and working out the enemy patterns and where best to shoot them from. It takes a bit of time but is very doable.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Arcade Game Series: Galaga is a great trip down memory lane and a challenging completion to boot. It takes around 3 hours to complete if you manage to get the patterns down for the bonus levels quickly but I can see how doing these will cause many people to tear their hair out.

SEGA Superstars Tennis

After doing a bit of research and continuing my quest to complete all games I own on the previous generation, I started up SEGA Superstars Tennis without honestly having the intention of finishing it. I was looking through my collection of non-backward compatible games with online achievements and this was the one I chose to start. I cleared out the online stuff and then just carried on clipping away at the solo bits and before I knew it, the game was complete. That makes it sound a lot easier than it is.

Superstars Tennis is essentially a basic tennis game. You play as various characters from a multitude of SEGA based games including Sonic, Space Channel 5, Jet Set Radio and Golden Axe to name a few. You play on a variety of themed courts, some of which make playing tennis more difficult than it should be as the lines become hard to see.

You can play singles or doubles but doubles is a pile of garbage unless you are playing with another human player.

However, the tennis element is only a small fraction of the game. The majority of playing time will be spent in the Superstars mode which is basically a collection of mini games where you have to do a variety of stuff in keeping with the SEGA games theme. For example, Jet Set Radio games focus on hitting the ball to the other side of the net to complete graffiti tags whereas Sonic mostly focuses on collecting rings. This isn’t true for every game though. Clearly where they couldn’t think of any appropriate mini games, you just have to play tennis – which is fair enough when you consider there are 101 challenges to complete in this mode.

Graphically, it’s cartoony and the animations don’t interfere with the gameplay which is good. But the music is sinfully irritating, especially the Samba Di Amigo stage. Thankfully this arena is just a tennis match that’s over quite quickly but I still hate it which is testament to how annoying it is.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

Achievement wise, completing the game is difficult and takes a massive amount of perseverance. There are a lot of fairly quick and easy achievements that will come from just playing the game, probably the trickiest of these is for hitting three perfect serves in a row. However, if going for the completion, a lot of tennis will be played so this will likely come through attrition.

Outside of Superstars mode there isn’t a lot to do. The first port of call is probably playing tournament mode but the achievement states you need to win the final stage. What it doesn’t tell you though is you need to win all of your matches without dropping a game to get to the ‘final stage’ so it’s a bit misleading. This also unlocks the ‘hidden stage’ which there is another achievement for beating. I’m pretty sure this was just a glitch though and beating the final stage is meant to unlock regardless of how you do it.

There’s a lot of other stuff to do but before that, playing through all of Superstars mode is required to ensure that everything is unlocked that you can then do in either singles or doubles matches or game modes. There’s not really a lot worth mentioning about it other than the fact it takes a while. There are various achievements that can be obtained while playing specific levels and you will unlock all the characters, play against most of them and unlock all the game modes.

One playthrough of Superstars mode and beating all the players and classic doubles pairings will likely leave you with two achievements – getting AAA ranks in all of the Superstars challenges and getting 7 chaos emeralds in the Sonic mini game.

Firstly, the sonic game… my god this is a piece of work. In order to get the 7 emeralds, you have to run around on court collecting rings while avoiding robots firing electrified balls at you. Bombs will also appear sometimes instead of rings. You get three lives. The worst part about this is several times when playing, a line of rings would spawn where I was standing and more often than not, exactly where I would be standing, a bomb would spawn costing me a life through bad luck. It became infuriating after a while, almost controller breaking.

However, once you get used to the pattern and learn how to manipulate the robots, it’s doable and very much rewarding once you get to the end.

Getting the AAA ranks in all the missions is the long road in this and it really only comes down to 2 things; the Jet Set Radio tags and beating the Alex Kidd tennis tournament.

The tournament matches are a bitch as you have to win all the matches without dropping a single point. Once you work out the patterns of play this isn’t so bad with the exception of the Alex Kidd tournament. For some reason, even if you set the difficulty to easy, these three guys play like pros and seem to hit cross court winners with ease.

