Beaten: Tenchu Z (360)

It's so damn cool to see From Software become one of the industry's giants over the last decade, as the prolific Japanese company had largely flown under the radar in the USA up until they created the Dark Souls series in the 2010s. I was way ahead of the curve in 1996 when I started playing their first US release, King's Field, on the Playstation, and have been trumpeting their amazing skill at gamecraft ever since.

Now that they are finally recognized by millions of fans after a decade of cranking out unique and amazing "Soulsborne" games (yes they created a subgenre of gaming on their own), everyone got excited when they announced a modern entry into one of their old franchises, Armored Core. They cranked out a lot of these games starting back in the late 90's and through the early 2010s, so when they announced a new Armored Core game, a lot of their fans were asking what that series was all about. It's armored mech combat. I got a taste of it when I played their other mech game, Chromehounds, a few years ago.

I've been sitting on Armored Core 4 (for the 360) for a long time so I went give it a try, caught up in the hype surrounding the release Armored Core 6 later this year. However, next to it on the shelf was Tenchu Z, a stealth ninja franchise they also were prolifically releasing during the same time frame as Armored Core.  Note that From Software was just the publisher for Tenchu games after 2004, not their creators. I decided to try that franchise instead, knowing that their 2019 release, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, was a spiritual successor to Tenchu. So much catching up to do!

Anyway, Tenchu Z.  A quick tutorial walks the player through the gameplay and introduces them to the game mechanics, and then it's off to complete 50 missions and a final boss fight. Stealth gameplay is encouraged but not required, as there is a seemingly deep combat system in the game as well. I went the stealth route, holding down the R1 button (no on/off toggle) for 95% of the time I was in the game.

The player is dropped into a fairly large area, usually a small town or a fortress, with one of several goals. Most of them are assassination assignments, some are find the package, and others say to kill everyone on the map. One difficult mission was to follow some guy through the town without being seen.

The camera is wonky, the controls sometimes fight the player (especially in aim mode by clicking the right stick), and the story is superfluous. However, the game was a lot of fun in spite of its shortfalls.  Standard stealth gameplay had me watching the patrol routes, sneaking up behind guards, and disappearing quickly once spotted.

Crouching, rolling, and use of a grappling hook were all essential to success in these missions. There are a lot of items the player can use, but some of them seem really useless for stealth. Many of them open up once you get to a certain part of the game, and once I unlocked the blow dart thing, that was all I used for the rest of the game. I stopped carrying healing items as they were not required for stealth gameplay.

Enemy AI is pretty standard. They see you or a body you left in the open and they freak out and attack, but if you run away and hide, they quickly forget that there is anything going on and go back to their route, never getting upset again regarding the visible corpses around them.

There are dogs that bark and chickens that cluck, alerting enemies, but I found delight in shutting them up with throwing stars. A few times, I unloaded several stars at what I thought was a dog in the distance, only to reveal that the creature was a cat, that was just background graphics, sitting there nonchalantly as cats do, unharmed by anything. Cute.

For a game that is stealth centric, I found it quite odd that there were two or three boss fights where the player could not sneak up on the boss for a stealth kill and had to face them head on. At least, the boss fights were not in an enclosed space, and the whole level I had cleared to get there was available to use hit and run tactics sucessfully.

Like all From Software (in this case as a publisher) games, there are strange design decisions but fun gameplay. With 50 levels, the assignments get repetitive, and many maps are reused frequently. For most of the game there are no enemies on the rooftops, which made things easier. I can recommend this game to stealth game fans, but only those who are ready for the usual From Software idiosyncrasies and patient enough to endure the graphical, control, and camera issues common in games from that time.

Twenty Five Years Ago: Ultima Online

I've written so much about Ultima Online, a game that changed my life as well as an entire industry, that I feel there is not much more I can say that is not repetition. On this day in 1998 I rushed home from Best Buy with my first modern PC, paid for with my first credit card, with a copy of this magnificent game, and no knowledge whatsoever of what I would encounter.

For example, when logging in, one is prompted to select a shard. I had no idea what that was, so I selected Great Lakes from the top of the list the first time, since I live near those. After a quick run around with my character, I logged out for dinner. When I came back, Atlantic was at the top of the shard list so I logged into that and started over before I understood what was happening. Shards are servers, and each was a copy of the game world all its own.

Once I was up an running, the rest was history. I made a name for myself in that game and in its community with my passion and dogged insistence that they do something with the ships and sailing part of it all.

