This is an interesting collection of games. I enjoyed all three in their own right, but I only finished one. I could see myself keeping one of these three installed to come back to on occasion, which is saying something. So instead of being annoyingly cryptic, let's just get to the games in this month's Game EXP Trilogy that have been sitting in my Unfinished Games of Steam queue for the last 11-14 years.
Systems: Xbox 360, Windows, Linux, OS X, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Wii U, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: October 20, 2010
Publisher: Team Meat
Developer: Team Meat
Time Spent: (3.9 Hours; Last Played October 24, 2015) + 13 Hours 30 Minutes
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You know, I was fully expecting to go back into Super Meat Boy, prepared to play for about 15 minutes and remember why it was that I stopped playing this game 11 years ago. At the time, I was barely making it through Chapter 2: The Hospital, and the game wasn't being fun anymore. For all of its "pixel-perfect platformer" reputation, Meat Boy seemed to be a really floaty jumper, and it didn't so much feel like I needed to be pixel-perfect, but rather to be able to account for how Meat Boy floated when jumping while either regular or X-running and mentally calculate that into when I jumped and what would be around Meat Boy when he landed. While I still kind of feel that way about the mechanics, all thanks to having played and beaten (the main campaign) of Celeste, I now feel that I was able to make another go with Super Meat Boy.
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Instead of jumping right back into the thick of it with World 2, the hospital stages with the fountains of broken syringes, I played a handful of levels from World 1. I quickly found my footing again through muscle memory, despite the 11-year gap in playing. I remembered from muscle memory that I was mostly playing by holding down X to sprint, but this time, I thought I would take my time and forgo any desire to get through the stages quickly. That lasted all of about 19 minutes before a level forced the player to sprint to make long jumps, and then it was just sprinting throughout the rest of the game. There were a couple of late-game levels that required a combination of X running and regular movement running to make it through tight-fitting jumps between buzz saws, which was oddly nice to know that the game would, at times, force the player to slow down.
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Overall, I found the game to be enjoyably difficult, compared to needlessly difficult, although that aspect still exists in the game. If I wanted to "complete" the game, I would need to beat the default time on each stage, which then unlocks a harder version of the Light World stages in the Dark World, and I found a lot of those stages to be excruciatingly difficult; but I also consider those to be optional. The second to last stage, World 6 Level 5, was one of those levels that was incredibly difficult, taking me just over an hour to beat, which both sounds like a lot of time and was a lot of time, but I frequently felt like I was making incremental progress, and so that made the game feel bearable. The last level, the "boss" fight against Dr. Fetus, I actually enjoyed a lot more than I was expecting, for the sole reason that the level was on rails. Because you could only progress when the predetermined moving blades aligned, and how purposeful the game had been about timing and placement up to that point, it meant that I just needed to figure out how and when to move. And even with Dr. Fetus chasing you, I was able to ignore their attacks throughout the majority of the level, because as long as you kept moving when the game wanted you to move, the good Dr. was not really a threat until after you reached the final room.
But that Final Part II stage, that was a pain in the ass, and I'm glad it's over.
Briefly, something else that really helped me get through the game was the music. Danny Baranowsky's music throughout the game was that perfect blend of catchy and high-energy melodies that helped me to push forward when levels were feeling really hard. Similar to the music in BIT.TRIP Runner, the never-ending enthusiasm of the music 100% helped me to get through this game.
COGS
Systems: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, PlayStation 3
Release Date: 2009
Publisher: Microsoft
Developer: Lazy 8 Studios
Time Spent: (56 Minutes; Last Played December 8, 2012) + 2 Hours 4 Minutes
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COGS has a lot going against it. First and foremost, it's a game where the primary mechanic consists of sliding block puzzles. I don't like sliding block puzzles. Never have. I have a vague memory of standing either outside or in my neighbor's house, trying to figure out one of those birthday party favor sliding block puzzles; it had a yellow or green frame, but I don't remember what the picture was. I recall getting so frustrated with the puzzle that either my neighbor or I took out the pieces, and we tried to put them back in, but the puzzle was essentially broken. In Resident Evil 4, I was eternally thankful that the in-game time paused while trying to figure out that sliding block puzzle; who knew it was that easy? Second, the game has varying levels of stars as part of your reward for completing each puzzle, made up of the time you took to complete the puzzle, the number of moves it took you to solve the puzzle, and..... Lastly, and connected to the second point, levels are locked behind a set number of stars, so even if you beat a level, there's no guarantee that you'll be able to play subsequent levels if you don't have enough stars. That whole nonsense again.
