Dylan’s Blog

I have been meaning to do this for some time, but I have been getting really annoyed with my spell checker. Every time I end a word with ve it thinks it’s another bloody word, like have would have the ve underlined in red. It also gets tons of words wrong, as in it says that it isn’t correct when it obviously is, like suggest.

That is my quick quicke. Just felt I needed to get that off my chest.

BUT! I will give you this inspirational quote that you should remember.

“Cats are known to see within the dark. Yet, if you had sight like a cat, even for one day, would you really want to see what’s in the dark?”

There is a small trend that you may have and I certainly have noticed over my past reviews and that’s that I only review good games. This is probably because when I buy a game I do it because I’ve done my research and thought it was a good game, and in the end I was right. Eledees is a game that didn’t follow this case.

I’m rather confused about Eledees actually, my friend loved it and we played it every time he came over and we had great fun. However, when I’m sitting on the couch by myself I can’t get myself motivated. So I figured that this review would really help me understand why.

To start with the bad, it isn’t particularly inventive. It’s a cross between a simulator designed to trash your house and hide in seek where every now and again some little black spiky thing runs at you and stabs you in the eyes. In all fairness it does have somethings that you would never be able to accomplish in real life like zero-gravity but it feels rather fake considering zero-gravity doesn’t affect you, or the ability to pick up buildings. But where you can pick up buildings, your main character was born with this mysterious physical defeciency where he is unable to lift anything heavier than a flashlight and his own thick skull so he uses a ‘capture gun’ which can also coincidentally pick up objects. You can power it up to lift heavier objects but at the lowest level this can result in being unable to open drawers or lift toasters. You use this capture gun to capture Eledees which powers up the house, which can be used to power toys which can upgrade the gun through power Eledees or even operate doors. It is in a seperate dimension, but last I checked doors were mechanical and didn’t need 2400 watts of electricity to operate. There is also some person who goes around the house not only cleaning up after you but setting up certain items to make the levels. Now this might somehow make sense in the house but once they start replacing hot air balloons, giant lego pieces, rocket ships and re-establishing buildings in a matter of minutes as you navigate through the menu I started raising an eyebrow. Also, there are some stupid objectives you sometimes have to maintain or else you fail, like you can’t make x amount of noise at once, you can’t break x amount of items, etc. which seem fairly pointless considering nobody is even around and once you break all their china they suddenly realise that you are wrecking the house and come storming back in to tell you to stop.

The storyline is that you are a small boy who doesn’t have enough attention paid to from his parents, because they are scientists. This is in an alternate world where electricity is powered by pint-sized creatures, but one night the power went off, and his parents buggered off to figure out why. The boy decided that he wanted power back and to find his parents so weilding the capture gun he trecks off. Now I got to the point where I figured out why the eledees rebelled, but it was a while ago so I don’t remember. I remember they were gathering for something but I don’t give a flying hoot about the storyline anyways.

To talk about the good things they have pretty fun levels. There is some cool concepts, like a firing range, abandoned city and a carnival, and more, but they all are pretty fun. There is also some moments where you get maximum power and just throw everything apart to find the last 5 eledees to finish the level with 15 seconds left, and you tear apart the terrain to make a battleground of chaos. Although the multiplayer is unflattering, it is fun to play single-player with friends by taking turns. There are also some cool powerups that allow you to unleash hell on Eledees. The controls are fluent and intuitive and, it has a level editor.

To sum it up, Eledees was mediocre. It seemed surreal, but not the kind of surreal where you go “Woah, crap!” in dead space but the kind of surreal where you go “Huh? Crap…” if you catch my drift. It brings the question whether something is surreal in a realistic way and something that just seems fake. In reality, Half-life seems very fake, but it’s and air of predictability that it has to it. You understand that if you shoot it, it will stop moving, and if you throw something, it will fall. Eledees had floaty physics, the creatures themselves did things that would be impossible in our world, and the levels seem impractical. However, in it’s defense, it was just fun, but didn’t really compell you to play it again.

This is a freeware review of a game called Lyle in Cube Sector. It is all about a black kid with green hair surrounded by creatures trying to make ends meet when suddenly, some complete asshole comes along and steals his cat! Lyle must use it admittadly poor abilities to save his cat from some one, or… some thing. Or some place. Or even some object. How many more of these can I do? That many.

