Looney Toons: ACME Arsenal

This game wasn’t on my radar in the slightest. Then a friend of mine from America contacted me. He is more into achievement hunting than I am – to the point where I have supplied him with a European Xbox 360 to play region-specific games. To be fair, in exchange he gave me a load of region specific games from America, but I still need the specific Xbox to play them.

Anyway, he recently contacted me to ask me to hook him up with some more Euro-zone games. He had a list of 9 games of which I already owned 6. Of the three I didn’t own, Looney Toons was the first one I played as I clearly have to finish all of these games before I send them on to him… right?

I’m not really sure what the ACME Arsenal storyline is despite playing through it in its entirety. You play as Bugs and Daffy and the Martian chap... Foghorn Leghorn and Taz… and Gossamer though I can’t remember what he’s from? And you have to stop some evil thing from doing something with robots.

The gameplay is very basic with a jump button and three different attack buttons that do different things, but the controls are shoddy if I’m being polite about it. The first thing you will notice is that the camera is a fucking pig. For some reason their default camera movement control is left to go right and right to go left. This makes no sense. Not even in-flight simulation games would be that way around. The camera also appears to be a separate entity that gets stuck on walls or behind scenery.

The jump controls are complete shit as the speed and distance of your character jumps are bizarre. This is especially noticeable when playing as Gossamer who is one of the faster characters. You can be running at full speed, and as soon as you press jump, you practically stop like you’ve got hydraulic brakes equipped and don’t jump very high either.

Looks wise, it shows its age for a game released in 2007 and the music is painful to listen to. It’s not traditional Looney Toons music and sounds like a cheap knock off. Even the voice of Bugs is off to point where it’s not charming – it’s just horrible to listen to.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 44 Achievements

I powered my way through this list, keen as I am to get it off my backlog and off to America.

For playing through the story, you will get 10 achievements. A couple more if you do it in local multiplayer however, I got caught out by this. I was doing it with two controllers and signed in with two profiles however, when I unlocked the last local co-op level related achievement and went to continue in single player, I loaded up my game and found that the last three levels hadn’t saved. It turned out I had saved progress on the second profile as that profile was the lead when I unlocked the achievements.

While I’m on co-op, there are five achievements associated with specific local co-op play. Three are for completing specific levels in co-op but two are a bit different. You must complete a co-op level with two characters wearing superhero outfits. To do this, you must complete the game and also pick up the super suits while playing the story, then replay a level with both characters wearing said suits. This is annoying as you can’t wear costumes until after completing the game. The next one is last achievement I earned and it’s a fucker and mainly down to, shockingly, the game’s controls. You must score an atomic combo of 9. I think this means killing nine enemies at once using a combined attack from both players. However, I say ‘I think’ because it seems to be totally hit and miss as to what counts. I swear I did this five or six times in a room with 13 enemies all of which died only to get a combo of six. It’s like the game doesn’t know its own system. Along with this one, there are three achievements associated with a getting a 6, 9 and 12 combo in single player. I’m pretty sure I lucked out on the last one.

In addition to this, there are a few collectible achievements and three speed runs to do. Two of the speed runs are straight forward but the game doesn’t tell you what the time to beat is. At least I think it doesn’t. The time wasn’t obvious if it was there. Anyway, once you complete the game, Gossamer makes two of these easy. The third is for doing a speed run of a level on a scooter. Another control issue, these levels are essentially vehicle sections but for some bizarre reason, the left trigger is accelerate and the right trigger is shoot… like no other racing game before or after. This speed run requires a very precise route to be taken as any deviation from the route will result in you missing the time by one second. It was incredibly frustrating.

Multiplayer

There are three achievements associated with online play and I only really started this game now because True Achievements were doing a viral week and one of the achievements is for playing with someone who has Bugs’ bug. I still have no idea what Bugs’ bug is or how to get it despite internet searches but the viral session meant that I didn’t have worry about it. I got this one and another for completing a game over Xbox Live. I was also fortunate to meet another gamer who wanted to get the other online achievement… for getting an online atomic combo of 9. That’s right, you have to do the stupid combo thing a total of three times. This was the first of the three combo achievements I did and it took us four hours before the game finally let us have it.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Looney Toons: ACME Arsenal feels like a cheap, rushed attempt at cashing in on the Looney Toons franchise. It’s got a poor story, poor gameplay, poor controls and a glitchy game structure which turns what should be a mildly amusing experience into an episode of frustration. I think it took around 10 hours to get all the achievements based on the fact it took me four working days to get them all. I can’t recommend playing it so I hope my friend knows what he is getting in to.

Battleship (Xbox One)

This was my last selected game prior to the Bean Dive and one that I’m unsure why I added to my collection in the first place.

Battleship is the video game adaptation of the popular board game of the same name. The premise is that you have five ships, your opponent has five ships and you take turns trying to sink each other. There are two modes. Classic – which is the standard board game, and Clash at Sea – where each of your ships have special attacks and you build up resources each turn to use these special attacks.

The main solo campaign is all Cash at Sea and this is where the game reveals itself to be a pile of garbage. All the missions involve having a battle with another fleet with only minor changes from the mission before. You also have to use different fleets with different special attacks but this proves irritating as some of the other fleets have entirely different special moves, some of which are next to useless and cost more resources.

The most painful thing about the campaign is the basic premise of Battleship. The idea of the real game is that your opponent doesn’t know where your ships are – this is made evident in the local multiplayer where the game asks the other player to look away when you are placing your ships. However, the AI has no real way of not knowing where your ships are. This can go one of two ways. For the early missions, the AI becomes fundamentally retarded when it hits your ships and does deliberately crap shots that only a two-year-old would maybe think is a hit. The second way is that they will use a specially attack that hits 12 squares at once… and find four of your ships. This was majorly annoying because if a human player did that it’s total luck but when the AI does it, it knows where your ships are. In the later missions, once the AI finds your ships, it will actually sink them, making the whole game primarily luck based. This is even more true in the notorious mission 24 where you must win receiving half the resources of the AI.

Musically, it’s repetitive and annoying. Graphically, it doesn’t do anything other than irritate you with overtly long cutscenes which play every time you sink a ship, even if you sink more than one ship at once – one cutscene per ship. The other negative thing I noticed was that the load times were excessive, especially when you consider how little there actually is to load.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 16 Achievements

Most of the game’s achievements can be earned by playing through the campaign but as per my earlier comments, this is the most ‘challenging’ part of the game.

You have to play with the different fleet types in the game a certain amount of times and sink 150 enemy ships. If you are winning missions, that’s a minimum of 30 games you have to play. There are 30 campaign missions and 8 tutorial missions so this takes care of itself too. You will need to play some local matches as the Tech Fleet to round this off though.

Outside of the main campaign, you have to play some versus games. There is an achievement for playing a game under Classic rules which doesn’t happen in the campaign so you have to start a versus match to do this. While you are at it, you may as well do a local player versus player match and score ten hits in a row on ships when you know where they are placed, and then win the match. Doing all of this will net you 4 achievements. It’s also worth playing another game with normal rules to get another achievement for revealing all your opponent’s grid squares before winning – made easy when you control both teams.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Battleship was a less than mediocre gaming experience that took me around 10 hours to complete. It would have been less if the AI didn’t luck out and hit four of my ships in one go twice in a row in the final mission. It’s a good one to get on to the completed pile and yet another reason why I shouldn’t just buy games that I see other people playing.

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.