Beaten: Alpha Protocol (PS3)

 I really really need to write these reviews immediately after finishing a game, and not months later.

Alpha Protocol was released in 2010 at the height of the XBox 360/PS3 era (which I call generation nine but the world says is eight) and there was a lot of anticipation for it. It is a full on espionage role-playing game, so a lot of us were thinking "Mass Effect meets James Bond", what could go wrong?

The reviews hit and it appeared that a lot went wrong. There were bugs and glitches of course, but for the most part the consensus was that the action - shooting, hiding in cover, and so forth - was very bad, even if the storytelling and character conversation options were great. So Alpha Protocol came and went, lost to the ages as many much more better games came after. 

There has been, however, an internet wave of nostalgia towards this game that had so much promise, but for me the question was - it is playable enough? Keeping with my recent PS3 love, I choose that version and dove in. 

After enjoying all the conversation options in my recent playthrough of Rise of the Argonauts, I was prepared for it in Alpha Protocol and was not disappointed. It really is deep and complex with options to be a nice romantic bond type or a total douchenozzle. I choose the cold professional but helpful agent. I just did my job and took some weird satisfaction in shooting down all the characters that were clearly hitting on me. "Uh, thanks for the intel, and no I am not interested in a romantic subplot with you" seemed to happen a lot.

The plot is pretty standard - agent gets burned and goes underground to uncover the plot. I loved that the villains are basically flimsy corporate caricatures and the company is basically Halliburton, and that there were little parts of the game where the TV is on talking about world events. There are a lot of small touches here and there that add depth. 

So the reviews were right - the story, characters, and conversation choices represent a part of the game that was clearly designed very well, and for multiple playthroughs. The action though, is so poor that most players wouldn't bother. The player plays in third person, and the aiming is sketchy at best, and the stealth is broken. Crouched behind cover, since Gears of War, usually means the player crouched behind an object is sort of stuck to it, and hidden. In this game, you just crouch near it an obstruction and hope for the best. If a single pixel is sticking out, a guard a hundred feet away will see you.

I had fun in my playthrough, and with a few cool boss fights to break the monotony, even the substandard action was bearable. The concept of an espionage RPG is still out there, but this attempt in 2010 called Alpha Protocol was a step in the right direction. Hopefully, someone will take that concept and run with it someday.

Beaten: Wanted Weapons of Fate (PS3)

Videogame adaptations of movies have earned a pretty bad rap, even though some of the earliest known such games were pretty good (see Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back on the Atari VCS).  Goldeneye 007 in the late 1990s was certainly a high standard, and the first time that I can recall a videogame making me immediately want to see the movie. It should be noted that the movie is adapted from a comic book.

I remember when the movie Wanted came out in 2008 and adding it to a list I had of "get around to seeing it eventually" movies. It had the star power of Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy, and Morgan Freeman, but the wife and I never got around to checking it out, even when it appeared on streaming services we had. I had also heard about the tie-in videogame but it was of course also forgotten about.

That is, until my recent hunt for XBox 360 and PS3 hidden gems, as I am coalescing around the idea that that specific console generation was the highpoint of the entire hobby. I picked up the PS3 version for this as my 360 has been getting plenty of attention this year. Reviews had warned me that it was fun but short, and my expectations were prepared.

Wanted: Weapons of Fate is a third person shooter that takes place five minutes after the movie ended. Having not seen the movie yet was not a hinderance as the game caught me up pretty fast on what was going on. The story revolves around a secretive assassin's guild and the main character's quest to understand both his abilities and history. 

The big hook of these assassins is that they can slow things down and curve bullets, and the game delivers on that cool mechanic. It's really fun once the player gets it going and the controls work well. Other than that, it's third person combat with a story that is a great continuation of the movie - which I watched a few days after beating the game. The movie is also really good.

After finishing, part of me wanted Wanted Weapons of Fate to be a little longer, but that's a minor quibble. Over the last few years I've come to value shorter game experiences, so maybe it was the perfect size. If you're a gamer that can appreciate that too, then this game is recommended.