Anyways, at the beginning, Lyle can run and jump. That’s just about it. But he must venture into cube sector filled with cubes *gasp* and get powers to use them. It’s a pretty interesting game, where you need to explore the land to find your cat. It is, however, extrememly annoying at times and forgiving at others. For example, if you go out to the ass-end of hell to get a power-up and then die 4 seconds later, yes, you have to start back at your house again. However, to your delight, you will realise that you will still have the power. Sometimes, this doesn’t mean anything when you are trying to get through areas with very, very difficult circumstances. All of the powers you get are inventive (apart from the one allowing you to pick up cubes) and most of them are useful. And the music is top-quality game music. I love it, love it, and at times, am alright with it. It also has a few… well, I’d say they’re mini-games, but they are just different circumstances, like using cubes to knock a basketball into hoops.

Anyways, if you like side-scrollers, then it’s hard not to like this game.

Link: http://www.sitesled.com/members/bogo/lyle.html

Well, this is my review on Pikmin. For a quick real-life backstory, I have recently bought the Wii remake of the game, so I will include the controls.

Pikmin is an adorable little game where you play as Captain Olimar, a small, pudgy adventurer who, while flying unsuspectantly through space, is hit by a meteor and starts plummetting towards the surface of a planet.

There on the planet, he finds an object with three legs which he calls an Onion, which does look like an onion with a flower on top and three legs. Out of the onion flies out a seed, which sprouts quickly into a stem with a leaf. After pulling it out, Olimar discovers that it was actually a slender red creature which he calls a Pikmin. He must utilitise the Pikmin to find is 30 lost spaceship parts that are scattered across the realm. On his travels, he finds blue and yellow Pikmin. Red pikmin do the most damage and are immune to fire, yellow pikmin can be thrown further and higher and can carry bomb rocks, and blue pikmin are the weakest fighters but can survive in water. By having pikmin pick up objects and take them back to the onion, you can use it to create more pikmin. Also, pikmin can harvest grass to find nectar, which evolves them into a flower state, which makes them move faster and do more damage. Alternatively to picking pikmin, you can leave them in the ground for a while where they will eventually turn into buds and then flowers.

Starting with the bad things about the game, from worst to least bothering, the pathfinding is utterly unBEARABLE! Well, it isn’t very bearable. When working with 20 pimin +, going through narrow walkways will usually cause pikmin to walk blindly off the edge where they will run into a wall until they realise that doing the same thing they’ve been doing the last 10 seconds won’t do. There are techniques that can reduce the individuals who do this to 90+ danger, but it doesn’t always work perfectly. Secondly, you have 30 days until your life support systems fail, and 30 ship parts that have fallen. That means you must collect at least 1 ship part a day, which isn’t that bad considering you have the option to restart at the end of a level, but if a lot of your pikmin die and you don’t think it’s that big of a deal and save over your old one on day 25, you may have to start all the way at the beginning of the game to fix it.

With the good things (in no particular order), is that the pikmin are adorable. Their curious little faces all look up at you and interact with the enviroment with great enthusiasm. Also, there is a surprising amount of tactics required for most combats. It isn’t a go there kill that sort of feel, it’s more like you’re using the pikmin as a type of DOT (damage over time). Different parts of different monsters will be more or less effective than other tactics, and some enemies have some very unique attacks, such as a mushroom that emits poison which, when it hits pikmin, turns them into wilted flowers and start attacking you. The levels are very pretty to looks at, as you are obviously pint-sized in this, and all the levels are based on the level designer’s backyard. Sort of makes me want to avoid his backyard if it includes walking mushroom-monsters. The pikmin are very nice to look at while they are accomplishing a task, their little stems all moving in synchronisation, like ants to carry away their new victim to the nest. The controls are also pretty intuitive, in the sense that I have no problems with it whatsoever.

All in all; if you have a wii and haven’t already played this game, get it, but otherwise you’re pretty much out of luck. Pikmin came out as one of the first titles for the gamecube so it’s more likely that ol’ Godzilla will be hopping around tokyo city like a big playground when suddenly batman bursts from the shade, and hits godzilla with a bat grenade. Godzilla will get pissed and begin to attack, but wouldn’t expect to be blocked by Shaq, who would proceed to open up a can of Shaq fu, when Erik Carter will come out the blue, and start beating up Shaquelle O’ Neal, and they’ll both get flattened by the batmobile, but before batman could make it back to the batcave, Abraham Linkon will come out of his grave and pull and AK-47 out from under his hat and blow batman away with a rat-a-tat-tat, but he’ll run out of bullets and run away because Optimus Prime has come to save the day than for a shop to be selling Pikmin on the gamecube.