Making the tags without missing a shot is just an episode of screaming. I mean there are certain depths of shot you can hit but I swear to god the game has a mind of its own sometimes. This is fine for some of the other challenges but when you’re not allowed to miss, it’s a massive ballache. This is coupled with the fact that you need to get the right colour spray cans to drop on to the court, only 4 cans drop at a time and some of the tags have six colours. Oh, and sometimes sponges will drop which if picked up, will wipe off your tags. Essentially what this means is a lot of things have to go your way for success… which brings me on to my biggest bugbear with the whole game.

When you have a selection of small challenges when you are going to need to restart a lot, the least the game could do is have responsive menu controls. After pressing pause, you need to delay for a second before it will allow you to scroll down to the reset button. This may not seem a big deal but when you are trying to retry for the tenth time after missing the first shot, it becomes incredibly old really quickly.

Multiplayer

There is also a small amount of online achievements for playing the game and getting wins in both doubles and singles matches and the only real way to do it now is with friends but there is one really annoying one where you have to get on the in-game Superstars Channel and no one really knows how this is decided. What I did was keep playing a massive tie break and it eventually unlocked during the game. Again, this felt more like luck than skill.

Downloadable Content – N/A

While there are a lot of frustrations with playing SEGA Superstars Tennis, especially if going for the completion, it is a very rewarding feeling if you get to the end. It’s also one of the more fun tennis games that doesn’t take the tennis too seriously.

Slayaway Camp: Butcher's Cut

This is another recent sale acquisition where I bought the game for easy challenge points initially but it then came up as my randomly selected ‘next to play’ game.

Slayaway Camp is a puzzle game with a funny twist. You are a killer, generally based on movies such as Jason and Halloween, and you have to navigate through maps, killing people and then finding the exit. Most puzzles have a set amount of moves you can use to kill the victims and escape so while, it’s a slasher in appearance, it’s a pure puzzle game at heart.

You essentially play through a series of these slasher puzzles to unlock the next set of puzzles. Once you complete these, you open the next one for a total of eight sets of puzzles. It’s quite forgiving here as to unlock the next set, you only have to complete the last puzzle in the set. Some of the puzzles are ridiculously difficult and take a lot of trial and error to resolve. Then they throw cats into the equation which makes it harder as you have to kill the targets but not the cats – because everyone loves cats.

In addition to the puzzles, there are a few mini games that unlock too. I only played one of these as only one had achievements tied to it but more on that later.

Looks wise, it’s gone for a Minecraft style appearance with block characters in appearance and animation. There’s nothing wrong with this but if they wanted to have made a higher certificate game, they could have made it more realistic and therefore more gruesome.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Back up to the traditional 50 achievements for this one. As I mentioned above, some of the puzzles are really complicated and can result in getting into a position where you can’t actually finish them. There are several guides online to get through the tougher ones, including video and text which greatly help if you get stuck.

Achievements wise you don’t actually need to complete a whole lot of puzzles to get all of them. Simply completing the last puzzle in each set will get you an achievement for each. There are also achievements earned along the way for killing victims in certain ways. None of these are secret so its case of working out which level you get your specific death scenes in and killing away.

Outside of what you can do in the main game are grindy achievements, of which there are three. Throughout the levels, there are cops who you don’t need to kill but you can. There’s an achievement for killing 30 of them and this can be done in one of the deleted scenes where two cops appear. This is small grind compared to the victims who you need to kill 666 of for two achievements – there’s another one for 100 victims. This will obviously take some time but there is another deleted scene where you can kill four victims in a few seconds so it’s not as grindy as some other games.