Beaten: Rise of the Argonauts (360)

 Another XBox 360 game that has turned up in my hunt for games on the system I missed is Rise of the Argonauts, an action adventure depicting a story that, while not necessarily based in existing Greek mythology, was nonetheless an interesting and unique take on all of it.

The player is Jason, and he’s after the golden fleece as usual, assembling his crew of Argonauts on his ship the Argos. From there the story diverges as Jason’s crew features a lot of familiar names like Hercules, Achilles, and so forth, with the goal of getting the golden fleece per legend. In this telling though, Jason is really on a quest to resurrect his fiancé, by getting the golden fleece and using it on her corpse. He unravels a conspiracy of evil behind it all and sometimes does some hacking and slashing to get it done. 

The game unfolds in a linear fashion, with Jason and his crew of Argonauts expanding at each port. At one point the player has a choice of which part of the quest to take on next but after those sections of the game are completed, it’s linear again. 

While it appears this game is just another hack-and-slash, there really is not the same proportion of action to conversation as in other games. Conversations with people one meets and members of the crew are absolutely essential to getting through the game. In a unique twist, conversational choices align with various Greek gods, where Ares might prefer the confrontational approach, Apollo might prefer a more compassionate choice.

Greek mythology is ingrained not only in these conversations and their choices, but in an absolutely unique quest and challenge menu that consists of constellations that, with the completion of a quest or a challenge, add stars to show it. Upgrades to abilites take place in another menu where the various gods grant powers based on the player's actions and conversation choices. In addition to combat and conversation, stopping and praying to those attention-starved gods here and there also adds up. 

The combat is nothing noteworthy but there are a few decent boss fights along the way. No, this game is more about conversation and getting steeped in the mythology as a unique story unfolds, and that part of the game shines. I'd definitely classify this game as an XBox 360 hidden gem and recommend it to any player nostalgic for those simpler times.

Beaten: Ultima Runes of Virtue (Game Boy)

 Talk about a pleasant surprise. At some point in the past I picked up a loose cartridge of Ultima Runes of Virtue for the Game Boy, knowing that it would not be a full Ultima-style RPG, and tried it out. It seemed at first to be more of a dungeon puzzle game than even an action adventure and I didn’t fiddle with it much.

Then I plugged it into my new Analog Pocket and really dug in. Having beaten it after a few weeks of portable fun, I can gladly say that this game stands shoulder to shoulder with Final Fantasy Legend, The Legend of Zelda Link’s Awakening, and Final Fantasy Adventure as must-play Game Boy RPGs and action RPGs. 

So yeah, puzzles. It is a masterpiece of a dungeon puzzle game, with lots of monster combat thrown in. By that I mean, stepping on a floor plate might remove a wall and unleash a horde of spiders. That’s just one example though and fails to describe the gloriously crazy variety of such puzzles and traps.

Once again, playing this on an Analogue Pocket allowed me to save anywhere, eliminating the frustration of multiple repetitive dungeon runs. No, only my own lack of thoroughness and attention to detail resulted in multiple repetitive dungeon runs. None of these puzzles are insanely hard, and if I remember correctly, most can be solved within the same dungeon, with the items you should have, through trial and error and observation.

The game takes place in a standard, classic Ultima top down world. The player starts on a single continent with a few castles, shops, and dungeons, and opens up other sections of the world as the game progresses. Boats act as ferries to get to and from these landmasses, with the final continent only reachable through a dungeon at first, but a ferry opens up once the player has made it through so the dungeon trip does not have to be repeated.

With such complex and clever puzzles in the dungeons, the designers had to come up with a way to get players unstuck if they did the wrong thing. It is possible to get stuck in a lot of situations, so there is an item in the player's backpack to instantly teleport them out of the dungeon and back to Lord British's throne room for a quick healing and reset. It's an ugly solution that forces a complete dungeon restart, but with the Analog Pocket and its save states, I did not need to utilize it often.

There is not much in the way of NPC conversation and interaction, but the player does level up attributes and equipment to a basic degree. And it bears repeating that the player must explore every tile of every dungeon to avoid missing important items. While the goal of each of the eight dungeons is to recover a rune, there are also important items hidden that will be required for the player to advance.

