Games Beaten 2019:First 50:
51. Mario Party
N6452. ActRaiser
SNES53. GoldenEye 007
N6454. Mom Hid My Game
Switch eShop55. Money Puzzle Exchanger
Switch eShop56. Gunbird
Switch eShop57. Tokyo School Life Switch eShop
58. Musynx Switch
59. Gremlins 2: The New Batch NES
60. Subsurface Circular Switch eShop
61. Yoshi's Woolly World Wii UTokyo School Life
Tokyo School Life was a game that wasn’t really on my radar, but a set of decent reviews and a fairly substantial eShop sale swayed my interest enough to give it a go. The premise of the game is that you are an [implied] American student who is obsessed with Japan, and who after winning a content of some sort related to learning Japanese, is on an exchange program to a school in Tokyo. Once there, you find you’re sharing a home with 3 japanese schoolgirls. The game is a visual novel with dating sim elements, so you might expect it to be very fanservicey and a little skeevy, but that isn’t really how this one plays it (for the most part, at least, it can’t help a few bikini shots here and there – but it really doesn’t feel like the games focus, and may detract a little ultimately).

See, the game actually seems to really want to tell you bit about life in Japan too. It’s pretty light touch, nothing much you couldn’t figure out as a tourist, but it is an interesting experience in a game. Dates you go on with the girls take you to different areas of Tokyo (Shibuya, Akihabara and Kabukicho respectively) and give you a taste of what makes those places standout. You also go on a school trip later in the game, which can be in one of 3 places depending on which girl you’re closest to – one takes you to Osaka, one to Kyoto and one to Okinawa. The game definitely takes the idea of you being a stranger to Japan just as seriously as it does the idea of you getting a cute Japanese girlfriend.

On that front, the plotlines for the 3 girls are pretty interesting too. They’re a little cliché, taking on lots of stereotypical anime tropes, but its written fairly well overall and the Japaneseness of the storyline just kind of fits. One of the girls plotlines deals with karate and the Yakuza, one on them follows a sick girl who is a closet otaku, and the last follows a girl who is a junior idol. I think the quality of each story varies, but they were all charming in their own way, and they sometimes took some more serious turns than I expected.

The music of the game is sickly sweet but charming, and visually, the game doesn’t have a lot to look at, but the girls are fairly well animated overall. Finally, the game really is serious about being a game about learning about Japan, thanks to it’s subtitling options. Not only does the game have English text, but in addition you can also enable Japanese text. This can be romaji, hiragana & katakana or kanji, allowing for you to practice reading in Japanese alongside the game.

Ultimately, I had a pretty good time with Tokyo School Life. It’s certainly not for everyone, but it’s short and fairly easy going, and I had a good time with it. Recommended if you think you’ll like this kinda thing.
Musynx
Musynx is a rhythm game for Nintendo Switch featuring lots of songs from Asian artists from a variety of genres, but with a focus on electronic music primarily. The tracks come from Japanese, Korean and Chinese artists, and if there’s one thing to be said for the game is that is certainly doesn’t skimp on content. There are easily 100+ songs here, and playing through them all even once is quite the time commitment overall.

On top of all that, there are 4 ways to play each song – see, the game actually has 2 different difficulty settings. Not only do songs come in easy and hard forms, but they also come in 4 and 6 key versions for both versions. In the game, notes come down a track towards the bottom of the screen (think Guitar Hero) and pressing the corresponding button for each track will hit the note. The easier 4 note difficulty uses left and up on the d-pad plus X and A buttons for each of it’s 4 lanes, but the 6 note versions add right on the d pad and the Y button for 2 new middle lanes. This adds up to a humungous amount of content to play through and master overall. Add on to this the ability to just the speed of the note chart and you have a myriad of ways to adjust difficulty.

This huge amount of content does come with some drawbacks though, particular in the game’s presentation. This is a bare bones experience – when you hit start you literally go straight to song selection, and the animations and backgrounds which accompany each song are limited – there’s about 8 different backgrounds for the games 100+ songs. This means if you play every song in order, like I did, you’ll find the backgrounds quickly getting repetitive as you play through the 10th song in a row with the rainbow background. Worse, the backgrounds generally correspond to genre, so playing in order will mean getting 20 similar songs in a row with the same background, and if you have a particular taste in songs, you’ll see the same background an awful lot.