The hardest achievement to get is for playing one of the mini games called Faces of Killed 3. This game involves pressing A when a fast-moving cursor moves into a kill zone and you have to do this 25 times in a row. At the beginning it’s easy as the kill zone is large but it gets progressively smaller until at the end, it’s a matter of pressing A when you think the cursor will be in the kill zone as by the time you see it enter, it’ll be too late. I always took this approach and continuously fell short of the target so maybe it’s just me. It took me about an hour and a half of playing to get this achievement – almost as long as it took me to grind out the victim kills.

While you’ve been doing all of the above, you will have been amassing coins to spend in the in-game shop. Incidentally, the fact it took me such a long time to clear Faces of Killed 3, meant that I had a lot of coins. There are several things in the shop to buy that will unlock achievements and there are two ways to go about this. The first is to play the game a lot and gather loads of coins. The second is to abuse cloud saves to unlock achievements, delete the console save, relaunch the game and buy another item. I got bored of playing Faces of Killed 3 when I was 6,000 coins short of the target so I abused the save system to get these last three items. Having to have done that for all of them would have been more soul destroying than playing the game though.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut is a fun little puzzle game for a single playthrough. The puzzles don’t have much replay value and it suffers from the same trial and error-based approach that most puzzle games suffer from. The killer style was a unique twist which was both funny and enjoyable.

I would recommend it to fans of the puzzle genre but it’s overpriced at £13.59 so it’s most definitely sale material.

Darkest of Days

This is a North America only game and also a pretty clever game title that works on so many levels. When I initially got Darkest of Days, I thought it would be based during either World War I or World War II and be a traditional war shooter. The only reason I got it was to make use of the American Xbox I own as it’s not a genre I would usually play.

Now, the reason that I think the title is clever. As soon as I started playing the game, I realised that the gameplay, game design and construction is so bad that it’s a circular reference to gaming in general and that playing the game is most likely the darkest day you will experience in the medium. Bad joke aside, here’s why.

You play as a guy called Morris who is fighting during Custer’s Last Stand. You may be led into thinking that this is therefore a game set during the American Civil War. You will immediately hope not though as soon as you are asked to wield a shitty pistol at some Indians. The aiming mechanics are bad, and the graphics and gameplay generally don’t lead a lot to you being in for a good ride.

Anyway, Morris gets injured and is about to be killed when outta nowhere, a portal appears and some dude drags you into the future. I know what you’re thinking – what a twist! It gets better too as your mission becomes travelling back through time to World War I, World War II and The American Civil War to rescue some people of significance to the future timeline while you try and find the father of time dude who invented the concept of time travel.

The premise is fairly good, original and inventive however it’s completely derailed by the shocking graphics and gameplay that would have been more at home on the original Playstation. It got worse the more I played as they tried to create that war time effect of having loads of guys fighting each other at the same but all this did was murder the frame rates and make the game unplayable at points.

The difficulty is another thing that puzzled me. There are three difficulties to play on and I spent most of my time playing on easy but this doesn’t seem to mean anything at all difficulties seem to have the same ridiculous difficulty spikes. My favourite thing in all games is not knowing how or why I died and the enemies range from not being able to hit a barndoor with a banjo to being able to snipe you from 750 metres with a World War II rifle. Get fucked.

Musically, its grating and the characters swear more than necessary and I couldn’t listen to a lot of the contrived dialogue.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 13 Achievements

Another limited list and despite the frustrations, its probably possible to get through it in around 8 hours. It felt a lot longer for me due to the constant death and shitty frame rates causing me to vomit in my mouth repeatedly.

Anyway, from playing the game without worrying about anything else, 4 achievements will be earned. Technically 5 for playing the ridiculously shit hidden mission at the end of the game where the game developers thank you for playing and tell you how much effort they put in to making this pile of smokeweed.

There are five miscellaneous achievements available and these are best done on easy at the beginning on the game. The first one alludes to the game having a sense of humour. It’s called Horse Puncher and it’s awarded for punching a horse to death. This is easily done in the first mission when Indian arrows from point blank range do nearly no damage to you. You can run into a crowd of horses wailing on the melee button and this will unlock easily.