In this sense, the game requires some level of backtracking if the player is not paying attention (like me), and some level of grinding to save up money for some of the more expensive purchases available in shops. Fortunately, it was easy to find places to quickly grind gold, and even some of the more useful items.

It's always a good feeling when a game gives you more than you were expecting. I was expecting a half-assed dungeon crawler that was just cashing in on the Ultima name. Instead, this is exactly what one would hope for in a portable adventure and it was a joy to explore and solve over a few weeks. I guess I had better start looking for the sequels to Ultima Runes of Virtue for more pleasant surprises.

Beaten: Two Worlds (360)

 The summer of 2024 has been bittersweet for fans of the Xbox 360 as Microsoft has pulled the plug on the online store for the console, ending a long era of support for the legendary system. It had to happen but it’s still a bitter pill to swallow.

The sweet part is a wave of nostalgia across the internet as many gamers post videos and social media posts recollecting the glory days of the console. I’ve never stopped playing on my old XBox 360, which has survived the red ring of death, a lightning strike/power surge which took out its ethernet connector, and a hard drive upgrade. As of this writing, the disc drive door is scting fussy.

In addition to a wave of last-minute downloaded games arriving on my 360, my physical disc collection is once again growing thanks to a local mom and pop video game store near my office. One game that has languished in my 360 backlog for too long is Two Worlds, a full action RPG released in 2007 by Polish studio Reality Pump.

Oddly enough, I had played and finished Two Worlds 2 on the Playstation 3 back in 2011 but at the time dismissed the idea of going back and playing the first game as the reviews were pretty mediocre. It was a good, solid RPG too, if not quirky and a little “off” in a delightful way indicative of a non traditional game studio.

That right there is the rub of my love of games from this era. For every Grand Theft Auto IV or Elder Scrolls Oblivion, there were dozens of full-effort, packed with loads of content and story games released by studios trying their best, and sometimes failing.

Two Words was surprisingly stable, with only a few crashes during my play through. It’s really a sprawling open world RPG with good combat, lots of NPCs with quests, factions, and everything one could want. The graphics are what one would expect from the early XBox 360 days, but I found them good enough.

The voice actor who voices the player’s character was thankfully in this one too, as his snarky comments here and there were a source of amusement. 

As usual, I did not dig too deeply into the complexities of character development. Nor did I scour the map for every scrap of content; but rather I completed enough side quests to level up my character enough that, when the path opened up to the endgame, I was ready.

Two Worlds is a different enough, functional enough, and fun enough game to recommend to those with a taste for a unique studio’s take on the action RPG. Even though this game was lost in the crowd of XBox 360 releases back then, it can certainly stand out as a hidden gem in one’s 360 library to this day.

Beaten: Farcry 6 (Series)

I'm currently sort of stuck on a few games and while taking a break from them, I decided to try Farcry 6 since it was there on XBox Game Pass for free. After several recent open world games bogging me down for months, I was thinking I would avoid them for awhile in favor of more focused, linear games.

What I wanted for the break was a game that I could play and make regular progress, feel some sense of accomplishment, and mostly have fun. So I took on Farcry 6 with the caveat that I would not necessarily care about beating it and just enjoy each little piece of it. If I got bored and abandoned it, that would be fine.

I hadn't read any reviews and only knew that that one actor who is showing up in almost every science fiction show was playing the bad guy. I know Farcry, and Ubisoft, its publisher, so I had expectations. I was surprised as I started playing that the game, while presenting a huge map, seemed smaller than recent Farcry and Assassin's Creed games I've played. It seemed even smaller when I found a helicopter and did some aerial reconnaissance, but also smaller in terms of side missions and optional collection quests.

Dare I say, Farcry 6 was optimized in some way to make a more approachable experience for those of us who don't want to dedicate 3-6 months of our playtime? Or was my own perception of it all altered by my attitude in approaching the game, by only going after bite-size pieces of content without the goal of beating the game present in my head.

