I’ve been playing a lot of shorter games this month. Not really intentionally, but since I polished off two long ones first thing, I just drifted over to a bunch of palette cleansers.
I just went to the bottom of my PS3 history (least-recently played games) and picked one. The first was Stick Man Rescue (#72). The graphics are simple, and it’s almost a game that I could make myself, but it was fun to just knock it out. spent about an hour on the remaining levels, and I had left the game at about 2/3rds done before. It’s a simple game, you just go and pick up 4 stick men at a time, and take them back to base. But they’re under threat, you have to kill opposing stickmen who are trying to drop bombs on them, or steam rollers that want to crush them, etc, so you can’t just focus on grabbing them and going home, you have to deal with a bunch of hazards, turn switches off, then take a load home. I enjoyed this one more than some of the later ones.
Lollipop Chainsaw (#73) was next. A decent little beat-em-up game. Punch zombies with pom poms, then slice them with a chainsaw. Lots of special moves, leapfrogging over them, etc, and various minigames breaking up the action. Decent little 7 hour game. This one was for a bounty on Completionator.
After the long games and the non-twitchy games, I decided to go back and finish a couple bullet hell shooters that I’d gotten about half way to 2/3rds through previously. Graceful Explosion Machine (#74) and Platypus (#75). The first one I can play for 40-50 minutes before I completely lose my concentration and stop being able to finish a level, so it took a number of sessions for the last 18 levels I had. Platypus, on the other hand, I finished the last two levels in a single sitting. I didn’t even think I was going to beat it that night, but the last two levels started giving me lightning guns, and that just let me plow through without losing all that many lives.
Went back to the bottom of the list again, and started playing some Arcade ports on my PS3. It reminded me of just how badly Arcade games have aged. You can tell that Dungeons and Dragons: Chronicles of Mystaria (#77 and #81) was originally an arcade game. It’s really, really easy to die in that game, and the thing munches virtual quarters like crazy. If I had played this at an arcade at $0.25 per play, it’d probably be $15 to beat both of the games in the collection. They were better than the other arcade ports I played, but still not fantastic.
Golden Axe (#78) was a series I’ve actually played in the arcade before. I can’t remember which game I played, but it was one of them. I don’t know how people actually enjoyed this game, it’s really cheap and easy to die in, and just not much fun. But I beat it in about 30 minutes, using maybe $5 worth of fake quarters.
Altered Beast (#80) is the last arcade game I’ll mention. It basically loops until you kill a certain number of “glowy” wolves and turn into a beast, and it’s like Golden Axe as far as its difficulty and stiffness goes. Not really a fun game at all.
I’d probably give the D&D games a 6/10, and the two Sega games a 3/10.
You might have noticed a gap in the sequence. In the middle of all those arcade games, I played Universal Paperclips (#79) which is an auto-clicker game. It only took a couple days, but I had fun with it. You can click on the name to play it yourself.