Super Night Riders

Another one that was part of my quest to clear easy completions from my list, Super Night Riders is… an Arcade Racing Game!

There isn’t really a premise, you just select a course and it’s a checkpoint race against the clock to get to the end. You have to go around other slow-moving bikes along the way, and this is main challenge. If you hit another bike, you will most likely fail the stage. I did feel at times, the game was a little harsh with the judgement of whether or not I actually hit a bike but this may have been my frustration boiling over.

Graphically, it’s very simple, blocky classic arcade style, the type of graphics you would expect from one of those coin-op machines where you have to get on a pretend bike and race that way – I know they had names but I can’t for the life me remember what they were called.

Musically there is a limited soundtrack of some very Japanese sounding rock pop – just music, no words, which to be honest probably makes it easier to concentrate on not making mistakes when racing.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 20 Achievements

The game can be completed in just over two hours if you flawlessly do everything. There are 13 different races to do and each carries an achievement. There’s also a double achievement for clearing your first stage. Outside of completing the races, there a few other things that need to be done.

Firstly, when doing the races, selecting a different song each time will get you an achievement for listening to all the music. There are also some little achievements for passing a bike quite close but not crashing (pretty sure I clipped the bike when I got this), trying again after a game over, and then another for passing the course after you fail. The last one, which I struggled with, was for getting 75,000 points in 1 second. To do this, you have to knock off another biker by clipping the front of their bike when you pass them. It’s really fussy over the right way to do that and what constitutes a correct hit so it takes a few tries.

Out of the all the achievements, the hardest one is for clearing Courses 1 to 6 in one run. This essentially boils down to 16 minutes of concentration, throttle control and sweating. I think it took me three or four legitimate attempts which suggests that I am being a little unfair by saying the game was unforgiving when it’s judged me to have hit the AI bikes. It’s certainly a tough and rewarding challenge though.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Super Night Riders is short and partly challenging completion. The game is currently retailing at £6.39 which is okay value for money. Not the best. The game doesn’t offer much replay value either. Once you’ve completed all courses, there’s nothing else to do.

Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts

Earlier in the year of 2018, True Achievements held a viral even where gamers get together to share online Viral achievements. Such examples normally include some form of playing with the developers of the game and then anyone who plays with those players that played with the developers also get the achievement passed on. Much like a virus.

Any way Banjo Kaoozie: Nuts and Bolts was one such game that carried a viral achievement for, incidentally, playing an Xbox Live multiplayer game against a Banjo team member, or somebody who has already. My friend hosted a session for this achievement and I used it to start the game, 3 months later, I was able to add it to my completed pile.

Nuts and Bolts is, to be mean, a collection of all the shitty bits of Lego and vehicle games all rolled into one. To top it off, it’s dressed up as a satirical piss take of Banjo Kazooie. This kind of humour is something I’ve never really found funny and it’s not whimsical to have the characters in the game communicate in stupid animalistic noises in the day and age where we have voice actors. It’s annoying and infuriating.

Anyway, the story goes that Banjo has got fat sitting on Spiral Mountain when the Lord of Games shows up for no reason to throw them into another adventure. After pretending it’s a platform adventure game for less than two minutes, you are then given a shitty cart and have to compete in various vehicle challenges for the next 50 or so hours. Again, I’m sure this was supposed to be funny but it’s not.

The gameplay itself is hurtful. You have to build your own vehicles to compete in the challenges and not only does anything you build handle like you’ve built it, but they also fall apart really easily, get stuck on scenery really easily and if you get airborne, fly through the air at a stupid rate of knots and you lose all control. Essentially any mistake you make, or if the game decides to fuck you over (which will happen a lot), normally means restarting the challenge. And I haven’t even started talking about Showdown Town yet.

Showdown Town in the hub world from which you can access all the other levels. Showdown Town is filled with NPCs that walk around the roads, continuously getting in your way and throwing dumbass one liners at you like it’s your fault when you hit them. 

