Family Game Night 4

This is the last title I needed to buy to for my American friend and I’m not sure if I saved the best or worst to last.

Let’s start with what I liked. Playing through the first game show. That’s it.

Family Game Night 4 is a game that consists of playing five games; Connect 4 Basketball, Yahtzee Bowling, Sorry Sliders, Bop It and Boggle. You can either compete against an AI opponent or a human player and you have to play all 5 games in a best of three scenario, with the exception of Boggle, to complete a game show.

You can also play the individual games under another menu. The individual games offer a slightly different variant to the one that’s part of the gameshow and these do have slightly more variety. But essentially that’s all there is to the game.

The controls are a bit awful though. For Sorry Sliders and the Bowling, the power meter is very fiddly. You have to slide it very carefully to avoid overshooting and it takes a lot of practice just to not get a full power shot. This is meaningless in the bowling which is a 100% game of luck but in the Sliders it becomes really frustrating when you have slide one slider for the win and overshoot and lose.

My biggest annoyance though is the voice over guy. He sounds majorly sarcastic when you win and overly condescending when you lose. And he can’t be interrupted at certain points, especially the end of the game show which is unskippable bullshit every single time you complete a game.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 31 Achievements

I’ll start with the ones that aren’t part of the game show. You have to play all games outside of the game show and this will net a couple of achievements. There are also achievements for playing the special variants of the games available outside of the gameshow too.

In addition to above, the Bop It ones provide a little challenge in that the AI is so fucking stupid that you won’t be able to get the achievements for getting 30 commands in a row without some human help. Or using two controllers – which is what I did.

The rest are all obtained, one way or another, by going for the big one – playing fifty game shows. Playing this many gameshows allows all of the annoyances I’ve mentioned above to really sink in. There are many ways to make it quicker but going for this achievement further highlights problems with the interface.

Sorry Sliders has the unskippable intro which makes the game the longest part of a run. Yahtzee bowling is just pure luck so you may as well sack it off. As mentioned above, the AI is pretty stupid in most games but will sometimes pull a quick move out of nowhere in Boggle or Basketball to steal wins. This all adds to the game’s ending where the cash cards are turned into money but it’s totally random. Once, I won all the games, only for the AI to get the biggest card handed to them at the start. This meant all the cards had to be drawn which adds minutes to each game show.

Getting to the 50 games will get all bar one achievement and that’s for getting 1,500 Points in Boggle. This is a bit weird because if you get a win, it’s 25 points to win and you can get a maximum of 29 points for a win. So even if you get maximum points on every game – which is so unlikely to the point that it won’t happen – you will still need up to ten games to finish it. For me if was 8.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Family Game Night 4 is so weak and devoid of content, I can’t understand how it’s a standalone title. It hasn’t endeared me to the other games in the series and this will likely be my last venture in the genre – not including games already bought and started of course.

Talking in real terms, a game show will take you around 15 minutes to complete meaning an estimate for completion of around 12 to 14 hours. They will be some very boring and repetitive hours though.

Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion XL

This was the next requested game of the three I didn’t own and while I think it was better than Looney Toons it’s not great by any means.

The story mainly revolves around Dexter as he travels through universes assembling a team of Cartoon Network characters to fight the ultimate evil and save all worlds. The ultimate evil is a remote control. Which I suppose can commit the ultimate evil of changing the channel away from Cartoon Network.

I must admit, there was some nostalgia here. When I was little, I used to watch Johnny Bravo, Captain Planet and Dexter’s Lab (sometimes the Powerpuff Girls) but some of these other ones I had never even heard of. Who the fuck is Chowder and why does he have to continually belch? I don’t get it. But I also didn’t get Cow and Chicken either and they didn’t make the cut, thank God.

The gameplay is like Super Smash Brothers in that you have two attacks and boss battles turn into a clusterfuck where it’s impossible to know what’s happening half the time. When you are not in a boss battle, it’s a side scrolling beat ‘em up although it’s generous to call it a beat ‘em up when there are only two moves you can do. The health system doesn’t make a lot of sense either. When I was playing on hard it looked like my player character could take up to 300% of damage? What’s the point in this? Why not just have a health bar like normal beat ‘em up games? It just adds to the obscurity of not knowing what’s going on.

The controls caused me a bit of an issue too. Apparently, the jump button, which is required for the side scrolling and is very important for staying alive during boss fights, defaults to the Y button. This game doesn’t pre-date standardised controls so why the fuck isn’t it the A button like every other game?

It’s based on Cartoon Network cartoon characters so it’s predictable as to what I’m going to say about the music and graphics. The music is repetitive and irritating. I think I may actually play Skyrim again just so I’ve got something nice to say about music. The graphics are as you would expect from a cartoon-based environment although some of the likenesses were good – Captain Planet aside.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

The first thing I did before tackling this game was check for missables and difficulty specific achievements. There are no missables but there is an achievement for playing the game through on hard. This is one of the worse parts of the achievement hunt, not because it’s hard but the game is so boring, I struggled to play it for more than an hour at a time. If you do play the story through on hard, you will net 11 achievements. In reality it’s 13 achievements as you should get the score related ones from doing this.

The next thing I did was clear up all the things you need to do in story mode. There are a few speed run achievements but none of these are particularly troubling, with the exception of SECTOR V which requires you to complete one of the longer levels in under 5 minutes. Basically, this is trial and error so you have to do several runs to work out when you need to race through and when you need to be careful on the platforms.

There are also achievements for doing certain fights without dying. One of these fights is against a character called Aku and it was a total pain as it seemed like luck as to whether one of his attacks blew you off the map or not. This took me several attempts before I lucked out and finished it.

After this, its case of using battle mode to get all the other achievements by using two or three controllers and getting PTE finishes and assists with specific characters. The one exception to this is getting three knockouts at the same time with Captain Planet’s special attack but this is easily done in one of the end levels.

You also need to spend your points to unlock the stages, characters and alternate costumes, some of which you will need for the achievements in battle mode. This is a small grind but less painful that playing through story mode.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion XL is an easy completion but it seriously lacks in the fun department. I wouldn’t recommend playing this one either. There are much better games out there. Even Gamerscore wise, I don’t think it’s worth it.

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.