The next two are for killing yourself, either with a grenade or via drowning, both of which are easy to do in the first World War I mission.

The next two are strange as it’s a gun-based game but you get awarded for completing a level without killing anyone and also for punching 25 dudes to death. The second one is made even more bizarre as generally speaking, you have to run through their bullets to apply the killing blow – another cause of constant death.

After each mission you will be awarded upgrade points to apply to either your skill with pistols or rifles. There is a limited about of points available and there are two achievements for upgrading both the pistol and rifle to the maximum level. The easiest way to net both is to save all the upgrade points until you have the 40 required to upgrade a weapon fully, upgrade one, then reload a previous save and upgrade the other.

The last achievement is for completing the game on the hardest difficulty level but thankfully there is a Bioshock-style work around where you can play the game on easy right up until the end and then change the difficulty to the highest one and then finish the game. This is the only blessing in an otherwise dyer experience.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Darkest of Days will definitely be remembered as a dark point in my gaming history. The basic gameplay mixed with grey/brown environments was bad enough but throw in the terrible gameplay functionality and it really is just a pile of smoking garbage. I wouldn’t even say it was easy due to the variable AI ability an it’s certainly not worth anyone’s time investment.

Nevermind

With a new social challenge of True Achievements came a new excuse to buy games on the wish list when they go on sale. That’s how I came across Nevermind, a quick to complete adventure game ideal for this year’s iteration of the Great True Achievements Score Challenge. I don’t have the time to compete with the elite of the field for this as the competition runs for 48 weeks. Thankfully, the challenge only requires getting to week 10 and the score available from Nevermind was enough by itself to get through one of the earlier weeks.

Nevermind places you in the body of a doctor working for some company that specialises in analysing and repairing (I think?) the memories of its clients after they’ve suppressed horrible memories that they can’t face. In terms of games, it’s quite similar to Layers of Fear in the way that it plays. There are also echoes of The Park during some of the gameplay elements as well as you explore some frankly disturbing images the game conjures. It’s more emotionally jarring that visually scary with some of the iconography and representation focussing on some real issues that people face.

Criticisms of the game are also similar to The Park in that it takes an age for your character to get anywhere as they have the walking pace of a snail. If a snail had legs.  The looking mechanism also feels severely handicapped even if you adjust the sensitivity to max. So essentially in a game where the walking and looking are the two main gameplay elements, they are both the worst aspects of the game.

Where the game does strive though, is the atmosphere it creates and this is done by the scenes you explore, which are all intricately designed and thought out, and the accompanying music and eerie sound effects add to the immersion. This also makes it feel like the gameplay is part and parcel of the atmosphere the game aims to create.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 17 Achievements

It’s another short list and takes around 6 hours to get through. There are four individual memories and a tutorial, which is essentially Hansel and Gretel, to play through and just doing this will net you 6 achievements.

Unfortunately, the game makes an error next with its achievement list and requires you to play through all of the memories again for a second time to collect an additional set of memories. The memories don’t change so it’s effectively an entire second playthrough that feels redundant and unnecessary as there is no reason why these couldn’t have been incorporated into the first playthrough.

This is made even worse during the last memory where you have to play through a third time as there is an alternate solution to one of the puzzles that contains one of the memories. You also have to finish the memory for the collectible to register so that’s three full playthroughs of this bit for the completion and as it’s the last mission in the game it’s one of the more convoluted ones to complete.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Nevermind is a good atmospheric story game that falls down on a combination of slow gameplay and replay requirements. It’s painful once you’ve been through the whole story to not be able to speed things along during a second playthrough. This isn’t helped by the fact that the second playthrough feels entirely unnecessary when the memories could have been put into the first playthrough.

Still, it’s another quick and easy completion to add to the pile.

Tacoma

Despite telling myself I wasn’t going to jump on sales this year, I have failed on several occasions to restrain myself. Especially when games on my wish list keep cropping up for less than £5. In response to this, I severely whittled down my wish list removing any trash that I didn’t have a reason to keep on there, limiting myself to wanted titles, platformers and open world games. Tacoma doesn’t fit into any of these categories but I think someone recommended it so into the collection it went.