In order to bank the Jigsaw pieces, you first need to earn them in the relevant level. This then causes them to appear in a level-specific globe in Showdown Town. Then, you then need to transport them from here to the big globe in the centre of town. Why???

Once you get to a certain stage of the game, police cars will start showing up in order to stop you banking the Jigsaw pieces you need to complete the story. This whole thing is unnecessary. All it does is drag out the process of completing the game for no reason at all other than to be deliberately annoying. At this point, you know the game is trolling you.

Achievements – 1,250 Points – 60 Achievements

I’ll confess, I gave up on trying to complete this game without help after the tutorial once I discovered what a cunt it was going to be. That said, I only really used it as a guide to find the best builds and take advantage of some of the in-game glitches that were available.

The first part of completing the game, involves going around Showdown Town collecting as many bits of vehicles as possible. This allows you to be able to build some decent vehicles from the start making the opening few levels a breeze. After a couple of hours of playing, it also dawned on me what a slog it was going to be. There are 131 total ‘jiggies’ to collect. In order to get them all you need to complete every challenge in the game to TT standard. There is a bar at the top which either increases or decreases as you do things and you need to get the maximum score. After a while it’s very repetitive and I could only play for an hour at a time before doing something else. Like punching myself in the eye.

Anyway, getting all the jiggies will get you a fair way through the achievement list. There are also other things you will need to do in Showdown Town, collecting all the notes being the big one. There are 900 of these but they are often in large groups. You also need to rehouse a Jinjo which involves pulling a switch and taking it to its house. After doing this, you need to arrest a Minjo by putting it in the prison you freed the Jinjo from. These words don’t make a lot of sense to me either.

The hardest part of the non-jiggy gathering is for completing Klungo’s arcade game. It’s a very straightforward rail-platformer where all you need to do is jump but the game is so fussy that you have to jump perfectly to clear some of the obstacles. It’s quick but frustrating, made even more frustrating by the fact that the game will randomly crash when you’re playing it. This is part of the game bizarrely. I’m not sure why anyone thought that would be a good idea.

There are several specific things you need to do in each of the game worlds for a few more achievements and another few for building some specific vehicles and getting them to do certain things. An example of this is getting a 200 block vehicle to travel over a certain speed.

The worst part of the whole list is a 0 point achievement called Stop N Swop. To get this achievement, you have to play Banjo Kazooie, an entirely different game, and unlock a Stop and Swop egg. Then go back to Nuts and Bolts and pick it up. So now I have another game to complete!

Multiplayer

As mentioned at the start, there is a multiplayer element and a viral achievement. In addition to this, you have to complete various multiplayer stuff including but not limited to, winning ranked matches and winning races by crossing the line backwards and by walking. The biggest one of these is completing a marathon multiplayer game which is made even longer if you download the DLC before doing it. Which I did.

Downloadable Content

What does the DLC entail? More of the same. There are another 12 jiggies and trophies to collect here and you have to get them all if you want all the achievements. To top it off, these challenges are majorly harder than the main game ones and they feel very cheap at times. For instance, one such challenge has you do a 180 spin if you touch anything, scenary or other racers and it’s nigh on impossible to catch up with the AI afterwards. If you do hit another racer, they seem to be completely unaffected too.

There are another two multiplayer achievements for the DLC. One can be knocked out if you did download the DLC before doing the marathon above as this will include all the DLC games. Win them all for one achievement. The other achievement is for winning a DLC game in a ranked match. This was frustrating as the matchmaking for two people often results in a random game being selected so it took several attempts to get this one.

After getting all the jiggys, Klungo has a new game that’s even harder than the first one. Thankfully this time there are no crashes though. That’s the only positive.

Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts felt more like hard work than fun at times but after seeing it through, I had a strange sense of accomplishment that almost made the whole thing feel worth it. I am definitely on the slide for these style games though and won’t be buying any more racing games… once I’ve completed all the ones I already own, that is!