I started, of course, with the tutorial island, and told myself if I wanted to keep going after that, I could. Once completed, there are three factions across the map to recruit for the overall revolution. I had enough fun in the tutorial to head to the first faction I choose.

There was nothing different here. The player is a part of a revolution against an evil dictator, who being backed by an evil foriegn corporate dude, is enslaving his own population to grow some weird cancer-fighting tobacco or something. The main story missions explain this situation really well, and the side missions are no longer cookie-cutter repeats but rather more focused "stories" usually relating to one of the NPCs encountered.

I've always loved the capture-bases-to-liberate-the-country model since Just Cause, and Farcry 6 delivers that. And since I had fun with that, and the characters, side missions, vehicles, I found myself picking at little pieces of the cake until six weeks later I had beaten the game and liberated the country.

I had fun and did not feel overwhelmed and stressed or rushed to get to the ending. Oh there are some complaints that come to mind, but nothing stands out as game-breaking. It is 2024, so if I am carrying a rocket launcher and you're suddenly throwing me into a cutscene and it shows me holding a pistol, congratulations Ubisoft, you're several steps back from where games I've recently played from 2008 were.

So was Farcry 6 an optimized improvement on their open world design, or am I optimized to not get overwhelmed at giant open world games? I guess I'll find out the next time I take one on.

Beaten: Little Kitty, Big City (Series)

 In recent years, I've been loving games that let one play as a regular animal and mess up human stuff, like Goat Simulator, Untitled Goose Game, and of course Stray. I think of that as my role in this world anyway (to mess up human stuff), so these games really appeal to my itchiness for anarchy.

Since Little Kitty, Big City was on XBox's Gamepass, and I needed something light to play while stuck in other games, I dove in and started checking it out and found myself enjoying it more that I had suspected. 

In terms of gaming habits, this year I’ve shifted from an absolute determination to finish each game one at a time, and instead, when I get stuck, move on to another game for a break. I'm currently stuck in Gears 5(One) and A Boy and His Blob Trouble on Bloblonia (NES), so after perusing the contents of Xbox Game Pass, I found Little Kitty, Big City and dove into it's cute, fun adventure.

The cat you play is living the good indoor cat life up in a highrise home, when sudden circumstances bring the kitty down to street level, with a quest to just get back up there again. The viewpoint is third person, with a fairly large few blocks of city making up the map. The graphics are colorful and simple, and the city looks great. 

Kitty's quest takes him around a few blocks with some things the kitty can jump up to, which is easy as a prompt appears onscreen when a jump is viable. At first I thought that this prompt made it too easy, and then I remembered that such jumps are instinctually easy for cats, so this was accurate.

There's lots of exploring to do, and little surprises along the way including encounters with other cats who help the kitty, and dogs that can be bribed with a bone to allow access to areas.

I don't have much else to say about Little Kitty, Big City except that it was a light, short, and fun game that was a nice break from the usual fare I play. It's not sophisticated like Stray, nor does it have as many things to do as Goat Simulator 3, but for the cost (free with Gamepass), it was just the break I needed.

Beaten: Operation C (Game Boy)

 Oops I did it again.

Playing Operation C, the Game Boy entry into the Contra series on my shiny new Analogue Pocket, I was just hoping to see how far I could get. 

I’ve never beaten a Contra game before, but have fond memories of trying, especially those Contra 3: The Alien Wars co-op sessions I had in 1992 or 1993 with my friend Dave Frye.

The difference, as one can tell from recent articles I’ve written, is that the Analogue Pocket can create a save state anywhere when playing an old Game Boy, Game Boy Color, or Game Boy Advance cartridge. If the cartridge has its own save battery option, that still works too.

These games are still difficult, don’t get me wrong. The save state option merely eliminates the repetition of having to play through everything over and over again when attempting to get through a difficult part.

A game like Operation C has no built in cartridge save of the player’s progress, so when first all the players’ lives are gone, and then a limited number of continues are used up, it’s back to the beginning of the game, not just back to the beginning of the level or the boss fight.