So last night I logged in to check my vendor and my house. That was it. I really don't have time to play as I wish, the few friends I had in-game are long gone, but maintaining that house and my little piece of history in that game is still important to me for some reason.

Still, I should not let the 25th anniversary of the most important game I will ever play pass without some fanfare, so here is a screenshot of my pirate character in his glory days.

2022 Year in Review

The stupid end-of-year intensity of the holidays make it especially difficult to sit down an write about video games that I hardly have time to play, so here it is, mid-January of 2023, and I am just now starting to jot down thoughts about the previous year. Keeping in mind that I am writing about my year in videogaming, and not yours, or the world's, here we go.

Beaten in 2022:

• Phantasy Star (Master System via Sega Ages version on Switch)
• Mafia: Definitive Edition (PS4)
• Firewatch (One)
• Dying Light 2 (PS4)
• Stray (PS4)
• Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress (C64/MS-DOS/Windows/GOG)
• Moss Book 2 (PSVR)
• Car Battler Joe (GBA)
• Tunic (One)
• Borderlands 3 (One)
• Wildlife! (Odyssey 2)

Games of the Year:

• Winner: Stray (PS4)
• Runner-Up: Tunic (One)
• Runner-Up: Dying Light 2 (PS4)
• Runner-Up: Moss Book 2 (PSVR)

The Year in Review

This year my finances were tight and my time limited, so there is not much to report in terms of collecting or game acquisition. The biggest graphical upgrade I have ever witnessed occurred this year, though, as cataract surgeries on both eyes cleared up my vision at a distance and everything looks better. It's not just sharpness that the surgery corrects, but the ability to see colors brighter as well. This makes all videogames better.

My financial situation improved dramatically by the end of the year and I was able to procure a Sony Playstation 5. Oddly enough, this mirrors my acquisition of the first Playstation at the end of 1995. Unlike that year, where by the last day of the year I was able to play enough Wipeout to name it game of the year, I have not had time to jump into either of the two PS5 games I bought - Horizon Forbidden West and Elden Ring - much at all. I'm in the middle of Tenchu Z on the 360 and kind of want to finish it.

A recent blog entry detailed the three Odyssey 2 games I got this year, and I think I mentioned finally landing a boxed Space Wars for the Vectrex too. Muppet Pinball Mayhem for the GBA was another missed opportunity from 2006 that I corrected by getting a complete copy of that game. Other than that, not much collecting going on, but if the budget allows, there will be more such purchases in 2023.

I also hope to acquire an XBox Series X in the coming months and like the PS5, begin building a library for it as well. Continuing to acquire or even re-acquire games for the XBox 360 and PS3 remains a priority, and with bargain bins filling up with titles for the One and PS4, those collections could use a boost as well.

Everything is always up in the air, in our fragile civilization and my own chaotic life, so who knows where I'll end up a year from now. 2022 was like the rest of the 2020s have been so far, and I finished the year once again wondering if I'll ever see my dream retirement of comfortable living, endless video game time, and lots of nice, legal weed. 

Three New Odyssey 2 Acquisitions in 2022

Having finally collected all of the Odyssey 2 titles released in North America during it's commercial run from the late 1970s through the early 1980s, I’ve turned my attention once again to the exploding homebrew scene. I have also started looking out for the famous Parker Brothers four - rare arcade adaptations of Qbert, Popeye, Frogger, and Super Cobra that were only released in Europe and Brazil for the Odyssey 2.. 

I had hit the Odyssey 2 homebrew scene back in the now-somehow-ancient 2000s, grabbing essentials like Kill the Attacking Aliens, Planet Lander!, and Mr. Roboto!, but stopped grabbing them for about a decade, since I had poor controllers.

A few years back I picked up K.C.'s Escape! as it was a limited release, complete with a full box and manual, and goodies inside including a plush K.C.! Now that I have good controllers again, it was time to start grabbing Odyssey 2 games. Here’s what I’ve added:

Amok!

First among Odyssey 2 homebrews, Amok! was created in 1998 by John Dondzila complete with a box and everything. That puts the gap between Power Lords, the last Odyssey 2 release, and Amok! at 15 years. This release ended the drought forever, and filled in an obvious gap in the Odyssey library which never got a Challenger Series-style translation of Berzerk!