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What COGS has going for it, though, is equally a lot. The game is visually appealing as it gets. The woodgrain of the board and tiles is that comforting cedar stain. The brass accents on the steel pipes just pop. The gears are large and somehow friendly-looking; I don't know how else to describe it. In levels that use pipes, they're frequently this gorgeous shade of brass that denotes loving care has been taken with them, as opposed to dirty pipes rusted with age. The music is calming and helps alleviate the stress of the fact that I'm playing a sliding block puzzle. I love the look and feel when I'm doing a puzzle that spans across multiple sides of a cube, and the satisfaction when that last block slides into place and the whole contraption works is quite the serotonin boost.
The game itself is broken up into three separate modes: Inventor Mode and Challenge Mode, and within Challenge Mode are Timed Mode and Moves Mode. Inventor Mode is the primary source of puzzles, where you're graded on completion, speed, and the number of moves used. Generously, just completing a puzzle gives you three stars, but to acquire three stars in the other two categories, you need to be fast and mindful. Of the 51 levels, I've only made it to level 14 here, with only one level, the first, earning three gold stars in each completion for time and moves. In Challenge mode, puzzles are unlocked from Inventor Mode, but here you're limited by either time (30 seconds) or moves (10 or fewer). Moves Mode in Challenge Mode is probably my favorite because I know ahead of time that the puzzle is designed to be completed in 10 or fewer moves. The problem I have with Timed Mode is that the timer starts at the exact moment the level starts, before you've even had time to register the level prompt and take in what the puzzle looks like. By the time you're ready to move your first block, at least five seconds have already elapsed. It doesn't feel great.
Systems: Windows, Mac, Linux, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: June 8, 2011
Publisher: Final Form Games
Developer: Final Form Games
Time Spent: (4 Hours 24 Minutes; Last Played January 27, 2014) + 3 Hours 12 Minutes
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Like COGS, I have a love-skill relationship with Jamestown. I love the aesthetic; I love the steampunk design and retrofuturism of a 16th century American colony story taking place on Mars with a lot of the same historical figures; John Smith is still a piece of trash, which still tracks. I love the amazing soundtrack by Francisco Cerda and how the music at times comes across as dynamic, all because the game is on rails, so music cues can be "pre-programmed" to happen in time with events on the screen. I love the "oomph" the game gives the player when destroying waves of enemies and the execution of special moves; visual impacts can be felt.
But I can't beat this game because of both a skill issue and how the game handles progression.
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The game has five difficulty levels, from Normal to Difficult, to Legendary, to Divine, and all the way to "Judgement" (ie, stupidly difficult). You can play the first three levels on any difficulty, but the fourth requires Difficult or higher, and the final level requires Legendary or higher. I get that the game's progression requires you to get better at this type of bullet-hell game, and it doesn't help that I'm not particularly good at this genre either. Something I found interesting was that the hitbox on each of the four playable characters/crafts seems to only be the size of your character, and not the ship they're piloting, and that enemies themselves do not cause damage, only the projectiles they're firing. I'm sure that this plays into actually being good at this game, although for me, I found that I became really jumpy whenever the screen really filled up with enemy fire.
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I did a bit of reading about the DLC that includes several additional characters/ships that have different abilities, and the consensus seems to be that the additional ships are really good overall. Which got me thinking that maybe I could benefit from access to additional ships, but then that felt like paying to win the game, and that made me sad. So I didn't pick up the DLC, which leaves in a tight spot. Because the game doesn't have cloud saves, I'll either have to manually save whatever file it is that you're supposed to save to, then use for games that don't have cloud saves, or just start over from the beginning if I decide to uninstall the game, because I know that I'm not going to be able to beat it this time around either. I might just have to resign myself to that fact, which I'm kind of okay with.
Mostly.
So those were the recent additions to my current and "long?" running series, Game EXP Trilogy. All three of these games were a lot of fun, but for COGS and Jamestown, it just boiled down to a skill issue, and one that I'm not so eager to build up just to say that I beat these two games.
I'm going to take the month of October off from publishing another article in this series so that I can focus on a couple of other games I'm working on, but I'll be back for November (or December if I get caught up again). But there are plenty of games in my aging Steam backlog that I'll be getting to in the coming months.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental
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