Operation C is a great, five stage sampler of Contra, containing every bit of that game’s run-and-gun shooting action. The player starts with a rapid-firing machine gun that has unlimited ammunition, starts running and jumping to the right as waves of various enemies attack.

There’s no time limit, fortunately, but few places where one can stand still without endless respawning enemies running up from behind. Occasionally a power up will fly by with a big letter on it indicating what it does. “S” for upgrading the gun to a spread of bullets rather than a straight line, “F” for fire, and a few others.

“H” is for homing bullets that home in on enemies, curving their trajectory, and other than the save state was my key to victory in this game. I had the spreading fire first, then picked up the homing bullets, and then took care to not pick up another power up at any point after that.

In addition to scrolling and jumping right and sometimes up, some stages are viewed top-down and scroll up. This certainly adds to the variety, as does several mini-boss type of encounters scattered here and there. The boss fights are likewise challenging, but patterns exist in their attacks for players to discern.

I had a perfect playthrough going on at the final boss fight, meaning I went into it with five extra lives. I failed to beat it with my first life and his homing bullets. Since the game at least puts the player back in the midst of the fight for their second and subsequent lives, I was able to burn through those extra lives to victory.

I can now cross “beat a Contra game” off of my videogame bucket list.

Beaten: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan (Game Boy)

 Platformers have never been my strong suit, even when they reigned supreme during the 16-bit era.  While I tried and played many, there were few I finished. This was especially true on the Game Boy, where the hardware limitations could cause a blurring effect when the screen scrolls in some games.

Thus, my Game Boy collection has quite a few unfinished platformers, and I’ve been giving some of them another shot since getting the Analogue Pocket, as the clear screen, the save state option, and the end of any blurring issues with these types of games makes them shine in a new light.

Enter Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan, a five-stage game featuring the famous reptilian heroes scrolling right to defeat an army of ninjas and other foes from the cartoon and comic. After failing to beat the very difficult NES TMNT game I must’ve been hoping the Game Boy game would be easier. 

I have no idea how far I got back then, but sliding the cartridge into the Analog Pocket, I dove in without much hope of getting anywhere new, but I was having fun so I pressed on. Soon, I was beating the first stage without using the save state feature, which gave me enough confidence to start a new playthrough and use the save state, just to see how far I could get.

Now, save states have not been a guarantee of success for me by any means - I still got stuck at very difficult parts of Castlevania on the NES mini and Splatterhouse on the Turbografx 16 mini - but they do remove the frustration of completely starting over upon death.

Thus, with TMNT: Fall of the Foot Clan, I locked into a pattern of slowly moving right until the next enemies spawned and attacked, killing them without taking damage, waiting until things settled down, and saving. 

With no time limit this made most of the game pretty easy, but there were boss fights at the end of every level to contend with as well. These were not particularly hard either, and saving right before them made it easier. Some I beat on the first try.

There were three small bonus mini-games I found during my travels which added variety to the experience, and those were mostly fun. I kept waiting for a spike in difficulty that never came.

Played as intended, this would be a fairly tough game, simply because there is no natural save option on the cartridge and each attempt would mean starting over. Oddly enough, the player can pick any level to play right at the start, but to get the ending one must play and beat them sequentially, I suspect.

I had fun beating this turtle sized platformer after owning it for 34 years. However, there is no way I’m trying that NES TMNT game again, thanks to the now legendary water level’ difficulty. 

A lot of these old platformers are difficult simply due to the need to start over every time. I’m too old now to hit those walls, but with the advent of save states, I can save a good playthrough in progress and take on new challenges as I encounter them.

Beaten: Mazes of Fate (GBA)

When thinking about what I wanted to write about Mazes of Fate, a Game Boy Advance dungeon crawler I'd recently beaten, I realized that the story of my acquisition and enjoyment of this game is the convergence of three of my gaming interests: portable adventure games, cleaning up at clearance sales when a device for playing them is done in the market, and unique game designs and developers.

