Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes] - wheeeee

Skullgirls - hehe

Splatoon 3 - I may have hurt some people today

Mahjong Soul/Riichi City/IRL mahjong - Very close to hitting 7th Dan on RC, and at the same time I'm closer to dropping to Expert 2 on MJS than I am to earning my Master 1 back. Honestly I think this is just a consequence of RC's rating system being kinda jank.

Been working on a *secret project*, so I haven't had much time to play anything but my usual rotation.

My pick this weekend is Mutant Mudds Deluxe (Proton). Mutant Mudds was originally an early indie title for the Nintendo 3DS, and it's a solid game that pays tribute to past platformers. It also builds upon a lesser-known-but-excellent one - namely Virtual Boy Wario Land, from which Mutant Mudds takes its frequently-used mechanic of jumping between foreground and background planes.

The game sees a boy named Max, aided later in the game by power-ups created by his Grannie, take on an invasion from a planet of mud-based aliens, which he does by gathering the 40 Water Sprites that are hidden throughout the world.

I haven't played Mutant Mudds since the original 3DS version, but I'm happy to say that it still holds up great today in the "Deluxe" PC re-release. My only gripe is that, in spite of having a Steam Deck Playable rating, to make it work properly on the Steam Deck you need to switch to Desktop Mode and have an external mouse connected (you can't use the Deck's trackpads because the game prevents their inputs from being read) in order to change some settings so that you can use the Deck's controls (which the game detects as an Xbox 360 controller) and have the game running full-screen at 1280x720.

[+..••] Other stuff that I played this week;


Ardy Lightfoot (SNES)


Asteroids (Arcade)


PathBlasters (Native Linux)


Saturn Bomberman (Saturn)


Super Bomberman 2 (SNES)

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Cricket 07 (2006 EA Sports) - Sony PlayStation 2 - Sports (Cricket)

There are a lot of great faces in this weekend's post, but this one is my favourite by far - he looks like a villain from a cheesy movie!

Quoting: PenglingThere are a lot of great faces in this weekend's post, but this one is my favourite by far - he looks like a villain from a cheesy movie!

The one on the left looks a bit like Gerwyn Price.

Anyhow…

I've finished Lego Indiana Jones 2 during the week and quite frankly I pulled through because of Indiana Jones. It's a game from the phase when TT started switching to open world games, which may sound like a good idea, but it isn't. I think I've written several pages about my gripes before, but it basically boils down to a lot of tedious repetition. Indy 2 has 6 hubs – one for each of the original movies and three for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Those are hit and miss. The Raiders hub and the first of the KotCS hubs is serviceable, the hub for The Last Crusade is horrible because it is segmented into several islands with an extremely winding path between them. Some of them look nice, but they are a pain to play.

Each hub has only 5 short levels – one of them is a (mostly) annoying vehicle level, one a mini room with a fight against many enemies and one an even smaller room with a fight against a boss. No mini-kits in the levels, no red bricks in the levels; only the coin limit True Adventurer is present. So obviously there is no meaningful free play for the levels. Red bricks (and blue and green bricks) are part of the hub – one each. Unlocking characters is only done in the hub. There is no character selector at all – you have to go to the character that you want and tag it. Which is cumbersome since most wander around in an area while some of them are supposed to follow the player, which doesn't work all the time due to the disjoint area. There are also 5 bonus levels and 5 treasure levels. The treasure levels reuse the geometry of the story levels and you enter them at the same places of the hub as the story levels. While the bonus levels automatically give you the correct characters, the bonus levels don't. They just tell you what abilities you need. So you have to go to the level entry, enter it, read the messages, leave, find the characters and go back to the level entry. Oh what fun.

Obviously there has to be at least one horrible level in any Lego game – e.g. the second part of vehicle level in Indy 1 where you are blown up every few seconds while you try to collect studs after escaping from Brunwald by motorbike. This one has several of them – three bonus levels use the same mechanic that is cumbersome - mostly because you have to fight the auto-aim to do it. The first occurrence kills you all the time while doing it.


I've got Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! for 1 € on Fanatical to get a discount code to buy two bundles. I love(d) the first game and was okay with the second game. The story and theme of the third game isn't what I would have liked – war in 2041 destroyed the USA and the original restaurant, so you have to redo in a food truck with two robots, but the resulting mechanics (auto serve by one robot when you move the right stick) make it more feasible to play on a controller/Steam Deck.