Tacoma follows the story of Amy, who is tasked with going aboard the abandoned space station, Tacoma, to retrieve an AI program at the request of some corporation. The game centres around exploring the various areas of the station and recovering the memories of those that were aboard. Amy uncovers that the crew were in trouble after something collides with the station and the memories describe their attempts to escape certain death.

Game play elements are fairly limited and while it’s labelled an adventure game, it’s closer to a visual novel. You cannot die and the objective is to look at the memories left behind by the crew to work out what happened while the main goal is retrieving data and the gathering of memories appears to be something to do while you wait for data retrieval to happen.

Some of the load times were a bit long and Amy doesn’t walk very fast. I was able to get through the game is just over 3 hours despite this so there’s no a lot to do and what’s there is drawn out. Looks wise and sound wise it doesn’t put a foot wrong and it all contributes to the isolated atmosphere of the station and the crew’s perils.

Regarding the other characters, there’s a real mix of lore surrounding them and they are all interesting in their own right. They do appear to have gone full on in pursuit of the diversity card as there is a heady mix of races and clear gay and lesbian characters. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this but it does feel a little forced at times, especially with Andrew’s secret gay relationship.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 12 Achievements

A short game with a short list but a rather weird one too. The list is 90% collectible based and really tests your ability to explore… or prepare.

There are five achievements for performing various actions on the station, such as playing basketball, rebuilding a science skeleton, going to the gym and rebuilding a broken sign. Sickeningly, some of these ridiculously obscure actions are hidden behind secret achievement blockers making unlocking them naturally nearly impossible unless you have bizarre natural tendencies to do weird shit for no reason.

There is another achievement for finding 7 cat memories and some of these are in really obtuse locations where I can only imagine you need to know where to look in order to find them. Again, there is another one for finding a wedding ring towards the end of the game and as you can imagine, something so small is incredibly hard to find… unless you already know where it is.

While there are achievements that unlock during the course of play, there are a set that only unlock when you finish the game. The problem with this is obvious – you only find out at the end of the game whether you’ve missed something and while I was able to unlock all bar one of the achievements, the one I missed – for finding all the AR Records – was because I didn’t click on one square during my playthrough. Thankfully, it’s not a long game and nothing becomes permanently missable. Even with my need to revisit locations, it still took less than 3 hours to complete.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Tacoma is a relaxing and interesting game to play though it does verge a little close to a walking simulator at times. Achievement wise, it’s easy with a guide but makes it slightly harder to enjoy the underlying story if following words to ensure you don’t miss stuff.

Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sloggers

Another one of my American backlog games, Sandlot Sluggers is a baseball sports game in a cartoon fashion. In terms of similarity, style wise it’s the same as Rookie Rush but far less obnoxious in terms of achievements.

There are several modes to play in Sandlot Sluggers but for the achievements you only need to play story mode and play now to get them all so I won’t be mentioning the other modes.

The game was a real pain in the ass to learn how to play and even now, I’m not sure I know how to play the game. When you play Story Mode, you create your own character and then have to play with some really shit characters against teams that are better than you. When you beat them, you get a new team mate until you’ve formed your All Stars team and can take on the Bullies. It’s fairly contrived but serves to provide a story for a game that didn’t really need one.

The game play itself consists of pitching and batting. Pitching is simple enough. You have to throw the ball at the square on the screen by selecting a pitch type and using a power meter. The AI then rolls the dice regardless of what you’ve done and they will either hit the ball or not. Strike out three of their players with good fortune and then you can bat.

Batting is the same as pitching in that it feels like complete luck as to whether you hit a home run, hit the ball straight up in the air, get a strike out or just hit the ball into the field. There are various objects in some of the playing fields which will grant automatic doubles or triples but most of my wins felt like luck in the early game.