The note patterns on the game are sometimes good and sometimes bad. I found that anything below 5 on the difficulty scale was too easy and boring, but equally that anything about 7 was really tough and 9+ was nigh on impossible. I feel the game would have benefitted from a medium difficulty option to ease between the generally too easy standard difficulty and the generally too hard hard mode. I found myself jumping between difficulties by song depending on rating to keep an appropriate level of challenge.

Speaking of challenge, moving to 6 button mode is just that. I don’t know why, because I’ve played more complicated rhythm games before, but I found 6 lane mode tripped me up all the time. The game isn’t shy about throwing 2 or 3 notes at you simultaneously, or making you hold one note whilst hitting others in between, and the button gymnastics can get confusing even with 4 buttons. I think the game is pretty bad about easing you in to 6 button mode though, because it puts the new lanes in the middle – meaning that the lane you might be used to being X on 4 button mode is now Y, requiring you to unlearn all the muscle memory you had from before.
Lastly, the biggest issue I had with the game was feedback. Most rhythm games I’ve played have had sound effects or similar which play if you either hit the note or miss it, but Musynx doesn’t have anything like this. Because of this it took me a lot longer to figure out how good my timing was on songs.

Overall, Musynx was an OK time, but I find myself actually wishing for more features and less content overall, which feels weird to say. The music is good, if a little too unbalanced for dancey electronic tracks for my personal tastes, and the gameplay whilst simple can be compelling when the difficulty is just right. But I found myself too often wishing for a more curated experience where I had less controls for difficulty but the game had better default settings, where the experience was more engaging and offered more feedback. If you see this for cheap, you might want to pick it up, but I suspect there are better rhythm games on switch already. I’ve not played them, so don’t quote me on this, but the likes of Voez, Deemo and Taiko No Tatsujin are probably better choices.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch
Gremlins 2 is a game I received as a birthday present from a friend. I had actually played it once before at his place, and thought it was pretty good. It’s a top down platforming adventure of sorts by Sunsoft, from back when they were actually good, and it has a real feeling of quality. The thing about Sunsoft when they made good games though, is they also generally made hard games, and this is no exception.

You play as Gizmo, and you run around the levels shooting enemies and collecting power ups before taking on bosses at the end of each world. In the first world your weapon is a tomato which you lob forward and which his kinda similarly to the bombs in Blaster Master – it’s short range, and can only be fired in 4 directions. Luckily, as you progress you get new weapons, such as a match which shoots a blast further forward, a paperclip which fires in a spread and finally a powerful bow.

Alongside the games enemies, your main hazard will be falling into the many pits that litter the stage. The game has quite a lot of platforming, often with moving platforms, and this can be the most frequent cause of your deaths. Luckily, there’s powerups to help deal with both enemies and platforming – hearts to replenish health, and powerups which add an extra hit point to your health for the rest of the stage. A pogo stick grants temporary invincibility (but stops you being able to shoot or jump pits, so has some restrictions), and most helpfully, a balloon saves you if you fall in a pit. Some power ups can be found on the map, and some can be purchased from a store which appears in some areas in stages.

Once I got into the swing of things, Gremlins 2 wasn’t too bad. I had a fun time running through the levels, and I manage to amass enough lives and balloons to keep me safe from a game over. Later levels throw some mean challenges at you, with moving platforms running into electric currents and gremlins who throw stuff at you mid jump, but I managed to deal with it. The bosses weren’t too bad either – the key to all of them is to keep moving and spam attacks whenever possible.

The graphics are decent enough for NES, and the game has some pretty impressive cutscenes for the console showing events from the film. The music, as Sunsoft tracks so often are, was fantastic and was a highlight of the game, and a classic NES soundtrack.