That's right, Amok! is an Odyssey 2 version of the arcade classic Berzerk, or if your knowledge of computer games allows, Amok! is a port of the Commodore VIC 20 Berzerk knock-off of the same name. I actually had the sequel Super Amok for the VIC and loved it.

After John Dondzila stopped selling it, it was later re-released by a group called the 2600 Connection, which issued a "Rack Test" version of the game. At the top of the cartridge, under the traditional Odyssey 2 handle, is a small switch which allows for a slow but functional level selection. Toggle the switch left and press fire and the game rotates through its levels. When the player gets to the level they want (they are numbered) they toggle the switch back to the right and press fire to start on that level.

I am not sure why this was included, but whatever, arcade fanatics may find its inclusion a cool feature.

So how does it play? The character moves fast and shoots slow, and the indestructible Smileybot (the Amok version of Otto) shows up in seconds to chase the player. There is not time to meticulously clear the level of the robots, who move and shoot sporadically enough for the game to not be Robotron, but this game is hard.

I ordered Amok! from Ebay, and it comes in a nice slick plastic box with a manual. The seller, Tim Duerte, included a catalog of other Odyssey 2 homebrews he was selling, and my mind was blown by what I saw there. A few months later I ordered the next game.

Wildlife!

There was a screenshot in the catalog that I got with Amok, and the one I was looking at in stunned amazement was for Wildlife!, because it looked like the Atari VCS classic Pitfall, somehow on the Odyssey 2! The top half of the screen was the tree canopy and a campfire, the bottom half a tunnel clearly underwater. The character looked like the usual pre-built Odyssey 2 guy, but with the Indiana Jones fedora. This guy is called Josue' Jorge though, and he's looking for the Holy Grail.

Made in 2014 by Rafael Cardoso down in Brazil, Wildlife is really more like Adventure than Pitfall, but it is AN ACTUAL, COMPLETABLE ADVENTURE GAME on the Odyssey 2, something I thought cold never be done with the limits of the system. Like Marty said, "I gotta check this out, Doc."

There are only three screens in the jungle across the whole map, but below all that is a maze of water filled caverns to navigate to reach the treasure, that goes to a depth of three screens itself. This makes the entire map 12 screens, keeping in mind that each of the 9 screens underwater are mazes unto themselves. THIS IS AN ACTUAL, COMPLETABLE ADVENTURE GAME ON THE ODDYSSEY 2 AND I AM VERY HAPPY HENCE THE ALL CAPS.

Ok, let me calm down a bit and break this down. The player starts at the upper left corner of the map at the campfire screen, with a score of 5000 counting down. This campfire is annoying because timing the jump over it when it is low is very touchy. Should the player miss this jump, they are deposited back at the starting space west of the campfire with a loss of more points. 

The next screen over is the opening to the underwater maze, guarded by 2 crabs. Touching them will send you back to the bad place on the other side of that annoying campfire, and a loss of points. The next and final screen to the right has a "wild native" guarding a key, but he is easy to jump past and back again. From the campfire and the wild native screens, the player can see treasure chests below.

After getting the key, it's time for a long swim in the underwater maze. Fortunately, there is no air meter, and Josue' Jorge can apparently hold his breath for nearly 5000 points. Dodging the crabs to get to the maze wasn't too hard either. 

The nine screens that make up the underwater maze are mirrored down the middle. Taking the right side delivers the player to the chest under the wild native screen, to the left, under the campfire screen. So here is the twist: randomly, one of the two chests is a trap, so the player can loose a lot of time if they select the wrong one first and get teleported back to that super annoying campfire.

So what is in the maze? Clownfish cross the screen at a certain level and must be avoided, but that is easy. No, the real foe here is the walls. Touch one, and it's back to the campfire and the chest resets with the Grail in it. So, with only the time limit as pressure to hurry underwater, the player must be very very careful to avoid contact with any walls down there. I seem to remember Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES being like this.

Once they come back and pass the crabs and wild native again, the game is won. That is because Wildlife! is a AN COMPLETABLE ADVENTURE GAME ON THE ODYSSEY 2 AND I CAN'T BELIEVE I HAVE LIVED LONG ENOUGH TO SEE SUCH GLORY!!!!

Super Cobra

An Ebay gift card as a thoughtful gift from a friend led me take the plunge, and in spite of not speaking Portuguese, I purchased a complete Super Cobra for the Odyssey 2. You see, even though the Odyssey died in North America, in Brazil and Europe it held on longer. This brought Parker Brothers to release four of their licensed games, already adapted to Atari and others in the U.S.A, to the Odyssey 2 for those markets.

