Beaten: Car Battler Joe (GBA)

 Not all of my "unfinished business" games in my backlog are 1980s floppy disk games. Acquiring games to play later has been a strategy of mine across all generations of gaming. In the mid 2000s, when Nintendo introduced the DS, there were a few years when Game Boy Advance games were in bargain bins everywhere, and I was scooping them up.

One place I scooped up three of them was a gift shop in the Chinatown district of San Francisco in 2006. It had all the usual tourist stuff one would expect, but as we entered, over to the left was a tall glass display case all the way to the ceiling lined with Game Boy Advance games, many of which I had never seen anywhere else.

I picked up Defender of the Crown, Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars, and Car Battler Joe that day. I wanted more but the budget did not allow that. Later, on a message board somewhere, I revealed that location to other collectors who thanked me. 

I dabbled a little with Car Battler Joe when I first obtained it, but decided it was pretty in-depth and I would need to devote a lot of time to learning how to play it. I had always wanted to play and beat a CARPG, something I've called that niche of adventure games spanning way back to Roadwar 2000 and Autoduel in the 1980s. Basically, they are like fantasy RPGs but one levels up and fights with their cars, usually in a dystopian Mad Max-style world. 

Like many Game Boy Advance titles, it looks like a SNES game, which works well. In towns, the view is the standard top-down perspective as seen in many RPGs. The player walks around the town, talks to folks, shops at stores, and accesses save points and their garage in this mode.

When one leaves town, the gameplay shifts to classic SNES Mode 7 perspective for driving and combat. Think Super Mario Kart to understand it if my words aren't doing the job. The roads always lead to another town, and each connection this way between towns is a unique area. There are enemy vehicles, turrets, and natural things like rock formations and trees that the player can shoot at in these areas.

There is also a level of exploration in these areas, as some parts of the map may be unavailable due to obstructions that can only be overcome once the player gets their car the jump ability. The exploration of these areas rewards the player with upgrades and loot, as well as taking the edge off of any grinding one thinks is needed.

In truth, the combat in these areas is so much fun that it never feels tedious to be out there trying to secure loot. In the course of exploring all these areas, more of which opened up as the story plays out, I levelled up quite rapidly. Car upgrades came fast, too, leading to almost always being able to handle the next challenges the game had to offer.

All of the car upgrading stuff is pretty well done, but as always I did not dive into it too deeply. I upgraded weapons on my starter car and made it to the end with that car, even though the option was there to create and upgrade other cars.

There seem to be two types of loot out there in the wilderness, some that appears in the player character's inventory, and larger loot that the car must tow behind it until arriving in town to sell or use it. The player starts with one slot for such cargo, but by upgrading their garage (done by bringing in various basic materials found as loot) they can add more cargo slots.

In fact, upgrading the garage seems to trigger story events in the game. I was unsure of what to do next for quite awhile, so I upgraded the garage, and shortly thereafter new areas and quest elements opened up. This happened at a few garage levels. There was also a nearby town that requested these types of upgrades but I never finished those to see what happened in that town.

The game's end was fun and satisfying and there was still lots of things to do if I had wanted to linger there. Car Battler Joe joins Advance Wars as one of the greatest Game Boy Advance titles of all time on my list, bringing a normally complex type of game to the world of portables, and doing it so well along the way. It's also the rarest Game Boy Advance game I own, with complete-in-box copies selling for around $600 to $1000 on eBay. 

Beaten: Moss Book II (PSVR)

 It’s the twilight of support for Sony’s PSVR platform, as PSVR2 is on the way and it’s not backward compatible. That leaves the PSVR platform through PS4 as its own world, so I’ve recently taken the ol’ headset out of storage for something special: Moss Book II. 

Moss Book I was amazing but short. As a proof of concept, it worked on every level and had a great ending, but the wait for Book II has been despairingly long.

Fortunately, Miss Book II picks up right after the end of Book I and from there it’s off to the races, expanding the lore, introducing new characters, and over the course of the game adding weapons to your cute mouse hero Quill's arsenal.

