A few updates:
1. 3D Power Drift
3DS2. Maze Hunter 3-D
3DS3. Hyrule Warriors Legends
3DS4. Icarus Proudbottom's World of Typing Weekly
PC5. Paper Mario
N64 *NEW*
6. Catherine
PS3 *NEW*
Paper Mario
Paper Mario is an RPG for N64. I first played it over 10 years ago now, when I borrowed my friends copy. That Christmas there were 3 big games coming for the N64 in the UK, a system on it's last legs. They were Pokémon Stadium 2, Mario Party 3, and Paper Mario. At the time, I didn't know what to make of Paper Mario, I wasn't much of an RPG guy outside of Pokémon, but I knew I wanted the other 2 for Christmas. I searched and I searched, but never found them. My buddy though, the lucky bugger, found all 3 under his tree that Christmas. I borrowed them all from him over time. First Pokémon Stadium 2, which I enjoyed. Then Mario Party 3, which I thought was great too. And finally, because I needed something else to play, Paper Mario. And man, did I adore it.
Fast forward 12 years or so and I finally found my own copy of Paper Mario waiting under the tree this Christmas. The game is one of the pricier big name games for N64 over here, with a loose cartridge easily hitting £60+ when it sells on eBay, and it's been top of my wants list for some time. The game takes place in the Mushroom Kingdom, and Bowser kidnaps Peach yet again, this time abducting her whole castle into space. He also steals the legendary Star Rod, allowing him to grant his own wish to beat Mario, and making him effectively invincible. As Mario, you must journey the Mushroom Kingdom saving Star Spirits who will help you overcome the powers of the Star Rod.
Aesthetically, Paper Mario still looks lovely with it's 2D character models on bubbly, colourful 3D backgrounds. Characters flip over when they change direction, and the idea is played with throughout the game - buildings open up like a cutout dollshouse when you enter or leave then, you float down gently from some heights, you roll into a tube when going down a pipe - it's super cool. The backgrounds all have an impressionist art styling too them and it just looks lovely. The music is super cute and catchy too, and fits the environment wherever it is.
The game is super inventive and quirky too. As part of the plot you'll fight against Ninja Koopas, defeat a ghost eating monster, ride the back of a tuna to a far off island, explore the inside of a toy box, solve a penguin murder mystery and read Luigi's secret diary and more. The game moves at a brisk pace, with it's 8 chapters spanning over about 24 hours, and it constantly throws clever and entertaining new scenarios at you to keep you interested throughout.
The battle system takes the basic idea of timed button presses from Super Mario RPG and actually does something worthwhile with it - basically every attack here can have it's damage increased with successful button inputs, which is displayed on screen. It might be timed button presses, mashing the analogue stick left as fast as possible, holding a button and releasing at the right time or more, but it makes battles feel very involving. You can also reduce enemy damage by pressing a just before an attack hits, which can make a major difference to your survivability. RPG mechanics are super simplified here - attacks always do set number of damage, normally in the range of 1-10, and your maximum HP is 50.
You only have 3 stats - HP, FP (read: magic points) and BP. BP is the most interesting as it allows you to equip more badges which give additional effects such as increasing damage, rendering you immune to damage from jumping on spiked enemies, gradually recovering FP and more. Whilst the low stats do mean small increments make a massive difference (a +1 to attack could mean a 50% damage increase!) it also allows you to make some very precise strategies or exploit the game mechanics in fun ways - I used a badge combo that would allow me to deal 50+ points of damage in a single turn easily, in a game where the strongest enemies have 99HP.
Paper Mario is a wonderful, compelling, charming and hilarious game. I enjoyed every single second of my revisiting this game after all those years. I completed the game 100% (all badges, recipes, optional bosses, star pieces, sidequests etc...) and don't regret a second of it. A wonderful game for one of my favourite systems. If you don't have it, get it, it's worth every penny.
Catherine
Catherine is a block pushing puzzle game for PS3, but it's better known for it's storyline premise. You play as Vincent, a man who is at a crossroads in his relationship with his long-term girlfriend Katherine. Marriage, a family and a lifetime of commitment is on the agenda, and Vincent is struggling to cope with the idea. Enter Catherine, with a C, a blonde haired temptress who Vincent cheats on his girlfriend with.
Around the same time, Vincent starts having nightmares where he visits a realm where he must climb towers of blocks to survive a fall into the abyss. Men who die in these dreams have been dying in real life, despite appearing as Sheep to Vincent. This is the main 'gameplay' segment of the game. Blocks can be pushed or pulled if you have a foothold next to them, and you can also drop down and crawl along the edges of them if there's a foothold there. You can push multiple blocks, but only pull one. If an edge of a block is touching the edge of another block, it won't fall, even if no block is underneath it, but if they are seperated it will fall after a short second.
Learning all these intricacies of block interaction is essential, because Catherine does not fuck about. This is a hard ass game, and just as Vincent is punished for his infidelities in his dreams, so will you be by this games difficulty curve, which closely resembles that of the block towers you'll spend most of the game climbing up.
The story of Catherine was interesting, and I was curious how it would develop next. It manages to keep you guessing well enough, and new elements get introduced at a rate just fast enough to stop it getting stale. There are multiple endings (I got one of the 'bad' ones on my playthrough, not using a guide) but they're basically all 'real' endings - just different potential outcomes.
The block pushing gameplay can be super satisfying when you solve something satisfying, but overall I had a lot of issues with this, which is an issue when it's the main part of the game. The boss fights where you had to climb a tower as fast as possible whilst being chased by a monster were awful - the difficulty spiked horrendously for the first few (and actually dipped for the last few compared to the normal levels, oddly) and whenever they would attack, the camera would pull out in an awkward manner to show them doing so - an issue when you need to see all the blocks you're handling to move at a speed satisfactory to outrun the damn things.
In addition, the levels featured really odd difficulty spikes, with earlier levels sometimes being outrageously hard, and later ones being easier than expected. There's a luck element in later levels that broke the whole concept of the logical thinking of the game too in my opinion - making a wrong move early on could cause the tower to collapse in such a way that it would be incredibly difficult or impossible to finish the level much higher up - with no way of knowing that you had that impact. In addition, the last world in particular was riddled with random chance in a way that was incredibly aggravating - curtain blocks would reveal themselves as a different type of block when you stepped on them at random. Monster blocks would randomly shift themselves to a new position, often in a way that made it difficult or impossible to progress, necessitating you rewind some moves and hope they didn't do it again as you replayed.
Catherine is an interesting game that I'm glad I played, but not really one that I enjoyed my time with. I found myself stressed out by the cutscenes and the gameplay more often than I found myself having fun, and it's a game I could only play in short bursts. Give it a go if you're interested, but I suspect it's not a game many will enjoy. Those who do though, I bet will love it.
. The last third of the game however is a linear pile of shit that you have to trudge through and the story goes from a pile of shit to a mountain of shit 
. It's very easy to notice where the game went from "A Game for Fans and Newcomers"(as SE loves to remind you every time you open the game) and went to fuck it lets finish this bitch. They are currently reworking the last few chapters though so the game maybe will be finished in a year or two. I really don't see the story line as salvageable, but at least they could expand on a lot of the obviously cut/abandoned content at least the paid brotherhood DLC fills in some side stories for the party that were so obviously chopped for resale.