When I first read years ago that there was an adaption of the arcade classic Super Cobra for the Odyssey 2, I thought "There's no way they pulled off that game for the Odyssey 2." Why? Super Cobra is a side scrolling shooter, and the Odyssey cannot side scroll at all, as far as I know. It's good with single screens and that was all we ever saw back in the day.

Well, they did it.

The chopper scrolls left to right, and when the player reaches the right side of the screen, everything freezes, scrolls over one frame at a time while beeping out a pleasant tone, and then unfreezes with the chopper now back on the left. The enemies are numerous and the caverns challenging but they made it work.

Another technical hurdle the designers overcame was the Odyssey 2 controller only having one fire button, where in the arcade Super Cobra had a fire button and a bomb button. In this version, a quick tap fires and holding in the button for a few seconds and releasing causes a bomb to drop.

Throw in your multiple lives and the classic high score entry found in Challenger Series games, and Super Cobra is a fantastic translation of the arcade game. The packaging is a sturdy but weird plastic case that flips up to open. The manual is in Portuguese. 

Nothing could have saved the Odyssey 2 from its demise, but if Parker Brothers had gotten this one out earlier in the console's life cycle, it would have been a hit.

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.

Beaten: Dying Light 2 Stay Human (PS4)

 Is it human to take five and a half months to beat a modern videogame campaign, even when one skips thousands of side missions and objectives? Picking it up when one has increasingly rare playtime, getting stuck on a challenging part of the game and not coming back to it for two weeks? Is it human to say "Wow, this game is great, but when the hell does it end?"

I found out this year with Dying Light 2: Stay Human, the latest and greatest entry in the Dead Island/Dying Light series, which I've enjoyed very much over the years. I was ready for a release-day AAA title, and knew this game would be good, but I was surprised at how good it really is.

This is a polished, smooth, and complete game package with a great story and reasonable level of challenge. I really wish I had more time to go back and hit all the unfinished business I left behind in that world, but other people release games I want to play, too, so it's not happening. I'm glad all that content is there, because it helps create a huge amount of gameplay for those who want it.

Combat and Parkour are the main focus of the gameplay, with the concurrent levelling of those traits happening based on what missions or challenges the player completes. Upgrading and modifying weapons is there, too, but I just got by with what I found and was fine doing little of that. Armor is upgradable too, and like their previous titles, lots and lots of looting fuels all this.

The "Stay Human" part of the title is one of the game's challenges. The player is already infected but only starts turning at night, when out of ultraviolet light. This makes the early part of the game very challenging in terms of nocturnal activity. There is a timer on how long one can remain out of UV light, and while there are items that can prolong that time, it really comes off as a huge inconvenience in the early game, but hey, that's the game. The timer expands, too, as one finds certain items and applies them.

Combat is almost all melee, with archery added later, and it handles like a dream. Blocking enemy hits is essential and makes the combat fun. Enemy AI is pretty smart, but one must often use the environment to their advantage, climbing away from trouble when necessary. The player has a stamina bar to watch during combat, preventing button mashing battles and adding to the challenge.

The stamina bar is also depleted during parkour moves like climbing and swinging from one's grappling hook, but it expands as the player levels, once again making the early game harder than the later part of the game. Oddly enough, to this acrophobic old gamer, the parkour was much scarier than the zombies and human enemies one faces. There are a few places where the player must climb a dilapidated skyscraper, making series after series of jumps and watching the stamina bar dwindle. Add in grappling hook use, where one has to hook onto something at the corner of the building, swing out blindly around the corner, jump off, and quickly grapple to another hook and then to a platform, and  my nerves were shot. 

It's not even a VR game, but it looks so good that those challenges were the most nerve-wracking part of the game. There were very few frustrations in this game and very few bugs that I found. Both sections of the enormous map were well designed, the rooftops and other parts of the city clearly created and tested for cool parkour moves.

Just playing the main missions left me more than capable of beating the final boss through multiple phases and the ending was satisfactory. After the six hour credit sequence, one can continue in the open world if so desired.

And I so desire, but time is not on my side. It's not you, Dying Light 2 Stay Human, you did everything right. It's me and the nature of middle age that keeps me from your rooftops going forward. Maybe I'll swing by again in retirement.