Controls are the same as Book I, with the player moving Quill around, jumping and attacking, pulling switches, and the like. Concurrently the player controls The Reader, able to move objects in the environment and even heal Quill. It might sound like a lot going on control-wise but it works until it doesn’t, such as when Quill is too far back or near the side of the screen. 

There are multiple sections of the world to explore after one arrives at the central hub castle. Each has its own challenges, from light-difficulty puzzle rooms to combat areas where Quill is sealed in until a certain number of enemies are defeated. There are also scrolls to collect along the way and figuring out how to get to them is one of the most challenging aspects of the game.

The new weapons are a real treat. One is a sharp disc boomerang thing that when thrown does damage and returns to the player. The other is simply a hammer, and by the time the player finds it, they've already passed lots of things that need hammered. Best yet, each weapon has a special function that can be charged up and used for other effects. Charging up the sword, for example, powers up a dash move that allows Quill to jump across platforms, opening up more of the world for exploration.

Using the weapons to fight as well as solve puzzles is a great design choice, keeping the inventory simple and easy to navigate. There are other outfits Quill picks up as well, but I could see no difference in their use, so I assume that they are simply a cosmetic choice.

I'll wrap this up by saying that Moss Book II is everything a sequel should be, but once you beat it, that feeling comes back that the game still could have been longer and more complex. It's so good one wants to see a full, all-out 100 hour RPG based around the kind of gameplay as Moss. On the other hand, Moss Book II never wears out its welcome and is such a complete package that any regrets about its length are just a compliment to how much fun (and how totally cute) the game is.

Beaten: Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress (C64/MSDOS/WINDOWS/GOG)

 For this year's "Unfinished Business" game I choose Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress, as this one's been a thorn in my paw for decades. Unlike last year's run on Bard's Tale, my play history with Ultima II is a bit less direct, involving attempts in both the 1980s and late 1990s, and my own road to Ultima II being a bit rocky.

It was released in 1982 on floppy disk for Apple and Atari computers at first, and at some point after that for the Commodore 64 as well. I was stuck on a Commodore VIC 20 with a cassette drive by mid-1983, lusting after just Ultima: Escape from Mt. Drash after seeing an ad for the legendary vaporware game. The state of the art floppy disk RPGs of that time were mostly out of reach for me at that point.

Fast forward to the summer of 1986, and me juggling college, work, partying, and barely reaching third base in erratic and sporadic dating efforts, but high on the glory of a Commodore 64 and 1541 Disk Drive and the incredible library it had opened. By August, I had been campaigning on The Bard's Tale for five long months, but was lured to Ultima IV: Quest for the Avatar by reviews in the legendary Questbusters newsletter. 

I would have started the Ultima series with Ultima I, but there was not a C64 version out for it yet. The reviews were glowing, the game mechanics a leap ahead of its predecessor, and well, I wanted state of the art. As a regular reader of my gaming habits of the 1980s might suspect, I played Ultima IV for months (ask me about the best week of my life sometime), and gave up while fighting my way through the final dungeon.

Less than a year later, Ultima I was finally released for the Commodore 64, with a new box to match the Origin Systems standard box size introduced with Ultima III. I decided that since I could now play all the games in order, I'd pick up Ultima I and do just that. Seventeen days later I had crushed that game and had found a cheap, used copy of the Sierra On-Line Ultima II, beautifully complete with instructions and cloth map inspired by the movie Time Bandits. Elaboration on that ahead.

Pissed off about murdering her boss/teacher/lover at the end of Ultima I, Minax the Enchantress throws the universe into chaos somehow, fracturing the world into five different time eras connected by doors that appear and disappear and link the various eras, again inspired by the aforementioned Time Bandits. Garriot was feeling experimental with this one.

The world is tile-based and the action is turn-based, and each movement on land consumes one food. When a monster is on a tile next to the player, they attack. The player issues keyboard commands like A for Attack (a command which is followed by a query as to which direction the player wishes to attack). Towns, castles, towers, and dungeons appear here and there. The first priority is getting weapons, armor, and food sustainability so you can begin to explore and of course, grind some more.