Overall, Gremlins 2 is a pretty great time. It’s unforgiving, as many NES games are, but it’s got a great bouncy soundtrack, fun gameplay and avoids too many cheap moments overall. It also tends to be cheap, even over here in Europe where NES wasn’t too common, so it’s a highly recommended purchase in my eyes.
Subsurface Circular
Subsurface Circular is a visual novel game set in a world where AI robots are manufactured to do jobs. AIs use the Subsurface Circular, an underground railway, to travel between stations to their jobs. The game is set on this train line, and you play as a detective AI – an AI whose job is to investigate and solve mysteries assigned by the government. AIs are manufactured with different levels of intelligence depending on job role – some, whose job is to work on electronics deep underground, can barely communicate, but AIs who work with humans are capable of interaction and a certain level of free-thought. As a detective AI, you have one of the highest levels of intelligence, and are capable of thinking for yourself.

At the start of the game, another robot asks you to investigate his missing friend, a task which you accept despite it not being assigned by the authorities, thus breaking the rules. This begins a whole chain of mysteries which unfold through the night, which you try and follow to establish a truth of sorts.

Investigation in the game is done purely via communication. You cannot move or choose where to go – you merely sit on the train as it goes from station to station, questioning and communicating with the robots who arrive and leave on the way to their jobs. However, there are some puzzles to be solved in terms of using thoughts and new information from one robot to get another to expand or open up some new information. The dialogue is interesting and the robots range from likeable and fun to haughty and rude, and all between. The writing quality is very good overall.

And nowhere is this felt more than in the world building. Despite being set entirely in one train carriage, Subsurface Circular manages to build a believable and in-depth world. It touches on some big concepts and topics – stuff like whether AIs can or should have free will, the idea of humans losing their livelihoods to machines, government controls and bureaucracy, theology, prejudice, martyrdom and so much more in its mere 2 hour long timeframe.

I won’t go into too much more depth on the game because I would worry about going into spoilers. The experience of playing the game is worthwhile and interesting overall, and for the low price it goes for, I would say this is an essential purchase. It may not be for everyone, but for such a small commitment of cost and time, it’s definitely worth giving it a go.
Yoshi’s Woolly World
I’m not the biggest fan of Yoshi games. It’s hard to explain why. I actually think Yoshi’s Island is a fantastic game one of the best on SNES, but I don’t have a huge amount of desire to go back to it. I enjoyed Yoshi’s Story OK and found Yoshi’s Island DS to be pretty average. So I’ve not been the most keen to try new Yoshi games overall – until I was won over by the aesthetic charms of Woolly World. So how does it hold up?

Yoshi’s Woolly World has you playing as a yarn Yoshi, on the quest to save all your Yoshi brethren from Kamek, who has turn them all into balls of yarn. You do this in a fairly standard yoshi way, running, jumping and fluttering, licking up enemies and throwing stuff at people. There are some differences though, thanks to the Yarn mechanics. First of all, you throw balls of yarn instead of eggs. This often has the same purposes, but there are some small differences – you can fill in outlines to knit new platforms by throwing yarn at them, and some enemies like Pirahna plants get tangled up in the yarn instead of merely defeated. Yarn can come from enemies or from the environment – licking up loose threads often unravels areas of the environment and give you large yarn balls that can hit multiple enemies in a row.

Transformations are back from the first game, with Yoshi knitting himself into new forms such as a motorbike or an umbrella for short sections. Rather than feeling like part of the core level, these are more like mini game challenges this time round. They’re fun, and I wish they were utilised more.

Also back from the main series is the collection focus, which I’m not a fan of. Each world has 20 hidden stamps found by collecting specific gems, 5 flowers and 5 balls of wool to collect. To complete a stage fully you need to find all of these as well as finish with the maximum 30 health. Personally, I find this to be quite tedious and one of the weaker aspects of the series – it really slows the gameplay down. It sucks too, because there are good rewards behind it – new yoshi colours and new levels for example.

Like Epic Yarn before it, you collect lots of gems in wooly world, and these can be used to spend on power ups before levels. Some of these are call backs to the first yoshi, such as getting melons to spit, and some make stages way easier by giving you invincibility or whatnot. Some felt like must haves for me though, with the gem magnet ability being a frequent must buy to keep gameplay fast.

Overall, I liked Woolly World. It’s up there with the original Yoshi’s Island as one of the best in the series, and it’s absolutely high quality. I still had some concerns with slow paces though, and found my favourite levels were often those where they mixed up the standard gameplay. Despite that, this is a totally worthwhile game to play, and super adorable to boot. Worth getting.