Aside from just batting and pitching, there are also power ups you can use. As a pitcher, they make the ball do weird things but again as you’re playing against AI in story mode, it’s up to the game whether this makes a difference or not. When in bat, you will get some abilities that mean the ball cannot be caught which is useful when the game decides you are going to sky the ball.

That’s essentially it for the gameplay. As mentioned above, looks wise it’s cartoony and sound-wise, the commentators are annoying but no where near the level achieved by the other games in the Backyard series.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

9 of the achievements are awarded by default by playing through and winning in story mode. Loads of others will be unlocked along the way and the ones that aren’t – for completing specific actions during a game – can be easily set up with two controllers in Play Now mode.

There are some exceptions though, the most notable one being for winning every game via the mercy rule. This means that you have to set the game up so that the mercy rule is on, then you have to get a 10-run lead after the bottom of the inning to auto win without playing the whole game. Doing this for every game is a ballache, especially early on when your team is utter shit.

Another story mode one that’s a bit of a pain is for completing all the mini games and unlocking the boosts. The minigames themselves are really easy but if you fail one and skip, you will need to play all of them again for the achievement.

Some of the more notable Play Now achievements were painful too as they involved going through the entire roster to get the same player to score a single, double, triple and home run. I kept losing track of who had done what so every time a play finished, I was crossing my fingers that it was the right one.

A few others have you playing full five-inning games and performing specific actions at the end and it was here that the game started to drag. Getting the achievements in the easiest way involved striking out teams all the way to the final inning and then performing an action. Luckily this didn’t happen to me, but I could easily see going through the pain of getting to the fifth inning only to mess up the action and having to play through again.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sluggers hasn’t made me want to play more baseball games and on review of my collection there are still two more to play. I will be glad to see the back of them to be honest and certainly won’t be buying anymore.

That said, Sandlot Sluggers was a two-day completion clocking in at under 6 hours of play time so it’s not that bad for completionists.

Inside

Inside is a game that’s had a lot of critical acclaim after its release in 2016. I subsequently bought it a few years later and didn’t play it… then it became free with Xbox Gold so what better time to play it. It’s just another kick up the ass to get through my historic games, something I’ve made a lot of in roads with this year.

Inside is a side-scrolling adventure, puzzle game where you play as a boy who must have some kind of super powers as he is being hunted by some dudes who keep trying to shoot him with tranquiliser guns. There are a few puzzles along the way and lots of exploring to do in a multi-directional 2D plane.

In terms of the praise the game got, and this may be controversial but I’m not sure it’s warranted. In places, the game is clever and some of the puzzles are unique in terms of how they are solved but I didn’t really feel like the game was massively breaking new ground and the silent protagonist and lack of any real information towards what’s going on didn’t give the story anything extra either.

That’s without mentioning the ending of the game which made absolutely no sense and raises questions as to why the protagonist even went on this little escapade in the first place. So it’s not fantastic, but it is very competent which I shouldn’t find surprising in the modern gaming world as most new releases set the bar so low that it’s really easy to achieve mediocrity.

Looks wise and sound wise, again it’s competent in that there could have been no background music at all and it wouldn’t have made a difference such is the focus on the game play, and I didn’t get stuck on any unintentional environmental bits all the while the independent artwork looks the part.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 14 Achievements

My playthrough for 100% took just under 4 hours but the game itself is slightly longer. It’s another list that actually finishes before the main story so achievement wise, there’s nothing to drive you to the end of the game. I finished it anyway but I kind of wish I hadn’t after experiencing the bizarreness of the game’s conclusion.

All 14 of the game’s achievements are tied to finding secret collectibles hidden throughout the game. Some of these are obvious while others take a bit of effort and for these you will need, either a bizarre ability to figure out obscure things… or a guide.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Inside is a well made, competent game with exploration and puzzle, platforming elements. With a completion time of just over 4 hours, it doesn’t outstay its welcome and it’s a quick 1,000 Gamerscore for the achievement hunters.