Odyssey 2 Arcade Adaptation Scorecard

 The race was on once Atari landed its official license to put Space Invaders on its 2600 VCS and the industry realized that the pipeline from arcades to home consoles was a profitable one. It was clear that bringing home the superior arcade experiences was what players wanted. Those who could not front the marketing prowess, however, were free to publish their own adaptations of these hits for their systems, and every console and computer at the time had some version of Space Invaders before too long.

Magnavox's Odyssey 2 was no exception, and many of its early games were at least inspired by some sort of early arcade game equivalent (Football, Cosmic Conflict). At first, Odyssey made no big deal of it, but later put the tag "Challenger Series" on its arcade-inspired releases. Let's look at the progression of Odyssey 2's arcade knock-offs and see how they did as compared to the official licensed adaptations by Atari.

Alien Invaders - Plus! (Space Invaders)

While this game is not that good for several reasons (the scoring only going to 10 and ending the game), it captures the Space Invaders theme well enough. The weird twist is that the 3 barriers that the player hides behind between shots at the armada at the top of the screen are not degradable shields like Space Invaders, but rather storage for extra lives. 

When the player's gun is hit it is destroyed, but the player emerges as the usual little Odyssey 2 guy and must run to one of those shields. Once under it, pressing the button removes the shield and puts the little guy back in a gun. Essentially this gives the player four lives per round.

The game is a campaign, meaning that once the player wins 10 rounds (or the Invaders do) the game is over. This is the first videogame campaign that I ever beat. It took only a few play sessions to learn how to do that every time I played, and to this day I can still do it. This adaptation was not a part of the Challenger Series, which started later with Monkeyshines! (which itself, oddly enough, was not an arcade adaptation).

Score: Much worse than Atari Space Invaders or literally any other Space Invaders clone.

UFO! (Asteroids)

The designers at Odyssey must have heard that kind of criticism for Alien Invaders-Plus when making UFO! , which became critically acclaimed as one of the best games for the system and remains so to this day. They added 4 digit scoring (it's hard to get to 100 much less 10,000 so that was fine) as well as a very cool 6 letter name input via the keyboard for those who got the high score, which became a standard on most Challenger Series games after that.

This is Asteroids on steroids (see what I did there?). The player gets one life to live (setting another Challenger Series standard), and the game can be brutally hard. Just like Asteroids, the player controls a ship and shoots at space rocks and occasional UFOs that show up. The player's ship has a rechargeable shield that can stop an asteroid or enemy fire, but goes down for a few seconds after a hit. 

To make the most of one joystick with one button, the designers created an amazing control scheme where the gun is one dot of the shield and is rotated using the joystick in a clockwise motion, while still flying around and dodging everything. It seems insane at first but soon becomes a delicate ballet of shooting, rotating, and dodging.

Score: Far superior to Atari's blinky-ass home version of Asteroids.

K.C. Munchkin! (Pac-Man)

So good it got banned by a judge because K.C.'s gobbling animation was too close to Pac-Man's. Odyssey 2 was the first to bring the insanely popular Pac-Man home to players with K.C. Munchkin, and they really did a great job on it in a lot of ways.

First of all, there are only 12 dots to catch in the maze, but they move around on their own. Four of those dots glow in multiple colors and those are the ones K.C. eats to turn the ghosts vulnerable enough to kill. The mazes are smaller than Pac-Man but there are a lot of them pre-programmed into the cartridge, some with walls that are invisible when moving. 

Continuing with what UFO! did, there is the same high-score name entry at the bottom of the screen and the player only gets one life. The real value of this feature in these games shows when one is playing with friends and trading off the controller, taking turns and competing for the high score.

As far as I know, K.C. Munchkin also contained a home console first by allowing the player to design and program their own mazes. That's right, there were games with level editors as early as 1982! The whole package is quite a value with that taken into account. And it moved a lot of Odyssey 2 units before the court injunction removing it from the market forever.

Collectors need not worry, though, as the game had been out for months before the injunction and many copies were sold. 

Score: Far superior to the absolutely crappy, rushed, and critically derided home version of Pac-Man for the Atari.

Freedom Fighters! (Defender)

Defender is an arcade masterpiece, with a gorgeous side-scrolling landscape and a lot of buttons. I immediately wondered how any home version of it could even be done given those constraints. The designers at Odyssey 2 ditched the scrolling landscape and put the ship in space, and consigned the joystick to movement and firing. 