Asemblance

This is another cheap, easy Gamerscore title that I’m not sure fits into the horrendous category. It’s certainly not a Your Toy, DYING: Reborn or One Eyed Kutkh but it’s not going to be winning any awards for goodness either.

The idea of Asemblance is that you are tying to re-live past memories using some kind of machine but like all experiments of the mind, it all goes sadly, badly wrong and you end up caught in some kind of infinite loop of the same three memories. You gradually explore these memories in different ways to unlock some kind of system error that results in some kind of death or end sequence. I’m not really sure what was going on or why, but supposedly there is a lot of reading material scattered through the memories that provide some semblance of what’s going on.

Gameplay wise, it’s touted as an adventure game but it’s a glorified walking simulator at best. Just because you need to interact with a few items in the environment does not detract from this fact either. Given that the ‘puzzles’ are just as obscure as the story, figuring out how to get to ‘the end’ without the use of a guide is impossible unless you are a super intelligent lifeform. Or you wanted to play the game for countless hours staring at the same rooms over and over again. It’s obscure to the point that the game suffers from no character development and it doesn’t make your average gamer want to invest in it either.

Now, on to the looks and to be fair it excels here. It has to be because there are so many loose pieces of paper that you most likely need to read to work out what’s going on and so being able to see the detail is important.

Musically, I can’t remember much, but it does try to use sound effects to portray mysterious goings on – not that this really mattered as it lost its impact along with the obscure story.

Achievements – 10 Achievements – 1,000 Points

It’s a short achievement list to boot where none are missable and all are story based if you follow through all the endings – not that the endings are different, it’s just the colour of the background that changes. Essentially you get achievements at certain points of the story and once you reach the first ending, there are another 3 achievements for completing it in blue, green and white ‘shift.’

You must go through each ‘shift’ from ‘normal’ to progress from normal to blue to green to white. You do certain things to move through the shifts but it’s all very easy with the exception of the getting into the white shift.

For some reason, getting to the white shift is a timed thing. You need a stopwatch and have to record the time based from when an in-game clock ticks to a certain time and then run to a different room to look through some kind of peep-hole. I’m sure there is a reason why this is what you have to do but figuring this out would likely be enough to qualify for Mensa.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Despite the play on words referenced in the game, Asemblance is a game that’s either too clever for its own good or too obscure for regular gamers. It’s probably a combination of both. Achievements wise, the lot can be scooped up in under an hour. It’s currently retailing at £6.39 which is just outside the less than £5 for easy Gamerscore price tag.

DYING: Reborn

On to game number two in the shitty games series and introducing DYING: Reborn, a game that has some kind of weird premise that doesn’t make any sense, and a character with a fish for a head.

In terms of comparison, this game is almost a copy of Your Toy, except Your Toy had an identifiable premise. In DYING: Reborn, your character wakes up in a room complaining of headache. The idea is to… you know what, I have no idea what the purpose or story is about. But you go around picking up all manner of items and solving all manner of ridiculous puzzles. There are TVs which give you some ideas as to what may or may not be going on, but it’s all blah and it gets even more blah when the man with the fish for a head turns up (this is not a spoiler, look at the cover image for the game.)

The gameplay is frustrating and not just because of the unsolvable-for-normal-people puzzles. The control interface is a pile of garbage. It took me a while - and having to press every button going - to work out how to open the inventory. And that was after I picked up around 5 items and couldn’t figure out how to use them. To sum it up, it’s unintuitive.

Looks and sounds wise, both are offensive. The whole game feels like it’s trying to be scary and edgy but the voiceover from the protagonist just seems whiney rather than scared or angry. The whole environment is made to look like what I can only describe as standard faire for attempted, ‘look how scary it is, everything is either broken or covered in blood/red pen.’ This environment construction is not scary when poorly thrown together and it’s clichéd.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 19 Achievements

In terms of achievements, it’s almost a relief that the majority can be earned just for following the ‘story.’ Outside of these, the other three are for getting all memos, watching all TVs and solving all password puzzles. There is chapter select too so that means you don’t need to worry about missable achievements.