Mazes of Fate is a portable adventure game, which early on for me was something I very much wanted to have. For the 1980s, all I had for that was the handheld Dungeons and Dragons released by Mattel. When the Game Boy showed up at the end of the decade, it was not long before full turn based RPGs followed, starting with Final Fantasy Legend. Since then the RPG has been a part of every major handheld console, and along with it the joy of having an adventure game that you can pick up and play anywhere, and of course save your progress. 

Shifting gears, there was a day in 1985 when, while in college, my friends and I stopped at a nearby Quality Farm & Fleet store for some other reason but saw a bin of Vectrex consoles and games all on a clearance sale. I sure did not have the money back then to clean up, but made a note that, when a game system goes down, to try to pick up as much in clearance sales when I can.

I got to put that into practice when the Game Boy Advance was supplanted by the DS in the mid-2000s. Without much effort, I was able to pick up a lot of GBA games here and there (I even found an original Game Boy game still on a store shelf amid that search) and build a nice little library. While I was pretty much done with that by 2009, I nonetheless picked up Mazes of Fate after finding it cheap at a Half Price Books store in San Antonio, Texas.

I tested the game, of course, and played a few minutes, but put it down until my recent acquisition of an Analogue Pocket portable. This device, with its clear screen, great controls, and save state option, has brought forth a renaissance in my Game Boy/Color/Advance playing, even more so than the Game Boy Player for the Gamecube did back in the day. I now exist in a state of always having some old game I dismissed or didn't play much in the Analogue Pocket for portable fun at home, and sometimes at work on my lunch break.

While there were lots of RPGs for the Game Boy Advance, this one is unique for a lot of reasons. It was developed by Sabarasa, and Artgentinian studio, and published by Graffiti Entertainment in the US. According to Wikipedia, development took two and a half years and the game was released on December 12, 2006. Yes, this was well after the heydey of the Game Boy Advance and well into the DS's reign as the handheld to have.

Gameplay is typical fantasy RPG stuff, where the player chooses a template character or creates one of their own, and is later joined by up to two other NPC characters. When in town or the overworld, the view is forward-top-down style and the tiny player walks around before entering a building or a town. In the overworld, there are no random encounters and little to explore. Points of interest sometimes only open up after an encounter with an NPC somewhere where the NPC tells the player about it.

In dungeons or other areas, the view turns to first person with the top part of the screen the view ahead and the bottom part the three party members' health bars and such. Battles take place in real time, with players attacking, casting spells, or using an item. Enemies approach and attack at their own speed as well. What is odd that the player can get a few range attacks on a foe, back away, and continue to hit and run. My best archer and mage, however, did not seem to ever do enough damage at a distance to make that a great strategy, so I would soften them up a bit before engaging in melee attacks with my fighter. Perhaps a different character build and other skills would have made a difference.

There is a lot of skill customization for the characters as they level up, but I did not explore that too deeply. Lockpicking is definitely a must for at least one of the characters in the party, as chests often require a high number in this skill to get open, and the breakable lockpicks are expensive at first. There were weird skills, like "Celerity" that I probably did not grasp. For those looking for character skill depth, it is here but not necessary to comprehend fully to get through the game.

Death of one or two of the three party members during combat is not permanent, meaning that if one can heal the any of the others back to life, they can continue to fight. If all three fall in battle, though, the player will have to start back at the last save point. Saving is anywhere, so death and backtracking are only an issue if the player lets them be.

The artwork for the enemies is unique, with a sort of slightly exaggerated cartoony style. Enemy attacks during battle are often just a few frames that sometimes create a slow blur. In fact, combat suffers from substantial lag at times, but never to a point where it causes issues as long as the player is aware.

There are cool story elements along the way, a few side quests, a decent level of loot and special weapons and armor, and lots of hidden walls in the dungeons to explore. I know I did not find everything nor do every side quest, but I did have a good time playing Mazes of Fate. Experiencing the different design, storytelling, and graphics provided by a rare game developer from the southern hemisphere was unique and refreshing enough to get past some of the minor lag issues of the game. 

The convergence of my lifelong quest for portable RPGs, my desire to build game libraries for defunct systems, and to see what different game studios can come up with was truly a treat. Mazes of Fate is a unique Game Boy Advance RPG that's worth a try.