Oddly enough, the other controller can be used to activate hyperspace, but as with Defender, it's a crap shoot as to whether it has any strategic value at all, as the player might hyperspace right to their own death.

In the end, it's as hard as UFO! without the unique design charms of that game, and bears no great resemblance to Defender other than a sleek side-scrolling ship and dudes that need rescued.

Score: Atari's home Defender was better and more akin to the arcade.

Pick Axe Pete! (Donkey Kong)

One would probably look at the Odyssey 2 Challenger Series and assume Monkeyshines! was a clone of Donkey Kong, but it came earlier with a different design. The similarities end with monkeys climbing platforms.

Pick Axe Pete! was their answer, and what a great answer it was. By the time it released in the summer of 1982, Odyssey had lost their court case with K.C. Munchkin being too close to Pac-Man, so it seems like the designers decided to capture the gameplay of arcade games they were imitating but not the look, and then to add their own twists.

Pick Axe Pete! has the now much more flexible little Odyssey 2 guy running around a series of platforms, jumping and ducking like a pro around a bunch of bouncy rocks that pop out of the three doorways shown. The character and controls are extremely precise and with the game’s difficulty it is appreciated.

When two rocks collide, they can create a pickaxe or a key for the player to pick up. The pickaxe allows the player to break the bouncy rocks, and the key allows the player to go through one of the doors to the next level.

There is a great transitional animation between levels, and each new level removes one segment of the level's platform. Strategy plays a big part of the player’s decisions to stay on the current level or grab some points and move on.

Maybe it was Space Panic they were imitating, but either way they really knocked it out of the park with Pick Axe Pete!

Score: Far superior to Coleco’s adaptation of Donkey Kong for the Atari, but obviously not close to the great version they did for their own Colecovision.

K.C.’s Krazy Chase! (Ms. Pac-Man)

Post-lawsuit, Odyssey needed a new maze chase game for their library as Pac-Man Fever still gripped much of the nation. Arcades were filling with Ms. Pac-Man machines while at home Atari VCS owners were stuck with the crappy port of Pac-Man mentioned earlier.

As with Pick Axe Pete! it was clearly the designers intention to imitate only the gameplay and then improve on it while adding unique twists to the theme. K.C.'s animations are different enough to not get sued again as his movement through the maze is rolling and not gobbling, at least until he makes contact with the enemy or a tree.

No dots in this one, so K.C. gobbles segments of the Dratapillar, which as one can guess is a caterpillar-like beast. His head section is deadly, so K.C. must roll up behind him or from the side to get those segments. Eating one turns the three Drats chasing K.C. around vulnerable for a few seconds, and he can gobble them too in that time. Lastly, random trees pop up in the maze, and they can slow down the Dratapillar as he takes a few seconds to eat them, or slow K.C. down as he seeks to escape the Drats.

It also was released ahead of the Voice module but certainly uses it well. 

Score: Far superior to Atari VCS Pac-Man at Christmas 1982, but Atari owners got a good version of Ms. Pac-Man a few months later in 1983.

Attack of the Timelord! (Demon Attack)

Since Alien-Invaders Plus! was such a dud, the Odyssey 2 hadn't gotten a good invasion-style shooter, while over at Atari, every company was producing them. Imagic gave us Demon Attack, Activision had Megamania, Games by Apollo brought Space Chase, and so forth. In the arcades, games like Galaxian and Gorf pushed the theme by adding enemy flight patterns, different waves, and other bells and whistles.

Odyssey took that void and filled it with Attack of the Timelord!, adding their own awesome design decisions to make a game that could stand tall next to the greats of the time. Waves of saucers like the ones in U.F.O.! drop up to four different weapons on the player, each requiring its own tactic to avoid. It's fast and frenetic and a blast to play.  

As a Challenger Series game, the usual one-life and high score entry options are on the screen. It could also be easily deduced that Attack of the Timelord! was developed as the killer app to accompany the release of the Voice module at Christmas of 1982. Between waves, the disembodied head of Spyrus the Deathless appears to offer vocal taunts to the player, reminiscent of Space Fury in the Arcade.

If I had to say Attack of the Timelord was based on any other game, I’d say it was Demon Attack for the Atari 2600 rather than an arcade game. That being said, the Timelord showing up between waves to taunt the player is straight out of the arcade game Space Fury.

Score: Can stand up there with Demon Attack and Megamania a one of the best Invaders-style shooters on any system at the time.

Smithereens! (Artillery Simulator on Apple II?)