I will confess to using a guide for this. The game is only two hours long max and as soon as I realised it was garbage, I wasn’t going to waste too much time puzzling over garbage.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Something else horribly off-putting about the game is the price. It’s currently retailing for £15.99. Considering its length and horrendousness, I got it in a sale for at least 50% off. To be honest, I wouldn’t pay more than £5 for it. It’s an easy completion though, you just won’t have much fun other than laughing at the shitty dialogue.

One Eyed Kutkh

It seems that I went on a Gamerscore-specific buying splooge at some point in the distant past and it also turns out that that some of them are an absolute pile of wank. The series sort of started with Your Toy but after playing another four of these ‘easy Gamerscore’ recommendations, of which One Eyes Kutkh was the second I’ve played, this is effectively the one that started the trend of shittiness once I realised what was happening.

So, on to One Eyed Kutkh. You are an alien with one eye. I never figured out if Kutkh was its name, race or whatever but it doesn’t really matter. The point is, he can’t talk, and he crashes his spaceship into a planet despite pressing many buttons, none of which are the ‘instantly fix spaceship’ button.

Once on the planet, which is a Tardis in terms of size, you distract the sun and the moon and steal their ships. But it doesn’t work and then the planet’s natural inhabitants need to fix the shit you’ve broken. In terms of a story that offers something, it doesn’t do that. The whole moral aspect appears to be don’t fuck shit up in someone else’s house so I’m not sure if the game is designed as a life lesson for kids but it’s stupidly weird and not fun.

Gameplay wise, it’s supposed to be a puzzle game, but it suffers from modern puzzle game syndrome in that it’s either not challenging and closer to a walking simulator or so fucking obscure there’s no logical way to work out what you’re supposed to do. To be fair, One Eyed Kutkh doesn’t suffer too much from this last one. It just suffers from being shit.

Musically and graphically it can fuck off. It’s just poor and annoying in every aspect. Thankfully, I only had to put up with it for less than an hour.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

So less than an hour’s gameplay and the minimum amount of achievements for the Xbox One – clearly very short and there’s also not a lot extra to do. 2 of the achievements are story related and can’t be missed but the other 8 require specific actions in the game world. However, none of them are secret so it at least tells you what you need to do. There’s not a lot to it and with a guide, it pretty much becomes a walking simulator.

Downloadable Content – N/A

As is the start of a theme, One Eye Kutkh is short, shit and non-sensical. The only selling point is the easy Gamerscore and the fact that the game is over relatively quickly. It’s priced at £3.99 so at least it’s not over the top in terms of cost.

Saints Row: Gat of out Hell

A while ago, I committed to doing the only online achievement in this game with my friend who did Saints Row II with me. It’s taken a while for us both to be available at the same time but we finally managed it at the back end of my Bean Dive so I added another game to my backlog. Not to be fully bogged down by a host of unfinished games, I cracked straight on with the rest of the game as soon as I finished 6 out of my 8 Bean Dive titles.

Gat out of Hell picks up where Saints Row IV left off. The earth is destroyed, and the Saints are sailing through space just chilling. The next thing you know, the leader of the Saints gets kidnapped by the devil and it’s up to Johnny Gat (and Kinsey) to bust in to hell, murder a bunch of demons and bust him out of there.

The storyline is almost pointless in terms of how stupid it is but what the Saints Row series offers now is just hours of wacky fun… for the most part. More on that later. The gameplay is the same as Saints Row IV. You gain some super powers, grab some guns and go around completing challenges and taking over sections of the map, called New Hades. Along the way, you meet notorious characters from history such as Blackbeard, Vlad the Impaler and Shakespeare?! Yes, apparently Shakespeare was inherently evil and hell-worthy according to the Saints. Once you’ve taken over most of the map, you annoy the devil enough to face him in battle and once you beat him, you complete the game.