The Godfather II

For a while I was looking forward to playing The Godfather II. I skipped the first one in the series as it had some DLC that was no longer available and based on my experience here, that was a great plan as The Godfather II, to be polite about it, is a flat uninspiring gaming experience.

The story and premise are fairly simple – you play as some faceless goon, Dominic as he climbs the mafia tower in service of Michael Corleone. You have to wipe out other crime families and take over the city by controlling all businesses. There are other missions and an underlying story but none of the voice actors seem to care about this and I, in turn, didn’t either.

My first impressions of The Godfather II weren’t all bad. The driving mechanics and controls were really good considering it’s a 2009 release and it great to be using the triggers to drive rather than the A and B buttons. However, that’s where it ends. Once the takeover mission mechanics were explained, I lost interest and didn’t play it again for over a month.

Also, the shooting is god-awful (no pun intended) with horrible auto-aim that seems just as likely to kill you than save you. If you are in a gunfight with more than one person, Dominic will lock on to some dude hiding behind a chest-high wall 500 feet away, rather than the guy standing in front of you with a shotgun.

What else sucked? The whole structure of the game, if I’m honest. If you have taken over businesses, the rival families can take them back by attacking them. It happens a lot and at the beginning the game, where everything is loosely explained in a very dull way, it wasn’t clear how to prevent this.

Essentially what it boiled down to was taking out all of the made men from a family so they couldn’t attack you while taking over their businesses and sending any of your other family members to defend your locations if they are attacked. Except taking out all of the made men will take a long time and is hugely repetitive. Just like all of the other activities I’ve described.

So it’s basically an over simplified, boring version of Grand Theft Auto with terrible voice acting to boot.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 41 Achievements

When I eventually started getting into the game, the achievements came quite quickly. Most of them can be earned through playing the main story and overtaking all crime rings and businesses. Along the way you will likely rack up the 750 kills too.

There are some notable ones and this is again where I got slightly hung up on progressing the game. The first of these is simple enough. You have to eliminate 5 made men. The first one is a given in a ‘this is how you do it’ kind of way but the next four, you have to pick up favours (more repetitive work) to gain kill conditions and then kill them in a specified way. A concept that makes no sense – strangling someone means perma-death but headshots? Just flesh wounds, no worries. It’s a missable achievement as you will run out of made men if you wipe out all families but they will annoy you so much by attacking your businesses that you will want to take them out anyway.

The next is for completing all execution styles and to be honest this is the hardest work the game offers because the requirements are so irritating it’s not even funny. To get an execution, you have to injure a mobster enough to get an execute prompt and press the right stick with a certain weapon equipped to get either a standing or kneeling execution. The kneeling ones are stupid because getting an execution with the magnum or sniper rifle means you have to shoot them in the leg with a different gun, change guns then run up to them to execute them. Run up to them. With a sniper rifle. Super dumb.

There are also some environmental executions and thrown weapon executions, the most painful for me was throwing a bottle at someone to get the killing blow and I still feel I was lucky with this. I had to throw the bottle after damaging an enemy enough but before my allies killed them. You also have to pick up a bottle in the environmental so it’s conditional on whether there’s a bottle around to begin with.

Outside of this and clearing all the crime rings and businesses, there are safes in every location and favours you can earn from public officials. All of these collectibles are location-marked so finding them isn’t a problem, however the same can’t be said for the fire arms. None of these are too far out of the way but you do need to look for them and using a guide is probably the best way.

The last achievement I unlocked was for completing the game so there is no post game grinding, thought there could be depending on the order you choose to do things. The executions are one you’ll want to do prior to the end game as there will only be two guys left you can do executions on once all the families are wiped out. This sounded stupid so I did it as soon as I could.

Downloadable Content – N/A

The Godfather II was a boring and forgettable gaming experience where both gameplay and story fail to deliver. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you want to be bored for 12 or more hours doing the same repetitive tasks.