It turns out there were artillery games on early computers in the pre-Apple II 1970s, but the one I remember playing was the Apple II game Artillery Simulator. Two players take turns lobbing artillery shots at each other's position until one wins.

Someone at Odyssey saw how fun those were and put a medieval twist on it by making the artillery into catapults and the player uses it to defend a small castle. Enemy shots can hit the castle, the player, or his catapult,  requiring a few moments to roll out a new one.

With the additional sounds provided by the Voice, this little gem is a fine and polished take on the classic artillery duel type of games. I did not pick up Smithereens! back in the day, but rather when I began collecting the Odyssey 2 games I did not own. I was pleasantly surprised by how fun it was.

Score: As good or better than any other game of this type at this time.

P.T. Barnum's Acrobats! (Circus)

Circus was an early arcade game similar to Breakout, except the paddle is replaced by two clowns on a seesaw and the blocks are balloons. Like many popular titles, it was copied across various systems (Circus Atari on the Atari 2600, Clowns on the Commodore VIC 20 and 64, etc.), and Odyssey decided to put one in their library.

At that point in the early videogame industry, licensing was starting to take off, so to make their entry into the Circus copycat wave unique, they must've signed a deal with P.T. Barnum's company (the man himself died 90 years earlier). I assume they calculated that the name recognition would be a plus, but who knows?

Even without a paddle controller, it plays fine, but it was a late release for the system and I wasn't interested at the time. It was the last Challenger Series game I picked up as I finished my collection.

Score: Good enough if this type of game is your thing.

Turtles (Turtles)

Odyssey actually did score the semi-exclusive license to one arcade game - Turtles, which arrived as a part of a wave of Pac-man clones and made very little impact on the crowded market. Nonetheless, as Atari, Coleco, and others scooped up exclusivity to almost every arcade game, Odyssey managed to score this one toward the end of its life. A win is a win.

The player is the mama turtle, running around a tight maze, trying to find your baby turtles and bring them home. The home appears once you pick up a baby, and of course you're being chased around the maze by beetles. It gets challenging quickly bit not unfair or frustrating.

In spite of the limitations of the Odyssey 2, Turtles! was another fun maze chase game for the Odyssey 2. It also uses the Voice module really well and it should be noted, was never translated to the Atari. One wonders how many Atari 2600 owners lamented not getting an Odyssey 2 instead once Turtles! came out!

Score: Close enough, and the only other home versions were on the Emerson Arcadia 2001 and Entex Adventurevision, so good luck with that.

Killer Bees (Robotron 2084)

Robotron 2084 was an arcade masterpiece of mayhem, light, and sound that was also very difficult. It's twin-stick controls had the player running around a room of robots, trying to save a few humans and avoid any contact with the robots or their shots. It was brutally hard and only the most dedicated players made any headway with it. But man, it looked and sounded fantastic.

For its last great release ahead of the console's death, it really brought home the fact that, with ingenious programming, the Odyssey 2 could shine as well as its competitors. Killer Bees! has a unique title screen, uses the Voice to simulate bees buzzing and add to the system's native sound effects, and even features Easter eggs!

Players control a swarm of bees attempting to sting small robots to death, because that is a thing, and it plays like a dream. Three swarms of enemy bees attempt to find and sting the player to death. It's really cool that the player's swarm is a bunch of small dots, and coming into contact with an enemy swarm for just a second can peel a few bees off. Any longer than that, and the enemy kills you. I have finished levels with just one bee out of the swarm left.

Each enemy robot killed charges a RoSHa ray (named after Robert S. Harris, the game's designer, who also put his name in the game via Easter egg), and the ray is your only offensive weapon to use on the enemy swarms. So the player stings a robot to death, gets the charge, and tries to line up the ray to zap as many swarms as possible.

In my opinion, Killer Bees is still the best game in the whole Odyssey 2 library and the final proof positive that the Odyssey team was awesome at copying the general gameplay of an arcade game and improving on it within the system's restrictions.

Score: Better than Robotron 2084, there, I said it. 

The Odyssey 2 was certainly not the place to bring home the arcade (unless you were that one person who really dug Turtles), but it's clones and knockoffs of the popular arcade games of the time mostly held their own. Often offering unique twists to the gameplay of those arcade classics as well as Voice enhancement and on-screen high scoring where players could enter their names, Odyssey designers can be proud (for the most part) of their effort to make the most of their limited hardware.