There’s not much to it really – there’s the standard faire of activities and take-over set pieces, the most notable changes being the challenges that involve flying with your new-found demon-slash-angel wings.

Graphically it’s the same as Saints Row IV and doesn’t really need any more. I had a couple of crashes and got stuck on scenery a few times but all in all it’s a fairly solid build. Musically, it does have a soundtrack but like Saints IV you won’t hear any of it because it’s infinitely easier to travel using powers. The background music becomes very repetitive towards the end though.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

For the most part it’s a fairly straightforward achievement list. There are only two missables, one for collecting five orb thingys without touching the ground and another for completing an Extraction Facility on a motorcycle. The hardest part of this last one is knowing it’s an achievement (it’s not a secret but you need to read the list) and getting a motorcycle. Vehicles in the game are a bit weird in that there’s only about 5 or 6 different ones and if you need a specific one, it will never show up.

The in-game unlockable abilities are great because you can unlock a collectible indicator which shows you where all the collectibles are. I love it when games do this as it’s then about you collecting all the shit rather than having to search the entire map for the one you missed (I’m looking at you Crackdown).

The rest of the achievements are easy to get but the biggest issue with it is that it’s grindy and repetitive. It would have been nice if the game rounded itself up nicely, but the fact is after you have done everything that Gat has to offer, you will mostly likely have another 10 hours of grinding weapon and power kills on enemies to do. And even this wasn’t enough to get me to the 20-hour mark required for what was my final achievement - for playing for 20 hours. I unlocked this last while asleep as I left it rack up gameplay hours over night.

So the biggest problem with Gat is that it doesn’t have enough content to match it’s achievements and Saints Row IV had double the play time requirement too. It’s just a bit disappointing.

Multiplayer

The only multiplayer requirement is to play co-op online for 3 hours. It doesn’t have to be in on go but that’s what we did and we also used the time to get all of the missable achievements. And it’s always fun to play with friends. I’m just glad I had one rather than having to find a random to play with.

Gat out of Hell was an enjoyable game for around 8 hours or so and this time flies by. After that though, to get the rest of the achievements, it’s a grindy slogfest that will bore you half to death.

Batman: The Enemy Within - The Telltale Series

I’ve taken a new tact to getting my unplayed games completed. I’ve targeted completing the 30 ‘easiest’ games in my collection on both the Xbox One and Xbox 360. I wasn’t keen to do these in order, so I asked my friends again to pick numbers to go through. I think at the time this was number 2, where number 1 was the easiest. That’s to be expected from the Telltale series.

The Enemy Within continues from where the first game left off with Batman fighting crime and taking names. The Riddler is up this time and after the opening scene, it transpires that there’s more than just the Riddler terrorising Gotham. The Enemy Within sees the birth of the Joker in this universe and the conclusion seems to imply that we won’t be seeing any more Batman games from the Telltale boys.

There’s not really a lot else to say by now. The stories are multiple choice dialogue games where you can choose to say one of three things or nothing at all. This one felt a little longer than the other games though but I’m not sure if this was because I keep playing them late at night and falling asleep or they were just longer. I found myself taking between 2 and 3 hours to finish an episode rather than the usual 1 to 2.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 30 Achievements

Play through the story from start to finish and you will net all the achievements. Except one word of advice is to not skip the end credits at the end of episode 5. I did this, and the final achievement did not unlock as there is a post credit cutscene and for some bizarre reason, despite this not being the end, it doesn’t have a checkpoint and I had to play the whole of the 5^th episode again to get the last achievement.

Downloadable Content – N/A

While I quite liked the game overall, it did drag on a bit and you spend a lot more time being Bruce Wayne than Batman. And that last achievement glitch irritated me beyond all measure. This is one for the Batman fans and not necessarily achievement hunters, although it remains a straightforward easy completion.