Grinding becomes much easier in the three eras where, eventually, a pirate galleon sails up and attacks the player at the shore. Simply walk onto the ship and press B to board, which creates a duplicate ship under your command. Since under your command C fires the cannon, you can quickly take out the other ship any any onlooking spawn along the shore. Sail around, visit islands you could not reach, and kill everything that spawns, because guess what? Sailing does not consume food.

Back in those late summer of 1987 play sessions, which came and went into 1988, I explored every town, talked to every NPC, and took chaotic notes. In addition to the five time eras in the main world, one of the future eras has a rocket ship to steal, opening up the entire solar system to explore. Some planets have nothing, some have towns, and some are just silly. Realizing that the dungeons and towers were actually superflous loot sources whose exploration was not necessary for the campaign, I only mapped a few levels.

After solving all the puzzles and grinding my way up to a level I felt was ready, I took on Minax and lost. I do not remember how many attempts I made but I never looked back. Which is a good thing, since the boyfriend of my college housemate had asked to play Ultima II in my room since I was often at my girlfriend's apartment anyway. I agreed to let him and left instructions about creating his own character disk, which he of course ignored when he just overwrote my character disk, erasing my save. I wasn't about to start over, as I was just starting to add Ultima V to my burgeoning repertoire of unfinished Ultima games (I made it to where I beat the first Shadowlord).

After that, I did not play an Ultima game until Ultima Online, which finally got me to get a PC in early 1998. Shortly after that Origin released Ultima Collection for PC, and I made a second attempt to play Ultima II. I have notes from that time but clearly got bored with the grinding and abandoned that playthrough.

With my newfound desire to take care of "Unfinished Business" games from my backlog, I returned to Ultima II a few months ago, dusting off those old notes and sitting my ass down for some serious grinding. I reactivated my Good Old Games account, seeing that I still had Ultima IV waiting there, and I added the Ultima I-III bundle for less than ten bucks. 

My notes were thorough about what to do but lacked basic gameplay hints (like using the ships as described above), so it took me awhile to get my footing. Remembering where to go to level up attributes took a minute too, but soon I was off to the grindy races. A few weeks of sporadic gameplay later, I mounted a final assault on the castle of Minax the Enchantress, whose main weapon being a teleport spell to the other side of her castle, making you run back and forth across that place over and over.

Nonetheless, victory was mine:

I imagine it’ll be a few years before I feel like taking on Ultima III, but it was immensely satisfying to finally put Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress behind me after all these decades. 

Beaten: Stray (PS4)

Stray is an amazing new game where the player guides a normal cat around a ruined city that is only occupied by the robots that the humans left behind. It's the cutest post-apocalypse I've ever seen in a game and almost every minute of playing it is a joy. In spite of the temptation to drop hundreds of cat puns into this review, I will abstain because it's too easy and I bet every other review is doing it.

At its core this is a puzzle game, with the player using the cat's natural abilities to solve puzzles and avoid dangers. Thankfully, they did not make it a platform game as well, because a cat's natural ability to jump shouldn't be hindered by the player's own clumsiness. When an opportunity to jump is there, an X appears letting the player know that the jump is available and that's it. When exploring the challenge is to look around for places you can jump to and this option for jumping prevents endless "nope, can't make that jump" deaths.

The cat encounters an underground ruined city with no people left, only their robots who sadly just kept on keeping on, mimicking human activities like street musicianing and bartending as a sad sort of memorial to their lost creators. The cat then encounters a human intelligence in a small drone that wants to work with it and straps itself on its back with a backpack so the game can kick into high gear.

The drone helps translate writing and solve puzzles for the rest of the game, while the cat does the heavy lifting, and most fun of all, causes cat-chaos to keep the story moving along. Exploration of the environment is a big part of the game, too, and doing things like scratching up the curtains until they fall and open access to a window is an extension of the natural cat behaviors the game presents.

It's a short game but very satisfying and not very difficult. After spending five months in Dying Light 2, Stray was a refreshing gaming intermezzo of absolute cuteness, but in a way it's so good the player can't help but want more. Reviews and sales seem good, so I expect a sequel in the next few years that really expands on that world, without going all Ubisoft-thousand-points-of-light on it.